By the twentieth of June the senators and Perette were at their desks all day and all night, and I was keeping the same hours at my post, hunched over my equipment with a stale sandwich until four or five o’clock in the morning. To the manager in the restaurant, I delivered a long complaint about how the roof of my apartment had sprung such a bad leak in the last weeks of rain that the plaster was coming down, and while the place was being repaired I hoped I could count on his indulgence in letting me stay on a cot in the office upstairs. I offered a supplement to the rent, pretending it was from Nico. With the manager’s permission I came and went whenever I liked, taking breaks only to buy empanadas and cigarettes, to use the huge white-and-gold ladies’ room on the ground floor, and to stretch my legs by marching around the block in the rain. I kept the gun in a locked drawer in the desk.
The rain and the cold and the agitation in the Congreso meant that more and more business was being conducted in the confitería dining room, and during peak hours, between one o’clock and three o’clock in the afternoon, I would leave my recording equipment running in the locked room and go down to sit in a window seat with a coffee and listen.
“They’re laughing at us,” said a man identified for me by the manager as the head of a barley concern out of Entre Ríos. “They’re laughing at us all over the world.” He used an elegant metaphor in which a boy with a long Beatles-style haircut he had seen waiting at a bus stop in Recoleta stood in for the ills of modern Argentina, its disregard of the church, its general hollowness and permissiveness and lack of character, all of which seemed to be enclosed within a general condition of homosexuality. Illia had been too weak to correct all this, but Onganía was strong. On the same afternoon, I listened to an assistant secretary of something—trade? internal affairs? transportation?—explain in a low voice that he had land in Uruguay and he was leaving on the ferry at the end of the week. “They’re all doing it,” he murmured to his companion, a young woman. “All the officials, they all have summer homes and they’re all going away as soon as they can.”
“But they have jobs to do,” said the woman.
“Not for very long,” he said. “I know when I’m finished. I’ve already sold my wife’s furniture. I won’t have to come back to this fucking city for six months, and by then it will all be different.”
That Saturday was Román’s birthday, and everyone was invited to gather in Victoria’s apartment for liters of Quilmes beer and choripanes grilled on the racks of her oven. It was a provisional party, a weak approximation of the cookout in the country that they would have had under better circumstances, if the streets were not full of soldiers and police and every cabbie in the city weren’t charging double after dark. I told her I wouldn’t come because it was too dangerous, and she cursed at me over the phone, a litany of insults ending in laughter. “Of course you will come,” she said.
“I shouldn’t be out late,” I said.
“What is late? This isn’t late. You are coming.”
“I can’t—”
“You shouldn’t hide in your flat like you do. It’s bad for your health.”
It was pointless to resist her.
“Come early, if it will make you feel better,” she said.
At the last minute, as I was hunting for my shoes, I decided to take a bug with me. Perhaps this party was an opportunity.
Her apartment was at the edge of the Palermo neighborhood, on an upper floor of one of the new apartment buildings that had gone up before inflation: white, strung with balconies, ten or fifteen stories, jarring against the eroded stone and rusted ironwork that were the natural texture of the neighborhood. In the hideous mod lobby, a guard at a desk was being menaced by an enormous orange circle on the wall behind him. The building was funereally quiet, and I heard the music coming from Victoria’s apartment before the doors of the elevator even opened on her floor.
Most students lived with their parents, or in grim boardinghouses. Yet Victoria lived in this high-rise by herself. The grandfather with the soda factory must have been generous. I knocked softly on the door and Victoria jerked it open instantly, as if she had been waiting just inside.
“Yes, I knew it!” she said, kissing me on the cheek. “I knew Anne was not such a coward!” Behind her, Elena was hugging her elbows and shifting her feet next to the hi-fi, and Román was trying to contain the frothing overflow of a beer bottle. He came to greet me, giving me the customary kiss on the right side of my face, with a brisk, fraternal squeeze of my shoulder at the same time, as he always did. I wished him a happy birthday, and he beamed as if I were the first person to think of this courtesy and squeezed me again, leaving a beery handprint. Elena’s boyfriend, Juan José, brooded in anticipation in front of the oven, which gave out a rich smell of sausages and toasting rolls. The blue evening showed through the sliding doors of a tiny balcony, where three dark silhouettes crouched together over a joint.
“This is my bird’s nest,” Victoria said, spinning in a circle. “Very small, but just right for me.” She pressed a water glass filled with fernet and Coca-Cola into my hand and then spun away as the doorbell chimed again.
I stood in the narrow kitchen for a while with Elena, who was having some kind of problem with Juan José that I could not quite understand. His parents wanted him to leave Buenos Aires until it was safe again, and Elena thought this was cowardly but couldn’t say so. The effort of not saying so was straining their relationship, making her arch and sarcastic, making him bully her in front of their friends. She held on to my forearm with one hand and a glass of beer with the other, murmuring and shaking her head, sniffling periodically, and alluding to a reservoir of shared female knowledge between us: You know how they are, how it is, they always, we always, etc. In the living room, Román was talking about the Tupamaros across the river in Uruguay, Marxists who had been robbing banks and distributing the money in the slums of Montevideo. There was a picture in a mimeographed student newspaper I’d seen of a group of young men in crew-neck sweaters, their faces covered with handkerchiefs, standing on the roof of a Peugeot, waving bricks of bundled money at an assembled crowd of old women in shawls. Román, who kept tucking an unlit cigarette behind his ear and then removing it to gesture with it, was saying that they were the real patriots, patriots of the Americas against the foreign banks. “But they have bombs,” said someone, a girl I vaguely recognized, and he snatched the cigarette from its perch again and jabbed it toward her, triumphant, saying, “You’ve been reading propaganda.” I hadn’t heard him talk this way before. Perhaps, as his plans in the warehouse were developing, he was becoming more free with his ideas.
The Tupamaros were mostly college students like the people sweating and dancing in this room. They thought a revolution would be ecstatic and spontaneous. I thought they’d failed to learn the lesson of Cuba: the movie-star revolutionaries were always followed by a bleak and endless repression. The Tupamaros would make an opening with their stylish bank robberies, and the KGB would fill it. Gerry had just given me a report of KGB activity in the unions, pipe fitters bused in from remote provinces to march in protests on the Plaza de Mayo, men who had never seen a subway car who were mysteriously being put up in fine hotels. More brazen were pamphlets I’d seen denouncing United Fruit plastered to wet sidewalks just the week before, credited to youth coordinating committees that stopped just short of signing off with a red star. I thought of Castro and his four-hour state-sponsored Russian ballets, with party officials struggling not to fall asleep in the balconies lest they bring suspicion on their commitment to the revolution. That was the future that the Tupamaros would create by accident. They wanted rock and roll, and instead they would get the First People’s State Theater for Opera and Ballet.
Someone turned up the hi-fi so loud that threatening static began crackling in the speakers, but Victoria didn’t care. She had put red scarves over her lamps, and the living room was bathed in bordello light. Twenty or thirty people were crammed into the small apartment now. Sometime around midnight, as I was pulled into a knot of dancers hemmed in by a teetering floor lamp and a chaise longue, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been to a party in at least a year.
“Victoria,” I said breathlessly, “aren’t you worried the neighbors will hear?”
“There are no neighbors,” she said. “The building is half-empty. They haven’t sold an apartment here in two years.”
I kicked off my shoes. Shoes were littered around the living room, peeping out from under the furniture like Easter eggs. Victoria clapped and spun me in a circle. I was a little drunk; I had always liked to dance. I was sweating, and the green linen dress I had chosen was sticking to my back. I remembered crashing a party in Morningside Heights full of Columbia students—that was the last time I had danced this much.
Someone had opened a bottle of champagne, and I was giddy. I went into the bathroom, a strange narrow closet with tiles in a vibrating pattern of yellow and green, to wash my hands and splash some water on my face. A dark, flushed girl looked back out of the mirror. My hair was damp, sticking to my temples, and my lipstick had all worn off. The bump in the bridge of my nose was shiny with sweat. I edged back into the hallway.
Victoria was there, holding a lit cigarette. I tried to pass by her, and she put a hand on my waist. “Stay a minute and talk to me,” she said. She leaned close, wobbling a bit. “Do you like Román?”
“Sure,” I said. “I like Román.”
“Román and I are going to do important things. We are very strong together.”
“You seem very strong together,” I said.
“Very important things,” she whispered, leaning on me. “We have big spirits. Huge spirits. Together. For the people.”
I laughed, and she laughed too. She had put most of her weight on me, the end of her cigarette was smoldering a little too close to my face, and now she squeezed my waist through the damp linen and looked frankly down my dress. She kissed me, quickly before I could pull away, and bit my lip.
“You’re drunk,” I said, stepping back, shocked that she had the nerve. “Why did you—why did you think—?” I couldn’t come up with the things that a more innocent woman would say. I was surprised, but in the wrong way. Afraid that she had seen something in me. She had a greedy look on her face, her teeth showing insolently. “Anyone could see you,” I said finally.
“See what?” she said. Her hand was on my leg.
I stepped out of range. She laughed at me. When girls like her did this in bars, they were usually more kittenish. She wasn’t coy. She was flushed and amused. She swayed back toward her living room.
I was alone in the hallway, facing a framed poster from a Brecht festival in São Paulo. My mind cleared; I was nearly sober, and my hands were shaking. I took the bug from my pocket and slipped it into the back of the frame. The music from the hi-fi now sounded clattering and strange.
I stepped back into the living room, smoothing my hair with both hands. Victoria was laughing with some boys from the law school, her back to me. I drifted numbly to the balcony, where Elena was standing with a cigarette. There was a buzzing in my lip where I had been bitten.
“There you are. I was just thinking that I’ve been talking all night about me,” Elena said, with a sad smile. “You always listen.”
I looked down at the street, the blue-white glow of a city bus many stories below. I patted her arm. “That’s what friends are for,” I said.
I said my good-byes soon after and left. While I walked through the hushed streets, I went over those few seconds in the hallway again and again, every step of our choreography, and decided I had done well: I had given nothing away. I had pulled back. I had shown surprise, the way most women would. Her smell was still with me—her hair, the gin on her breath.