The Fugitivities, стр. 84

22

With the letter in Laura’s hands, Jonah took the ferry across the Río de la Plata. The great avenues of Buenos Aires looked like nothing so much as Paris. Proud, lively, officiously pretentious. From a cheap hostel in San Telmo he went searching for good bookstores in Recoleta. Everyone claimed there were excellent bookstores there. But it wasn’t true. Not on the calle Borges and not anywhere else. Palermo Hollywood was teeming with young Americans. He got roped into a conversation with some earnest, bright-eyed banker types. They demanded he talk sports. Then proceeded to enlighten him about the terrific opportunities of sovereign debt. There was no place they could fail to presume they should get what they wanted.

He ditched them and plunged onward, losing his way in the labyrinth of the city. Groaning buses filled the air with diesel fumes. Women with tinted shades pranced through the soot clutching monogrammed bags. Finally, he found a bookstore in the city center. The cool air-conditioning and the quiet were a relief and he idled in the aisles. The shopkeeper, a potbellied man in a gray sweater, came over twice to ask him if he needed help before huffing off again. Jonah decided on a copy of Los poemas de Sidney West by Juan Gelman. The bookseller practically snatched the money from him while muttering something he assumed the gringo wouldn’t understand. But Jonah did understand. There was no such thing as a good black person in Buenos Aires.

Large demonstrations against the government were taking place on the Plaza de Mayo. Mothers with gray hair tucked into their scarves carried signs demanding knowledge of the fate of their children. They were the mothers of the “disappeared.” Over coffee, Jonah deciphered the headlines in the leading daily. The generals said they were sorry, but that they had done nothing wrong. They were following orders. What was done had been necessary to rid the nation of Marxist terrorists.

Back at the hostel, the lady who did the housekeeping and tended the entryway noticed Jonah’s book of poetry while he was reading it alone in the common room. She asked him if he liked poetry very much. Yes, he said. She asked if he knew what they had done to Juan Gelman’s son. No, he said. They impaled him, she said. Impale meant to stick a rod up through the anus into the stomach so you bleed to death very slowly. They sent his pregnant girlfriend to a detention center in Uruguay. No one ever saw her again. He was twenty-four. She was twenty-three. So many young people, she said. All of us will take this stain with us to our graves. Every day, I ask myself, how could this have happened? Where are you from? America, he said. Why didn’t anyone in your country speak out and try to stop it? Because we supported it, he said. I know, she said, I know, but why? He tried to think of an answer. He thought of Katrina. He thought of how many images of disaster, torture, and death he had consumed in the relatively few years of his conscious life. I suppose it’s because we don’t care, he said. No, I mean, we do care, but only about money. Yes, she said, it’s the same here. Well, in a way, we are everywhere, he said. It was Burson-Marsteller that made so much money by lying about it. Who are they? She wanted to know. Advertisers, Jonah said. The best in the world. Then advertisers are the greatest criminals of our age, she said. How could they? Our mothers only ask for justice, peace, answers! And they get silence, threats, and lies. All of Argentina is built on unspeakable crimes and indifference. And nothing changes. The people are still in poverty. The same forty families own all the land. The Yankees, the military men, the bureaucrats, they are still our masters. My country is built on lies too, Jonah said. Terrible crimes, even worse. Yes, she said. Yes, of course, it’s very true. I suppose that’s what we have in common. It was impossible to sleep in Buenos Aires.

Without a plan, Jonah went to Constitución Station and studied the timetables. Finally, he settled on a late departure, a night train heading south to Bahía Blanca. The train went over the sweetgrasses of the Pampas in total darkness under the stars. The conductor wore a green bow tie and drank yerba maté to keep himself awake. Jonah tried to write, but the janky tracks made it impossible and he gave up. In the morning they passed an overturned Range Rover at a rail crossing. The conductor clicked his pen and made a note. At Bahía Blanca Jonah bought a sandwich then boarded the connecting bus for Viedma. As the landmass of the continent narrowed so did his options. At Viedma he saw nothing worth the price of staying a night, so he waited for another bus, this one nearly empty, that took him farther south again to Puerto Madryn, a town that promised whale-watching tours. The town turned out to be only a Potemkin village set up by the tour operators to greet visitors and ferry them out to the whales. After the hours on the road, he gulped in the oceanic air. It tasted like release.

—

He found himself heading out on a skiff with a young German couple from Würzburg. They spoke excellent English and insisted Jonah must visit their town. The most authentically German town, with the nicest people, the man said. Despite what happened during the war, and the heavy price they paid, the woman said. Jonah was relieved that the ocean was relatively calm.