For two days, when I tuned in to the bug in the warehouse in La Boca, I heard nothing but an empty hiss. On the third day, the murmur of male voices. I heard snatches of their conversation through the afternoon.
“It won’t be ready in time,” said a voice I didn’t recognize.
“It will be ready,” said Román. He had a lilting intonation that I recognized easily. How much did he know, I wondered, about his girl? I kept turning it over in my mind. He had been just around the corner, at that party. What secrets did she allow him, if she took liberties like that?
“Carajo, this is a disaster,” said the first voice. “We have to start over.”
And then silence, mixed with scraping sounds, footsteps. An afternoon passed that way, with unclassifiable noises and bits of conversation about the facultad.
Gerry was impatient. “They haven’t said where they’ll put it, when, nothing?”
“No.”
“They must be waiting for Onganía to move.”
“Maybe. Sounds like they’re having trouble with the material.”
“Keep listening.”
When the warehouse was empty, when Perette’s office contained only secretaries, I listened to Victoria’s apartment. In this way I learned that she had a Vandellas record that she listened to over and over again, that her mother called her every afternoon at two o’clock and asked her if she was studying, and that Román often visited during the siesta. I overheard sex one afternoon; they must have been on the living room sofa. I heard them fighting. Between them I heard the same vague anxieties that were spoken in the warehouse.
“How much longer?” Victoria said.
“Hard to say. Not much.”
“There aren’t many chances.”
“Sweetheart, I know. We won’t fail.”
This pretty girl, collaborating in a bombing plot. If I hadn’t heard it all with my own ears, seen the equipment in La Boca with my own eyes, I would not have believed it. I understood more easily now the grim edge to Gerry’s suave manner, the tense way he went through the world, enumerating dangers. The KGB was like a poison gas. It rattled me to know that it could wreak such awful havoc among bright and charming young people with the whole world to lose.
“Keep listening,” Gerry said.
It wasn’t tanks but trucks that woke me from a light sleep around five o’clock on the morning of June 28. They were downshifting roughly on the street outside the confitería, one after another making the turn from Calle Rodríguez Peña onto Avenida Rivadavia. It wasn’t until I had pulled a sweater on and lifted the sash to look out the window that I realized all other traffic noises had stopped. The trucks—square, flat-topped vehicles whose color I couldn’t distinguish in the distorting yellow of the streetlights—were alone in the street. All other traffic had been shut down. The first in line turned left, mounted the sidewalk with a drunken-sailor lurch, and drove straight into the plaza, over the sand that was populated in the daytime by darting dogs and children. The rest of the line followed. In a moment they were assembled behind the huge dry fountain, facing the Congreso building across the empty street.
I turned on my radio, instantly wide awake. It took me a minute and a half to find the right frequency and aim the transceiver properly. When I found the signal from Perette’s office, I heard the gentle, sleepy static of an empty room. Over that, faintly, I heard an echo of the trucks.
I pulled on my shoes and coat. It was still very dark in the hallway, but I left the lights off, creeping down with one hand on the wall instead. The walls were unfinished in the upper floors of the confitería, a rough lath that had never been painted, and I scraped my palm on a staple halfway down. One floor above the dining room, near the manager’s office and the storerooms, I saw a light on and went toward it. It was coming from a room beside the service stairs. Leaning against a counter beside a pile of folded cloth napkins, the bag from the laundry at his feet, was the boy who’d surprised me in the top room months before. He was smoking and looking out the window at the trucks on the plaza.
He looked over his shoulder at me. “What’s happening?” he said. He gave no sign of remembering me.
“You don’t know?” I said.
He shook his head. “They’re driving on the plaza,” he said. “They’re not allowed to do that.”
“It’s the army,” I said. And then I said the word for coup, which in Spanish, as in French, means a strike or shock, a blow with the fist. I knocked my fist into my palm as I said it, and it stung where I’d scraped it on the stairs.
“How do you know it’s a coup?” he said.
“Everybody knows,” I said. “It’s been in the papers.” I crowded in next to him to look out the window. From this lower vantage point, a couple of magnolia trees obscured part of the Congreso building, but I could still see the row of trucks idling on the sand with plumes of exhaust lit pink by their taillights. Onganía wouldn’t be here; he would be at the presidential palace in the Plaza de Mayo, a mile off. It would all be timed to happen simultaneously—the trucks here at the Congreso, another contingent there at the palace. I needed to hurry. This would be my last report.
I went down to the ground floor. The vast dining room was silent and abandoned, the heat and clatter of the early-morning kitchen shift barely discernible at the far end. The loading doors were open to receive the shipment of fruit that would come at six, and two dogs in the alley behind the confitería lifted their heads as I jumped down and walked toward the streetlights still shining on Calle Rodríguez Peña. I headed east, toward the lightening gray over the river.
My route was along Avenida Rivadavia, the long artery that divided the north of the city from the south. I tried to light a cigarette without slowing down, blocking the breeze with the collar of my coat, not wanting to look too hurried but not wanting to go too slowly either. Newspapers were being delivered to the kiosk at the corner of Uruguay, and the deliveryman and the proprietor were chatting over the bundles with their hands in their pockets, looking toward the plaza behind me, which was mostly obscured now by Beaux-Arts apartment buildings. The rumble of trucks was faint already, even just a few blocks away.
Before Avenida 9 de Julio I passed a nightclub with the doors propped open, young people streaming out into the street. I was startled by the intrusion of raucous nighttime into this quiet dawn moment. It was morning and maneuvers were underway, but they didn’t know. The nightclub was called Le Troc. Through the open doorway I heard the Kinks, or something like the Kinks. A drunk girl, young enough that her weaving across the sidewalk seemed lamblike and sweet, stopped in front of me and took the cigarette from her lips. She started to sing in a cartoonish growl. “Giiiiirl,” she sang, and then a run of slurred nonsense, the lyrics from “You Really Got Me.” I was hypnotized by her for a moment and then hurried away.
By the time I turned onto Calle Florida the streets were filled with trucks and soldiers, and four polite young cadets told me the Plaza de Mayo was closed. The light from the streetlamps was beginning to look weak: the sun was coming up. At the corner of Avenida Sarmiento, a few blocks from the Plaza de Mayo, I came across a cadet in a blue helmet smoking a cigarette in the lee of a bank.
“What’s happening on the plaza?” I said.
He started as if he wasn’t supposed to be there, too far from his fellows, away from the action. “Who are you?” he said.
“What’s happening on the plaza?” I said again.
He glanced in that direction and dropped the cigarette. “The generals,” he said.
“Which generals?”
“Onganía. Of course.” He laughed. “Are you a student? A tourist?”
In the distance I could hear a loudspeaker, but couldn’t make out the words. The cadet was hugging himself against the chill morning. “He’s all right, the old man,” he said, meaning Illia, I guessed. “But he’s not doing us any good.” A low rumble reached our ears, a wash of mechanical knocking and grinding over a thrum of combustion, and a tank came into view around the corner of Avenida Maipú. The soldier and I both stepped back as it blustered our way. For an instant it was like a wall in front of us, vibrating and hot, and then it was shrinking away down the middle of the empty avenue, trailing blue exhaust.
I needed to get my things—everything, all the equipment out of the confitería first of all, and then whatever I could strip out of the flat in San Telmo. And then I had to get to the ferry launch on the river and book a ticket to Uruguay. I could be in Montevideo by nightfall if I hurried. I had planned for this, but I felt a trace of nausea, a buzz in my extremities and heaviness in my stomach, like stage fright.
The cadet was still staring after the tank. “I wish I had a camera,” he said.
I went back to the confitería first. It hadn’t opened at the usual time, which was six o’clock. When I approached from the front I saw first the strange deadness of the front windows, dark and empty, and then a few policemen standing in a casual group on the corner. I doubled back two blocks and approached again from the rear, hurrying through the back alley, which was divested now even of its dogs, and let myself in by the service entrance with the key the manager had given me.
The place was deserted. The great ringing kitchen was empty. Behind the bar, a row of demitasses stretched infinitely in the dim light from the street. I went up the back stairs, taking them two at a time, so that I was coughing by the time I reached the office. I packed up all the recording equipment into a green leather case. I swept the crust of a sandwich and an empty Coke bottle into a paper bag, folded up the cot I had been sleeping on and propped it against the wall, and put my sachet of toiletries, my toothbrush and powder case and throat lozenges, into my handbag. I was on the landing, struggling to close the door behind me with both hands full, when I remembered the loaded gun that I had locked away in the desk drawer weeks before. I emptied the chamber and put the gun in my coat pocket.
I waited ten minutes for the bus, realized finally that it would never come, and hailed a taxi. The driver seemed excited. He kept looking in the rearview mirror at me, and as we waited at a red light at a deserted intersection—uncharacteristic of a Buenos Aires cabdriver—he turned up the radio and I heard the first official report of the morning.
“Dr. Illia has left the presidential palace,” said the newscaster, over a penetrating low whine. “General Onganía will make a statement shortly.”
The cabdriver was chewing on his thumbnail. A bunch of dried flowers hung from the rearview mirror, trembling with the idling engine. He swiveled in his seat.
“Can you believe this bullshit?” he said.
“It’s an outrage,” I said.
“It’s a fucking outrage,” he said, facing forward again. “She knows,” he added, jerking his thumb at me, as if for the benefit of an audience.
In his distraction he turned the wrong way down one of the one-way streets that stymied the flow of traffic around my apartment building, and started cursing and hauling on the wheel. “Here is fine,” I said, grossly overtipping him, and hefted my things out onto the sidewalk. I could still hear him grinding gears, reversing in fractions in the narrow street, as I walked the last block home, the green case knocking against my legs. A cold drizzle had started up again. The street was deserted. As I passed the café on the corner where I sometimes sat with the newspaper, I heard a radio. Inside I could see an old waiter standing behind the counter with his arms folded, listening to the portable wireless that I sometimes heard emitting the distant roar of a soccer game on Sundays, now tuned to the news and playing at full volume to the empty dining room. “The generals will make a statement.”
At the building beside mine, two boys in primary school uniforms were sitting on the step.
“Is there no school today?” I said.
“Mama said no,” answered the bigger boy.
“We’re going to go to the park,” said the little one. “When the rain stops.”
“We’re not allowed to go to the park,” the older one said, exasperated, as if he’d been saying it all morning. “It’s dangerous at the park today.”
“Mama said we could go to the park,” wailed the little one.
“She said another day,” said the older one. “You don’t listen!”
Upstairs, I started in the bedroom, pulling my dresses out of the closet. A box under the window held receipts and grocery lists, pamphlets from museums I had visited on lonely days, my library card, a stack of magazines. I sifted out a few things that had my handwriting on them, took them to the kitchen, opened the window, and burned them in the sink. Then I rinsed the ashes down the drain.
Nico would understand why I had gone; there was no need to contact him.
I thought of Victoria and Román.
I felt tired, suddenly, and bent down to rest my elbows on the edge of the sink. I thought of Victoria and felt relief that I would soon be away from her, her flamboyance, her unpredictable movements, her indiscretion. I lit a cigarette. But there was something else as well, under the relief.
I flipped on the television in the living room. One station played a test pattern. Another was dark static, with snowy figures moving in it. The third showed a newscaster sitting at a desk, waiting for a cue that didn’t come, his arms limp at his sides.
Victoria’s attention had been like a spotlight on me—blinding, acute—and soon it would be gone. I would be back in the States in a few days or weeks, and I would never know what she had wanted from me.
I hesitated beside the telephone, scolded myself out of the impulse, and went back to the bedroom to pack my shoes and stockings and my good coat. A moment later, the telephone rang. I hurried back out of the bedroom.
“Hello?” I said.
“So you’re at home,” Nico said.
“Is everything all right?” I said, hoping that he could divine the questions nested within the question.
“Yes, it’s fine, all fine,” he said. “You’re not in your perch today?”
“Of course not,” I said shortly. I was confused by Nico’s openness on this unsecured line. Maybe it was despair. He had said before that he hated every coup, although his boss would be happy with Onganía. Or perhaps he was drunk. Late at night when I couldn’t sleep, those last few weeks before the coup, I had seen men leaving the bar on the corner at last call, half-buttoned into their jackets, lurching alone down the sidewalks in the cold. I wondered if that was how Nico had been passing his time. In a bar in Barracas, maybe, until late at night, complaining to neighbors who wouldn’t repeat what he said, and then home again to his sleeping wife, bringing the cold in his coat and hair.
“So you are abandoning us,” he murmured. “I think you ought to stay. Safer to stay, really, for a week or two.”
I didn’t like the soft voice he was using. “Are you drunk?” I glanced at the clock: it was eight o’clock in the morning.
“I wanted to know if you’d spoken to your man at the CIA,” he said.
I was so angry for a moment that I pressed the receiver to my chest. I blinked for a few seconds, staring at the heavy curtains drawn across the french doors to the balcony, and then lifted the receiver again and said, “What man?”
He laughed. “What man.”
“How does your wife feel about these calls?” I said, and hung up.
The buzzing in my palms and the soles of my feet was becoming unpleasant. If the phone rang again, I wouldn’t answer it. I stepped out onto the balcony to finish the cigarette, even though it was cold and I was wearing house slippers. A low winter sun shone over the buildings across the street, picking out the television aerials and whitewashed chimneys. At the corner of Humberto Primo two olive-drab trucks roared by, soldiers standing in the beds like cattle, miserable in the cold. A traffic cop saluted as they passed.
Good-bye, Buenos Aires, I thought. Then I said it out loud. I felt more remote in Buenos Aires than I ever had, and maybe that was close to happiness, being adrift far down the Atlantic coast with thousands of miles of grasslands at my back, the south a desert that stretched to the Antarctic Circle, even the river an empty expanse, the far shore never visible.
I checked twice to be sure the gas was off on the stove and the water heater, and then I went out, carrying two cases, all I had. I took the key with me. I wondered how long it would take the landlord to notice I had gone.