This is the first chapter of my as yet unpublished novel about the bloody clash between left and right-wing factions in Argentina in the 1970s as seen through the eyes of a young American drawn into the fray by his own ideals and a young woman's love. As this scene opens, after nearly 18 years of exile, iconic leader General Juan Domingo Perón is returning to Argentina for one last term as president, defying the military and on a wave of popular support that ranges from far left to far right. The comeback will be short-lived. He will die the following year, plunging the two factions into a veritable civil war that will eventually spark a military coup. And Argentina will be changed forever. But the writing is already on the wall even before the elderly general's plane lands in Buenos Aires.
"For a Peronist, there is nothing quite as good
as another Peronist."
—Lt.
General Juan Domingo Perón—
June
20, 1973 — Ezeiza International Airport, Argentina
"Fireworks," he thought when he first heard it. It was like
the crackling sputter of a string of lady-fingers, followed by several deeper,
duller pops, like M-80s going off.
He pictured a lesson in one of the texts they had used in Mrs. Garth's
high school Spanish class—a lesson about celebrations which showed pictures of
Roman candles bursting in the night-time sky over Mexico. His mind scanned the
text for the Spanish term for fireworks, then he turned to Beto and tried it on
him. "Fuegos artificiales,"
he heard himself say.
"¡Ojalá!" Beto muttered, which, Paul had recently learned,
meant, "Let's hope so! Stick close to me, and if I say move, we move, okay?"
 |
| Juan Domingo Perón |
"Sure," he said, but he thought ojalá was a funny thing
for Beto to say. Paul would have known the sound of fireworks anywhere, and
this was, after all, a big celebration, even if it wasn’t Mexico. Of course,
the sound was, he had to admit, somewhat indistinct, and distant from the spot
where they milled with the flow, shoulder deep in a heavy sea of Argentine
humanity that had turned out to meet General Perón's plane, after his seventeen
years in exile. The remoteness of the sound reminded Paul of the distance of
his high school days and of everything familiar to him back then, including
M-80s and lady-fingers. He didn't feel sad about being so far away, just
strange somehow—out of his element, on foreign turf. Even though he was with
his new and trusted friend, Beto, he felt a little uneasy in the swelling
crowd. There was a tension, a mob-like fearsomeness in the air, despite the
festive occasion, as if an ulterior motive underlay the festival-like patina.
The crowd was surging, like a single-minded, seething mass, toward the
staging area for the welcome, where there was a reviewing stand from which
Perón was to speak on arrival in Buenos Aires, and a platform below it, where
the National Symphony Orchestra was set up to welcome the aging general with
some musical selections, including the National Anthem. Paul didn't understand
a great deal about what was going on in the crowd, except that on arrival he
and Beto had hung around with groups made up mostly of what his friend had
described as student organizations and intellectuals. As the growing crowd
organized itself into a kind of loose honeycomb of political constituencies, a
crossfire of collective chants had broken out between one section and another.
The chanting had been spirited and aggressive and it was clear that the chants
of some groups stirred up something more provocative than shared enthusiasm in
others. The increasingly hostile tone reminded Paul of the taunting
blood-and-guts bravado of the high-school and college football cheers that he
had always despised, that false togetherness, that kind of
you're-with-us-or-dead undertone that brewed beneath the surface of every Ohio
State-Michigan game, for instance, when bullies who had never made anything but
the beer-drinking team did the rounds of the bars trying to pick fights with
the Michiganders in Columbus for the big game. But he found that kind of
bloody-mindedness odd at a celebration where everyone present was theoretically
Peronist.
He had asked Beto about this early on, right after a scuffle broke out
between two rival cells and fists flew for a few minutes until calmer heads
moved in to separate the scrapping opponents. Beto had explained that, to begin
with, not everybody there was a Peronist. He, for instance, wasn't. He was a
socialist. Many people, like him, were sticking close to the events from here
on out to make sure that everybody that deserved it got a fair shake in the new
democracy. People like him didn't want to see this turn out like Perón's old
government that had gone from popular uprising to incipient democracy to
iron-fisted dictatorship. But even among the majority here, who were indeed
Peronists, one Peronist wasn't the same as the next. It was a very broad
movement and there was much rivalry between the leftist and rightist extremes.
The problem, said Beto, was that the old guard rightists didn't want to
understand that Peronism was growing with the times. It could no longer be
content to be a nationalist movement. It must seek to join the inexorable rise
of international socialism, the development of a new world economic and social
order, of greater equality in the distribution of the world's wealth. Perón
understood this, Beto had assured Paul. It was obvious from his discourse from
exile in Spain. He was up on what was happening. He hadn't wasted those
seventeen years of exile. He knew what was coming off worldwide. The dinosaurs
thought it was the same old Fascist Perón of the forties who was coming back.
But no, this was 1973 and el Pocho was nobody's fool. He knew that
without the nation's youth, without the pressure the students and
intellectuals, and indeed the guerrillas had brought to bear on the milicos,
Perón would have died in exile. Hadn't it been Perón himself who had preached la tercera posición, the third position,
before anyone had ever thought of Third World unity and the rise of a new power
to be reckoned with? No, the Fascist dinosaurs of old guard Peronism were
finished. The news just hadn't been broken to them yet, but Beto figured that
would be one of the first things Perón would do on his arrival. The movement
needed new blood and Perón knew it. Youth and social justice would surely take
its rightful place in Peronism.
Now, once again there was a volley of lady-finger crackle and several
M-80-like pops, louder, much closer this time. And although it was a comfort to
associate the sound with fireworks and joyful celebration, Paul was no longer as
sure of what he was hearing as he had been before. The smell of gun-powder
floated above their heads and mixed with the pall of smoke from the chorizo vendors' makeshift grills. Paul
was just turning to Beto, in a gesture akin to whistling in the dark, to tell
him about his wild days back in Ohio, when he heard Beto mutter, "¡La
mierda, che! ¡Son tiros!”
"What's the matter?" he asked, noting Beto's pallor, but not
catching what he'd said.
“Don't you hear it, amigo?"
"Yeah, fireworks."
"Fireworks, ¡las pelotas!
Sounds more like shots to me."
"Shots?" said Paul only semi-credulously. He laughed a weak
nervous laugh, not wanting to be caught out by a porteño-style joke, and certainly not wanting to believe the sound
was gunfire. But Beto didn't laugh at him or with him, and now there were six
pops in rapid succession very near them. Others around them screamed, cursed
and jostled, trying to disband or at least to put some distance between
themselves and the sound. A nearby chorizo vendor flattened his back to a big
eucalyptus tree, made a rapid sign of the cross and touched his thumb and
forefinger to his dry lips.
"Shots?" Paul heard himself say again, but this time there was
a genuine and urgent query in his voice. A woman with a baby elbowed past him
and got under the tree with the vendor, where the greasy criollo sausages continued to sizzle and hiss festively over the
coals on a bedspring-grill, oblivious to the impending bedlam.
Beto grabbed Paul's arm and pulled him toward another small grove of
trees a little further on. But it was impossible to move fast in the crush of
the crowd and everyone was suddenly scrambling, trying to remain on a solid
footing for fear of falling and getting trampled if panic broke out. And it
did, when an older man just a few people away from them careened crazily into
the arms of two adolescents behind him, shouting, "¡Ay, la puta madre!
¡Me han baleado!"
People screamed and swore and started to push, wanting to break and run
in any direction but where they were.
Paul hesitated as he saw the two youths kneel with the wounded man, whose white
shirt and beige coat were fast turning scarlet. The man's eyes rolling back in
his head, as the boys tried to ward off the careless feet of a mob in flight.
"¡Cuidado! ¡Cuidado!” the boys
cried, "We've got a wounded man here!"
In the mad rush that followed, the crowd surged mindlessly toward the
action, rather than away from it. Paul and Beto were in sight of the blue and
white-festooned stage and VIP reviewing stand that had been rigged up for the caudillo's arrival. Paul looked that way
just in time to hear screams and see the musicians of the National Symphony
Orchestra cradle their instruments and lurch forward out of their seats onto
the wooden floor of the makeshift stage, as close-cropped men wearing suits,
overcoats and sunglasses a tier above them produced machine pistols and 9mm
semi-automatics and began to exchange fire with unseen armed opposition below,
in the core of the violently jostling mass.
"Come on, gringo, come
on!" shouted Beto over the tumult, jerking him sideways against the main
flow of the mob. "We've got to get out of here. Move!"
Suddenly, the initial shock drained from Paul's head and survival took
over. He moved in unison with Beto, placing himself in his friend's hands,
side-stepping against the human wave, pushing, heaving, surging leftward, away
from the staging area for Perón's welcome. Still Beto shouted, "Come on!
Come on! Move! ¡Movéte, boludo,
dále!"
Around them, some men's hands disappeared inside their winter coats and
reappeared armed with pistols. A swarthy young man with a straggly beard, not
an arm's length from Paul, hollered, "¿Donde
están los hijos de puta? Do you see the sons of bitches?"
"Up there! On the right, Negro!"
another man shouted, and Paul saw the young man take aim with a large-bore,
long-barreled revolver." The gun
exploded so near, that Paul felt the heat and his ears rang as if they'd been
boxed. Beto yanked him leftward, as four more loud blasts, just ahead and to
the right, answered the young man's shot.
Before he could secure a foothold, Paul felt himself being jerked
violently to the ground on top of Beto, as if the two of them had been lassoed
with a millstone. Seeing the kicking, digging feet all around him, Paul forced
his body to spring upward and expected to see Beto jack-in-the-box up in front
of him. But Beto didn't get up. Paul reached down through the crush of swirling
bodies, as if shoving a hand into a deep gunny-sack of uncertain contents, and
latched onto his friend's coat collar. He tried to pull Beto to his feet, but
it was as if Beto's clothes had been poured full of inert sand, a deadweight
too heavy to lift one-handed. Paul panicked and began to push and shove, at
first as if against a sandbag levy. But then he started shouting, "Hey!
Hey! Come on you bastards! Open it up! Open it up, here!" He shouted it in
English, momentarily unable to think of a single word in Spanish. To his
amazement, the people around him, surprised by the sound of a foreign tongue,
made minimal space for him to kneel down in aid of his fallen friend.
But when he rolled Beto over, it was obvious it was too late for aid of
any kind. Beto's right eye was staring sightlessly back at Paul. The left was
dangling from the socket by a bluish-red mass of nerves and veins, like a
macabre, novelty-store gag. The whole left side of the face was bathed in a
thick sauce of blood and brain-matter.
"Beto?" he said in an oddly quiet voice, although he knew
already that his friend was dead. In a stroke of efficiency, he pressed an ear
to the blood-soaked chest of the corpse, listening for a heartbeat. Nothing.
"Beto?" he said again and pressed two fingers to the gore-sullied
throat. No response. Then he stood and looked dizzily around himself. Everyone
was pushing and shoving, trying desperately to move out, as a Fourth-of-July
barrage of gunfire ripped through the crowd. Things seemed somehow muffled and
unreal. Only a terrified young woman, perhaps eighteen or twenty years old, was
looking his way, staring first at him and then down at Beto's cadaver.
As Paul stood half-dazed, wondering what to do—an idiotically organized
side of him pondering was how he would get Beto's body out of there, while
another more practical part of him frantically asked how he himself would
escape alive—he turned again toward the staging area. He was thinking that,
perhaps, if Perón's plane indeed landed, things would calm down. But then, his
practical side asked him, why would Perón's plane land in the midst of utter
chaos? The tower must surely have radioed the plane by now to tell the pilot
what was happening here. But then, if Perón was the iron-man they said he was,
maybe he'd chance it. (Perón wasn't, of course, and didn't. He was flown to the
safety of a nearby Air Force base and tried publicly to pretend the whole thing
hadn't happened, the abortive welcome being a personal let-down for him, after
so many years and so many miles).
High on the reviewing stand over the crowd, a half-dozen men—three in
jackets and jeans, three in coats and ties—appeared to be calling orders down
to comrades in the disbanding crowd. They pointed and gesticulated, letting the
others know where the opposition shooters were. Their leader was a pear-shaped
man in a tweed jacket, button-up sweater-vest, white shirt and tie. He was bald
and wore glasses and a carefully trimmed mustache. Paul was thinking that if
the man weren't now waving a semi-automatic carbine over his head to attract
the attention of one of his men below, he would look very much like Mr.
Jackson, the chief teller at the Feningsville National Bank. The thought struck
him oddly funny and he started to laugh and then he began to sob. Mr. Jackson's
look-alike aimed his carbine into the crowd below and fired four shots in rapid
succession, lowered the weapon enough to assess the damage he had cause and
then squeezed off four more rounds.
And then the crowd was tearing open like a thick sheet of wet paper,
pealing into two flanks, as a score of fast-moving men in civilian clothes,
carrying pump-action shotguns at port arms, drove a human wedge down through
the middle, shouting as they went, "Get out of the way, carajo! Move! Let us through!" And
as the crowd closed again like quicksand behind them, there was a sudden storm
of small arms fire and then the deafening answer of twenty shotguns opening up
against all resistance.
The terrifyingly explosive din scattered the crowd around Paul like
shattered safety glass, and he suddenly found himself and the frightened young
woman to whom he had spoken standing alone together in a clearing, under a blue
haze of gunsmoke and barbecue. On an impulse, he grabbed her hand and tried to
cut and run in the direction he intuitively sensed was safest. But she panicked
and tore her hand from his.
"This way!" he yelled for no reason he was sure of, as if he
had smelled danger in the other direction. But she paid him no heed. She had
gone no more than ten terrified, reckless paces when he saw her pitch forward,
face-first onto the ground, preceded by a pinkish shower of bone and blood that
spewed onto the grass.
Paul felt his body heave involuntarily and his vomit blew onto the
ground, his shoes and his pants legs. But the next wrenching spasm was cut
short by a rocketing surge of adrenaline as a slug whistled past his left ear,
and another tore bark off a tree to his right. He dived instinctively to the
ground and low-crawled for the cover of a nearby official car. But he found the
spot crammed with other cowering mortals. And now, he was back on his feet and
running like he never had before—not even when he set the high school
long-distance track record, what seemed like centuries and a million miles ago.
And his feet didn't stop pounding the ground until he had reached a wooded
area, somewhat removed from the main crowd and the epicenter of the fighting.
 |
Though not the center of action, however, the woods was far from
peaceful. He had been lucky, he could now see, to enter the tree-line from the
far end of the dense grove of eucalyptus, away from the section that directly
faced the reviewing stand and stage several hundred feet away. Now, as he
embraced a tree and gulped air into his burning lungs, he could see clearly
that had he run toward the middle of the woods, he would surely have been
killed in a hail of crossfire. He was now looking that way from the cover of
the large eucalyptus under which he was catching his breath. In that area, not
fifty yards from him, there was an armed man behind nearly every tree, some
with revolvers and pistols, others with shotguns and what looked like .22
carbines, a privileged few with machineguns. It was a disorganized array of
mostly "domestic" weaponry, nothing at all like the neat Hollywood
divisions of opposing bands, one group armed with brand new U.S.-made assault
rifles, the other with brand new Soviet ones. But, he was thinking in his
muddled, dream-like half-shock, that there was indeed something movie-like in
all this. He watched the men in TV-learned poses, parapeted behind trees,
returning fire from the staging area, probably—and fortunately, for the death
toll—somewhat ineffectually out of range, given the civilian nature of most of
the arms. Only the men with rifles on either side of the fighting were
occasionally creating casualties.
What was obvious was that distribution was hardly even. The
close-cropped men near the reviewing stand definitely had the better hardware
and were whittling down the odds fast. Even as Paul watched the shooters behind
the trees, a bullet slammed into one of them with such impact that it knocked
him flat on his back. He immediately began to scream and curse that he was hit.
Another man moved to his aid, but when he saw that it was only a shoulder wound
he dragged his downed comrade to cover and returned to the firing line.
Half-dazed, Paul leaned against the tree, slowly recovering his breath and
watched the shooters in a kind of fascination, saw how their right shoulders
bucked with each shot, followed the shockwaves through the backs of their
denim, tweed and wool jackets, saw how they turned, backs to their cover,
white-faced and a little queasy looking, as they dug for ammo in their pockets
and shakily reloaded their overheated weapons. These were mostly young men, his
age or a little older, a few in their thirties. Paul was thinking: "This
is real! This isn't a nightmare! This isn't some newsreel of Beirut or Nam!
Beto's dead and these guns are real!" And again the adrenaline filled his
veins and he once more lit out in a mad dash through the trees.
It was the wounded man lying on the ground who saw Paul break from
behind the tree.
"Hey! Hey! Who's that? Hey, get that sonuvabitch!" the man
yelled.
Paul didn't turn back but he could hear more shouts behind him and then
there were shots and bark skittered off a tree a few yards ahead of him. He
zigzagged, running full out, limbs and brush snatching at him like enemy claws
as he picked his way, full-speed, as best he could, through the wooded area.
A blow like a line-drive across the bridge of his nose dropped him on
his back. He rolled, moaned and tried to sit up but fell back, blood gushing
down his throat from his broken nose so that he had to swallow fast to keep
from choking. He tried to roll to one side so that he could spit out the blood
and breathe through his mouth, but a heavily shod foot kicked him over onto his
back again. Then someone dropped down astride his chest, knees pinioning his
biceps painfully to the ground. He heard the voices of others nearing fast from
where he had fled—not many, two or three at most, but certainly armed and
surely more than he could handle. The one who had hit him must have been up
ahead, alerted to the situation and waiting in ambush behind a tree. He felt
cold metal against his forehead, felt and heard the click and whir of a
revolver being cocked and thought, "I'm finished." He heard the
footfalls of the others as they arrived. Three of them, he figured. He braced
himself for the blows he imagined were coming, but then, the man on his chest
eased forward the hammer of his revolver and said, "Falsa alarma,
muchachos."
"What do you mean, false alarm, Negro?"
"I think he's with us."
Paul opened his eyes and, through the tears of pain from his smashed
nose, recognized the swarthy young man with the straggly beard and the
long-barreled revolver who had been shooting from the crowd right next to him
just before the barrage from the reviewing stand killed Beto.
"That's right, isn't it?" he said, sitting more or less
comfortably astride Paul's chest, the barrel of his revolver now pointing at
the sky. "You're one of ours. I saw you with Beto."
"Beto?" Paul said dumbly. "You know Beto?"
The man smiled at the others, who stood one at either of Paul's
shoulders and out of his range of vision, except for their feet and the cuffs
of their pants. The three of them laughed aloud.
"Yes, said the one sitting on his chest, "we know Beto."
"Beto's dead," Paul gurgled through blood and mucus and then a
sob tore through his body and he began to weep, lying there on his back, the
blood still running down his throat, but slower now, tears squeezing out the
corners of his eyes and draining off into his hair.
The man on his chest grabbed Paul's chin firmly and spoke imperatively
into his face in deliberate, foreign-accented English. "Look at me. Look
at me, rubio!" Paul opened his
eyes and looked the man on his chest directly in the face. "You are sure
Beto is dead?" The young man's face was serious, hard and full of sorrow
at the news. Paul nodded and began to
cry again, his mouth wide open. but with nearly no sound coming out, except for
an airy, wheezing moan."
"It was the hijo de puta
with the carbina," the Negro said.
"El pelado, the bald one," Paul heard himself say
accusingly through his tears.
"Yes," said the man against whose leg his pounding head was
resting, the man the others called Negro.
"Yes, that's the one. You know him?"
"No. I saw him. Up there on the reviewing stand. I saw him shooting
into the crowd with his carbine."
"What you are doing here, yankee?" the Negro asked.
"I just came with Beto. I room with him."
"Vino a acompañarlo a Beto," the Negro
explained in Spanish for the others' benefit. "He has nothing to do with
anything."
"Un pobre boludo," one of the others said, referring to Paul as
something akin to "just some poor asshole".
"I'm getting this one into an ambulance," said the Negro, "then I'm going to go kill
that pelado hijo de puta with the carabina."
Paul moaned as the Negro eased
off of his biceps and stood up. Then Paul himself sat up. Pain throbbed through
his face, and his nose felt enormous and all-important. He wondered vaguely how
boxers stood having their noses broken again and again, how they could continue
to fight after such a painful blow. The blood began to flow again and he had to
fight an urge to sneeze.
"I lament the breaking of your nose," said the Negro in English and with no real pity
in his voice, presenting an apology that was little more than simple
battlefield etiquette. This, he appeared to figure, was a fortune of war, after
all. "A friend of Beto's is a friend of us," he offered, and then
with a note of irony, he added, "Even a yankee imperialista. Keep your head back until the bleeding is stop."
"Where'd you learn your English?" Paul asked, seeking to calm
his own nerves with a touch of sociability. But it came out sounding a touch
sarcastic.
"Why? Because is so good or because is so bad?" the Negro said with a suddenly coy grin that made Paul feel less frightened
of him for the first time.
"Neither. Just wondered."
"I live sometimes in the USA," he said it as a word, like
oo-sah, instead of ewe-es-ay. "Also sometimes in England. Come, gringo, we put you in an ambulancia."
"I don't need an ambulance."
"Is the only way you get out of here okay."
There were renewed shouts from back the way they had come and the
shooting was more sporadic and closer by, as if the men in the woods were being
pushed back by their more heavily armed opponents located in the staging area.
"We must go pronto,"
said the Negro, and to the others he
said, "¡Vayan, ya! They need
help back there."
Paul was seeing the other three for the first time, now that he was on
his feet. When he had been on the ground they had loomed large and frightening over
him. When he had been running with them in hot pursuit, they had seemed like
terrifying, invincible monsters, snapping at his heels. Now he noticed that
they were barely beyond boyhood—youngsters, students with long greasy locks and
incipient beards, college kids in unwashed jeans and denim jackets. One of
them, with olive skin, dark, burning eyes and a sparse black beard, wore a
jauntily placed beret to enhance a Che Guevara image. The others had to be
content with who they were. They turned, on the Negro's orders, not without a touch of fear
and reluctance in their eyes, and headed cautiously back in the direction of
the shooting, two of them with .22 revolvers in their fists, the Che with a .22
carbine—a Marlin, like the one Paul's grandfather had given him on his
fourteenth birthday.
"Come," the Negro
ordered as he stuck his revolver in the waistband of his jeans, under his olive
drab field jacket. "We go."
The Negro had the lay of the
land, and they moved quickly away from the epi-center of the violence that
raged on behind them. They made rapid headway through woods and fields onto a
road beyond the airport. It was crammed with cars, buses and ambulances, caught
in a snarl, the bigger vehicles unable to advance or retreat.
The ambulances that had managed to load up wounded from the staging area
were making their way out of the airport complex off-road through the fields.
Police units had sealed off the area to other vehicles. Now that he thought
about it, Paul was surprised not to have seen more uniformed police inside
after the shooting broke out, almost as if they had decided to sit back and let
the two sides shoot it out. The Negro pulled him into the path of one of the
retreating ambulances and waved it down. The medic on the passenger side rolled
down his window. One of the rear windows had been pierced by a small-caliber
bullet and two bigger slugs had torn holes in the right front fender of what
Paul now saw was a Ford pick-up converted into an ambulance. Medic and driver
were visibly shaken and short-tempered.
"What the hell do you want?" the one on the passenger's side
snapped.
"What does it look like," the Negro snapped back. "I've got a wounded compañero here."
"No walking wounded," said the medic brusquely.
"He's a foreigner, a yankee" the Negro said, turning on the charm and smiling. "I want to get
him out of here before he gets hurt worse."
"I've got critically wounded in the back and you're holding me
up," the medic said and started to roll up his window, but the Negro was quicker. Suddenly the
long-barreled revolver came into view and was against the medic's temple before
he could react. The man immediately put his hands on the dash and began to
tremble, saying, "Please don't shoot! ¡Tranquilo!
¡tranquilo!"
"I am tranquilo."
the Negro said softly, "and that
is how I want you to be, Sr. Doctor.
" He flipped open a credential of some sort with his other hand, flashed
it through the window and immediately stuck it back into his jacket pocket.
"I am with police intelligence and this man is an undercover agent of the
United States embassy. Now, Doctor, you can join the wounded in the back and
let your driver take this man back to town or you can stay here with me under
arrest. Which do you choose?"
"It's all right, agente,"
the medic said tremulously. "I didn't know who you were. Está bien. We will take the señor with us. There is room up front
with us."
The Negro lowered his gun but
didn't put it away. He glanced around to see if anyone had noticed what was
going on. Apparently no one had, amidst the confusion. He kept the gun out of
sight, now, down to his side. Even if the medic didn't believe the police story,
he probably would ask no questions now. He was too frightened and would prefer
to believe rather than question the Negro's
word. The Negro stepped back and let
the medic get out of the cab of the ambulance. Paul climbed in the middle, and
the doctor climbed back in after him.
"You are muy amable, Doctor," said the Negro again with a smile. He touched his imaginary cap in a kind of
salute and waved the ambulance on. He had already turned and was making his way
back in the direction of the fighting when the ambulance, with Paul on board,
pulled away.
The three of them, driver, doctor and Paul, sat stiffly, staring
straight ahead until the ambulance was out of the fields and up on the highway
headed into Buenos Aires. They had the siren blaring, and no one stopped them,
the cops waving them through, even making way for them where they could. Once
they were out of the immediate area of the airport and well on their way into
Buenos Aires, the medic turned sideways in his seat, with a whistling sigh of
relief, his back against the door, and faced Paul and the driver.
"This," he said past Paul's swollen profile to the driver,
"is my last run. Let them kill each other. I'm not going back." The
other man, frozen to the wheel, nodded stiffly, without a word. Then, almost
tenderly, the doctor said to Paul,
"Quiere que le examine la nariz, señor.”
"¿Como?" said Paul still dazed and too exhausted to think much
in Spanish.
"The nose," said the doctor in English, demonstratively
touching his own. "You want I look?"
Paul shrugged. The medic reached across and placed thumb and forefinger
on the bridge of Paul's tender nose. Paul hissed through his teeth and sat
stiffly as the medic gently felt the break. Then suddenly the medic's hand
snapped, and Paul heard a crunch and saw stars.
"Shit!" he cried, feeling the blood flow freely again.
"More good now than when is already, how you say, set," said
the medic softly.
They rode in relative silence. Only once did the medic make reference to
the Negro's introduction, saying "You are with the North American
embassy?" to which Paul shrugged and said, "Sort of."
He was thinking about having left his dead friend behind. Beto had never
mentioned family. Paul didn't even know whom to notify. But there must be something he should be doing about it.
He thought better of telling the doctor anything, however. If there was one
thing he didn't want, it was to be held for questioning. And there was nothing
to keep the medic from telling the police whatever Paul told him. In a way, it
was Beto who told him not to say anymore. He checked himself because he
remembered how twice when they were walking down the street together, they had
passed policemen who were also on foot and once past, Beto had, on both
occasions, hawkered up and spat on the street and then sworn under his breath, "Cana hijo de puta, sonuvabitch cop." The second time
it happened, Paul said, "You know that guy?”
"What guy?" Beto had said.
"That cop."
"Cop?"
"Policeman."
Beto had burst into laughter. "Here," he said, "we call
them cana. We also call them hijos de
puta, because they are all sons-of-bitches.
"Well there must be some
good cops," Paul had said with a laugh.
Beto had stopped walking and firmly grasped Paul's forearm. Speaking
very seriously and looking Paul in the eye, he had said, "You remember
this and you live longer: Here in Argentina, the only good cana is a dead cana. This
is not Norteamérica, where we believe
this about the policeman is your friend and all that. Here you go to the police
station to ask for help and you end up in a cell. They arrest you for spitting
on the street and you end up dead. You go into the comisaria because you have a traffic accident and maybe you never
come out. Here the police is, as you North Americans say, bad news. "
No, he would say nothing to any stranger until somebody closer to him
helped him decide what to do. But who?
They were doing maybe 90 miles and hour, with the siren screaming, fast
approaching the Federal Capital. At one point the medic looked over the seat
into the rear of the ambulance at the wounded man they were carrying. Paul
looked too. The face of the grizzled older man strapped on the stretcher was
grayish tallow. The eyes were open and staring sightlessly, the mouth lolling
agape. Paul wasn't sure, but he thought it was the man who had been wounded
near him when the shooting first started, the one that the adolescent boys had
been trying to protect from the disbanding crowd.
"Excuse me," the doctor said, as he climbed over and around
Paul into the rear of the ambulance. He checked the man's vital signs, which
were apparently no longer vital and called in Spanish to the driver, "Che, Luis, you can slow down now, and
don't bother turning off at the hospital exit. This one goes to the
morgue."
