Silverland I

It was a Ford Falcon. The engine was cooling, making tiny noises that echoed in the narrow road. Its black finish was lightly coated with dust, which meant that its owner had just driven into town from Salta or Tucuman.
She was not the only one to have seen it. Two men coming from the plaza crossed the road and talked in hushed tones without looking directly at it. They nodded to her and she walked on to the truck that was parked in front of the Falcon.
As she touched the friendly off-white curve of the truck she let her breath out and cursed herself for paranoia. Most people her age would barely have looked twice, but with her father –
She yanked open the truck door and wriggled onto the hot driver’s seat. She left the door swinging open within inches of the rough concrete wall and lit a cigarette. The smoke rolled back along the road and over the Falcon. She tried not to follow its path with her eyes.
How long would he be?
Punctuality was in her half-military blood, and with that car there– As she stubbed out the cigarette she could not look away any longer and glanced in the mirror. The Falcon’s windshield was visible over the end of the truck, the sunlight a bright gleam on the black sheen.
Probably owned by an American tourist. There weren’t many Argentines who’d drive a Falcon, let alone keep one clean and shining for twenty-odd years. Not unless they’d spent too much time in the armed forces anyway. She turned round in her seat and slammed the truck door irritably. She fumbled for the key in the sudden enclosed heat before resting her fingers on the hot rim of the steering wheel. A few more seconds passed and the sweat began to run down under her black hair and down her thighs where her cut-off denims ended. She looked at herself in the mirror and grimaced at the tired lines around her dark eyes. With sudden decision she turned the key and the engine juddered asthmatically into life.

It’d be audible in the plaza, she knew, and a few ragged birds would flap listlessly before resuming their siesta on the eternally outstretched arm of San Martín’s statue. He’d better come running now, she thought to herself, with a baleful glance in the wing mirror at the Falcon. If not, she’d be off back to her father’s house and get started writing that essay for the American university.
But nothing disturbed the oppressive heat reflecting off the concrete on either side. Several times she lifted her hand to begin manoeuvering the truck out away from the Falcon. Her feet did not touch the accelerator even though the hanging blue fumes represented several cents’ worth of her work.
Here he was, his shirt clinging to him and his forehead slick. She watched him in the mirror. He didn’t give the Falcon a second glance. Then he was pulling the door open and jolting the truck’s suspension as he climbed into the cab.
“Sorry, Sara, I’m sorry,” he said, bringing in fumes and dust.
“What were you doing?” she demanded crossly, not looking at him and easing the truck out into the road.
“I’ll tell you on the way,” he said and kissed her sweaty cheek. She could feel his breath in her ear and relaxed again.
The Falcon was left in sweltering isolation as the exhaust fumes settled over the scorching heat of its squat bodywork.
“Don’t go by the plaza,” he said breathlessly. He put a long white hand over hers as they reached the T-junction.
She flicked away a sodden strand of hair and looked at him. “OK.”
They went left and through the uneven back streets. Behind the growling and clanking of the truck’s passage lay a trail of houses full of grumbling in which siestas had been interrupted.
As they passed by the plaza at the other side she threw a quick glance at the cafe to the left of the crossroads. As she’d expected, the man was still sitting at one of the pavement tables. She saw a white T-shirt and the dark back of a head slumped uneasily under the sun’s oppressive rays.

“Señor Bolivar! Come in!”
“Good day to you,” said the man in the doorway with precision. He stood for a few more seconds looking down at the clean outlines of his shadow in the light. Then he stepped, slowly and carefully, into the comparatively cool shop interior. He did not take off his sunglasses until José had eased his bulky body round the rough-sawn end of the counter and approached him with his hand outstretched. Señor Bolivar shook it with studied formality and waited until José had cleared away the pages of Clarin that were strewn over a round dark-polished table that stood to the left of the bright doorway. Then he sat in one of the two chairs on either side of it and smoothed down the fading olive-green of his trousers.
José moved quickly over the uneven floor and soon returned from one of the rooms behind the shop with a battered pack of cards. He sat opposite Señor Bolivar and a faint smile twitched on and off his face like the winking beam of a lighthouse.
Now the two men were of even height and Señor Bolivar allowed his expression to become less stern. “Is Anna here?”
“Oh yes, yes,” José said quickly. “She’ll be up in a second, before she goes for siesta.”
“But not Pedro.”
“No, he did stop by this morning, but he won’t be back.”
Señor Bolivar’s regal silver head dipped slightly towards the table. He knew exactly where Pedro would be, but it wouldn’t be right to speak openly.
“He met another Englishman yesterday, and he was off to meet him again.” José said suddenly.
He was pierced by the other man’s blue eyes. Señor was always at his sharpest when he looked most weatherbeaten. “The one from the University?”
“Yes. I suppose it’s to do with him going back.” Pedro meeting one of his own countrymen was unheard of and José could not restrain his curiosity. But Señor Bolivar had heard and thought nothing.
“What’s his name again? The new one.”
“John.” The unfamiliar “J” burst out like a minor explosion.
“Juan. Hm.”
“How did you know that there was another Englishman in town?” José asked, suddenly putting two and two together. “Did you see him? I mean, I know you haven’t met him.”
“Sara told me. Pedro mentioned to her that he’d seen him, and she told me. There’s no secret about his existence.”
“Of course not,” José said, chastened. “Did Sara meet him then?”
“No. She has no interest in meeting any other Englishmen.”
“But if she were to go to England –“ His tongue had slipped again. He should learn not to say stupid things like that, especially in front of Señor Bolivar, who was fixing him with his hard eyes.
“That, of course, would be different.”
“And a long way in the future too,” José agreed hurriedly. The silence that followed clamped the uncertain future out of the conversation.
Señor Bolivar drew in breath to begin talking again, but then there was an exclamation that made José jump and he himself look uncomfortably over his shoulder. Anna, her hair bound tight around American curlers, had come out into the stale air of the shop and was hurrying across the floor to the table.
“Señor Bolivar! It’s good to see you again!”
José winced inwardly as she seemed about to embrace the man, but she simply offered him her hand. Her enthusiasm was too great for this formal greeting, and she stepped from foot to foot in her flapping floral dress, talking loudly.
“Good afternoon Anna. It’s good to see you too. How are Carmen and her child?”
“They’re well, they’re well, José was on the phone to them the other day. They’ve got a new house, right in the middle of Cordoba, and Alonzo’s got a new job in the fire service.” Señor Bolivar smiled at the torrent of news. Like him, the Achuas only had one daughter, and she had already moved away despite being younger than Sara. Anna talked about Carmen’s husband and his whole family as though tey were her children too. “And I’m sure Sara’s well. Oh, but it’s too hot for your cap, Señor Bolivar. Take it off and let the heat away from your head. And José, you might have told me he was here. Now he has to wait for his coffee and I have to miss my siesta! I don’t know, you and your Buenos Aires ways!”
She picked her way back across the shop between the old racks of new bread and yerba maté packets. José did not protest but raised his eyebrows at Señor Bolivar, who pursed his lips understandingly.
But the old man did as he was told and pulled the cap off his mass of silver hair. He placed it on the table, the brim neatly parallel to the worn packet of cards. It might have been an Army cap once, worn by officers in the field, but now it was so washed out by sun and long service that its previous life remained safely anonymous. José did not look at it for long, because to do so would be to invite speculation. The past, for José and Señor Bolivar, began with the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century and ended with the Liberation in 1810. What happened before and after that was something each man kept to himself.
José shook his heavy face slowly and ran a brick-like hand through his greasy hair. “Well – today. Shall it be poker or truco?”
“Truco today. I don’t feel too… American at the moment.”
José nodded and his thick fingers began to sort through the pack, taking out the eights and nines while Señor Bolivar looked on in silence, or glanced round the cramped and rickety shop at the oranges in string bags and the rough-and-ready stacks of cigarettes.
Anna returned with two off-white cups, down which thin streaks of coffee had slipped. “There is sugar in yours,” she said, tight-lipped, to José. “There’s also maté and hot water for later in the kitchen.”
They thanked her and then she was gone. The flimsy plywood door closed behind her. In the light of the shop’s open front door, José dealt the cards for the first mano.
Cafayate was dead quiet in the afternoon heat and the two men played in corresponding near-silence for a while, occasionally challenging and accepting or refusing.
“So what brings you to town today?” José asked at last. “We weren’t expecting you until Thursday or even Friday.”
“The funeral. Señora Guiza – you had heard, I would think.”
“Yes. We didn’t know her family.” José shuffled the pack with cumbersome fingers. Señora Guiza had been well known, what with the disappearance of her daughter back in the Seventies, and then her campaign to find her. She’d even been to Buenos Aires and walked round the Plaza de Mayo with other women whose children had been taken away – or so he’d heard. It had been a long time since José had been to the capital, and he tried not to think about the Dirty War at all. The most he wanted to know about Señora Guiza was that she used to stand outside the church day after day, perhaps as some kind of penance.
“I was going to go. To pay my respects. But then,” Señor broke his words off with a sigh. “But then I thought better of it.”
They lapsed into the effective silence of the card game again.

Anna moved away from the thin door and made her way along the corridor parallel to the Avenida Belgrano. She could already feel sleep creeping up her back and eyes, but she would’ve liked to have known more about this new Englishman. She would’ve liked José to come with her for siesta too, but Señor Bolivar had come round. Still, José wouldn’t have come anyway. He would have gone along to his little cupboard room and got all those maps of his out again. It was all very well taking pride in your mestizo heritage, she though crossly as she passed by the low door of the map room, but surely there’s nothing else you can tell poor Pedro. And what would happen if the poor man disagreed with José in his book? Much as she loved her husband, Anna knew he couldn’t be right all the time.
Those maps of his would keep him occupied for hours at a time. When he was making a new one he would rush out before siesta began, clutching pens and bits of rolled up paper. At the chosen place (so he told her) he would measure out the length of his stride and pace about in all sorts of directions, scribbling and drawing all the time. Heights, apparently, were more guesswork, and seemed to involve staring along perfectly flat pieces of card. It was all very complicated. Anna, despite herself, liked the satisfaction he got out of it even though some of their friends always joked about it. He had a lot of completed sheets and soon would have all of the town, the valley and the Indian settlement rendered understandable on paper. Pedro’s appearance had sent him into a new frenzy of mapmaking that occupied most of the siesta hours.
But Pedro would be off soon, back to England and his University. The new Englishman’s arrival made that pretty clear. She went into the bedroom and got herself ready with careful modesty that betrayed a fear of hidden watchers. Once before she had been surprised alone in her room, and the fear that those uniformed men would return still troubled her. A sudden impulse made her kneel for her prayers this time – her poor knees were not young enough to do it every time – and as she got to her feet, hands pressing heavily on the yellowing sheet on the bed, she worried about José.

On the right-hand side of the truck, the rocks turned up golden with faint dusty brushes of green. On the left, the valley floor undulated its way to the base of more stone hills. Peter had always sworn to himself, privately – because the scarfed old women on the El Indio bus he’d first taken all this way, and still flagged down if Sara was going to drive him back, would have stared and wound the window blinds down even closer if they’d heard him say it – that he’d never stop looking at it. But that was a promise that rang a little hollow now. In the hot airless cab he barely spared a glance even for the road, whose uneven surface leaped up at the jittering wheels of the truck with surprising sharpness. He was staring at Sara with sweat-spongy eyes as she navigated the road’s twists and turns at a speed even he wouldn’t have dared.
Sometimes he couldn’t keep his eyes from the way her hands moved so precisely, the way the very tip of her tongue would curl out and touch her upper lip. He even persuaded himself he could see the shade of her skin through the grubby cotton of her T-shirt. He was well aware that she wore no underwear – he could see that even without staring – but his thoughts weren’t only about sex. They would both have to make a choice soon, and he wondered what she was thinking.
“Is he a friend?”
“A colleague.” Sara paused while she recalled his word from the recesses of her English vocabulary.
“Well, he must be a sort of friend then. Will he stay with you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how long he’s staying for.”
“Perhaps he’s come to make sure you go back.” She took her eyes from the road and looked him full in the face. She pinned him back against the hot window; caught him staring. She smiled slowly, the flame of it creeping along her lips into rich folds around her mouth. Or so it felt. When her eyes were on the road again he could feel the truck moving as if he’d never been away.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah… just a bit hot, that’s all.” She sensed that he was glad of the change of subject. He hadn’t wanted to talk about the new Englishman yesterday. Perhaps he thought he had no choice today. He still wasn’t happy about it. Poor Peter. He always liked it simple.
“Englishmen. It’s the midday heat that does it.”
“And being bitten by the mad dogs.” He was happier now, looking at her with more relaxed eyes, the future forgotten.
“But if he does come to stay with you, you’ll have to tell him about me. Will you tell him about the silver too?”
He paused before answering, and reached out an arm towards the sticky plastic of the radio. The hairs on his white English arm gleamed with damp. She thought he’d reach for her too and her skin tingled on her thigh. But the spell was broken as crackly soft-rock music from a Salta station filled the cab.
“Anglo-American reject crap.” He said over the noise. Then, “I’ll think about it if it happens.”
She watched another kilometre post flash by – 20 from Cafayate. They’d be turning off the road soon. She thought about the yellow-grey concrete dust blowing up under the truck and, like him, tried to think only about the stuffy gloom of his hut between the cacti.

“It wasn’t what I’d expected.” He said it again, in English this time, confident that no one would hear, let alone understand. He thought for a second that he should have brought a Dictaphone to capture the way his accent changed – European Castilian to American. That might be something worth doing, because so far as he knew no one else had thought of studying it. They’d all have to be impressed. But still, a lot of people still stared when he mispronounced things and he had to swallow his anger.
He leaned back in his chair and felt the plastic sag beneath him. The front legs floated uneasily above the ground for a moment and he hovered, calculating how long the back legs would last. If they gave way the hotel staff would gather round him, bleary-eyed after their siestas and that would be that.
It would be the most exciting thing ever to happen here, he thought resentfully, glaring at all the white, grey and yellow of the buildings around the plaza. He’d seen that in Atkins’ eyes. He’d grown all dull and flaccid from living in amongst these houses that looked like they’d been designed by Stalinist dwarves. Even their national hero’s got pigeon crap all over him. San Martín’s statue still stared regally over the roofs, ignoring the petty jibe.
Yes, an Englishman cracking his head on the burning flat concrete would be the most exciting thing to happen here since the Falklands War… he rocked back again, daring fate to prove him right.
As the hard plastic front legs scraped and crunched against the ground he sat up. What the hell was that? He glared at the faded façade of the church in disbelief. Sounds of bells were being emitted from the scruffy tower at the apex of the roof – electronic bells. He chuckled to himself. Somewhere up there a couple of badly-wired speakers were tolling the hour with a dull soullessness. The dust and air sat still and indifferent around the deserted plaza with its desiccated trees.
John pushed his chair away from the sloping table and walked slowly across the crumbling road surface to the shrivelled grass spreading out around San Martín.
Ingenious but very tacky, he thought as he looked up at the wires. They had been painted to blend in with the eaves’ dull red, but were now bright incongruous white streaks that connected the speakers in the little corner towers to the idle-looking clock face. Ten minutes out as well, he thought, checking his watch.
As he looked up again, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare, he saw a doo open in the right-hand side of the church front. For a second there was just blackness. Then a man came out. He had a sad, hanging face and white hair blown over into a huge quiff. His belly strained against his pale collared T-shirt and he leaned heavily on a stick. He shuffled down the steps along the church-front in what appeared to be brown carpet slippers. A woman in a long skirt came out after him. The man turned and waited for her. A third person, another woman. The trio stood in sombre silence in the road.
They were joined by a fourth, another woman, all steel-grey, and then the door on the left side opened and John understood. The bearers stumbled going down the steps but their expressions didn’t change. He realised that the white car they approached wasn’t some derelict, but was the hearse. The springs protested as the coffin was slid carefully in through the back doors. He could see its shape, squared-off and dark in shadow through side windows framed by flaking paint.
By now other people were coming out of both doors, most dressed with a kind of crushed correctness. Only the younger ones, the girls with pulled-back hair and eyebrows like strokes of charcoal, and the boys, their necks pulling away from their collars, looked at him. The broken tarmac and concrete in front of the church was now covered with people and still more were emerging from the two doors with measured steps.
John, even John, was embarrassed. They had to be aware of him, the gaudy Ingles standing open-mouthed on the edge of this silent gathering. He thought about going back to the hotel – but that would take him right in front of their eyes. He could walk round the plaza or duck into a side street – but they would think he was ignoring them, showing disrespect. So he stood until the entire congregation had come out into the road – more people then he’d ever thought could fit in that knackered old church.
A man got into the front of the white car and forced the engine into life. Now the formless crowd resolved itself into two sections. One group, seven or eight strong, all looking very smart, gathered in the cloud of exhaust fumes. Seriousness was etched into their faces. The rest stood at a respectful distance as the hearse moved slowly off, and then the whole mass followed at a morose pace.
John breathed again and smelt the car and his own sweat. He could feel droplets of it sliding across his head. That had been a bit wierd. Out of some film or other. He felt a bit faint. Another glance up at the clock. Only a couple more hours and Atkins would be back. Perhaps he’d show him the sights of Cafayate. John snorted. Still, there must be something to keep him here…
It had been pure chance that he’d found Atkins at all yesterday. Still, without a little bit of luck no one got anywhere in life. It was probably a good sign, too, John thought, that the things that he wanted were just going to fall into his lap. As he thought this, he brightened up.
He’d just gone out for wander – to check out the lie of the land before he started doing anything proper about looking for Atkins and whatever it was he’d managed to find. No matter what he might end up saying to him, he hadn’t asked anyone about him. He just wanted to have a look about. Then he’d spotted this tall thin bloke wandering down one of the roads just off the square. And there he was, when he caught up with him, and not very pleased to see his old friend. Well, his face wasn’t anyway, judging by the way it fell.
“Look, John, I’m really busy today. I can’t hang about. Where are you staying?”
“In the big hotel on the square.”
“Right. Right then. OK. You’ll be around… tomorrow, will you? Siesta starts about two o’clock… Oh… I’ll be busy then. I’ll come and see you before then. If I can’t stay, and I probably won’t be able to, we’ll go out in the evening. I’ll… I’ll think of something.”
“All right, Peter mate. I’ll see you then. Ask for me in the hotel. I’ll be there. I’ll be reading up on Cafayate.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll see you then.”
Then he’d stopped his quick-stepped march towards the edge of town and awkwardly held out his hand. He’d snatched it back as quickly as he could.
“Sure you can’t stay for a drink?” John asked, innocently.
“N-no. We’ll have a drink tomorrow. See you then.”
“Yeah. See you then.” Mission accomplished. As Atkins’ back had got obscured by passers by, John had smiled.
Atkins hadn’t had time to hang about this morning. He’d have to spend time with his old colleague this afternoon, since he hadn’t been able to come up with excuses not to. It made no difference to John.
He went back to his chair and cast an idle glance up at the closed face of the hotel on the other side of the square. What remained of his coffee was a sour slop in the bottom of his cup. Something kept the fool here, he thought again, examining the burnt skin on his arms.

The sound of Peter’s truck had disappeared into the world beyond the loosely shuttered window. Sara lay in the crumpled sheets of the bed. Their folds were clammy against her skin. Her mind was beginning to revolve again in that slow unfocused way that signalled an unwelcome return to the world.
She spread her hair out on the pillow and reflected on Peter’s last hurried kiss before he went off to meet the other Englishman yet again… He would, no doubt, be looking at his watch and assessing what could be done in the time left before their meeting. England. What would – what might it be like? She had to remind herself that going there that was a decision she had not yet made.
There would definitely be books like these, roughly arranged on the shelves or lying in haphazard piles on tables and the floor. There would be the BBC – but not crackling out worthy observations on a shortwave radio. There wouldn’t be this three-room shack, these battered trucks, the valley.
Now her thoughts were hurrying as though the effort of remembering that she could still choose her fate had set them rolling down some scree slope towards the road and the river. She threw the sheets off and in almost the same movement threw open the shutter. It creaked and the gauze curtain rattled furiously. Dust-filtered light fell across her body and the tiny chaotic room. For a moment she leaned on the sill and stared out at the cacti on the mountains’ bald edges. She was aware of the sun on her breasts and arms and she didn’t move, lost in thought but not thinking.
Then, with precise, controlled movements she put on her T-shirt and shorts. She ducked through the splintery doorway and out of the hut altogether, out into the valley. There was a car on the road, buzzing along, but no one would be looking. There were only the mountains and the road to see – unless you followed this trail.
It was walkable, but she drove her truck there because she knew how tired she was. She pulled on the handbrake in a patch of deep shadow that jutted out onto the path. There’d been a rock fall here centuries ago and the rocks had settled around a narrow-mouthed cleft. She peered cautiously into the gap, looking for any snakes that might have taken up residence. Then she put her hand into the cool dark. Just one touch, for luck.
The coins were hard and clustered in irregular lumps beneath the carrier bag plastic. Cold as the sand before the sun rose. But she didn’t believe in luck, and pulled her hand out quickly.

“You’ll get sunstroke, sitting out like that, you bloody fool.”
“I can handle it.”
“Not if it’s me who has to tell the University that you’ve managed to do yourself in.”
John paused before replying. You never could tell if Peter was joking. Still, he did seem to be grinning. “I’ll be fine. If I can get here without dying it’ll take more than a bit of sun to ruin my health.”
“Did you drive?” Careful indifference, it felt like now, Atkins’ hand resting lightly on the wet glass of the beer bottle. John watched him very closely. Atkins was looking out for himself.
“No. The bus. Four hours and a nutter for a driver. I’d’ve got off and waited for another one, except they only run once every three hours.”
“The drivers know the road though.”
“I’m sure they do, but there were still some close shaves. I would’ve enjoyed it more if I’d been in the driving seat.”
There was a pause. Beyond the bead curtain separating the café from the house came the sound of children talking. John watched Atkins’ unsteady eyes take in the enormous television screen which sat in a blue corner. It flashed out bright light and game shows.
“I suppose you flew into Tucuman and bussed it up to Salta before coming down.”
“Peter – you haven’t asked me why I’m here.” Atkins blinked at him slowly, as though surprised by the sudden forthrightness. He opened his mouth, but changed his mind as a young girl came up to the table and carefully placed a metal dish containing four empañadas between them.
“Thank you,” The girl smiled shyly and then flashed John a glance from under lowered eyelids. He shifted on the discomfort of the rope seat and stared at her skinny back as she went back to the high counter along the far wall. No more than fourteen, for all her neatly-styled hair. Perhaps she’d seen him at the funeral.
“I thought that would have been obvious.”
“We haven’t heard from you for months. Not since that last e-mail you sent from Salta.”
“It’s hard to stay in touch when there aren’t many phones, let alone modem cables. Anyway, you could’ve asked my mother.”
“So you’ve been in touch with her then? Your Faculty’s beginning to think you’re dead. After that business with your car –“
“Suicide’s the obvious answer is it?” Now he was angry, and he could feel his cheeks burning. The sweat ran on his palms. Anger was humiliating, ineffective. He imagined he could feel the eyes of the café’s matron peering curiously round the brightly-painted partition from the kitchen to examine him. He subsided. “We’d better eat these before they go cold. Have you had many since you got out here?”
“Anyway, the College decided that I could do with a short trip. My speciality’s always been Peninsular Spanish, so they thought, and I agreed with them,” He slipped the crisp, greasy empañada into his hand, ignoring its heat. Peter nibbled tentatively at the steaming corner of his own, staring into space. “that I should get more experience of the rest of world speaking Spanish.”
“Castellano,” Peter mumbled. “Good, for two pesos, aren’t they? The empañadas.”
“There was a definite feeling that if I found you it would be a good thing.” John’s cheeks flapped against his teeth, Peter thought. There’s grey in his whiskers too. He watched as John poured the last of the beer into his own glass and then flicked his eyes over to the pubescent breasts of the girl leaning on the counter. He remembered how much he had tried to avoid the man in Oxford.
“So now you have. You can tell them I’m coming back.”
“That sounds like a dismissal. Don’t you even want to know how I found you?”
“Not really, no.”
“I did some research.” He grinned and Peter found himself watching how the thick lips seemed to smeared themselves up and over his teeth. A lightning picture of Sara smiling appeared in his head. He put down what remained of his empañada and pushed his grey pottery plate away from him.
From a pocket somewhere on his wide buttock, John produced a folded and bent piece of paper. “ ‘A year’s sabbatical’” he intoned in a dull voice like the College Principal’s “… ‘to undertake research into a book which will address the Spanish Conquest of the Americas from the point of view of the Indian peoples… blah blah… military resistance in the Andes… blah…’ Very interesting Mr Atkins,” he continued in the same voice. “Of course you must go. Especially as you’re mentally unstable and only talk to your colleagues once a month.”
Peter had to look away. He could feel anger and even tears strangling up in his throat. He stared to his right, out of the café’s open door and into the evening light on the Avenida Belgrano outside. He wanted one of the men sitting talking at the tables outside to come in and order more beer. None did. He could feel John’s eyes taking the measure of him.
“I’m sorry. Let’s just forget about it, eh?” No remorse, just joviality speaking that dull sick Surrey English. “Anyway, I just happen to know that the biggest Indian settlement round here – round Salta – is just down the road. And when I got here it was just a matter of asking for the ‘loco Ingles’.” Well, Atkins didn’t rise to that bait, John thought, wondering whether to push it further. But there was sweat carving little waterways down the dust on his neck and he could see tendons beneath the white skin – silly bugger doesn’t even tan – shifting and grinding like Argentine bus gears.
“Who did you ask?” Spoken with effort.
“Oh, around… All the ladies seemed to know who you were.” ‘Laydeez’. Peter swung his head and his eyes, usually so grey and watery, flashed.
But the girl had come back, with the rest of the ‘menu de dos pesos’. She walked round the table, collecting the remnants of the empañadas with slender hands. John watched the joints working under two moles between her fingers. Casually he ordered another beer. The girl smiled and he held her eye. Then she looked away and lingered over a glimpse of her eyebrow, sleek and black against her dark skin.
Peter was about to speak, but John, laughing inwardly, interrupted him without aggression. The other man sat back against the cool wood of his chair and watched with sullen defiance. “I wondered what had kept you here.” He prodded at the bowl in front of him with a knife. “And what’s this?”
“Locro.”
“I know that. I can read the menu. What’s in it?”
“Beef and maize. It’s an Argentine speciality.”
“Too bloody right.” He stopped and prodded again at the steaming brown mass. The smell of beef hit the back of his throat, but he wanted to see what Atkins’ reaction to his next question would be. “I’d like to see your Indian fort, or whatever it is.”
Peter snorted heavily into his beer glass. “What the hell for? It’s called a pukara.”
“I see. Anyway, I’m an intelligent man. I have an inquiring mind. And I’ve just got here. You’re not going to send me scuttling back to Salta so soon are you?”
Now one of the men from outside did come in. He was heavy with thick eyebrows and grunted in low tones to the older woman behind the bar. She ran her fingers through greying hair and laughed at something, high pitched. Neither she nor the green-shirted man looked at the Englishmen, though both Peter and John saw that the girl had noticed the rising tension between them. She twisted a stained tea towel round her wrists.
If I can get her to look away, Peter thought, then that’ll be it. He’ll have lost. He gulped at his beer and wiped his unshaven chin with a bold hand.
John’s hands were flat, spread out on the bright red of the plastic tablecloth. Would they tremble if he moved them?
Peter saw the joints in the hands relax as he laughed and leaned back, stretching his legs out on the hard floor. “Yeah, I can take you to see it. I’ll pick you up from the hotel. When do you want to go?”
“Whenever you’re not busy.” The change of gear was light, abrupt. Such a thug, but so quick.
“What about tomorrow?”
John’s body was very still for a moment. Peter looked at the ceiling, seeing only the big shoulder at the corner of his vision. Well, yes or no? He kept his fingers unclenched. “All right then.”
Now he could look back at him again, and breathe. “I’ll pick you up in my truck. It’s best to go before it gets hot, say, about half eight?”
“Sure thing.”
The girl at the counter watched Pedro’s shoulders loosen as he began to eat the locro in big dripping spoonfuls. The other Englishman did not change his position leaning forward over the table, only reaching for his food with a lazy big arm. Pedro was staring at her again, not with the hot eyes the other man had, but with hurt.
She didn’t understand. Why shouldn’t she stare when the new Englishman gazed at her, when she could walk round him and smell him and almost touch him? He was old, true, but he’d looked first.
Pedro looked at her again, sadder than she’d seen him before. She met his eyes, pushing herself off the counter a little and he looked away, spooning and spooning, always more frantically. She laughed at him, as they’d always done a little bit. Come on, big Englishman, look at me again!

Señor Bolivar could hear Sara walking around in the next-door room. She was supposed to be working. He should go and tell her to. He even put a hand out on the polished wood of the chair arm, but thought better of it. Whenever he caught himself on the verge of lecturing her thse days, her remembered Maria, his wife. She had been ill or convalescing for so long that she was never able to be like her daughter. The book on his knees was too heavy for hurried standing up. Instead he stared blankly at the silent vacuity of the television game show and straightened the cap on his head methodically.
Sara paused on her pacing and stared at her desk. Under the warm light of the desk lamp it looked almost inviting at first, with the gourd of maté giving off curling vapour and the paper under it slightly crumpled from the pressure of her hand where she had been writing. But then in the shadow around the pool of light sat books left open and piles of printouts collected on her regular trips up to the internet café in Salta. Endless information, all in disorder. Her writing in the centre was all sharp lines, well ordered like her father’s. But at the moment it went nowhere. She just couldn’t finish her ideas. And he was waiting to read them. She could feel her shoulders sag. The bra straps, so hurriedly arranged when she heard him push open the front door of the house, cut into her skin.
Disordered thoughts, Señor Bolivar reminded himself, were for communists and atheists. Sara would have her essay completed this evening and he would read through it with a clear mind. Then she could put it in the post so it would be delivered to the professors in the American university. He pushed his body upright, away from the back of the chair, and bent his eyes to the black-bound book in front of him. But the dry economic details could not hold him and again he listened for Sara’s step in the room behind him. No noise. Had she gone? Again he moved as though to get up, but again he relaxed. In his mind’s eye he could see her back hunched over the desk. Her hair would be tied in a straight ponytail. She would be sitting at her desk writing in the measured way that indicated intent thought.
She flipped through pages idly, trying to regain the thread of her ideas. She sipped again and again at her maté, then pushed it aside in disgust. It was meant to be shared, not gulped at in a tiny room while her father sat in splendid isolation next door. She wondered if he’d seen the Falcon in town and what he might have thought. Probably reminded him of his youth, she thought sourly. Then she corrected herself. Everything reminded him of his youth.
Once again he wondered if he should ask Pedro what he meant to do with his daughter. But the young man never spoke much – though he was always correct and polite when they met. There was a time when the young man would have answered smartly and in good order. Just the sight of a uniform would have been enough, unless he was a communist of course.
Now this was it! Peter could have given her the answer earlier, but he’d been thinking too much about the other Englishman. She’d worked it out nonetheless and she was proud that she had kept her promise to herself not to ask for help from him. The words came to her quickly now. Peter would be pleased. This would mean that she could see him tomorrow, once the essay had been approved by her father and sent on its journey of thousands of kilometres to America.
The English had their own ways of doing things, he decided. It was usually sloppy and undisciplined. Then he thought of the way they’d killed all those young conscripts in the Malvinas, or the “Falklands” as they called them, and his ideas lost their coherence. He should really be thinking about his daughter’s future anyway. The time had come, the time he’d wondered about but not dreaded because dreading it would have made it too real. Sara was the age that Señora Guiza’s daughter had been in 1977. He closed his book and placed it on the table beside his chair so that the spine ran parallel to the wooden edge. The he got to his feet, puffing with the effort. At the door he paused and looked round the room. The green olive walls were bare, the floor polished and swept. The shutters were tight against the window frame. Only the television remained out of order. Its grey and silver controls glinted under the dull bulb. The silent figures on the screen roared with dissolute laughter. Appalling that he should have forgotten! He walked to it slowly, controlling his anger with himself, and snapped the main switch to one side with venom. The screen went black and static electricity crackled over it. Then it was still. Satisfied, he walked back to the door.
Sara heard his feet in the floorboards of the corridor. When he pushed open the flimsy door of her little room she was standing facing him with an expectant face and eyes that searched his out. He blinked at her for a second. The shadows on her face cast by that lamp made her look like her mother…
She moved aside to let him sit down at her desk. The essay lay on it, its title looking up at him disconcertingly: “Some Consequences of US Economic Involvement in Latin America”. But the pages were piled neatly and her pen lay alongside them with its lid on. He straightened it absently, so that it lay in line with the paper edge. He didn’t spare a glance for the disorderly rubble of notes all round it.
“I’ve just finished it.”
“Very good.” He ran his fingers down the paper. The first paragraph was good – clear, well-balanced sentences – but more of that later. “It’s not long now until you finish the course. Have you decided what you’ll do when they give you that – qualification?”
“Not yet, Father. They might not give me my degree anyway.” She hated it when she found herself clasping her hands in front of her like some nun. And she always spoke so quietly to him.
Señor Bolivar did not answer her speculation. “Still. I’ve thought about it. I would like to speak to Pedro.”
“Peter, Father.” This was better. Peter would recognise her now.
Her father looked at her over his silvery spectacles. Instinctively she looked away, at the wall where red paint had faded to an exhausted brown. “I think I would like to speak to him tomorrow.”
Tomorrow! She could already see how his cheerful stride towards the truck would falter. He would glumly watch his boots as they gathered dust all afternoon and her father talked.
“You are going to meet him tomorrow, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes. After work.”
“Are you sure?” He had heard the slight sharp breath after her words.
“Yes, Father.”
“Hm. Remember the Commandment ‘Honour thy Mother and Father’. If you really are going to marry him it’s best to get my approval first.”
She reddened, then controlled herself. His eyes were in darkness as he looked up at her out of the lamplight, but she stared back at them.
“Of course, Father,” she said lightly.
“You’ll be finishing at siesta, as usual?”
“Yes. Unless there are a lot of guests overnight, though that doesn’t usually happen until the weekend. I’ll be out as soon as I’ve cleaned all the bedrooms.”
He seemed satisfied there in his twenty-odd year-old clothes, occupying the only space in the house that was hers, forcing her to stand with her back against the shuttered window. He sat and rested his hands together so that the deep crevices in them rested together.
She opened her mouth to tell him about the Ford Falcon that had watched her in the Avenida Colon that afternoon. Immediately he diminished. What had seemed military in his pose was just a stiff back. His jutting beard was just grey.
Whatever he had been, he was just an old widower now. Tomorrow he would be frustrated in his schemes again, and she could afford to treat him as a father for the moment. “There’s maté,” she said, picking the gourd up off the desk. “I’ll bring you some out on the front step.”
“That’s good.” He was out of his seat more quickly than she had expected. “I’ll read this – and we can talk about it, so bring out a flask as well.”
In the kitchen she made some calculations as the kettle began to huff and puff. Just by setting off half an hour earlier, she’d be able to give Peter warning. That would work. She’d be able to escape in the afternoon somehow. Her father, after giving up on the apparently absent Pedro, would probably go to José’s. But then there was the other Englishman. She hadn’t accounted for him… she pulled the band from her hair and it fell loose and warm over her shoulders. Now she could think more freely. It just depended on how easily Peter could leave the visitor. He’d said, only half-joking, that he suffered the English disease – “he’s an empire builder, and not very good at letting people go.”
That could be planned tomorrow though, when she spoke to Peter in the morning. Her father would know nothing that might upset him. And he wouldn’t be able to disturb her life. She smiled to herself as the maté leaves swirled around in the gourd. She filled the flask and bound her hair tightly back again before going out to the night air and her father.

“Morning!”
Atkins bounced up the steps towards him, his hair flapping about in a brown mass. He brought the smell of his truck with him, hot plastic and fumes. The smile on his face was as bright as if they really were friends.
John followed him back down to the street, feeling that his face was being stretched thin over the front of his head. Behind hm, some of the hotel staff were already gathering dusters and mops in a desultory way. The rest of them stood in a huddle passing a pot between them. From it they sucked some drink through what looked very much like a metal straw. John wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and stared at the people standing in the light from the door until they looked away.
They’d better not go snooping about in his room. Except those two girls with the curly hair and lips that curved pleasantly round the straw thing in the pot… They could come in any time.
Atkins was waiting for him at the door. “You look done in. Never mind. You’ve got fifty kilometres to wake up in.”
“What’s that in miles?”
“Er – dunno. Thirty-odd?”
Now they were out in the sun and he saw Peter’s eyes glittering. That meant he was up to something, at least. It was hot, but there was enough of a breeze to catch at their clothes and stir up eddies of dust and shrivelled leaves. A few cars and trucks choked their way around the plaza giving off bolts of reflected light.
A few old men sat on the benches around the plaza. Some read newspapers while others passed round little pots like the one the hotel staff had had. They talked in a lizardlike way.
After a while John remembered that it was maté they were drinking. That nasty green tea stuff they always shared. He’d tried it once. One or two of the men nodded when they saw Atkins. All ignored John, except one who smoked without taking the cigarette out of his mouth. His eyes were dark, sunken in folds of skin and under massive eyebrows. Those brows were really beating his hair back. The man kept staring as they went past, despite the vehicles that moved through the field of his gaze. John watched the cigarette shift as he inhaled and then saw smoke curl round the man’s ears.
Perhaps he’s retarded. Only a moron could look at something for this long and not get bored. But then the man got up from the bench and began to walk along parallel to them. His belly swayed from side to aside but his arms more than matched it. He’s bigger than he looks, bloody hell.
“Where’ve you parked your truck?”
“Not far. Just a couple of blocks away.”
“Have you spotted the Indian-looking guy?”
Peter turned to look. The man who had been following them stopped in his tracks against a grey-blue wall. He smiled and put a hand up to the folds in his forehead in a kind of salutation.
“I thought you were going to wait in the truck. You should take advantage of it. It’s not often I do the driving.”
At first the man didn’t seem to hear and came from the wall’s shade into the sunlight, where all the colour seemed to drain from his clothes. “It’s all right,” he shouted over the noise of a small black Ford turning round at the corner of the road. “I just wanted to have a look at him.”
“You’ve got all day to look at him.” Then in English, “Silly sod.”
The old man seemed to be hesitating on the kerb of the road, smiling aimlessly while he thought about something.
“Come on over then. Come and meet him.” Peter had switched back to Spanish as quickly as he could. “This is José Achua, a friend of mine.”
Not the sort of friend John was expecting. “Has Peter been asking you about Indian history then?”
There was a flicker of confusion on the man’s face, then another smile. “Oh yes. Pedro and I’ve talked for many long hours about the Indians in the Valles Calchaiques. I am one myself – well, partly. When he got here,” José whispered conspiratorially, indicating Peter, “I had to tell him everything.”
“Not quite,” Peter replied. “I knew a couple of things you didn’t, at least.”
“Oh yes, but only a couple.”
John raised his eyes to heaven.
“It was a real meeting of minds,” Peter went on. “I was just asking around town in case anyone knew anything that might be useful. After a while I figured out that anyone who might know anything would tell me to go to José. So I did.”
“Really?” said John. But the bored tone of his voice was belied by the way his eyes rolled around to latch onto José’s face.
“We’ve been friends ever since,” José announced, cheerfully oblivious. “We go and visit the pukara very often – more often than I ever used to do. It was just for my own interest in those days, but now Pedro – Peter’s got his book to write we have to go round and check out hundreds of things. It’s been very interesting.”
“Very,” echoed John. He was still trying to penetrate the shopkeeper’s skull with his gaze.
“Let’s get going.” Peter said, standing little apart from them with his arms folded. Perhaps he got close to José Achua’s breath too, John thought, rubbing his nose. “You can tell him all about it on the way there.”
But they had to hang on another half-minute while José extinguished the remains of his cigarette and lit another. As he ground the stub between the loose stones of the road the shopkeeper stole another look at the new Englishman. He was a disappointment, a badly-sealed sugar bag. In that case he could wait for the tiny grunt of satisfaction that signalled the successful lighting of the cigarette. No point in going about changing your old habits for a man like that.
“Anna wasn’t very pleased that I was going to come with you today. Anna’s my wife, Juan. She – “
“My name is John.”
“Whatever you like, Señor.” José was unruffled, warding him off as he might a dissatisfied customer. “You know what she’s like, Pedro, ‘Buenos Aires this’ and ‘Buenos Aires that’. She keeps forgetting that, really, I’m from here.”
“But she did let you go, didn’t she?” Peter was grinning. “And it wasn’t my fault. I only said where I was going and there you were, getting out your maps.”
“Only so I could help your friend.”
They turned into Avenida Jujuy on the edge of the town. A few children kicked a ragged football about in the spaces between the cars.
“José was born in the outskirts of Buenos Aires,” Peter explained. “The porteños aren’t that popular in the rest of the country – a bit like people from Islington.” John gave no indication that he had heard. He walked slowly along the centre of the road with his hands in his pockets, looking over to where the low buildings ended and the horizon opened out onto dark trees, vast space and distant morning-tipped mountains.
José looked at Peter worriedly. “But really I’m from here, you see. My people beat the Spanish for a hundred and thirty years, and the Incas before that. Then they shipped us off to Buenos Aires. I moved back here in 1975, the year before the military coup. It was getting rough in Buenos Aires then, lots of bombs and things. In between running my shop, getting married and having a daughter, I’ve learned all there is to know about the Quilmes Indians. Pedro reckons I’m a real world expert.”
Atkins laughed, more in agreement than in mockery. “That beer we had last night, Quilmes, the brewery’s named after where José’s people ended up. The real Quilmes is where we’re going.”
John kicked at a loose stone. It rattled and bounced its way over the crumbling tarmac, stopping with a clang against the wheel hub of a derelict truck. Stupid, the pair of them. Trying to make him feel like a new son-in-law or something. “Why do you keep changing our names to Spanish ones all the time?”
Peter kept on walking but José stopped and spread out his hands, taken aback by the Englishman’s inconsiderate interruption.
“It’s – it’s just a thing,” he said, dropping his cigarette stub into the dust and stamping on it nervously. “Just what Señor Bolivar does.”
“What did you say?” Mother of God, two accusing stares! Anna was right again. Should have stayed at home and gone with Pedro like normal in the next couple of days. Shouldn’t have changed what was normal.
“Nothing, nothing Pedro – but it is what Señor Bolivar does, isn’t it?”
He crossed himself quickly now that the others had turned away again. If they were all like that, no wonder Pedro had stayed away from other Englishmen when they’d come down here!
He didn’t like the way Juan watched his friend either. Pedro had his back to them both, but Juan was still looking and nodding, as though he’d been told something. José fingered the heavy folds in his neck with one hand as he reached for his tobacco pouch. His skin, at least, was loose and flabby, like on every other day.
No one spoke again until the truck was manoeuvering carefully round the children and a tourist’s car before taking the empty road to Quilmes.

That was the Englishman’s room. Sara watched the door with trepidation as she went about the short corridor with her mop and bucket and dusters,. The blinds were down over all the windows and the only sounds on the whole floor were the ones she made herself. But still, he could be in there, though where that meant Peter would be was difficult to tell. Everyone had said that he was out, she repeated to herself. They’d seen him leave – Luisa had said so, smoothing down her hair as if in anticipation of his return.
No. He was out, and the lingering feeling that he was there was just ill-directed nervousness because Peter hadn’t been in and by the fact that her father was coming to town to see him that afternoon. She knocked on the glass pane in the door anyway before turning the handle and going in.
The door caught on the floor like all the others did. It rattled angrily and then swung again. The only light crept in around the shutters. It was clear enough to see by, but the brightness around the window edges made the rest of the space feel dingy. Perhaps it made the smell of him stronger too. There was sweat and the chemical fumes of deodorant and aftershave.
There was very little in here. She moved away from the door slowly, breathing the still air in shallow gulps. The bed was in a mess and the creased sheets still lay forlornly as if huddling against his body. His underwear was there too, in a small blue and white heap at the foot of his bed.
He didn’t sleep naked like Peter did, she decided. Then she laughed at the faint shock the discovery had caused. She a little bit of a catholic – or just her father’s daughter. And he was untidy. His toothbrush lay by the bed. Some tissue paper had been discarded in a relatively unswept corner at the other end of the bed.
On a table next to the door through to the tiny ensuite bathroom was the big blue guidebook all the English and American tourists used when they came to Cafayate. Like all the others, its corners were bent and folded and the page edges were grimy. She could see no other books. Perhaps they were in the big rucksack that slumped like a limbless body on the floor.
She went into the bathroom. Some soap, and a soaking towel. The floor and walls were dripping wet all around the shower. It dripped just like all the others in the hotel.
She resented him then, him and his ordinariness. It was because of this boring man that Peter was gone when she drove to his hut, that he was gone from José and Anna’s shop when she ran in, coated with sweat and frightening poor Anna out of her wits. It was because of this dull man that she’d been late and risked joining the other unemployed of Cafayate eking out their lives on others’ charity.
The door banged behind her. In the flat light of the corridor, she knelt for a while on the cold lino floor. Her throat was dry again as it had been in the morning when she drove one-handed and more quickly that she’d dared before, smoking incessantly to avoid thinking.
There were two more rooms to be done. She worked automatically, as she always did. Fruitless anger rose up in her at every sweep of the mop along the floor. She wasn’t going to share Peter with some dull Englishman, not even in England. It wasn’t until she was going down the stair with the bucket handle cutting into her fingers that she remembered how Luisa had looked when she said his name. Maybe she’d missed something.

With the sand cooling and moulding itself under his shoulders, Peter began to believe that he was escaping. Above him was the sky, immensely deep and so vast that only when he looked left or right could he see the tops of the mountains on either side. As the sand cooled, so did he, the sweat chilling under his arms and draining away the sticky heat. The truck had barely stopped moving when he’d thrown himself here. The sand leaped up where his legs and arms fell against it. A couple of lizards catching the last of the day’s warmth had darted away out of sight.
The bush visible just over the ends of his trainers was a leafless burst of wood. He could hear two thorns gently scraping against each other in the evening breeze. The endless oil slick of the road in the valley was silent; the air was full of the smell of hot stones –
Sod John bloody Wilson! Next time he saw him he would tell him to piss off right out of town and if he ever came near him again he’d – Peter moved restlessly, feeling his stomach clench as his thoughts rushed on to visualise the fist and the face, the blood running out of the smug jowls.
He straightened his legs until the sand touched his calves. It ran out from between his fingers. Away on his left, the sun was already gone and the mountains were turning from orange to grey to blue. There was one set that ran in a sharp diagonal from close to the rough skyline almost to the bright black sliver of the road. They weren’t one of the canyon’s great tourist sites – not the drama of the Devil’s Throat, not the windswept grandeur of the Castles or even the great crashed alien mothership of rock visible as the road swung sharp left across the valley floor – but he knew every contour of it from where he lay. He traced the line of them with his finger as they faded into the rocks behind. His mind wandered; suddenly the rocks were Sara’s thigh raised up clear of the bedclothes.
Gagh! John Wilson! He got up and brushed the sand off himself with barely controlled violence. To kick something so that it yelped with pain! Yet even as he looked wildly about him he knew he would not find anything, only the hubcap of his truck. It clanged and he swore bitterly as pain spread through his toes.
Inside, he sat at his desk as dusk cast gloom over the window. This was exactly the way he’d felt driving back to Summertown from the centre of Oxford up the Banbury Road in October. The College meeting – he’d no recollection of what it was even about – had taken its usual course. He remembered John, in a grey T-shirt for some reason – why would he be wearing that? – doing it again, making all those poor academics shift in their seats and sway in the wind. Some were old women from when the College was still women-only, moistening the edges of their shawls with their tongues. So he remembered.
No, really they were mostly young or middle-aged, and like everyone else, trying to guard what they really loved from the dull stupidity of organisations. He was not the only one to see through Wilson. He was just the only one that was made sick by it, and even that was because he felt like he’d seen through everything.
Wilson had arrived six months before. It was a relief to most of the tutors because there’s been so many complaints about the stand-ins for his predecessor. He had excellent academic references, but the people at Leeds, his old university, never said much about him as a person. Someone report hearing rumours about students being terrfied by fits of rage, and someone else heard that there’d been “something going on” with one of the female students a few years ago. These stories were probably just due to jealousy – nothing of that nature was ever officially reported. When he arrived, the man was standoffish, to be sure, but he published at a healthy rate and went to a lot of committees. It was only after a few months that they realised he had “ambition” as the Dean called it. People began to notice that he never shoped any spontaneous curiosity, though he certainly knew his subject. By then, John Wilson had accumulated a lot of influence. “Standoffish” become something else.
After that October meeting, while Peter stumbled aimlessly through the scented air of the Dean’s lodgings staring out at all the students, Wilson had caught up with him.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing!”
At first he’d smiled back, his head a whirl through lack of sleep and food. Then he’d just nodded.
“Why don’t you just go – don’t make us throw you out.”
“Why, why Mr Wilson, this is not the good friend we know and love.”
“You’re fucked out of your head.” Perhaps that was what Wilson had said. It was true, at any rate. As if from the other side of the oak-panelled door, he saw himself wipe Wilson’s spit off his face with a slow and uncertain hand, and stare at his colleague’s shoulders moving under the limitless black folds of his gown. Yes, yes, he must have been wearing a gown. Not a T-shirt.
He didn’t remember anyone asking him if he was fit to drive. Perhaps it was the Woodstock Road he’d taken. He distinctly remembered approaching Marston Ferry Road lights and signalling right. But then perhaps he wasn’t even going home at that time.
The indicator had ticked and ticked. As it counted the seconds, he had felt John’s words grow meanings in his mind. With meanings came a heavy feeling. The lights must have changed. There was hooting and the car behind him in the queue pushed its bumper right up to his.
Carefully, he turned off the indicator. Then the engine. He put his keys on the dashboard, then opened the door and got out. He closed the door gently and walked around the car to the pavement. He must have been up as far as the off-licence in Summertown before the police caught up with him. He didn’t really know; he was thinking about the beauty of the two matching horse chestnut trees that rose up on either side of the Banbury road at the junction. One in the garden of the Health Centre, one in the garden of Clare College. The symmetry of it transfixed him. Peter knew he was ill before this. The bottles of pills he sometimes found-half-empty had already told him. He knew it had got worse, too, ever since he turned twenty. His mother called him “moody” and he made sure he believed her for as long as he could.
It was odd that when he looked back on thenillness, it felt as though a horrible external process had dragged him along. At the time though, there’d never been a time when he was totally unable to make decisions. Coming to Argentina was definitely a choice he’d made. It was a good one. Up to now he had felt much better.
But now he was here, sitting in darkness with not a soul for tens of kilometres. If he went outside into the cool night air and put on the powerful flashlight he kept beside the door to the hut, still not one person in the world would have known where he was; what he was doing.
Except Sara perhaps – though even she would be guessing. She would be more likely to think that he was out in the mountains having another look at the silver. “Another?” she’d say, and laugh because she would be doing the checking too, if she were him.
She still wouldn’t say she’d decided to come with him, he thought with a sudden pang of sadness. He was beginning to believe that she really hadn’t made up her mind.
A real longing to see her had tortured him on the drive back from the ruins at Quilmes. He’d even gone to the hotel with John, with an image of her in her work clothes and her hair tied back with a red cloth bouncing around in his mind. Even his tongue had curled in anticipation as though waiting to taste the sight of her.
But no. Long gone, as he’d known she would be. And perhaps she’d tried at José’s and then here, and then gone back to her father’s.
If she had waited, John would have seen her. He remembered those smooth clever eyes on the breasts of the girl in the café. He swallowed the bile that rose, hardly noticing how his hands crushed the notes on the desk into free-standing paper mountain ranges.
Sod it. He’d go and look at the silver. That would stop all these moods piling up on each other. He almost ran out of his hut, but returned almost immediately to pick up his flashlight. He flicked it on and off experimentally and felt his way with dazzled eyes out into the canyon’s night air.

There were always some girls who’d fall for a tourist, Anna thought. It was the idea of metropolitan ways and money, which were to be found far away in Buenos Aires, America or even England. There were boys, too, who would roll their eyes at a woman with long dark hair, mysterious eyes kept behind sunglasses and expensive scent. In the bars and cafés the one who served her drinks and got a smile in return would be rewarded by friendly punches on the arm and whispered comments. Every so often one would get what he wanted and put on airs and talk about leaving. That was rare though, thank the Lord. At least Carmen had moved away to get a job, and then met a man, a good one too. And there was always a good chance she would move back to Cafayate, when times were better.
Now, out of season, the rumours about this Englishman had taken on a flimsy significance amongst the girls in Cafayate with nothing to do. Most of them probably hadn’t actually seen him. If they did their interest’d soon be gone. Anna eyed him with distaste across the shop. His arms, white and flabby, supported him on the counter and the customers had to go all the way down one aisle and up another to get round him and pay for their goods. Most never gave him a second glance now because it was mid-morning and everyone had gone to whatever work they had. The ones shopping now were mostly buying on José’s credit because they had no cash. A few cigarettes, a packet of maté, hot water for the flasks they carried – anything to get them through another aimless day while the porteños fiddled around in government.
Jonh had come in with the working men and joined their patient queue. José had not even seen him until he was at the counter and saying a greeting in Spanish. Anna had been serving another customer at the time but she had seen her husband’s frightened reaction out of the corner of her eye. Mother of God, my soul, forgive me, but I was so angry that he could do that to my José. She hadn’t forgiven him yet.
José had turned to her with a wavering smile. “My dear, this is Juan – I mean John.” And so the rule laid down by Señor Bolivar was overturned. “John, this is my wife, Anna.”
She had met his stare and greeted him coldly, standing back from her side of the counter, out of his reach.
She knew his game. Most of the men she knew couldn’t resist playing at stares to show they weren’t weak. So she held his gaze and stared back at the flabby flesh around his eyes. Sometimes tourists would try to play at staring too, looking and looking as they walked past a man on his bench. If any of them ever lost patience and shouted at the man, all they’d get would be a smile and a wave. Anna would be no different, the Lord give her strength.
Behind him stood two men, waiting their turn. José should be serving them – but no, he was watching his wife staring out the Englishman. Perhaps the silence that had descended was only very short after all, because when he spoke, this Juan, it was as if they’d met in friendly way on the steps of the church.
“José showed me round the ruins of the Indian settlement yesterday. I suppose he’s told you all about it.”
He had. She acknowledged this with tight lips.
“Peter tells me that José is a great expert on the Indian settlements here – better than any of the other people he’s spoken to, at any rate. That’s what he says. Isn’t it José?”
And so the game ended. Juan had turned his head, and those cold brown eyes, to glance at her husband. She breathed out silently and relaxed her shoulders just a little, but not so much that he would notice. She blinked a few times until her eyes were used to the usual shapes of the shop again.
“So he says,” José was even laughing with him, but in breathy gasps. His laughter was normally a quiet chuckle, as she well knew. “But what does he know? He’s an Englishman.”
Anna raised her eyes to heaven. She let them talk while she served the waiting men. Then she went inside the house and made it orderly and ready for when the Englishman was invited in. José, in spite of everything, wouldn’t be able to resist showing off the maps he’d made for Pedro over the last few months.
But when she came out again they were still talking, their elbows matching each other on the counter. Anna watched the Englishman closely to make sure she wasn’t wrong about him. His chin was unshaven – grey stubble. His hair was thin and badly combed – going the same way as José’s. Carmen wouldn’t have fallen for this brute. She wouldn’t have swooned over him like those silly girls. More likely slapped him.
Yes, yes, a good slap was what he needed.

Anna had cleaned the house for him to invite their guest in. Oh, he’d only be too glad to show Juan the maps of he cared to see them. If he cared.
Perhaps he should have told Anna how frightened he was – but still what was the use? José caught himself shrugging. Juan was frowning at him. He laughed again, again and shrugged again.
“Perhaps you’d like to come in, into our house I mean. You don’t mind watching the shop do you, my dear? I can show you some of the materials I’ve collected over the years. Not that there’s much Indian life to see outside the pukara these days. A few collectives here and there, some old men selling pots by the roadside.”
“I saw them,” Juan said in his quiet voice. “I saw them from the bus on the way here. Do they live out in the valley or come back into town?”
There, the questions again. José scratched his stomach in confusion, but Anna saved him from having to speak. “Not many people live out in the valley. Go in, go in, José. I’ll keep the shop.”
José beckoned Juan round the end of the counter and into the space normally reserved for the family alone. There wasn’t much room and Anna had to press herself against the shelves behind her while Juan brushed past the front of her dress. She could smell him and was glad that their skins did not meet. She kept her bare arms behind her as she stepped away from the shelves.
“We’re not getting any younger and thinner are we? Not one of us,” she said. Juan looked back quickly, threatening to renew the staring game, but she was smiling.
The door closed behind the two men and now her shoulders did slump. Hopefully, Juan would go soon and leave José alone. But she prayed for this with little conviction, even becoming distracted by the long scoring marks cut deep into the polished countertop. Her fingers rested along its edge. She stared at them as well, noticing how her skin had creased over the years. She only remembered she was meant to be praying when a customer tripped over the step at the door.

“Hey! Englishman!” Hernan was very, very drunk. His friends and the matron at the bar were used to it. They knew what to do – look away until he forgot about it. The tourists all seemed to know that too. They usually just laughed and drank more beer.
“What?” They thought they’d pick on him while he was alone, did they? That must be why that girl wasn’t in tonight. John flexed his fingers in the hot fumes from the empañadas. Why did everyone think they had to get the better of him? It must be because he always got the better of them. They must be scared, to gang up on him like this.
He had a quick glance round. Everyone else was looking the other way. Even the great lanky kid who was standing in for the girl was leaning on the bar having a drink. He could see the boy’s too-long greasy hair shift on his shirt collar as he spoke. Perhaps it was just this little git in front of him who wanted trouble. John breathed out a sigh of relief. He wasn’t going to lose to this little scruff.
“Hey Englishman! You fuck any girls today? No? Got no dick, eh? Ha ha ha!” The ceiling was moving too quickly, Hernan thought. But it was all right, all right, those English fuck all the girls all the time specially that one who worked in the hotel in the day with the nice tits, the English were just shit, and they stole the Malvinas.
“I might have. What’s up? You want to feel my dick?” John could feel himself working up to proper anger. Still, they’d all be up in arms if he hit him, all that brotherhood crap. But if he comes at me I’ll show him.
The other men at the bar kept looking away. The day had been too long and hot for anything like this. They just wanted beer and a bit of a rest before the football started. The woman behind the bar muttered behind her hand to them. They nodded and laughed. Hernan was laughing too, at John.
The Englishman felt his anger surge. He wasn’t having any of that. This little tosser was going to stop laughing very soon. But it wouldn’t be good to let rip straight off, not with all these other people who might get on the other guy’s side.
John carefully pushed his chair under the table. He walked slowly towards the little man in the yellow shirt. Hernan swallowed. He was a fucking big man.
Wild, wild punch. John caught the fist as it went by. Hernan’s face fell as the Englishman pushed his towards him.
“Tut, tut,” John said. It was bad Hollywood, he knew, but he liked to see the expression on their faces as their stomachs seized up.

The matron stepped out from behind the bar and picked up the fallen chair, puffing with the effort. The men looked around with mild surprise. It was as if no one had been about to fight behind them. Only the half-empty glass of beer and the hot empañadas in their silver bowl showed that there had been anyone there. Well, this might stop Hernan drinking so much.
Outside in the Avenida Belgrano, Hernan half-lay with his legs under the low front of a Vauxhall and his head against the rough concrete of a building. John looked at him in the dull light for a while, then prodded his soft side with his foot.
“Talk to me, you silly bastard,” he said, laughing. “You can’t be that pissed.”
Hernan’s head rolled back like a capsizing ship. John could see the sticky brightness of vomit on the man’s awful beard and down the front of his shirt. Could smell it too. He took a smart step backwards. He watched the man’s apparently still face for a while, squinting in the dark to try and see if he knew he was there. Hernan must have been trying to focus because after a few moments, punctuated only by hoarse breathing and a car motor, the man gave a start. John saw one dirty hand shoot out into the greater light in the middle of the road. Hernan was trying to crawl all the way under the Vauxhall.
“Come out, you stupid sod. I haven’t laid a finger on you.”
Sense emerged. Hernan had an idea of who he was and what he was doing. All the stars in the sky were laughing down at his sore eyes. And he smelt! Here was the Englishman helping him to his feet, finding his hand a place to rest against the wall and hold him up.

A very interesting couple of days, John mused to himself. That scruffy but informative beggar Hernan put a cap on it. José Achua was eating out of his hand, and poor old Atkins – he would get a visit tomorrow, out in his little shack. Perhaps he might also meet the elusive Sara Bolivar, now that he was no longer guessing at her existence.
He turned off the shower and made his way, dripping, into the main bedroom. Poor old Pete. Would he even come back to Oxford? He laughed. Of course he would. He’d nowhere else to go, except stay out here. And when he did he’d find john Wilson the toast of the academic world. No one would be chellenging him, they’d all take back what they’d whispered, what they’d said and done.
Oh this bloody towel! He dragged it again and again across the front of his body, ignoring the feeling of his flesh corrugating. It was the towel, the towel making him feel like a porker. He sat on the bed out of breath, still feeling water running down his thighs.
He should pay one of the hotel girls to do this sort of thing for him, get her to clean him all over… though no doubt José Achua would do it for free if he wanted him to. You had to have a smile at the way the poor old guy had crumbled among the ruins left by his hard-fighting ancestors.
Big as he was, José had been just like most people when you used a bit of power on them. It was almost too easy. John had done what he had done so often before. Used a bit of strength, a bit of verbal intimidation while Atkins was scrambling around on top of a bunch of ruined walls out of sight. People were so predictable, even in Argentina where things were free of English restraints. José’s resistance had collapsed right away. From then on it was just a matter of asking the right questions.
“And what about Señor Bolivar? Is he an expert too?”
“Oh no, he’s just a friend of mine, just a friend…”
“But Peter doesn’t like him.”
Oh how José Achua had swallowed and told him all he needed to know! “No, no, he does, I’m sure. He can’t choose not to, you know.”
And when Peter came back, the little hints he’d dropped: “You know, José, when I first got here, all the women knew exactly who Peter was. Doesn’t sound like the Peter I knew, but you never know how things will turn out, eh?”
Peter would look up at the sky. José Achua would run his finger round a stone and force out a “Yes.”
When he’d gone to the shop today he’d just been making a point, like a fighter who comes back and tells a man “I’ll have you”. And José, big arms and all, knew it.
Hernan had confirmed everything, given him Sara Bolivar’s name and a place to find Mr Indian-Sympathies Atkins. José Achua wouldn’t half get a lecture from that wife of his when she found out!
As he walked across the room for the shorts he wore in bed, he instinctively looked around for a mirror so he could catch his own eye. There wasn’t one. He picked up the scratchy shorts and put them on, and understood why the disappointment he’d felt was tinged with relief. To see his genitals flapping idly through his own eyes was bad enough. Confirmed in glass they would have made him sick as though someone else had laughed. He climbed into the cool sheets of his bed with a frown instead of a smile. He hadn’t got what he wanted yet and he suddenly wanted to go home.

“So if my daughter goes with you to England will you marry her there?” Unless you were Sara you never took maté with Señor Bolivar in the morning. You drank coffee.
Peter drank and blinked once or twice, digesting the question. He was glad of the familiar surroundings of José’s shop, even though Señor Bolivar had surprised him there. As he had come in looking for Sara, her father had risen up out of the chair by the door. Open mouthed, Peter had obeyed the command to sit down. “Of course I will.”
“And you will support her if she decides to study?”
That grey beard moved relentlessly. He wondered where Señor had learned his interrogation skills. No – he knew where. They all learned that sort of thing in the 70s. The Americans taught them. He swallowed nervously three, four times. Meeting Señor Bolivar’s eyes was like putting your hand in boiling water. “Well, I’ll never be rich.” Señor Bolivar frowned. Show him your palms, look honest! “Yes. Yes, I will.”
“And she will be free to come back to her own country.”
Ah, this was easy. “Yes, yes of course. I will be back as well. Many times.”
He breathed again. Surely that was it. “… catholic churches?”
No. It went on. “I’m sorry, Señor. I didn’t quite catch your meaning.”
“I said, I trust Sara will be free to attend catholic services in England. I know you, Pedro, are not a catholic.”
Another easy one. There was even a catholic church on the Woodstock Road! “Oh yes. I wouldn’t dream of stopping her.”
Señor Bolivar was silent for a few seconds. Peter held his breath, unsure where either of them stood with regard to the truth of what he was saying. Sara going to church?
But perhaps the father was satisfied. He had said nothing for a while. Cold chills ran up Peter’s neck. This was the moment of judgment, and the only hurdle remaining would be Sara’s own decision. He’d never imagined this kind of interrogation in England, but it seemed quite right here, where Señor Bolivar often appeared to have set the rules.
“I’m an old man, Pedro, with no wife to stay with me… and few friends. Perhaps you can guess why.” One elegant brown hand made a precise gesture towards the tattered cap carefully placed on the tabletop. Peter gladly followed the movement of the hand with his eyes, but when he returned Señor Bolivar’s stare was as still and solid as the Quebrada rocks. “I trust that you will make every effort that I may see my grandchildren. You are older than she is. I hope you have given your responsibilities some thought.”
Judgment was deferred, apparently, though perhaps the taut concentration of the game required it to be played out to the end. Peter cleared his throat.

Stacking shelves, stacking shelves – José pushed the packets into neat rows on the uneven surfaces as though excessive care with these small items could defer what might, or what would, come. As he patted the crackling skin of biscuit packets to coax them into strict alignment, he could feel Anna’s and Pedro’s presences weighing on each shoulder. Over his left shoulder Anna was unpacking their latest delivery of coffee, which had lain undisturbed in their hallway for over a week. Over his right, Pedro and Señor Bolivar were still engaged in their earnest talk. José knew what they were discussing, but he would never have dared encroach on his friends’ privacy even though Pedro’s chair was half-blocking the doorway.
When she discovered what had happened Anna would roll those sharp eyes of hers and for a second there’d be vivid white against the veins and mascara. She’d clasp her hands and invoke some saint appropriate to the situation. “Oh, José, José, I should have expected it from you, oh how blind you are!” Her voice would rise and fall and end in a dry crackle.
Pedro would not quite hear, but suspect the parts he’d missed. “What?” he’d say, like snapping leather, and the stare would be – well, there’d be no José Achua to survive it, even if he’d not eaten himself up with shame when he repeated himself. He could feel the words sticking in his throat, a mass like an egg.
He was bending over an unstable stack of loaves when Juan’s cold shadow fell across his back. He could tell it was him right away. Pedro and Señor Bolivar had fallen silent. Anna, like them, had turned her head to see who had darkened the doorway.
It was Juan, sure enough, and he didn’t hesitate to cross the threshold and run his hand through the stubble of hair on his head. He and Pedro barely acknowledged each other. Each face was cast into twilight by the sun at the door. No articulate words were spoken. That is, until Juan peered at and understood the presence of the old man with one hand resting lightly on his severely trimmed beard.
“You must be Señor Bolivar.” This said with a slick movement of his bulky body. Señor Bolivar watched the thick slab of an English hand approach him. At the last moment he got to his feet and presented his own with his back parade-ground straight.
“You are Juan.”
“John.” The word was spat and Señor Bolivar receded into his chair, holding the muscles of his squeezed hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Señor – indirectly, I may say.”
A venomous stare at Pedro was matched by Pedro’s own look – directed plainly and unforgettably at José. The shopkeeper shrank back, almost clambering up onto his own shelves as though longing to take his place as a thick-crusted loaf among the crumbs of his predecessors.
And this was all by the by. He knew that in the depths of his churning bowels, this crushing of Señor Bolivar, this spawning of hate in his poor English friend was all just a side show. Juan the Englishman really wanted José Achua. He wanted him to take him into the map room and unroll a certain sheet of paper. He would lay his finger on a single point, and say, laughing down at him as the conquistadors had done to his ancestors, “X marks the spot, eh? Am I right?”
Perhaps so. José had never tried to decipher Pedro’s scrawl on that particular map, but John would be able to read them. The map of the Quebrada would be spread out between them and Juan would have his answer, and whatever it was Pedro had meant by that marked X.

There was stony silence in Peter’s truck all the way to the Bolivars’ house. He drove with extreme caution to maintain the apparently fragile equilibrium in his elderly passenger’s mind. Perhaps the journey back, the lift offered and accepted had been some kind of final test, though Peter could not understand why the decision might not yet have been taken.
The truck made its way over the stones of the Avenida Jujuy like an ungainly bug. So many thoughts crossed Peter’s mind as they mounted the paved road out of town and passed between the avenue of trees that marked the boundaries of the vineyards on either side that he almost started gabbling at Señor Bolivar. But it was clear the old man required silence. He kept his eyes beneath their impenetrable sunglasses and kept them directed at the bushes that lined the part of the road near to town. Peter directed the energies rising up inside him to controlling the shaking of his knee on the truck’s accelerator. The sound of the engine filled the silence between them.
He dropped Señor Bolivar off at the bundle of shacks on the far side of the rocky outcrop south of the town. The old man announced that he would “walk from the edge of the road”. Peter did not protest. Once Señor had closed the truck door behind him and offered a dusty “Thanks” through the open window, it felt as though weights had been lifted from his spine. His muscles protested but he sat upright in his seat and put the truck into gear. He pulled back onto the road with the branches of the bushes around the shacks swirling in his wake.
Now he was approaching the canyon’s most impressive part, crossing a flat plain that started at his moving wheels and spread over to the mountains’ stillness. In between, numberless thorn bushes and cacti shifted positions in their crowd as he moved along the tarmac. The complete solitude of it crept into him and he felt aches spread out in his shoulders as he relaxed them.
He could view it all rationally now. Señor Bolivar was only doing what he believed was expected of him as a father. A simple interview couldn’t – wouldn’t – change his mind if he’d already made it up. It was just his style, and an old man’s fear of being left all alone. Peter snorted in the hot air. All Peter wanted was to be left alone.
As the rocks closed in on the road and the corners became sharper, he remembered José. The shopkeeper had had some sort of fainting fit and pitched head-first into a splinter-ridden wooden box. The two visitors had jumped to their feet, but Anna had beaten them both to him. She led him into the house by the arm. Peter had seen José’s pale face, all thin and spectral, turn and stare him out until the door closed behind it.
Well, he could guess what had caused that. John Wilson again. The bastard had badly upset José yesterday, and he still hadn’t gone away. Not that he would. Peter watched the road ahead with grim eyes. Now he came to think of it, there had been no sign of the moron today at all. That was like having a snake in the house and not knowing where it was. Maybe he should go back into town, check that José was all right.
No point. And Señor Bolivar’s interview had worn him out. It was quiet dozing he needed, and then for Sara to come and dispel the pressure loaded onto him by her father.

Señor Bolivar had developed a limp. It probably wasn’t noticeable to anyone looking, but he could feel it nonetheless. It was an old-age limp, a tightening around his hip. He regarded it with severe and unshakable loathing, much as he did the raggedness of his cap and the slovenly way young people straightened their backs. Even Pedro. Even his daughter.
Those two were on the edge of something. They’d look up and their airplane would be landing somewhere, probably in London. Everything would be different. He looked at the houses of his neighbours as he passed them. The dogs knew his smell and only looked up incuriously as he passed.
He knew which wall would need shoring up next, which roof would need an old iron bucket under it when the rains came. Even with his old-age limp, he could make his way between the sagging doors and brown shutters without a second’s thought. He sighed despite himself. But even Señor Bolivar, eking out a pension among three ragged families with stick-like children, even he had had once looked up to find everything different.
He crested the slight rise in the centre of the space between his neighbours’ huts and picked his way over the plant-encrusted scrap-metal outside Tomas’ half-hearted mechanics shed. He had decided. Once on the other side of this metal chaos, where no industrial springs could unaccountably attach themselves to his feet, he would indulge himself and reminisce. He would then be quite sure that no interfering remembrances would disturb his afternoon’s study.
Of course, if you analysed the situation properly, as he was prone to do, there was little actually to recall. After the initial thrill of it – which was in fact partly youthful inexperience – it became rather dull, and them unpleasant.
But when it started it had been a beautiful winter June morning. He left the regimental married quarters a little late – such were the demands made by Maria and the unborn Sara – and hurried over the cool tarmac to the parade ground. It had once been a place he avoided, after the carnage caused by the communist terrorists’ bomb two years ago during Isabelita’s so-called presidency. Even now, 1977, there were men without wives, wives without men, and even mothers coming by to see where their loved ones had been made bloody ribbons by the explosion. Communists and atheists could never care about the pain caused to families, women and children by their actions. They were incapable of human feeling, and that was why they had to be exterminated.
Events had been brewing in Corrientes ever since the bombing, and even now the military were in power the war was not yet won. Communists and atheists, damn scourge of the continent and of his poor country. He didn’t turn his collar up at the cold, but at the feeling of being exposed on this bare stretch between scrubby fields of grass. At home he could hold it back, though if they were to reach him there they wouldn’t keep their hands off Maria or their child. Over in the barracks, where his regiment filed faithfully together onto the parade ground, he felt untouchable – there were strong fences and many sentries – though even that hadn’t stopped the attackers last time.
How unreflective he had been, mused the older man. Those feelings of security were those of a young man who had not schooled himself sufficiently.
Yes, he had walked on to his destiny with hardly a thought. The parade had been carried out as normal, and the latest decrees of the junta had been heard out by the rank and file in the most appropriate respectful silence. Patrols and the administration of the relevant parts of the city would be carried out as normal, as they had been since the news of Isabella Peron’s resignation and the coup last year.
That was a kind of order communists and atheists were not capable of. He had reached the door of his house now. In his mind he was approaching the door of his office in one end of the long barracks. The young man and the old man reached for his Army belt. The keys hung at the turn of his right hip.
Inside, he took off his cap despite the cold and sat down at the desk at the far end of the room. The presence of the flag behind his right shoulder made him firm. There was much to be done, as usual. With deft flicks of his pen, he acknowledged the receipt of four cars and gave permission for the release of six others. He turned the paper over and transferred it, face down, to the part of the desk’s polish-scented surface he used for orders he had dealt with. Then there was the issue of the delivery of oil to the depot. It would require an armed guard because the route it would take would brush dangerously against towns known to be bursting with unpatriotic feeling. He filled out the request and placed this second paper carefully on the back of the first. The air in the room, turned blue by the shade of the walls and the protective grille over the window, made his fingers cold. He fumbled the pen and jumped slightly at the clatter it made on the desk.
He had taken the trouble to remember these things closely because they led up to the point at which his duties changed beyond all recognition. Perhaps his office had not been so quiet as he now thought, because he was close to the military vehicle pound, whose movements he was directing. Perhaps too the heavy black telephone on the far right-hand corner of his desk had rung once or twice and he had had to reach round his photograph of Maria to answer it. But it was the documents that were important and these, he knew, he had recalled correctly.
Inside his house, he called out once for Sara. But she had gone out – to Pedro’s no doubt. He cleared his throat and banished all thought of it. They would be talking about him, wondering what he had decided, but he would give them his answer in due course. He closed the door of her room with a firm hand and made his way to the kitchen to struggle his way through the preparation of some coffee. He had wanted some that morning in 1977 too, but had reached for the third document instead.
He knew by its format that it was another request for “Special transport” from the part of Corrientes’ military actively working against the terrorists. It was an open secret that most who climbed into those Ford Falcons did so against their will, but Captain Bolivar had no great sympathy for them. If they were to be deatined it was because there were suspicions against the, and in these violent days suspicions had to be treated as crimes. He poised his pen over the paper to approve the order. Then he spotted the other sheet attached to it. Frowning at the irregularity, he flicked and flicked again at the corner of the page.
He swallowed. This was an official order from the Colonel addressed directly to him. He took care not to tear anything as he separated the order from the ordinary paper. He laid it out flat on the desk and smoothed it so that the light from the window fell evenly on the words. His presence in the Colonel’s office was required before 10 am. The clock on the far wall had just shifted its heavy had round to 9.30.
For a second he contemplated the impassive silver face. The Colonel must have perceived his thoughts. With no official request to work from, he must have somehow divined that his loyal Captain was desperate to serve his country more actively. Now the Colonel had stepped aside from his governmental duties to speak to Captain Bolivar in person. Neither the Captain nor the old Señor now spilling boiling water over his fingers ever fully admitted what he felt in those five minutes while the second hand lurched round the clock face.
On the front line of the struggle, he told himself as he straightened his uniform and held his hands stiffly to stop them quivering, he would be able to make the war against the terrorists go more quickly. He could help make sure his child was born into a safe, Godly and prosperous country.
This was where his memory always failed him, Señor thought sadly in his shuttered living room. He could never remember locking the door to his office or telling his secretary that he was going out for a while. He certainly couldn’t recall any detail of the walk from the main barracks to the Colonel’s quarters. He could reconstruct it from memories of other journeys in the compound, but that one walk, at the time the most important in his life, no, he couldn’t remember any of it.
But sitting in the Colonel’s waiting room, with his cap on his knees and self-important heat creeping across his ribs, he did remember that the completed orders were still lying on his desk, unexecuted. And so they would remain, perhaps for the rest of the morning until the Colonel released him. It was with an embarrassed sense of duty undone that he responded to the call and strode irresolutely into the Colonel’s office.