On a cold afternoon I had been listening to Vice President Perette’s secretaries murmur for hours when the man himself burst in. I sat up, coughed twice—I had been fighting a cold for two weeks—and scrabbled for my transcription notebook.
“Out, out,” he said. “Get out, all of you.”
There was a moment of silence and then a flutter of footsteps and high-pitched voices. The door shut. I had never heard this unhinged tone before. I fussed over the wires in my kit, checking and rechecking the connections. For a few minutes the reels hissed in silence. I imagined Perette sitting at the desk, staring at the wall. Then he began speaking again. He must have been on the telephone.
“It’s no good,” he said. “The Basque doesn’t want it, the son of a bitch.”
He meant Onganía. I lit a cigarette, fumbling with the matches. I had a feeling that this was big. There was a note of despair in his voice.
“Two million,” he said. “A cabinet post, contracts worth another ten, and he says he doesn’t want it.” There was a muffled thunk. “Let him come here, if that’s what he wants. Let him come here and get a bullet in the neck. We offered him two million and a cabinet post, and who the fuck is he?”
My headphones were cutting into the top of my ear, but I hardly noticed. They had offered Onganía a deal, and he had turned it down. He was set on a coup. It would have to be soon, now. Illia’s government was out of ideas if they had resorted to an offer like this, and if Onganía hesitated now, at the moment when his strength was most obvious, he would lose ground. I sat up stiffly. I’d been hunched in the corner behind the desk all morning, and my knees crackled when I straightened them. I needed to call Gerry.
My favorite phone box faced a candy store on a side street leading into the plaza. I walked to it automatically, and then hesitated and walked past it to one I’d never used, on the corner of a busy, ugly street that amplified the traffic noise with a cliff of featureless modern buildings. A cold wind snaked along the pavement. The Argentine winter had a penetrating quality that wore you out, a fatigue from never quite being warm, the gas heaters on the walls struggling without conviction. I fed my coins into the slot and dialed the service. The usual woman answered and I asked for Gerry and gave the number of the phone box, and then hung up.
When the phone rang I jumped, and a man passing gave me a funny look.
“What is it?” Gerry said.
“It’ll be soon.”
There was a brief silence. “What happened?”
“A deal failed.”
“I see. Good girl.”
“I have some papers for you. Am I mailing to the same place?” I said. He alternated among various PO boxes.
“Let me see.” He receded from the phone, and then came back on the line. “Use number three,” he said.
I would take the bus out the next day and mail the transcripts from a post office on the outskirts of town. We never used the same place twice.
“Three, all right,” I said, and hung up.
I dialed Nico’s number. His wife answered.
“He’s not here,” she said.
“Will he be home later?”
There was a pointed silence that I took for a shrug.
“At suppertime?” I suggested.
There was another silence, as if she failed to see the significance of this guessing game.
“I’ll come at eight,” I said finally.
“You will do what you will do,” she said.
That night I told Nico about the deal Onganía wouldn’t take, and Nico got up from the kitchen table and took a bottle of red wine out of a cabinet. His wife was in the other room, administering some home remedy to a large marmalade tomcat with an abscess on its back, and the animal was making a continuous low growl that carried clearly into the kitchen. Nico found two glasses. “Do you drink?”
“Yes,” I said.
He sat down again and pushed the taller glass across the table to me.
“This is not good news,” he said.
“That’s what I thought.”
“Perette must think it’s coming soon. He wouldn’t make an offer any earlier than he had to.”
I sipped the wine.
“This piece-of-shit country,” Nico said, and I was surprised to see that his eyes were wet. He looked precarious, like a house succumbing to a mudslide. “I tell you what. My boss, he doesn’t care. As long as the next man isn’t a Communist, he’ll be happy. But me? Every time this happens, I age ten years.”
I fumbled in my bag for a cigarette. A minute of silence passed.
“I’m sorry this is happening,” I said.
“Oh my God, you should have seen us in ’55, ’56, ’62,” he said, sighing. “Every year, another old man shouting from a grandstand with all his medals on. ‘I’ve come to replace your previous old man.’ Some people would go to jail, everyone else would get used to it, and then it would start all over.” He rubbed his face. I shifted in my seat, then made a production of getting up to fetch an ashtray from the sink. I paused to look through the living room doorway and saw the cat, half its fur scissored down to felt, struggle free of Señora Fermetti and wedge itself under the dainty sofa on the far side of the room.
“I have to speak to some people,” Nico said. “It won’t be long now.”
“You think so?”
“I think no more than a month. Then Onganía does what he’s been wanting to do.”
“I’ve heard he’s very—proper,” I said.
“Oh, he is. The proper ones are the worst.” He rallied. “Do you have another cigarette?”
I passed him the pack.
“She doesn’t like it when I smoke,” he said, nodding toward the living room. “I don’t care.”
“A lot of things could happen,” I said. “Onganía might fail. Brazil might take an interest.”
“He will succeed, and there’ll be another thousand nobodies sitting in prison,” Nico said. “Students. Union men. Psychologists. The fucking children who write the editorials in the papers. He’ll round them up and put them all in jail, break a few legs, some won’t come back. You watch. What a fucking joke.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Are you?” Nico said.
We looked at each other for a moment.
“Of course I am,” I said. “I don’t believe in coups.”
“The Americans love Onganía. They think he’s John Wayne.”
“The Americans aren’t intervening here,” I said.
A small detail came back to me from the previous day: Perette said the American ambassador had chosen this month to go on vacation. I felt a pang of guilt.
“No one wants a coup,” I said. “But it’s a war, isn’t it?”
“With who?” he said.
“With the Soviet Union.”
I couldn’t read his expression. For an instant it seemed like anger, but then it dissolved into something multivalent, wry. I pressed on. “Do you think they care about elections?” I said. “Ask the Hungarians.”
An ambulance went by in the street. Nico rubbed his eyes. “I’m tired. Do you know how old I am? I’m forty-nine. You would not believe how tired you can be at forty-nine. I spent fifteen years carrying buckets of bricks before I was a foreman, and now I wake up in the middle of the night so tired I can’t get up to take a piss.” He sighed. “What are you going to do when it happens?”
“Go. It won’t be safe to stay. They might find the bugs.”
We sat and smoked. Señora Fermetti had turned on the television. It was Cleopatra. I could hear Richard Burton’s insinuating voice.
“Best of luck to you,” Nico said. “However it goes.”