Carlos Gamerro - An Open Secret

DR ALEXANDER IS THE OWNER of Malihuel’s private surgery on Belgrano Street, right next to the Yacht Club, which he acquired over thirty years ago, along with the licence and patient portfolio of old Dr Rocamora, of whose lack of medical wisdom and hygiene the town still has a mouldering recollection. As if wishing to differentiate himself from his predecessor as much as possible, Dr Albino Alexander is as spotless and distinguished as his name suggests, and accompanies his deliberate speech with modest gestures of his long, white hands, which bespeak asepsia and talced-up latex gloves; beneath the discreet varnish of his fingernails, pampered weekly by Malihuel’s redhead manicurist, it’s impossible to spot the slightest trace of dirt. Dr Alexander’s practice plays across clinical medicine, traumatology, obstetrics and, somewhat by ear, the other branches of medicine. Along with the surgery and keeping up a well-established local tradition, Dr Alexander took up the post of police doctor; under normal circumstances he would have been responsible for examining Ezcurra’s body and issuing the relevant death certificate. If he didn’t do so, he deigns to explain to me in memory of my grandfather, taking up precious minutes from treating the pneumonias, influenzas and winter colds that clamoured for his attention, “it was because Ezcurra never was in the hands of the police, dead or alive,” he claims and asks if I take sugar or sweetener in my tea. “You’ve probably,” he supposes, “heard some of the tall stories going round town on the subject, suppositions and conjectures that insult the good name not just of the dead, who can’t defend themselves, but of people who work selflessly and unstintingly for the common good. People only remember doctors and policemen,” pronounces Dr Alexander the Police Doctor, “when they’re in trouble. And the suppliant, once sated, waxes critical. Gratitude is more volatile than ether, and the cured patient forgets to pay the bill.” He pauses to take a sip of his tea and I take advantage of the lull to ask the obvious. “He was killed by guerrillas,” replies Dr Alexander with enviable aplomb. “Murdered,” he goes on, “by his own companions, probably after one of those shoddy parodies they were in the habit of calling ‘revolutionary trials’. I’m reliably informed,” he adds, “though I can’t reveal my source — professional ethics you understand — that the boy sincerely regretted his participation in that criminal organisation and decided to ‘open out’, as people used to say in those days. You’ll have heard of a hypothetical meeting with the chief of police. Well, for once our small-town tongue-wagging is true. What they don’t say — what they can’t say because no one has access to first-hand evidence, as I do — is that those meetings were to reach an arrangement over the conditions of Ezcurra’s surrender to the authorities. His regret being so deep-rooted he wasn’t content merely to change tack in his life; he’d also set himself the mission of redeeming his past. To put it another way, he was willing to talk, tell them everything he knew, even name names, something that many would call treason, but which I call integrity or courage because it was a decision taken not out of fear but private conviction. But Ezcurra and the chief of police both made a mistake, a mistake the Ancient Greeks used to call ‘hubris’, a term that can be translated as an ‘excess of confidence’. They thought Malihuel would be a safe place to wait while negotiations developed; they presumed that here, surrounded by the scrutinising gaze of friends and neighbours, in a small town where a new face never goes unnoticed, he’d be safe. There are still people who claim the guerrillas were on the back foot by then; but you only have to look at the case of our unlucky neighbour to refute them. On the retreat? An organisation so powerful it even had ears in the smallest towns? Ears no news escaped? On the retreat, when they were capable of bursting in armed to the teeth and perfectly synchronised in broad daylight, and to everyone’s horror, abducting one of the town’s most prominent inhabitants, who was in police custody at the time? How many people in this town, where everyone knows everyone else, must have acted as secret informers, splitters and collaborators for the operation to be carried out successfully in the very midst of police headquarters? That’s where your investigations should be leading, as you seem so determined to dig up our past. For once we could hear both sides in this country where the winners make history and the losers write it. But of course, were we to attempt to do so we’d soon run into all sorts of obstacles. The vested interests are against digging up anything from the past that might leave them exposed, they talk of reconciliation and closing the wounds”—to which he as a doctor answers: “Before healing a wound you have to open it, clean it thoroughly and cut away what needs to be cut away, otherwise what you get isn’t a scar but an abscess, a fatal gangrene. Yesterday’s terrorist wolves are wearing today’s democratic sheep’s clothing, and what they used to rob toting guns they now filch with the white glove of the conjuror,” illustrate Dr Alexander’s whiter-than-white hands, holding aloft the object he’s been toying with since the start of our interview, a gilded letter-opener in the shape of an outsized scalpel.

THE KNIFE BLADE strikes the chopping board with the force of a guillotine, cleanly separating a T-bone from the rest of the ribcage. Florencio Brancaloni casts a critical eye over the cut and sharpens his knife with several swift strokes down the steel. Only then does he answer my question.

“Ezcurra was a shit, always was, always will be, I’ve never been one for keeping my mouth shut. Now because of what happened they’re all showering him with flowers, next thing you know they’ll want to make the poor soul a saint, but nobody lifted a finger to save him back then and rightly so. I’m telling you, and I don’t know what the dickens you’ve got to do with any of this, I’d already heard there was a Porteño city-slicker in town asking about the poor soul and I go Oh yeah? bring him on, I won’t mince my words, I’ll tell him what everybody thinks but doesn’t dare say — that the military, the police or whoever it was did us a favour.”

He wipes his hands on his white ochre-smeared apron and stares at me defiantly, hands on hips, through the curtain of sausages, black puddings, chitterlings and cuts of rump and flank.

“Evil tongues say evil things about Superintendent Neri I know, talk about kicking a man when he’s down. But my father may he rest in peace knew him well and I can assure you Malihuel’s never seen another police chief like him. But of course he — the man who kept law and order and brought all the crooks and troublemakers to book — gets stick for enforcing the law instead of taking backhanders; but cops these days all they care about is lining their own pockets so people just slip them a few pesos and they turn a blind eye. He didn’t consult my father ’cause he knew exactly what he’d say. I can still see him clear as day my old man, coming back from work, shouting from the kitchen sink where he was washing his hands, Looks like they’re finally going to get Ezcurra off our back, I don’t know who’d told him, makes no difference, everybody knew by then.”

Brancaloni looks at me with his globular eyes, two perfect discs of dull blue on turgid white, threatening to pop out of their sockets like the eyes of the two lambs hanging head-down on either side of him.

“That sonofabitch Ezcurra”—he launches into him again, kicking the twenty-year-old corpse as if it were still lying there on the ground—“that scumbag shat on half the town and nobody’d touch a hair on his head, laughed in our faces he did and not a peep, but my old man never took any shit and his son’s a chip off the old block, I swear if Ezcurra walked through that door now I’d smash his face in, like that I would, without a word to him, whack!” he exclaims and illustrates his point with a thud of fist on palm. He’s getting heated, and the real smell of quadruped blood and the imaginary smell of human blood have sent him into a frenzy like a shark in a documentary, and I’m beginning to wonder if it would be too risky to wait for him at closing time and follow him into the dark alleys of the Colonia where he lives and where I’ll stand a better chance of snapping his scrag with a discreet brick. “We could do with another Superintendent like Neri I tell you to clean out all the scum around town and I’d be first in line to hand him the list. Fuck could this town do with a clean-out. If there was one thing Neri got wrong it was that he didn’t go far enough. Greco the one who followed him did a bit better but didn’t give a toss about the town — all he wanted was to sell us out and hand the headquarters over to Toro Mocho where the big money was. And the ones today you can forget it. Go to the butcher’s on the next block, look at the cuts and if you can find any public-health labels I’ll give you a side of beef. Don’t even know what colour they are, one big illegal country carve-up it is. Think the cops care? Charge them the same as they charge me sir, side of beef a month, and me with all my books in order? I tell you sir,” he tells me with another swing of the pendulum between formality and informality, a common affliction of bullies with an inferiority complex, “there’s a lot of hypocrisy in this town. And anyone who tells the truth makes a lot of enemies, but that’s me for you, can’t change, chip off the old block I am, can’t keep my mouth shut, what can you do,” he concludes and before crossing the curtain of multicoloured strips with my little packet of T-bone steaks I cast a final glance at the unwholesome pink and grey marbling of the cow tongues on the steel tray, studded with tiny pointed cones and scraps of salivary gland adhering to their roots, whose mute dithyramb has in eloquent chorus accompanied their master’s voice.