Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

The next two decades, on the other hand, were so detailed it made you yawn and I flicked through them, taking the odd peck at the tastiest titbits. The smoke hadn’t yet lifted on the bombardments and executions of ’55 when old Daddy Wolf, arrested pre-emptively for his real or feigned sympathies with the fugitive Tyrant, began to do business with his captors, who were dazzled by the former officer’s background and, grateful for the juicy cuts that came with each public work they threw at his feet, they also decided to turn a blind eye to the arrest warrants taken out by the police forces of six European countries intent on discovering the fate of certain golden rings Herr Tamerlán had managed to grab while riding the merry-go-round of the war. He had enough time left to see his son graduate as an engineer and buy him his first estancia as a wedding present for marrying the surname furnished by a rather mouldy representative of the local aristocracy, Remedios Prado Agote; but not enough to meet his first grandson, Fausto Tamerlán II, born two months after his grandfather’s plane nose-dived into the Misiones jungle not far from the Brazilian border.

It was Konrad Fuchs, Wolf’s partner in the construction business, who arrived in Argentina in late ’46 at his former boss’s invitation, who should have been on that plane, but he’d made his excuses the day before, blaming an infection, and people were amazed at his miraculous escape, which didn’t, for all that, leave him in legal control of the company: he and the son of his late partner both came to be equal majority shareholders, so that neither would hold sway over the other; but the truth was that Fausto, until that moment — his twenty-fifth birthday — had done little more than chase after young boys once he’d given his father the heir he demanded, and the practical, day-to-day running of the company passed to Fuchs. Fuchs & Tamerlán plc moved beyond the restricted field of civil construction and property speculation, buying and selling land and even whole towns, obtaining monstrous public contracts as a front for German holding companies, and on into public works on a grand scale such as the El Chocón Dam. Seeing that the company gravy train was whistling past and threatening to leave him standing at the station counting the small change, Fausto caught hold of the tail-end carriage and little by little, each step taking years, he moved up through the freight compartment, third class, second class, first class and pullman until he was standing at the engine driver’s side. From the locomotive, a new twist in the convoluted braid of Argentina’s destiny — which by now resembled a DNA chain — could be seen in the tracks ahead. Sensing his time had come at last, Fausto pointed out the imminent danger and, when his partner stuck his head out to see what it was, he pushed him out of the train.

The opening pages of Fuchs’ catalogue of woes were laced with the clichés of the day: kidnapped by Montoneros outside his house in front of his wife and kiddies, who were coming out to wave him goodbye, he withstood two months’ captivity before showing up at the door of the company, located in those days in a building on Paseo Colón, with a bullet in his head and a placard round his neck listing the charges for which he’d been tried and found guilty, but omitting the main one, which was not coming up with the ransom money in time. Fuchs’ wife was ruined in the attempt, selling off at bargain-basement prices all the properties, company assets and so on that weren’t tied up, mainly to her husband’s partner, who, after extremely careful calculations no doubt, did everything in his power to round up just enough to fall short of the required amount. But the really juicy part was yet to come. One of the Montoneros captured a few days after the ‘investigation’ confessed (it never ceases to amaze me how these written transcriptions of torture sessions read like people chatting in comfy chairs, smoking pipes): ‘He handed him to us on a plate, with a detailed list of all his comings and goings, weapons, bodyguards, et cetera. He saved us all the groundwork; months it can take sometimes. That’s why we fell for it, and also because he promised us he was worth more than he looked. “He’s very clever,” he assured us, “he’ll try and convince you it’s too much. But you stand your ground and don’t ask for less than five, lads. Any trouble, I’ll cover the difference. And remember: ever onwards to victory.” We tried Fuchs on three occasions just to kill the time, but it was no use. We had to execute him after Tamerlán appeared on TV saying he’d already delivered the money to us — you all saw it; the fucker even had the nerve to look straight into the camera and send us a message: “We all want a better country. But this isn’t the way. Think, boys … before it’s too late.” He grabbed the company and the cash in one fell swoop. Tamerlán fucked us all.’

I looked up from my monitor at the ceiling. I could picture him clearly now, even better than when he’d told me himself, on the building’s terrace roof — the traffic on Paseo Colón, the red night sky of Buenos Aires, the distant river — raising his chalice to heaven and drinking a toast with the Only One who, for the time being, still stood above him, gulping down the gold nuggets in the stream of sparkling liquid: choicest blood and flesh, only for the elect. Yes, the Tamerlán I knew had been born that night, or rather conceived. No sooner had I returned to the ordered stars of the digital night than I corrected myself, for the next paragraph of the Montonero’s confession pointed to a more decisive nativity in this garbled astral chart: ‘So two months later we decided to hold him to a strict reckoning …’, and I scrolled down several pages to find out what he was talking about — though it wasn’t hard to guess.

The Montoneros had motives to burn: apart from setting them up — thereby merely bowing to the new star of the times — and having the militants who dished out leaflets on his building sites and used to come and go as they pleased beaten up and kicked out, to add insult to injury, he became close friends with the arch-villain of the day, Perón’s right hand and founder of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance — the infamous Triple A — José ‘The Wizard’ López Rega. It all started with the Altar of the Fatherland, a kind of Roman Forum mega-development where all Argentina’s national heroes from San Martín to Perón would be buried. For the sake of securing the contracts, it seems that Tamerlán even took part in secret rituals to bless the works, sacrificing yellow hens at midnight and sambaing, maracas in hand, with The Wizard and some phony Brazilian pai-de-santo on the hills of rubble, which was as far as the project ever got. But I suppose Tamerlán never bothered much about his kidnappers’ real and quite understandable motives; they must have appeared to him merely as the instrument of a higher wrath that used them to make him atone for his treatment of Fuchs. If such an egocentric as Tamerlán — the term is too small for him: let’s call him a geocentric — comes to believe that the machinery of the universe is driven by moral laws, he must then have thought that a large part of that machinery was set in motion to punish his crime in the worst possible way, with a refined cruelty for which no random chain of events could be held responsible. Being blown up in your car or machine-gunned or kidnapped was just one of those risks you learned to live with in those days, but for the Judas to be his own son, his heir made by him in his own image, was as if he’d been stabbed by his own reflection in the mirror. He had nine months to reflect on the matter, nine months underground in a damp cell, where there was neither light not air, nor any sound other than curt voices muffled by hoods. One of those voices, to which he couldn’t, until much later, put a face other than the blurred, Protean one his imagination had given it, informed him that it had been his son who’d turned him in; although, from what the boy would claim when questioned, it was a female classmate from the Buenos Aires National School who’d milked him for semen and information in equal measure, and, if he’d ended up taking part in meetings and sit-ins and Anti-Dühring study groups, it was out of love and the landslide of class guilt that his more radicalised schoolmates had landed him with. The voice that now sprinkled the spores of doubt daily in the father’s ear, spores that in the hours of interminable darkness proliferated in his mind like toadstools until they made him picture his son’s face beneath any of the hoods that had dragged him from the men’s sauna where he was ambushed to the waiting car — the same voice that behind his comrades’ backs would negotiate the prisoner’s ransom with Army Intelligence, was that of a young man who served in the armed organisation under the nickname ‘Chirolita’ and studied at the Faculty of Medicine under the name Alfredo Canal. It’s difficult to say for sure exactly how far his intervention affected the course of events; but the truth was that when, on a day like any other (the very concept of ‘day’ must have been wiped out in the private calendar that reigned inside the hole; by the outside world’s it was mid-April 1976), shots and explosions rang out, and a pair of rough hands dragged up into the blinding light a very different man from the one who had made the descent, the soon-to-graduate Dr Canal had already laid the foundations for his new career as the Rasputin of the afflicted family of builders.