Silverland IV

Anna sat with her hands folded in her lap while the two policemen filed in and stood either side of the door. She could feel her pulse fluttering in her throat and moved her head slightly to ease it. Her arms were tight against her body – the soldiers had dragged her off by them last time. Her knees were tight against each other – there could be no trust when there was so much shame possible. José came in and closed the door. He stood between the two uniforms, his slack, stained shirt hanging open at the neck.
He had locked the study door, he had locked the study door. José wrapped one fist around the other in an effort to recall turning the key in the lock. It was better they didn’t see the rolls of the maps and start asking questions. As he’d said before, he remembered in the Seventies too.
They began questioning her. Lord forgive her, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell them apart. Last time, she hadn’t been able to because of the fear and violence. This time there was no need. She had heard the car engine outside the bedroom window rev a few times so she knew they were coming. She may have forgiven them, but their ways hadn’t changed in twenty-three years.
José listened with mounting panic. He should have kept the shop open… he could be serving there now, smiling and patting the hands of customers before they turned to go. He’d have been safe there, separated from them by, of, dozens of doors. Anna gave brief, apparently factual answers to everything they asked. He rolled his shirt sleeves up, then rolled them down, hoping he was unseen.
No, the Englishman had not attacked her. No, the girl did not incite him to it. No, there was no attack. No, no one was attacked. No, she did not incite any attack. No, her husband did not incite any attack.
José had come in because he thought Anna might need him. He was her husband and she turned to him after what had happened, when she could turn to anyone. He’d closed the doors and ushered customers out so he could go to her and support her. But she was no more than one of his ancestors’ effigies in front of these policemen. Her arms grew out of her sides and stomach as though they were carved, and not limbs in themselves. Her mouth jerked up and down as the idol gods’ mouths did, offering, she always said, untruths to misguide the unguided. He pressed his sweating back to the cool door. The material sucked up the moisture and clung to him.
Yes, she had met both the Englishman. Yes, she had liked them both. Yes, she knew the girl. Yes, and her father too. Yes, they were all friends. Yes, she went to church. Yes, her husband owned the shop. And the house. Yes, she knew and liked everyone the officers had met in the valley that afternoon. Yes, she could vouch for the girl. Yes, she could vouch for her father. Yes, she could vouch for the littler Englishman. Yes…
Where was her tongue? José stared and swallowed. Anna’s eyes, apparently lifeless, turned to him. He rolled up his sleeves again. He rolled them down. He listened to the moustached officer, who smelt strongly of some American aftershave, press her on that question. The other Englishman. Could she vouch for him? José imagined Juan, with his smell, bending over him in the study, asking and asking while José’s tongue flapped around in his mouth and dried up.
No, she could not vouch for the other Englishman. In all honesty, as God was her witness, she had not known him long enough. She said this to be truthful, may God strike her down if she lied, but he had seemed pleasant enough. Not the sort of type who might attack anyone, least of all an old woman.
The officers began to walk round the room, happily at home. They looked under the crucifix. They lifted the television and knocked the ariel out of line. She still sat, stiff and aching, but she was not going to give them a chance to take her to the car by letting her guard down. She could still feel the shudder that had gone through the Falcon’s body iun 1977 as the soldier turned the key in the ignition.
José though, José would be glad to be taken away. He fluttered round the room like a leaf around the bronze hooves of San Martín’s horse in the square. Sometimes he brushed them and froze while the eyes behind their sunglasses reflected him back to himself. Sunglasses indoors Anna thought, offended the more by this. The porteños’ fashions got increasingly ridiculous.
“We want to question you in private, Señor Achua.”
“Of course, of course,” José agreed and regretted it. An officer took each elbow and brought him out into the hall. He cast a glance over his shoulder at his ancestors’ effigy, his wife, and felt a sudden terror that the room would be closed to him for ever, he’d die staring back at the door. Anna’s face was no longer an effigy’s. Its colour had fragmented into blotches and paleness. Her breathing was broken and ragged. It was now that she needed him.
But they closed the door firmly. One was behind him, breathing ht sugary breath across his face. The moustached one was in front. For the first time, he could just make out the shape of the man’s eyes behind the streaked plastic of the sunglasses.
“Is your wife lying? Is your wife telling the truth?”
His brain, overloaded and registering the proximity of the locked study door to an officer’s shoulder, was unable to tell the difference between the questions. He simply nodded, so vigorously that his teeth became drowned in his lips.
“Don’t mess me around.” The officer repeated the questions. This time José answered as Anna would have required – or so he guessed. “Are you sure? We had a very reliable report of an attack.”
“I’m not messing you around, believe me. Why would I want to mess you around? Why would she lie to you, I mean, I would, I mean, I would tell you straight off if there’d been anything like that in my shop.”
“Anything like what?”
“Well, an attack I mean, like what you were talking about.”
“So there was definitely no attack?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Well, we’ll see, eh?” It appeared to be a friendly farewell slap, but José was left holding his arm as they slammed the front door behind them.

Sara was not asleep, but the floods of darkness running through her head had a consistency that was difficult to escape. Peter was sprawled beside her. His voice made a pleasant buzzing and she replied in kind. They were talking about the Indians, or England, or her work for the American university. Well-trodden topics, but still valuable as exercises in being together. Their communication was made all the more comforting by the feel of his hip bone against hers and the shared coolness that brushed both their skins. She worried that her head was crushing his arm; she shifted slightly and he flexed the muscles. They hardened and relaxed against her back.
The bravery and adaptability of the Indians. She pointed out the parallels between the way they fought and they way they ultimately embraced the new, that was to say her, religion. Peter laughed and nodded and rolled against her so that his chest was hot and heavy on her shoulder and breast. There was no hurry to leave. Time lingered comfortably in the crevices and corners of the room where it had drifted in from the valley. She stretched out her naked limbs and, beneath the conversation, relished the familiar sluggishness of the afternoon.
Only – there was a cold creature in her stomach and her elbows were jammed hard against hard wood, and her father wasn’t waiting at home but choking, angry and conscious, on Peter’s bed. Peter stood there, ineffectual, learning his impotence while the pain in her back grew and John stood over the bed, apparently solicitous, and demanded that the silver thrown from the truck be fetched back. Sara was spiralling helplessly through layers of awareness. Fragments of reassurance crumbled to reveal thick reality and the sick imagined sight of Anna confronting Pablo and his friend.
She was completely conscious now, but stickiness and pain in her eyes and throat rendered Peter’s shuttered study, where she sat, alien and cluttered. She was angry. Here she was, with stinking sweat soaking into unwanted clothes, and all the confused promise of her future had dried to frail sticks. She got unsteadily to her feet, wincing at the bruise on her back and ignoring her thirst. John was still stnading over her father in the other room.
“How are you feeling?” He said.
“All right.” She watched his hand as it lay on the pillow beside her father’s head. He moved it after a moment and she saw the belly of the bag by his feet, tight where the silver pressed against it.
John swallowed, feeling that something violent was about to begin. He hadn’t forgotten how her hands had stretched out to tear his face earlier in the day.
“Where’s Peter?”
“He – er – went outside, for a walk I think. He wanted to clear his head, he said.”
“And how’s he?” Meaning the figure on the bed.
“I think he'll be fine. He’s just sleeping now. The stress must’ve got to him.”
Her father’s breathing was peaceful, it was true. It just sounded loud in the gap between one speech and the reply. She went forward, to measure John’s reaction, and straightened a rumpled corner of a sheet so that its lines were clean and straight. John Wilson stood and watched her. The energy she’d seen earlier had gone now but she could see no fear in his pose. There was no triumph in his eyes, either. As she saw this, she stood upright, close enough to smell his chemicals over the scent of her own body.
His skin was prickling again… The blood in him seemed to ooze down to his groin, but the matching rush in his head did not appear, to his relief. He could hold himself back now - no more of this wild fucking up.
“The police will have been to see Anna now.” Her breath washed over his face. “And then they’ll go and find your friend Hernan, and then they’ll come back here. How much money have you got left?”
“Not much,” he said in English, trying to pretend she had no power over him.
“That’s a shame.”
He swallowed again, bound up in, but resisting her eyes. Control, control, control. But it was difficult. He wanted to feel her body on his. What would she do if he caressed her? The fact that he didn’t know baffled him.
“I’ve got enough to get a bus back to Salta. And then I could get some cash out and get back to Buenos Aires.”
“And leave everything behind?”
“And leave everything behind,” he said, before realising that she had only pointed to the silver.

José stepped out onto the street and waited while Anna came out after him and closed the door. There would be no talking as they made their way to his car, and he was glad of it. She would walk a step behind him, as she always did, and he wouldn’t even have to see the mottled ruins of her face. The sunlight was unbearable. He felt it scorching him as though he was some miserable released prisoner who’d spent too long pressed against a wall. He saw other men and women striding about with their clothes tight and bright over their bodies. He tried to match their step, but felt the bag on his shoulder dragging him closer to the loose concrete instead. Even though most of the walls lining the street were windowless he felt unprotected – what the Quilmes warriors would have thought of him as they stood proud in their untaken fortress, he didn’t want to think.
Though, he supposed, he was free to imagine it, since he’d imagined so much else.
Anna wanted to leave right away. She couldn’t bear to stay in the ouse. They wold drive to Cordoba and stay with Carmen and her husband. No one there would suspect what had happened. José resisted. This was their home – what might happen of something else happened while they were unprotected? He imagined himself holding her close at the side of an empty road with no help from any side. He wanted her to be safe and he couldn’t protect her alone.
“The police aren’t like that now, my love,” he said. “It was all a long time ago.”
Anna had just put one hand on his knee and said in her old voice, the voice that had directed him down precise paths so often before. “What were the Conquistadors?”
“Invaders and thieves,” he said, knowing that that was the only answer he could give. As ever, there had been no more argument. She had packed the bags with hands that only rarely shivered.
The first hundred metres were done, and the strap of his bag dug deeply into his stomach. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and turned to make sure Anna was still with him. The skin of his hand slipped ineffectually off the wetness on his head and he pulled up short in mild shock. Anna was closer than usual, keeping up to his pace despite the weight across her own shoulder. She smiled at him without forcing it. She, at least, was happier now.
He was glad of that, and tried to fit it into the way he saw the town. Everyone was walking with purpose. There were young men talking excitedly through streams of their own cigarette smoke, old women with heavy bags at the ends of thick arms. He found he couldn’t even tell the jobless from the ones who really had somewhere to go. He straightened his back and recalled to mind his own painstaking map of Cafayate. From it he could work out how far the two of them had walked and how far they still had to go to get to the car.
But he made that map a long time ago, pacing it out surreptitiously and scribbling the measurements in a very small notebook. He only remembered its detail once he’d seen the places he’d chosen to mark on it. And there, El Hombre del Norte, the bar on the corner of the road had closed down. The building was a sun-blasted shell, more cracked and flaking than its neighbours. The windows were black blocks. As he passed under the once-gaudy sign over the buckled door his mind went morosely to the other maps rolled up and locked into near-oblivion in his study. But then he brightened: El Hombre indicated that the next turn – here it was – past the tree that he had drawn as a perfect circle despite its emaciated irregularity– and another forty metres, and there would be the car, sitting idle since its last use a week ago.
The trunk opened with a reassuring clunk and screech. The whole car body swayed as he dropped the bag in. His body moved in sympathy, though it was pleasantly cooled along the hot sweaty lines the straps had left. He looked around for a second, pleased again by the precision of his map, which had accommodated even the unusual turns in the road. It was only when Anna looked at him expectantly that he realised that he should have put her bag in the trunk as well. But she was still smiling. José smiled too. He opened the passenger door for her and ambled round to the other side.
The air inside was hot and stiff and Anna’s perfumy smell had infiltrated most of it.
“Are you ready?” he asked, when she had finished straining at the seat belt. He knew better than to try and struggle with his own.
“Yes,” she said happily. “Shall I put the radio on?”
He nodded and settled back into the mixture of sensations from the crackling radio chatter, the uneven engine roar and the heat of his wife’s hand on his knee. He still wanted to go back home, but the time that had to pass before he could wasn’t just going to be agony.

“Don’t open the door!” Hernan bellowed again.
His wife scurried back from the hallway and stood in front of his chair with wide eyes.
“Oh stop it,” he said angrily and made as if to get up. But he slumped back and ignored the mute appeal in Irina’s eyes. His mother, too, was fidgeting around like some flappy black spider’s web. They wouldn’t leave him alone, and he’d really better get thinking. He started to get up again, but there was more banging and hammering on the door as if someone was doing some building. He wanted to get up, but he could feel his knees going crazy under his trousers.
Irina pursed her lips and waited. Whatever came of it, she had done her duty. She had recognised the policemen’s car from its previous visits, when Hernan had been deposited on the front door step at a drunken angle. She’d gone to tell him immediately, as she was supposed to do. She had seen that they were settling down to drink their maté before knocking on the door. But he had not moved from his seat. So the time had passed, and she had spent it between the window and his chair, watching the the policemen’s maté gourd pass from hand to hand under the steep angle of the windshield. When Hernan shouted, she told him what was happening.
The repeated sight of the maté had made her thirsty, but she suppressed the feeling with a glum promise to herself that she could drink as soon as he moved. Whichever way he went, her duty would be done. She could leave it to his mother to carry out the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Irina crossed herself after belatedly remembering that the phrase to do with teeth was a Biblical one. Hernan’s eyes followed her movement, but he didn’t seem to see it.
“They’ll break down the door in a minute,” she said, keeping her voice flat. And that would be the twenty dollars he’d brought them yesterday gone, and another bit of credit on the long roll at Señor Achua’s shop.
He didn’t react to that warning either until there was a change in the blows raining on the wood. This was a shoulder instead of a fist, she decided firmly and went down into the corridor to watch the door jar and vibrate against the lock and hinges. Hernan’s mother was already there with her hands clasped and her eyes rolling, taking in the door, heaven and everything else in the dull broad hallway. Having observed, Irina left the old woman to it and went back into the room at the end of the corridor to tell him to be ready.
The chair was empty. She breathed a long slow sigh of relief and released her fingers from her shawl. It slipped off her head as she made a cursory round of the house. Hernan wasn’t there, so she hurried back into the hallway with new words preparing themselves for her mouth. She listened to the heavy sounds of the attacking body against the door. Finally they paused, and she opened it.
They were there, sunglasses and caps firm on their heads and their top lips still moist from the maté. Her own tongue was dry and thick. She didn’t say anything in the end but looked down, stepped aside and felt the air swirl slightly as they passed through.
As Hernan’s mother raised her voice in shrill protest, Irina stepped out into the road and looked left and right. She couldn’t see Hernan; his car was gone. A woman on the other side of the road looked at the police car and then at Irina, perhaps even her hair, which had suffered under the shawl. She would have liked to have stared back, but she knew it would just be pointless. She went back inside, to the kitchen and drank a long soothing mug of water.
He’d done it! Hernan slapped his hands on the wheel. He was round the police and in his car without any trouble, except a tear in the knee of his trousers where the bedroom window catch had caught. He wriggled around in his seat and beat out an even more cheerful rhythm on the sticky steering wheel. Even the old car, unused for weeks, had started easily. His wife had done her job and his mother was most likely doing hers, pulling at the cops’ badges and stuff and shouting about he hadn’t done anything and would they get out of this honest house. Ha ha ha ha ha ha haa! He flicked on the radio and pressed hard on the accelerator until the car was crab-hopping and swaying wildly about, almost as much as he was inside it, on the quickest road away from Cafayate, the road to Cachi.
But as he shot through the frayed houses of San Carlos and onto the crumbling gravel road on the other side, the fierce thrill of his escape disappeared in a second. The cops were behind him. They were close – he was sure he could make out the stretched letters “F-O-R-D” on the front of the hood. The Englishman must have sent them. He had put more money in their pockets than he would ever have given to Hernan. The word “Half”, which had made him so happy, was now bitter, flavoured by fear. The Englishman, the Englishman. He remembered his violence more clearly than ever. The radio jarred in his ear, laughing at him.
The Englishman kept floating through his head. Hernan should have stayed away from him. But fifty dollars a day! That was the sickest of all. How did he start believing he would get “half”? Should have known. Two Englishmen would always stick together against an Argentine.
And there was he thinking he’d have half! All the things he’d done spread out, clear now. Stupid and confused, he’d been. “Half”! The cops were getting closer, they had to be closer. The light off their windshield dazzled him. His hands oozed liquid and the wheel slipped under them. He gripped tighter until he felt like the blood would come out after the sweat. They were closer, driving over the holes in the road with barely a quiver, like some devil-driven machine. He had to go faster until he got to the paved road at Cachi. Then he would turn off – to Salta… or perhaps he could go to Bolivia. But his passport was in his house, and his money was dissolving into the sweat on his thigh.
Salta, Salta, Salta. But they were catching him up, catching him because his car was jerking all over the road. If he went faster, it would start leaping. But they would catch him, they really would, and he would be back in the power paid for by the Englishman. He wished he’d never taken that fifty dollars. But the Englishman’s money had looked so good.
The car reeled from a vicious gap in the road. Perhaps it had even jumped backwards, closer to the one behind. No time to think. His foot went down flat again and the engine squalled over a dozen more wide trenches. He had to go faster and suddenly, without control, he did.

The noise of the car engine made Natalina run quickly outside and leave the clothes strewn all over the floor. Surely Benito hadn’t been laid off? But she didn’t recognise the car outside, or even the make, and that frightened her too. She tightened the cloth around her head and stood in the half-cool doorway as the dusty wheels bounced and creaked their way across the open space between the houses. A man, a big heavy man with a workman’s shirt across his thick shoulders got out and looked at her with narrow eyes. He seemed nervous and unwilling to go round the car to her.
Perhaps Benito had been hurt – poor devil. An image of him bandaged and bitterly brandishing a doctor’s bill flashed before her eyes. Or was this man a creditor? She stepped forward, spreading her hands, ready to explain that she knew nothing of her husband’s affairs. Benito dealt with the money, all except what she earned, and that wasn’t much, but he’d be home in the evening – perhaps the man would like to wait.
“Who is it dear?”
“Nothing, Dad. Go back inside. It’s too hot for you out here.” Her father grunted sourly but did as he was told. She could hear her mother and him repeating the conversation. She let the door close behind her.
“My husband’s at work, but he’ll be back soon – unless you know him? We’re just waiting for him to get paid today, or is it tomorrow, that’s if you’re not from him. He is all right, isn’t he?”
The man paused, then, hesitantly, smiled. Perhaps he hadn’t understood.
“I’m afraid I don’t know your husband. Er- we were looking for Señor Bolivar’s house. We know he lives here, but not which house.”
“Oh, oh, Señor Bolivar and his daughter, you know his daughter Sara? Oh, I feel so relieved. I thought Benito – my husband – or that you were calling in some debts. They say that’s been happening a lot these days.”
“No, no, we’re friends of Señor Bolivar.”
“We?” she nearly asked, but then saw the woman watching her from the other side of the car. Her heart rushed on, but the rest of her was much calmer now – if it had been another man though! But a woman was all right. Benito was all right and he still had work. Or at least that was how it was at this minute. But there she was, worrying and worrying and the poor man wanted to find his friend.
“I don’t know if he’s in. They’ve been going out and coming in all over the place these days, but if you go over there, past Tomas’ – he works as an engineer, you’d think he’d be all right, but people have no money even for their cars these days – but never mind the bits and pieces he’s left, you just have to go round them, but leave your car out here so you won’t ruin your tyres. Yes, just round after Tomas’ you can just see it, it’s the last one along the road.”
“Thank you.” He was very polite, the man, not what she’d expected.
“Oh, and if he’s not in, which he might not be, you can leave a message for him with me, and I’ll see he gets it.”
“Thank you,” said the man again, “I will.” He bent over to let his wife out of the car. She must have been very hot, because she had to lean on the door for a minute or so while the man told her what he’d been told.

This wasn’t what José had expected. Señor Bolivar’s house should have been bigger, and plants should not have been growing out of the roof. He almost went back to ask that poor nervous woman if she was sure she’d told him right. But she’d gone back inside and the door had closed. Anna had got over the metal wreckage without too much trouble, but she didn’t want to follow him as he waded through the tall leafed plants that grew and wilted all around the four walls. There was a clearer patch of earth that faced onto a solid-looking door at the back, but even that had not been tended recently. It might once have had vegetables in it, but it was slowly returning to the knee-high jungle all round it. Why would Señor Bolivar not keep his land as tidy as he kept himself?
It was his suggestion to go to Señor Bolivar’s. They didn’t have enough petrol, he ought to check the air in the tyres… and then it would be dark. The idea of the dark empty roads between them and their daughter’s house reawakened his fear of leaving. Since they coldn’t go back hime, he had suggested this diversion. They would go to Carmen’s in the morning. It was only when Anna, to his surprise, happily agreed, that they realised that they’d never been to their friend’s house before. But with Anna smiling beside him at last, José was sure he’d find the right place. Anna had laughed, believing she had escaped, and they knew they could expect a good welcome from their friend.
Well, they had found the place. The welcome had yet to be proved. José wondered again about the things the three of them had never said.
The shutters were all tight against the windows. Now these were neat and firmly fasted to the concrete, only above them long trailing stems covered the corners of the flat roof.
José shrugged when he could see Anna again. “He could be talking his siesta. I’ll try the door.”
This door was strong too, unlike the ones on the houses nearby. It seemed too big for use as a simple entrance, and his knock only made a faint noise. He tried again, harder, but he still couldn’t believe that the sound he made could be heard inside. He grazed his knuckles on the wood grain. The door moved slightly and then lurched away from the wall. Through his alarmed sweat, José could feel a draught of cooler air and smell a lived-in house. Round the edge of the door, he could see faint glimmers of light marking out the curves of some unidentifiable furnishings.
“I don’t think he’s in, but the door’s open.”
Anna was close behind him now. He looked round to see what he should do, and was glad to find that she already knew.
“We’ll wait for him inside. He’ll understand.”
“Right then. But we could leave a message with that woman over there.”
“And what’ll we do in the meantime?”
“I don’t know. But whatever you think is right.” He got his fingers round the edge of the door and eased it open. For a second, while his feet still rested outside, he was nervous, unsure of the rightness of going into a man’s house in his absence. There was also a lingering doubt about whether he wouldn’t suddenly find Señor Bolivar sitting up in bed in his military clothes, ready to fight off intruders. But once he was inside, it felt safe. The air was warm and undisturbed. There was no one here. The room was neat. The chairs nestled close against the walls and the rack of thick books sat uniformly on the shelf. Even the television ariel seemed to have been groomed to attention. The screen had been dusted, as had the shelves and the glass fronts of the picture of Peron. There was a crucifix on the wall above a high-backed wooden chair. It was as thought the little room had been waiting for guests.
This was his friend’s house and José already felt welcome.
“Shall I get the bags out of the car?”
“No, no, not yet. We shouldn’t presume too much.” Anna was pressing her hands together excitedly and her face, which had seemed so old since Juan’s first appearance – well, it was to José nearly as young again as when he’d married her. That alone made him want to shake Señor Bolivar’s hand.
“I’m sure he’d wouldn’t begrudge us a cup of coffee,” he said.
“I’m sure you’re right my dear. Sit down and I’ll go.”
She went quickly out of the door and he sat, thinking of the ease with which she moved suddenly. He breathed in deeply. The air had the tang of Sara Bolivar’s cigarettes in it and he noticed the pristine wooden ashtray scooped into the arm of the chair he’d chosen. Its material had ridges of weave running across it that pressed into and soothed the muscles of his shoulders, which had been unused to his nervous posture behind the wheel. Even Sara Bolivar was settled and safe here. He contemplated the television screen and wondered how presumptuous it would look if the Bolivars came home to find him watching it.
“Anna? Are you all right?” She’d made a sound – an exclamation, or a yelp. Grinning to himself at the liberty he was taking, he wondered if she’d stumbled on a collection of dirty magazines or something else that showed that Señor Bolivar had some kind of vice. But she didn’t reply and he felt his affectionate inner joke blasted away by a fresh stream of panic.
“Anna? Are you all right?”
He didn’t want to go near the door and leave the known comfort of the room. He stood by the chair and asked the question again. But her continuing silence forced him out.
There was a small space between four doors and Anna seemed to fill all of it. She wasn’t sobbing but the smooth material on her shoulders quivered under his fingers. Her face was hidden.
“What’s happened? Are you all right?” Once again he was the numb spectator. He tried to root himself in his ancestors’ strength in the dark hallway. Again his ancestors watched him watching. But this time there was time to act. He put his arms round her and tried to hold back his bitter disappointment at this new trouble so as not to contaminate her with it. Her body filled the circle of his arms and he tried to believe himself into being her support in spite of his own sense of sliding unstoppably into things unknown.
“It was just a mistake,” she said, breathless. “I just went to find the kitchen. I didn’t know which door it was. God forgive me, and by the saints I didn’t mean to look.
“Which door did you go in?”
“That one there.”
As the front door had done, this one hung slightly open. The gap was less than a thumb’s width across. The door was narrow and frail, but the band of dull light on its other side hid things that… This was not a time for silly imaginings, José told himself firmly. It was better to know directly. He drew his arms across her as he let go, so as to keep her close to him as long as possible. Then, with his body between her and the room, he readied himself to know the worst about his friend.
It was too dark to see everything clearly, but he filled in with guesses what he couldn’t make out. There, in the closed confines, was all the history he and his friend had never gone into in all their games of truco.
Señora Bolivar, he guessed, next to another, bigger crucifix, stood in a frame at the bedside table. Behind her hung the uniform, set about with more photographs.
One, he was sure, was of General Jorge Videla, the man who became president in the military coup of 1976. There was at least one other of a military man. The uniform hung below it, the top of the cap almost touching the hard black frame. He looked away, and then back, his mouth set in a line that put aches though his muscles.
This was not something he wanted to know. While the bright buttons and sharp creases had stayed hidden he’d been able to pretend. Señor Bolivar had been a friend with no other affiliations. Now all that was whisked away and Anna was pulling at his shirt, bringing him out of the room.
“Let’s just go,” she was saying. “Before he comes back. We’ll close the door behind us and be gone and he’ll never know.”
“Where shall we go? We can’t get to Cordoba now.”
“Where do you want to go?”
The maps began to unroll in his mind again. He knew the roads to Salta and Tucuman well enough, and then there was the road west to Cachi and further round. He thought he could remember every curve in the lines of the roads. Once you were on them, though you didn’t see the curves, only moved round them with one hand on the wheel. No, those routes were no use. What would they do in another town?
“We should go home,” he said heavily. “And make the best of it. It’d be silly to go anywhere else.”
Anna nodded. José was surprised but relieved. He pushed the thought that the police might return far away, where she couldn’t remember it. He was sure, at this moment, that they wouldn’t. “We should get the shop open again,” she said steadily. “Make things back to normal again.”

Natalina heard the engine purr away, but got to the window too late to see the car before it accelerated down the road. Perhaps she could have tried to stop them and ask them if everything was all right. The Bolivars must be out. But surely those people would have wanted to leave a message…
She wiped the window glass down, so that the dust sticking to it was pushed to the edge. Her reflection frowned at her. She was getting thin with all the worry. The best thing to do would be to try and take in some more clothes to mend, so if Benito lost his job they wouldn’t be too stuck. Anyway, she’d let the Bolivars know they’d had visitors if they asked. She could even describe them to the police if it came to that.

“Why’re you doing all that for him, John?”
“Poor bugger’s had a nasty fainting fit, hasn’t he? It’ll only be the worse for us if he goes on and dies there.”
“But it was only a faint, it wasn’t like he’s had a stroke or anything. Even I can see he’s sleeping normally now.”
“Yeah. But we didn’t know that then did we?”
The cooling sand rode up between their toes. Behind them, framed by the still-hard face of the sun, the truck stood like an abandoned monument in the crystallised valley. Peter could feel his questions picking up the rhythm of the music coming from it even though the sounds were so faint as to feel almost unconscious.
“Sara doesn’t get you. One minute you’re shitting on her, then you’re looking after her old man as if he was your own.”
“Not really.”
“You’ve still got your hands on the silver though, I notice.”
“You’re a repetitive bastard, you know that?”
“I don’t understand why you haven’t taken off with it while you still can. The two of us would be much happier if you did.”
“I can tell that. So do you want to know what I’m doing?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
Peter slumped down further into the sand. His mind was still half on Sara and what she might be doing on her own in the hut. He wasn’t watching what he was saying and it had all led up to John’s revelation without his knowing.
“I’m losing, mate.”
“You don’t lose, John, you just fuck people over.”
“No, mate, I’m losing. Look at me. I just spent two nights sleeping rough in Argentina of all places. And the cops are running up and down and I keep losing it.”
John realised he hadn’t known what he felt until he said it. Now it had come out, he felt drained. He’d known he felt guilty after what happened in the Achuas’ shop – that had been a horrible thing to do, even though it wasn’t his fault – but this was worse than guilt. No one would listen when he told them what to do. They’d just laugh, as they’d always wanted to do.
“You’ve got the silver now. It’s what you came here for. Now you can go back to Oxford and spin them any kind of yarn. You’ve seen me and you can say you fell over the silver on your way back to the airport. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Unless you want Sara as well.”
John shifted uncomfortably next to him and Peter opened his eyes, ready to muster up the anger he knew would be required. But John’s eyes were wide open, staring at the colours creeping across the sky. When he spoke it was clear he hadn’t been listening, just holding his words back until the noise from Peter’s mouth stopped.
“I told you I’d taken a sabbatical. It’s not true. They got me, the bastards. Investigated me for misconduct. And it’s your fault. They did an inquiry into what you’d said, as if you weren’t out of your tree at the time. Then they suspended me ‘On the grounds of academic failure’.” The imitation of the Dean’s pompous delivery slipped in and out of his voice like a cloud. “They didn’t want fuss. Go and learn stuff, they meant, and come back when you have.”
Peter listened to John’s sigh and tried to picture Oxford, the wet windows and the clang of old radiators.
“Then I had a read of your e-mail.”
How was Atkins taking it? He was lying still as John looked at him. Was he even listening? The urge to speak began to shrivel up inside him. Was this something Peter could use against him? John didn’t even know what had made him speak any more, except the dull truce forced by everyone’s exhaustion.
The radio music from the truck was audible again. John was waiting for Atkins to speak, to ask him what the hell he thought he was going to get out of coming here. Wouldn’t he put up a fight? What did John think he was going to do when he came down here and tried to take his achievements off him? John had believed he could’ve made Peter do exactly what he wanted, for all his protests. This had been true in Oxford, at Heathrow, Buenos Aires, on the long bus rides, even in Cafayate. But now it was all broken down like a withered thorn bush.
Peter didn’t say anything. The sun went down quickly. The day’s stillness hung around while the light went. On the other side of the faint music the world was empty.
It was as though the conversation had never happened. The conversation had never happened, John asserted to himself. They’d lain here in silence. Atkins knew nothing and he didn’t have the silver any more. But the certainty of this knowledge stirred nothing in John except a desire to sleep like a man who’d lasted out a disaster. He couldn’t be proud. He’d sleep alone because Sara Bolivar hadn’t been – hadn’t been his to take. Everything came down to that. She had always shrugged him off.
Suddenly Peter sat up, dusting the valley off his clothes. He stretched as if he’d been asleep and got to his feet.
“Where’re you going, mate?”
“Going to see how Sara’s doing,” he mumbled.
John lay back. If they’d both been sleeping, the conversation didn’t happen. He remembered how strong he’d felt after a mood just like this while he was sleeping rough. There had been no truce. The silver was still his. He began to think about the keys to the trucks, how easy they might be to steal.

“Are you all right, Father?”
“I am fine.” She watched him push himself up on the bed until his body was a right angle. He took the cover off himself with the air of a man who wanted to keep himself clean.
“Do you want anything to eat, or drink?”
“Where’s he gone?”
“That Englishman. The one who was stealing my silver.”
“Oh, Father. Not you as well.”

The corporal changed gears with the contours of the road. Down one, up two, down three, all the time so that the vibrations of the engine were kept within strict limits. In front of them, the road stretched like a narrow plastic strip, broken occasionally by the crests of banks and hills. It was clear and clean, and so it would be all the way to Salta because the motorcycles of the outriders ahead would push each and every approaching car into the rough sprawl of the verges. Captain Bolivar enjoyed the sense of the empty road in front of him. It strengthened the sense of his mission. There the other drivers would be, staring out their wound-up windows with bulging eyes, admiring the stolid Army lorry’s power to interrupt their journeys.
Down went the gears again, and the tone of the engine changed throughout the truck. He liked the way the corporal moved, too. He was sharp, precise and quick, drilled in this, just as the six men in the back were drilled in what they had to do. Apparently the man was more often employed driving the Falcons when they went on counter-insurgency activities, but he could drive lorries too.
He saw the motorcyclists slow for a moment, then felt the mild jar of a few loose stones. After a few minutes, by his calculations, Salta would be visible below them – first the outlying houses, then the edge of the city grid. They could expect to stop at a checkpoint soon. He checked his watch carefully until the line of cars and uniforms were only metres away. Then he looked up and nodded the driver over to the edge of the road with a firm feeling of satisfaction. Through the efficiency of his soldiers, he was accurately placed in the midst of all the information the Army had given him.
The checkpoint sentry hurried off to the cluster of officers by the barricade to inform them of the arrival of Captain Bolivar and his detachment.
The corporal stared straight ahead of him, with his hands lightly on the wheel. Captain Bolivar touched the rosary he kept close to his chest and settled himself down to wait with the same stolidity. It wasn’t long before an officer came over with the rifle-laden sentry still in sweaty attendance. Captain Bolivar was out on the bright tarmac in a moment, saluting and confirming his identity.
“Major Astarte. We’ve been expecting you, Captain. There are some messages for you from your regimental HQ. If you’ll accompany me to our desk, I’ll hand them over personally.”
The major closed his fat red mouth into a bulging purse across his face. Captain Bolivar turned to have a quick glance at the truck. It looked safe and solid in the long line of cars pulled over for inspection. Satisfied, he fell in with Major Astarte’s sluggish step,
The cars still on the road pumped out a thick cloud of fumes that gathered round the folding tables arragned across the front of the checkpoint control building. There was an officer or NCO at each one and opposite them sat a driver or passenger from every car currently pulled over. Sometimes the officer would be brandishing a document or something half-forbidden that had been uncovered in a search of the bags. Sometimes these things lay between the two faces like the prize in a game. There were protesting voices, slumped shoulders or even pleas of ignorance, but Captain Bolivar was pleased to see little sympathy one the interviewers’ faces. With such a malign enemy as the Montonero terrorists, tender feelings could be fatal weaknesses. No doubt all those who had come to sit before the checkpoint’s justice were innocent – but these things could not be taken for granted, as the rank of riflemen nearby testified. This close to the Bolivian border, every care had to be taken. Now and again, a shambling awestruck man or woman would be sent on their way or escorted out of sight. It was the defence of the country at work under the blue-and-white flag.
Major Astarte said nothing while they passed the string of interrogations and into the relative calm on the barrier’s other side. Here the waiting troops had little to do except watch the permitted vehicles make their slow way down into Salta. They saluted as the officers passed by them into the checkpoint building.
Only now, in the hot, close heat, did the major open his mouth again. Indoors, he mumbled his words as though his moustache was getting in the way of his tongue.
“If you’ll just wait a minute, I’ll find the the things for you. You’re the fourth convoy we’ve had through today.”
Captain Bolivar nodded and opened his mouth to make a suitable reply, but the major’s hands had already delved into reams of papers strewed haphazardly along a table that spanned one wall of the little room. He turned away instead and looked out of the tiny square window.
The edge of all the activity outside was visible. There were some sentries’ backs, the hood and front wheels of a waiting car and, for an instant, a driver going back to her car, smoothing down her long hair with pale hands. Two Ford Falcons, bright green in the sun, took up most of the view. The light reflected full from their windows.
Major Astarte’s voice broke in on him. “Ah’m. I’m sorry for the delay, Captain. I won’t keep you much longer.”
Under his eyes, the major’s hands went back to searching amongst all the hissing sheets. Now calmly, now frantically, until many papers slipped off and onto the floor.
Automatically, the captain bent down to clear up the mess. As he did so an idea cracked in his mind.
Astarte was still among the piles of paper, creating more and more disorder. When the sheets retrieved from the floor flapped down on the table in front of him, he barely looked up. The whole place was dusty. Spiders had made fine homes in the corners. Even outside there was rubbish, blowing between the sentries’ crumpled trouser legs. Captain Bolivar swayed in discomfort. He concentrated on the pristine paintwork of the Falcons and forced himself to remember that Astarte was a superior officer.
“Here they are!” The man had the temerity to sound proud of himself. The sheets were bent and folded at the corners where they were stapled. “There’s the usual stuff, and a personal message for you, Captain.”
He took the papers. A request for a status report, the directions required for the return journey – and the other sheet. Had Astarte read it as he’d read the other documents? He was looking at him with sad expectant eyes. But he was not worth looking back at. Even so, the appearance of the personal message in amongst his duties embarrassed the captain.
The official messages were quickly dealt with. Then he was outside again blinking in the sun in the middle of all the noise and shouting of the military checkpoint. There was a woman crying and an interrogator repeating the same question over and over again. The noise was an irritant, conspiring with the harsh whiteness of the paper to prevent him understanding the ill-typed words.
Astarte put a hand on his shoulder. He had read the message, then. But it would not do to shake the hand off. Instead he merely turned and saluted, habit filling in for his usual enthusiasm.
Back past the motorcyclists, who revved their machines in readiness. Back into the cab of the truck, still carrying the message in his brain like an egg. They rolled through the barricade and all the sentries stopped in their idle strolls to stare lazily, maybe even wave at the men in the back.
Astarte had only said: “What is it you’re carrying? Can’t you send your men on with it? Is it very urgent?”
“It’s classified, I’m afraid sir. I’ll be going back home in a couple of days anyway.”
Not until they were on the other side of Salta, when the traffic thinned to nothing and the villages all but disappeared, did the egg shift in his head and he remembered. In the thankful isolation of the cab’s noise and the corporal’s commendable attention to his duty, he formulated prayers for his little daughter and his poor wife, surely this time heeding her final summons to heaven.
He didn’t think of the road ahead, or the power he wielded through the rushing motorcyclists. He could only see parade-ground images where Maria stepped forward at the call of her name. She was escorted away and no explanations were given. She was going, she was gone and the cause remained unexplained. There was no appeal against that kind of justice, he thought, thinking of God.
The corporal twisted the key under the steering wheel. The engine jumped twice and then stopped. The motorcyclists were standing by their machines, helmets off, checking their rifles for dust. There were some miserable looking houses visible some way off out of the window. He shook himself and sat up, suddenly taking his command again.
“You stay here,” he said to the corporal. “This won’t take long.”
The man nodded. “Yes sir.”
Captain Bolivar stepped out onto the sticky tarmac.

“Is he all right?”
“Yeah. He’s awake now, reading one of your books.”
“Oh. Which one?”
“I don’t really know. History of something. I don’t know.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, Peter. I’ll have to take him back soon. He should be in his own bed.”
She rolled her head from side to side as she spoke, and her eyes danced their looks across and over his body. She occupied the whole of the chair – her arms across its back, legs curled up away from the floor and taut under the material of her jeans. Peter tried to think of how she’d been the last time he’d seen her sit like that, naked and playing some idle game with his English, but he could only sketch the image in his head. He couldn’t remember it.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“When are you going to get rid of John?”
“Get rid of him? You’re making it sound like some kind of Mafia hit.” He moved closer, but he could tell by the way her muscles moved up her arms and shifted over her shoulders that she didn’t want him to. He retreated, careful as always, but catching his feet in some long-abandoned clothes
“John got to my father in the same way as he got to you.”
“Got to me?”
“Yes.” She sat up from the chair back and her teeth flashed out at him as though he was some poor cornered rodent. She’d never been angry with him, never before. It was the heat in the valley that did it, he was sure. They’d all be normal again once the sun had gone down. Now her eyes met his, loved and familiar except that all the love was petrified, as if it had just been hacked out of Los Castellaños. “Where’s John now?” she hissed. “Not in a police cell is he? Not in a hole somewhere with no home to go to. No, he’s here!”
The argument was already lost, so he just shrugged and looked back, hoping there was no defiance in his eyes.
“Even after what he’d done, he just spoke a bit of English and there he was, living with you, thinking about using our sheets.” She stopped. Her eyes went away from his and she was smaller, back in her seat and going over a fingernail with her teeth. Peter felt his spine ease. She was soft again, soft earth. “Can you tell how much he wants to fuck me?” She didn’t look up, just kept on at her nail.
“Er – er – yes. I mean, I – I mean, I knew he did, but…”
“Do you think he should?” Still at the nail.
Peter felt his face swelling up. Behind it, grotesquer images were trying to break through the surface of his mind.
“Well?”
“No, no, of course I don’t! What are you talking about?”
“He got to my father too. When he woke up, the first thing he said was that it was his silver in the cave. It’s no more his than it’s yours, or mine, or John’s. Everyone thinks they own because John wants it.”
“But whose country is it?” He threw her own words back at her with spit and venom.
“You’re not answering properly,” she said, her eyes wide and her face set. “You always do that.”
“Oh God.” The bandage was throbbing on his burning skin. He wanted to rush outside, find some cool shade in that bloody valley, and hide until the fires stopped. But her question wouldn’t be answered there. It would be better if John died. The silver would be Peter’s, Sara would be Peter’s, and John would have nothing, nothing, nothing. Outside, he’d said something about losing. All bollocks, no doubt. The only way he’d know he was losing was when someone had their hands round his neck and the skin was bulging out between the fingers, covered with great purple bruises and the blood starting out from behind his eyes and running down his face onto the hands that were killing him. No one would find the body here in the valley, in the silver cave.
“That was the reason he was good to my father wasn’t it? So we’d let him stay, so he could have another chance at getting his hands on it. He keeps getting into a mess because he’s scared, but he knows what he wants. Everything he does is to get hold of it. All the time he knows what he wants and he goes towards it and he’s always trying to think how to get there, even when he’s meant to be being kind.”
She went closer to him, trying to make the words more powerful. He just stood there, red and angry, drawing more anger out in her.
“He won’t have anything,” Peter said.
“How will that be? Will you stop him? He got the police to attack me and you just watched. You let them hurt me. You were just thinking about the silver because he was going to take it away. He was just thinking about the silver. He was going to have it after he fucked me. That was his plan. Now even my father only thinks about the silver.”
“Instead of about you?” Sara blinked. Peter didn’t say that. He should have said it. It would have been true. It would have made her even more angry, but it would have been true. She stopped, hovering, thinking of her own selfishness towards her father and her lover and knowing it was justified. But he didn’t say it. Instead, he said: “He’ll lose it all, I’ll make sure of it.”
“He hasn’t had me yet. Should I fuck him then, so that he can lose me? I know you won’t do anything to stop him.” Her sefish mouth had escaped her. It spoke of its own accord, running down any channel like flood water. As it spoke, her mind went back to other conversations in this sordid room and flicked through them as though through a book. They’d made jokes, talked about sex and history, England and Argentina, the valley and Oxford. Layers of the other’s self had grown round each of them. Who they were had been expressed and made while they spoke. Now they were just shouting, just opposing people, encumbered with sex, accents and hatreds.
“Do what you fucking like,” he said and turned away. The door cracked back against the wall. Then the outer door. Some critical violence seemed to leave with him. Sara slumped back in the chair, dry-eyed but drained. She thought of John waiting for his opportunity and oblivious of what was happening inside. Perhaps this time Peter would get rid of him. But now she neither wanted that nor opposed it. That, silver-stained though it was, had suddenly stopped being the battle that mattered.

They had a quick look over the car, first making sure that it was safe, then rifling quickly through the glove box – some cigarettes, some pesos and half-pesos, a coil of wire and a blunt knife with a broken blade. The older officer let his junior have whatever he wanted. There wasn’t any evidence in it and poor old Hernan wouldn’t miss it.
Newspapers, some from years ago, and a few beer bottles lay on the back seat. There was a pair of rusting pliers and a scattering of dog hairs. In the boot were various means of repairing the tyres and the engine, including a half-full gas can. Pablo sniffed at it, to be sure.
“Nothing special,” he said.
His colleague nodded and took off his cap. There was nothing here that couldn’t have belonged to anybody in Cafayate, except that most people took more care of their cars. The only sign that anything out of the ordinary had happened was the dome-like dent in the windshield with its networks of silvery cracks and the congealing blood on the dash and glass-studded seats.
The older man looked round, at the road and the sparse trees as though checking for anything he might have missed. They were still a long way from Cachi. It’d be better to get back to Cafayate and get things clear from there. Hernan’s car was well off the road, so it could be left for the time being. “Come on then. We’d better take him back. I’ll give Miguel a call when we get back to the station. He can fetch the car.”
Pablo laughed. “You sure? The only time I’ve ever seen any of his trucks on the road was when it was being towed.”
“It’ll give him something to do.” The older officer opened the police car door and sat in the passenger seat. He moved the mirror until Hernan’s battered face was visible. He was coming round, but the sticky blood had gummed his lips together. His hands flapped and made frightened smacking sounds on the upholstery. His wife wouldn’t thank them when she saw the state of him. But then she never was pleased to see them. Mind you, it’d be worse this time because it wasn’t drink. They’d call in a doctor on the way. Best thing to do.
Why was he feeling sorry for Hernan, the bastard? But he knew why really. He’d been tricked by the English.
What had really happened between the Englishmen? He sighed. Nothing that he could work out. It wasn’t worth it. Pablo would be disappointed but he would get enjoying the police work again.
“Right then. Shall we put him in the cells?”
“No. We’ll take him home and get a doctor to him. He won’t be able to talk by the time we get off the rough road anyway.”
“Oh. Right, what after that?”
“Nothing. We go home too.”
He could guess the expression on the young man’s face without looking round. Silly bastard, Pablo was thinking, wanting to run off to his wife and spend his nights watching the football. But he didn’t say that. His training was good enough… or was it fear of being smacked around where no one could see? The older officer flexed his fists. So, no, Pablo didn’t say that.
“But what about the English? There’s something going on there, and there’s those sheets that the hotel man was talking about. Come on, there’s still stuff we can do.”
“The sheets aren’t important.”
“Yeah, but what about the old woman?”
“Nothing happened. They said so.”
“Why’s he running away like we were going to make him disappear then?”
“He’s a drunk. He doesn’t think straight.” And anyway, he thought, looking at the fat groaning figure at the end of Pablo’s pointing finger, he’s supposed to be scared. That’s how you get law and order and a quiet life for cops.
“What about the girl?”
“What about her?”
“She was nice.”
“I’m married.”
“OK, OK, my last go, boss. What about that thing they pushed off the back of the truck while they were coming down the hill? Could be drugs.”
“Yeah…” Damn junkies. Wrecking poor old Argentina with their smuggling. No junkies would be welcome round here.
“Could be money.”
“Could be.”
“Ah, you’re the man with kids. It’s your choice, maybe good old Hernan will know. He had to be chasing them around for something.” Pablo reached back and slapped the injured man on whatever part was easiest to reach. Hernan moaned and shifted around, clearly in pain.
“Leave him.”
“We could ask him –“
“Leave him. I said we’d take him home and get him looked after. He’s a silly fucker, that’s all. Anyway, he’ll know nothing. He never does… but, yeah, maybe we should go have another look at what the English’ve been up to.”
Pablo smiled and turned the key in the ignition. Hernan began to wail and protest as police car made its way along the unpaved road.

This wasn’t what he’d wanted to remember. He wanted to go back and examine the moment when the Colonel had chosen to speak to him, Captain Bolivar. That had led to this, it was true, but the two things were, they had to be, separate. It wasn’t right to have the proud moment in which he had been given a truly patriotic duty, linked with this, this knowledge, in his ordered mind.
The fight was over quickly, Sara thought. Who had won? Perhaps neither of them. Peter might have just held out his arms and offered help. Peter might have been battered into the ground with a couple of blows and forced into the truck. John might have slipped, been caught while his leg was flying out, or just cracked his head on a stone. Then one of them had driven away. Sara heard the engine roar from where she sat. That, and the knowledge of where it had taken the two men, was all she really knew. The rest were all just routes she’d wondered out.
Señor Bolivar knew exactly where he had been when Maria died. With her time of death written on a scrap of paper, he sat behind the cold wood of his desk in the Corrientes barracks and examined the positions of the checkpoints on a map he had borrowed for the purpose. He had been here before she died – he’d checked his watch. He’d reported here after she died. He’d reported to the officer in charge.
While the day’s papers lay unattended in front of him, he calculated the time, the distance and the speed, narrowed it down to a few hundred metres, less than the width of his finger on the map. In that space, the corporal had turned the wheel left, then right with the curve of the road and Maria had died in her sterile white hospital bed.
Did they stop for the bag of silver Peter had thrown from the truck on the way? No, no, that was already down in the hut. They’d come back for it when they’d got the rest. Sara got to her feet slowly and moved towards the door with uncertain steps. They would come back for it… And how would they act outside the silver cave? “Get in there you bastard and fetch it out – You go – I’m not turning my back on you.” Peter would be forced face first into the dark, dragging the bags out, grunting, scraping his head on the arch of stone. There would be sweat all over his arms and chest, as she’d seen many times before. John would just be some ugly gorilla and each swing of his arms would end with the sound of the bags hitting the flatbed of the truck. Perhaps it would echo off the rock. Perhaps not. Perhaps, instead, each of them took his turn, helping the other, enjoying the theft. She opened the door and stepped out of Peter’s study.
It was all so long ago. Much longer than anything else in the world. He should have been able to dissect the time dispassionately and keep the memories that were not good where they belonged, out of the way. After all, for all his calculations in his Corrientes office, he couldn’t remember what he was thinking as the truck bounced over those few hundred metres of road. A less honourable man might try and believe he had prayed at least once in that time – he’d prayed often on the journey after he received the message. But such a belief could not stand up to scrupulous truth.
He straightened his back so that it was clear of any contact with the easy soft support of the pillows, and opened the book on his knees again. But the words were clouded. His mind wasn’t as clear as it should have been. Too much undisciplined thought. That was because he’d come all the way out here, to the house of the liar Englishman and that silver. That damned silver.
“I thought you said it was yours,” said Sara. He blinked slowly, not realising that he’d spoken his last thought aloud.
“Well so it is, and so it is damned.” The book dropped to the floor in a clatter of pages as he threw aside the bedclothes and got up. He grimaced as he felt the Englishman’s untidiness lying about under his feet. “I brought it all the way out here, and your mother died. And now I’ve nearly given you away to a man who wants to steal it and who’s quite happy to treat you badly for it.”
“I chose him, Father – you didn’t give me away. But – you didn’t bring it here did you? Peter said he’d found it in Alemania.”
“No, no, he was telling the truth that time. I took it to Alemania.”
“Why?”
“I was ordered to. The Colonel himself –“
She shook her head to stop him. Her dark hair fell forward and made the pallor of her face increase.
“But you came back to live near it.”
“No I didn’t, my dear. Not long after your mother died I was transferred to Salta and I stayed there until the end, the year after the Malvinas were lost – I mean 1983. When I retired, I didn’t want to go back to Corrientes and it was hard to settle anywhere else. I thought someone else would have taken the silver away again long ago. I didn’t think it would follow me.”
The day he had returned to the Corrientes camp, Sara had looked almost like this. But children never really understood what had happened to them. When he’d crouched down to embrace her outside the house f the neighbours who had taken her in, it had been for his own good. This time when he held her, he was making her shaking stop.
“I believe you,” she said decisively and stepped away from him before his aim had been accomplished. She closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them again he could see that she had controlled herself without his help.
“Where are the Englishmen?”
“They’ve gone away. They’ve gone to get the silver. But they’ll be back. There’s still the other bag. It’s around here somewhere. We should get away while we have the chance.”
Señor Bolivar drew himself up. He wasn’t going to be driven from a part of his own country by arrogant foreigners. That was how atheism and communism had gained their footholds under Isabelita before the military takeover that put things right. But his daughter was already outside. He heard the scratch and flare of a match as she lit a cigarette, what she always did before driving.

There was just enough light left to see the shapes of the mountains. Their features were mostly shadowed now, but Peter persuaded himself he could imprint his memories of their shapes over every gloomy metre. This was the valley he had promised himself he would never grow tired of looking at, and now he was cursing inwardly because he’d barely looked up for… years. All the beauty of that time had been wasted. It had thrown itself at the stupid top of his head and against the shielded windows of the coaches. He should have seen it all; he would see it. Tomorrow, at the end of all this, he would drink it all in.
He shifted irritably, trying to get the bags of silver to feel more comfortable against his back. He was glad he’d come to his senses now. Stupid bloody stuff. Wilson could have it and be glad. He’d never get it out of South America even if he got it to the border without being pulled in by the police, the National Guard or the army. John could have it and welcome. Peter Atkins could write his book about the Indians. At the very least he’d be able to look Sara in the eye again. Even that wasn’t the best he could hope for –
The truck swerved violently, breaking the memories of her as she had been. Then the engine cut out. The eerie glow of the headlights disappeared and the valley began to chirp and whisper as the insects and the wind took over again.
Peter lay against the silver as though frozen. The cold metal of the flatbed drilled itself into his limbs. John hadn’t believed him then. It was just a game he’d been playing along with, as always. Peter had said: “You can have it, you can have it and much bloody good may it do you.”
The big fist close to his face had dropped out of sight.
“Look, I’ll help you to load it up onto the truck.”
And John had thought: “Thanks, I’ll take the help. But you, you snivelling little bastard, I’ll sort you out. Don’t want anyone lifting it from me in the night do I? Don’t want to run the risk of someone trying to stop me.”
Peter’s ears were bursting, listening for any noise that came from the cab. At every creak from the seat, the same chain of events would blaze away in his mind. First the creak, then the sound of feet clumping on the floor, then the thunking of the door and the sound of feet on sand mingling with the slam of the door. The the blows to the head, or the thick hands round his neck. Peter Atkins would begin to die stretched out in the back of a truck n a deserted Argentine valley. Death in this way would be better than in some of the ways he’d contemplated for himself in Oxford, at least, he supposed. At least he was rid of the silver. Despite the constricting tension through his body, in his head he felt surprisingly calm. Maybe it was because he knew exactly how it would begin, with the creak of the seat, the feet on the floor... The fear was in what came afterwards, which was unknown.
Either way, he didn’t like the pain in his legs and back, which came from spending all this time tautly stretched. John was taking his bloody time. But still the seat creaked and creaked, and each creak set off the chain of events in his mind again like the launch of… dammit, like the launch of so many Exocet missiles in the Falklands. How’s that, Señor Bolivar?
The daylight disappeared completely. Peter lay hunched on the metal, feeling his body grow colder, no longer waiting for John. He would come in the end. Until then, life would spin itself out in ever-thinning threads. Two old men, they’d be, when the blows finally came down. They’d struggle out some aged feud the rest of the world had forgotten. It was silly. Why didn’t the victim run away? they’d ask, marvelling at the motives of these two ancients.
But then a roar and jarring all around him made him twist in terror of the unexpected. The engine’s started, he realised. The bags slipped and fell close to his head. He rolled back along the body of the truck as its acceleration pulled it away from under him.
“What the bloody hell’s going on?” He hammered on the glass at the back of the cab.
John glanced round, all bulging eyes and damp flesh in the headlights’ backglow. “Shut up!” he mouthed. Peter slid back down to a lying position again as the adrenalin ebbed, leaving him with just a rushing heart.

“I said there’d be nothing.” Pablo nodded glum agreement.
“It was always worth a try though.”
“Now it’s time to get home. Watch a bit of football, have a bit of food, and all that.”
“Yeah.”
They were both a bit disappointed, the older officer admitted to himself. After the chase and the return of Hernan to his wife – oh, he’d be getting an earful tonight, bet he wishes we’d left him out in the car till next week – the stillness around the Englishman’s hut had been almost frightening. They’d both got out with their guns in their hands, and God help anything that’d made a noise. But the place had been empty, apart from the bloody mess on the floor. Those English were filthy bastards. Pablo’d kicked open a door and it’d come back in his face, not because there was anybody behind it, but because it’d bounced off a sock or something.
Well, after that, the quiet had been boring. No point in doing a search. They’d all cleared out – should’ve guessed that when they’d spotted that the trucks’d gone. They’d left the car lights on all the time they’d been wandering around. Lucky no one had been there to see. Two cops scared because the valley was empty? They’d’ve been laughed right into the cells.
“Shall we look for whatever it was they chucked out of the truck?”
“Yeah. Don’t reckon they’d have left it though, do you?”
Pablo walked on up, and the older officer followed with the car. This time they needed the lights. But there was just a lot of dry brush and a few stones. They checked up and down either side of where they thought the thing had landed, kicking the sticks away. Nothing. He drove back down the hill again, feeling very tired.
They waited for a bit, with Pablo sitting on the hood and smoking cigarette after cigarette. He’d had to reach a long way round the car door to pass and receive the maté gourd. A whole flask drunk, and more time wasted. The English, whatever they’d done, if they’d done anything and not just been scared of the uniforms, weren’t coming back. Even Pablo had believed him in the end.
“We just need to keep our eyes open for them in town,” said Pablo as they drove. Poor Pablo, he just didn’t want to leave it alone. Just because it wasn’t all sorted out. He was only young though. He’d get used to all this unfinished business. It’d be nice to have it all explained, but there wasn’t any need to keep on worrying. Wouldn’t make him lose any sleep, anyway.
“I’ll drop you off unless you want to go and do some paperwork.”
“No… I’ll go home. Avenida Guemes.”
“I know.”
They pulled out of the junction and accelerated past a couple of cars into Cafayate’s street grid.

The flashlight was, after all, where he’d always kept it, but the beam it gave off was so narrow in these tiny rooms that it wasn’t really much better than stumbling around in complete darkness. He searched out clothes from the floor and under the bed, and put them on He was more comforted by their closeness to his body than their warmth. With them on, he no longer felt the creeping sensation that had plagued him since John had, apparently, driven off forever.
“I stopped because the police were back. I could see their lights. And neither of us really wanted to meet them again did we?” he’d explained. Peter belived him this time.
The last bag of silver was quickly retrieved. Peter was glad to be rid of its lumpen weight. They’d said little to each other – just a couple of mumbled goodbyes that cam out as though they were school kids in front of their parents. Now Peter had no truck, no light and no company.
The torch beam was grimly clinical. He felt like some kind of spy, no, archaeologist, picking up and evaluating the debris left over by past inhabitants. There was better lighting possible, from candles – hell, he could even point the torch up at the ceiling from the middle of the floor – but that would make the place more familiar, more like home.
Anger flared up in him briefly. It was an echo of the violence that had seized him during his row with Sara. He’d gone looking for John with it burning in his heart. Like his earlier rage, this new anger died the same instantaneous death, only this time John’s fist in his chest wasn’t needed. What was the point of fury against someone he loved? Her regular absence seemed to be written into the contract between them, so there was no point resenting being left alone. The anger was replaced by moody moroseness.
He wanted a cup of tea. Not Argentine maté or Brazilian coffee, but English tea. His last tea bags had been used up long ago but he remembered the taste. That would be his first drink back in Oxford. Not Stella, as he’d always thought, from the Gardener’s Arms on Plantation Road, but tea from the Jericho Café, or Browns, even from that shitty place in the railway station.
He thought of home for a long time. It had only appeared in his nightmares before now, but now he wanted to go back and trudge dully along the streets between rain-soaked sandstone and the mass of frustrated motorists. Faces, his mother’s among them, came and went in his mind. These he regarded with affection but not enthusiasm. First the place, then the people.
But as his plans for his first drink at home would be, the reality of the place would be perverted by circumstance. He couldn’t fix any part of the city in his mind except the filthy mess of the Cornmarket. Beyond that inability, distracting him, were hunger, thirst and an urgent need to urinate. The immediacy of this last call dragged him back to the half-dug archaeological site that was his hut. The torchlight made a path for him through the darkness.
Later, the phrase “clearing up to clear out” wouldn’t leave him. Every so often, he’d pause in the centre of the room. He sipped from the cup of maté he’d settled for and examined his progress. First of all he sorted the rubbish, the crumpled paper, the concertinaed magazines, the stone-hard crusts of bread. He was proud that they were organised now. They were all heaped as neatly as possible by the door. Then it was the clothes, folded despite their dirty state, and now occupying the armchair seat. Then it was the books, restored to their shelves, mostly put in order. But he wasn’t leaving. “Clearing up to clear out”… it was just a phrase, a nicely balanced phrase. He could use it in his book, he thought, as he turned his hands, hot and dusty, to what remained, the disordered rubble of his notes. This wasn’t leaving, it was just… clearing up, so that he could work. He already had ideas forming. Tomorrow, all this messing about would be done with. He’d sit down and work, start again, do what he’d come to do. In the miserable light punctuated by the flashlight’s harsh stare, the idea of sitting at his desk with the words marshalling themselves in alliance with his ideas was satisfying beyond any achievement he could remember.
The dust onsome of the paper was getting into his nose. He stumbled against a wall, catching splinters in his hand. His back and arms were aching. But he carried on, wholly determined. The recent past was not an issue any more. What mattered was the work he’d get done. A new pile, different coffee stains. More papers to be discarded – be ruthless with those good but irrelevant ideas. It would be almost like an office, he thought, sipping at the tepid maté and gazing almost lovingly at his desk. It was almost like it had been when he had first moved in.
No, he wasn’t leaving.
He picked up another sheaf of papers, discarded almost all of them and inserted the rest into the orderly collection on the desk. So much work done! It seemed not too impossible to imagine the hardback book they would become. Tomorrow he would stick to the work schedule he’d first set himself when he arrived: work right through until Sara came up, then, when she’d driven back down to her father’s, more work until it was too dark or he was too tired. Blissful days, like those he remembered from a week ago, until it really was time to leave. “Clearing up to clear out”, indeed.
And afternoons with Sara… the recent days seemed like just a disjointed blip in the endless continuity of him and her. He smiled, trying out the feel of normality, making it comfortable and close fitting. Tidying up was just a prelude to her return. She was the order he wanted above anything else. Once he had got rid of his stains, she would come back.
In the early days, when he had been staying in Cafayate, he’d made a resolution – another one; but they had been easy to make in those days – that one night, at about this time, he’d go out into the valley. He’d walk as far as he could across the immense space that was empty of paths, shouting “I love you! I love you!” at the top of his voice. No one would hear, not even Sara, who was meant to receive the news. It was totally alien to him to do things like that, but the valley seemed to invite it.
He’d never done it, though he’d always believed that he’d able to jump as high as the mountaintops as he shouted. No, he’d always been too tired, or it had seemed irrelevant because he couldn’t have felt any closer to Sara after their afternoon together. Now he was all ready to begin again though, he could give it a go. He put the last set of notes in order hurriedly, knowing that he might be dumping sheets in the wrong piles, but too eager to be interrupted by the temporary perfectionism that had afflicted him ten minutes ago interrupt him.
He threw the last papers down with such haste that they floated to the floor, and seized the flashlight from the middle of the room.
The beam it cast only extended a few hundred metres. All around it, he could feel the valley watching, wanting to reclaim the space usurped by the light. There was no difference, in the chilly backglow, between the sky, the mountains and the land between them. Peter’s lively run faltered to a slow stepping. The valley wasn’t welcoming him back. It was still, as he had imagined it earlier that day, a wasteland where no human light would shine. He flicked off the torch and stood still.
Night breezes picked at his hair and clothes. Perhaps there was rustling. Perhaps nothing moved. Now he could see the mountains against the sky, but their shapes shifted uncertainly, staying on the wrong side of recognition. The rest of the land stubbornly remained invisible.
He tried the torch again, flashing it all round him to drive back the dark. But the only effect was to attract something’s attention. It waited wherever the light wasn’t and pressed close to Peter’s shoulder blades. He started back to his hut, trying to keep the light steady and straight in front of him so as not to attract any more attention to himself. It jerked about nonetheless, and it was not until he was inside, with the candles lit and blankets wrapped round him, that he was free of the land’s unexpected hostility.