I kept busy as well as I could while I waited for Gerry’s plans to come through, cooking and cleaning, trying to fit into the domestic routines of a man used to doing for himself. I did the grocery shopping, glad to get out of the house.
One dark afternoon late in July, I went to the vegetable stalls to buy turnips and potatoes. My walk back to the apartment took me past one of the grand old public libraries in the Centro. A few yellow leaves still clung to a locust tree in front, slowing the drift of rain over a group of huddled students. With a start, I recognized Román among them, smoking a thin black cigarette. He looked whole and well, and I was relieved, and then felt a confused flush. I thought about speaking to him, but decided to delay contact, to watch him for a few minutes if I could. I crossed to the other side of the street and ducked inside a bakery.
I watched the students through the window, hidden by a rack of cooling challah. So Román was out of hiding. The students around him looked tense, but Román was the same as ever, smiling slightly, standing apart, as if a spotlight were on him. At the beginning of the academic year, when the afternoons were still long and hot, groups of students had stood in front of the facultad just like this, smoking and talking as they were doing now, and I had hovered nearby with Victoria’s shy friend Elena while she tried to calculate a way into the circle. It had been only four months since then, but it felt much longer. I was sweating. Behind me, the baker cleared her throat and called out, “We’ve got madeleines. Hot ones, out of the oven right now.”
“Oh, very nice,” I said. I waved my net bag. “Madeleines, yes. A dozen.”
She nodded approvingly and began to fill a box. Román had ventured a few steps away from the group to talk to a pretty girl with long, black hair. I wondered what Victoria would think of that. What did it mean that he had come back? He must have something in mind. It wasn’t safe here for someone like him.
A smallish turnip worked its way silently through a frayed part of my bag and fell to the floor, and I bent quickly to pick it up.
The bell rang over the door, and there was Román, dropping the end of his cigarette behind him on the sidewalk and running his hands through wet hair.
“Anne!” he said to me, smiling, surprised.
“Román!” We kissed hello.
“We were worried about you,” he said. “It’s been hard for foreigners.”
“I’ve been worried about you too,” I said.
“They keep arresting people at the protests. The student union has been marching after evening classes. I got knocked around.” He brushed back his hair to show a dark scab at his hairline, just above his left ear.
“A baton?” I said, wincing.
“A fist.” He laughed. “He split his knuckles open. Victoria says I have a hard head.” He glanced back out at the street. “It’ll get worse, I think. Victoria and I won’t stay long.”
“Where will you go?” I said.
“Ushuaia,” he said. He paused, as if he were trying to remember something, and then he turned to me again and said briskly, “I have an uncle there.”
“That’s far,” I said. It sounded like a nice idea, really.
“Very far,” he said. “Very quiet. What will you do?”
“I’m waiting for a visa.”
“I hope you get one. Your family must be worried.”
He squeezed my arm; he was affectionate like this with all his friends. He went to the counter to order biscuits, and I waved good-bye and went back out to the street. I walked casually in the wrong direction for several blocks, in case he had seen which way I was going, and then circled idly for a while so I could think.
Ushuaia was a clutter of utilitarian buildings in the lap of a mountain at the tip of Tierra del Fuego. People called it “the end of the earth,” a small city facing the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Victoria and Román would have to cross hundreds of miles of cold desert to reach it. It was the kind of place where you went when you were afraid. It was so remote that it seemed like a myth.
That afternoon, when I called Gerry’s service, he didn’t call back at all. I stood for twenty minutes next to the phone box and smoked three cigarettes. Perhaps Gerry could do nothing. Perhaps he had known since the coup happened that he could do nothing. Perhaps all the people he was connected to in Buenos Aires were poisoned by contact with Nico.
I thought of Ushuaia again. A new plan was beginning to form. But first I had to be sure that Román was telling me the truth.
James and I shared the bed now. I woke early—I had never been a good sleeper—and lay beside him until he woke up too. I liked it best when he faced away from me and I could rest against his back, as if he were a low wall or a rise in the earth, and watch the sky lighten through the uncovered window; at those times he reminded me of a girl I used to know. She and I had played house for a while once, and we had lain like this; but I had too many secrets to keep by the time I met her, and I ended it. She always pushed. There was a soft down on the nape of her neck.
I modified a small transistor radio from a department store and sat in a park a block away from Victoria’s building, listening to the bug from her apartment. When I felt that I had been there too long, I moved to a café down the street, and then to a back corner of a Christian Science Reading Room two doors down from her, where I could listen on headphones while I pretended to study a macroeconomics textbook. I was there when I heard the phone ring, and then Victoria’s voice saying anxiously, “When will the plane be ready?”
Román visited; I heard them discussing cold weather, the friend who would fly the plane, the grandfather who owned it. A little ranch plane, they said. There was excitement in their voices.
They talked about the ocean, about penguins.