Far South Read online

  ‘I’m trying to locate Gerardo Fischer,’ I said. ‘Nobody has seen Gerardo at Temenos for more than two days. Naturally, people are worried.’

  Silence. I let it linger.

  ‘We wanted him to come to Buenos Aires with us…’

  I waited.

  ‘We’d heard that Pablo Arenas had been released from jail and we were all a little outraged.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Well, me and Ramón,’ Carlos said. ‘We didn’t tell Miriam because we didn’t want her worrying. We’ve been trying to find out what we can about Arenas’s background… We started to ask some questions around in Ciudad Azul. We knew about his connection to the Triple A. And Ramón and I have been working with a human rights group. We tried to find out if Arenas could be prosecuted for, well… We’d like to see him behind bars for a long time, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ I said.

  I could also understand that Pablo Arenas would be very unhappy about a couple of nosy guys trying to get him put away.

  ‘I guess you asked some pretty indiscreet questions around town,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, we did. It wasn’t difficult to find out that he was involved in the drug trade in just about all of the clubs around the lake: weed, E, speed, coke, crack, smack… But something else that we found out… in Ciudad Azul, Arenas had some connections with the Artemisia Adoption Agency.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘It was a genuine adoption agency that existed until the end of the nineties, when the business was sold and its name changed. All the previous records were put into storage. And fifteen years previous to the sale of the business, we think that these Artemisia people did a sideline in finding homes for the children of activists who had disappeared during the Dirty War; kids who had been born in custody and the real parents were never seen again. We thought that maybe something might stick to Arenas from that… if we could find out enough about it. And about Arenas who may have had a hand in the arrangements so to speak. We started to ask around to see if we could find people who used to work at the agency. A couple of days later, we were having a coffee in a café in Ciudad Azul when a woman called Maria Dos Santos came over to our table…’

  ‘Maria Dos Santos? How do you know that was her name?’

  ‘She dealt a little coke from time to time in the clubs. If you do the club scene in Ciudad Azul, well… do you know her, too?’

  ‘I met her a couple of times, but go on…’

  ‘Well, this Maria woman told us that the adoption agency had closed down long ago, and that it would be better for us if we gave up trying to find out about it because we might bring heartache to a lot of good people who would be upset at us for digging up the painful past. She said it all in a very sweet way. But I couldn’t help thinking there was a threat behind it. A serious threat. It was quite scary.’

  ‘What did she have to do with this Artemisia Adoption Agency?’

  ‘Apparently, it was set up by her aunt.’

  ‘And her aunt is the mother of the guy who was killed at your place?’

  Carlos hesitated, obviously nervous. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Does Gerardo Fischer have anything to do with this?’

  ‘Not directly… But he was with us when Maria Dos Santos warned us off. He’d been interested in Pablo Arenas, too. He wouldn’t tell us exactly what about. It’s always difficult to tell with Gerardo what he’s up to.’

  ‘Was there anything Gerardo said the last time he saw you that led you to believe he might leave the area… or go away for a while?’

  ‘To tell the truth, Ramón and I were so frightened after speaking to this Dos Santos woman that we decided to leave Ciudad Azul for a while ourselves. We wanted Gerardo to come with us, but he said he had too much work to do. There were the rehearsals and then he needed to be there to do something with Damien Kennedy.’

  ‘Damien Kennedy?’

  ‘He’s the set designer for the theater company,’ Carlos said.

  ‘And he lives at Temenos?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘But Gerardo didn’t arrange to meet you in Buenos Aires?’

  ‘He said that he’d see us next week when the company brought the theater piece down here.’

  I’d got all I could from Carlos, I thought.

  ‘Okay. Thanks for calling. That’s been really helpful.’

  Arenas must have something to do with this. And Maria Dos Santos? But there was no point in calling in on them again at this time of night, on their turf, in the dark…

  ‘Please,’ Carlos said. ‘Wait a second, do you think he’s all right?’

  ‘I hope so. I’m looking for him.’

  ‘Please. Let me know as soon as you find out where he is.’

  ‘I’ll do that. And if you hear from him, you call me right away, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Carlos said.

  I hung up.

  I turned to Ana. She’d listened to the whole phone conversation.

  ‘Who’s this Damien Kennedy?’ I said.

  ‘He lives just over the hill,’ Ana said.

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘He’s been here about six months. He’s known Gerardo since the eighties. Other than Miriam, he’s the one who’s known Gerardo the longest. Gerardo invited him from Europe to do some kind of special project.’

  ‘From Europe?’

  Ana nodded.

  Gerardo probably just wanted him to paint some scenery for one of his plays. But I wanted to talk to him anyway. He might have been one of the last people to see Gerardo on the property.

  ‘It’s not late,’ I said. ‘You can take me over to see Kennedy after I’ve had a shower.’

  ‘I’ll call him now on his landline to see if he’s home and if he’s willing to speak to you. He’s a strange guy. But if he does want to talk, he’ll talk your ear off.’

  ‘Where’s the shower?’

  ‘It’s in the little cubicle under the lean-to.’

  I climbed down the ladder from the loft.

  I wasn’t going to find Fischer tonight, but I could try to get as much as possible out of Damien Kennedy. Fischer had been digging up the past, too. This much was clear.

  I stepped into the shower cubicle and turned on the jet.

  I soaped myself up.

  I really wanted to spend the night with Ana.

  Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez

  January 11th 2006

  Hours: 22:00 to 22:45

  Ana took me up the hill in the darkness. She carried a flashlight. It was raining, not hard but enough. A set of steps had been made through the green bank behind her cabin. The path continued up, into and through a copse of pine and eucalyptus. The earth was dark and greasy underfoot. Drops of water fell from the branches, cold against the cotton of my shirt, my linen pants. From time to time, Ana grabbed my hand as my loafers slipped on the steeper parts of the path. She laughed at me. She was a very sweet young woman: bright, full of life, energy. Is this what made her an actress, a kind of dynamism in her small body? The oriental letters of her tattoos seemed to be alive, to crawl on the whiteness of her inner forearm. We came out of the trees and the path led up to a ridge and then continued through rounded mica-flecked boulders. The undersides of the clouds were dark as wine; blocks of rock were silhouetted on the horizon.

  The house where Kennedy was staying looked like a construction site: bars on some of the ground floor windows, a pallet of bricks against the south wall, sacks of cement under a black plastic tarp roped down tight against the rainstorm. Kennedy opened the door before we got there. I don’t know how he knew that we were coming. He was about five feet six, long grizzled hair, reddish stubble on big features. His woolen sweater was frayed at the cuffs and collar, and his blue jeans were a trifle paint-stained, his sneakers were worn across the instep.

  ‘Come in,’ Kennedy said.

  We stepped across the threshold into the house. He usher
ed us through the small hallway into a kind of kitchen/dining area. The two-burner stove on a concrete shelf in one wall was a mess: a camping affair attached to a twenty-liter blue gas cylinder.

  ‘Juanma wants to talk to you about Gerardo,’ Ana said.

  ‘You know he’s missing,’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘You may have been one of the last people to see him before he disappeared.’

  ‘He might still show up,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  Kennedy shrugged.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Ana said.

  I was disappointed that she wasn’t staying. Kennedy took her back to the door. He waved to Ana as she went back down the path. He locked the door.

  ‘You want some mate?’ Kennedy asked.

  I shook my head. I was a bit suspicious of a gringo making mate.

  Kennedy lifted his chin to point out the living room. A large picture window on the west side of the house framed the darkness. In the day, he’d have a beautiful view of the Sierras. The room was spacious. So spacious that there was a large puddle of water in the center of the concrete floor right below a square hole in the ceiling.

  ‘I haven’t put the skylight in yet,’ Kennedy said.

  I nodded.

  He poured hot water into the thermos flask, grabbed his mate.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he said. ‘The room up there is finished.’

  I followed him up the concrete steps into his bedroom and makeshift studio that was the entire loft section of the house. The room reeked of linseed oil and turpentine. Below the easel with a half finished painting, there was a blackened saucepan with the remains of a dried up brew of rabbit-skin glue. The paint-spattered floor was just plywood. A low double bed was at one end of the room. Along the north wall were Kennedy’s canvases, nudes in a messy style that reminded me of the New York painter, De Kooning. A black drape covered what might have been another large canvas, or stage flat, that was about two and a half meters high and one and a half wide. There seemed to be some kind of box built onto the back of it, a box that was big enough to walk into.

  ‘I’ll move all this downstairs when I get the skylight in,’ Kennedy said.

  I wondered how he’d get the flat with the big box out of the room. Maybe it could be dismantled.

  Kennedy waved at a wicker armchair. It had a thin embroidered cushion on the seat and a Bolivian woven cloth over the back of it. I sat down. Kennedy got himself a straight-backed chair, also paint-spattered.

  ‘What did you talk about with Fischer before he left?’ I said.

  ‘He wants to do a revival of his play, The Alchemist, Bono. It was one of the first projects I ever worked on with him. For that piece he needs a replica of the Porta Magica in Rome. The actual marble doorway is still preserved on Piazza Vittorio in the center of the city.’

  ‘Did Gerardo talk about going away anywhere?’

  Kennedy pursed his lips, shook his head.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Did he mention anything that might be bothering him, or worrying him?’

  ‘No, we just talked about the scenery he wanted built. And then he left.’

  ‘You met Gerardo Fischer a long time ago.’

  ‘June 13th 1982,’ he said.

  ‘Precise,’ I said.

  ‘It was the same day I met up with a woman called Francesca Damiani. I still mark that day like an anniversary. For her… for him… who knows…’

  ‘I’ve heard her name before,’ I said.

  He raised his head, the smile gone, eyes a little wider. ‘Who from?’

  ‘Miriam mentioned her, and Sara.’

  Kennedy nodded. ‘Miriam knew her in Buenos Aires.’

  ‘You met Gerardo… and this Francesca… in Italy.’

  ‘At a theater festival. Terme di San Tommaso. I was twenty-five and I’d just moved to Italy. I can remember the dates pretty well because Britain was in the middle of the Falklands War: Malvinas to you. I’m Irish, but I’d been living in London for years. And of course, because Francesca was an Argentine, it meant that the news had a personal interest for her. Gerardo, of course, is from Uruguay.’

  ‘So Francesca was on the run from the Argentine military and Gerardo had joined her there in Italy.’

  ‘That’s what I found out, yes, but not right away.’

  ‘Gerardo was Francesca’s lover. Is that true?’

  Kennedy’s craggy face softened into a wry smile. He ran a hand through his long hair.

  ‘I didn’t find that out right away, either. You see, Francesca and I got involved with each other… that’s the best way to put it… and she was involved with Gerardo, too… more than I realized… and not in any simple way of course… nothing is ever that simple with Gerardo… or with Francesca either… I was a bit naïve about the both of them, I suppose. Most of the people who talk to you about Gerardo will probably tell you what an amazing person he is: so creative, taking people right out to the edge… or beyond. Gerardo makes people drop their masks and be real for once in their lives. Would you like to do that?’

  I shifted in the wicker armchair. ‘What?’

  Kennedy laughed. ‘Drop your mask and be real for once in your life.’

  ‘What?’

  I wasn’t sure that I liked this guy fucking with my head.

  ‘It’s true that Gerardo does that,’ Kennedy said. ‘A lot of the time maybe he takes people where they don’t really want to go. He’d probably say it was only for their own good. Sometimes it was a little difficult to agree with him about that… especially over Francesca… But that may well be my jealousy… it’s funny, isn’t it? Even all these years later… anyway, whatever happened with Francesca, I ended up involved with Gerardo just the same, didn’t I? He brought me here to Argentina… the grand reunion. What more can I say?’

  ‘So you went to Italy to work in the theater and that’s where you met Gerardo.’

  ‘Oh no, not at all. I had nothing at all to do with the theater until I met Gerardo. I decided I’d move to Italy at the end of a trip to India and Nepal. May 1982, I’d been in New Delhi, euphoric, among all these bright colors of the Rajastani textile market… blue sky… dazzling sunshine…’ He waved his hands about as if he might conjure the scene in the air for me. ‘And the next day I dropped out of the gray clouds onto the gray tarmac of Heathrow airport, next to the wet gray rooftops of terraced London houses. And then there was a war on. And Margaret Thatcher was in power… I could have wept, really. I just thought: What the fuck am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing? So… what did I do? I enrolled in a five-day commercial course to learn how to teach English as a foreign language and I bought a ticket to Italy to work freelance. Teaching English would pay the rent while I lived in a garret and worked on my epic comic book diary.’

  ‘Why Italy? What took you there?’

  ‘When I’d been in Nepal, I’d met this woman, Liliana Franceschini. She was doing some kind of meditation course for a month near the Great Stupa in Bodhanath, and it turned out that she lived in Rome. We had this great long talk about Eastern philosophy over a few beers in a restaurant in Bodhanath.

  I could easily imagine Kennedy having a great long talk.

  ‘Then out of the blue,’ Kennedy said, ‘Liliana said to me, “If you ever come to Rome, you can stay for a few nights in my house.” And she gave me her phone number. Well, some people say things like that and they don’t really mean it, do they? But I was sure that she did. I was convinced. She’d given me her phone number, hadn’t she? So now, I was in London, I was a fully qualified English teacher after a five-day course… what a joke… and I was going to Italy. Obviously. Why not? I was young. I had a place to start: sunshine and blue skies, good food and wine, the prospect of beautiful women. So I called up Liliana.’

  ‘And she knew Gerardo Fischer?’

  ‘She knew Fischer, yes. First of all I thought that was a problem for me because Liliana said sh
e wasn’t going to be home on the day I planned to arrive in Rome. She was going to a theater festival at the Terme di San Tommaso. Shit, I thought, now what? Maybe she didn’t really mean I could stay at her place in Rome. “The festival,” she said, “it’s held every year. San Tommaso is one of those small medieval towns in Tuscany. Hot springs, you know? And the festival: it’s all experimental theater. Do you want to go?” Well, of course, I wanted to go. It wasn’t exactly looking for a job and a place to live to begin my new life but so what? “The house I’m staying in is full,” she said, “but I can book you into a hotel.” Well, I thought, an experimental theater festival in Tuscany couldn’t be bad, could it? “Yes,” I said.’

  ‘And you met Gerardo Fischer at this theater festival,’ I said.

  ‘That I did,’ Kennedy said. ‘And Francesca, too.’

  Witness Deposition:

  Damien Kennedy

  Liliana Franceschini picked me up at Fiumicino airport. She was waiting for me just past customs. If you saw Liliana from a distance, you’d get the impression of her being a big woman: she has these wide cheekbones… wide face… maybe that’s good for an opera singer; the voice… and the laugh… it just erupts out of her. Up close, she was a bit less daunting. And it was great to see her again. We went across to the car park and I bundled my rucksack and drawing board into her Volkswagen and we set off for the Terme di San Tommaso.

  The hotel she’d booked me into was in a converted building in the old walled town. It was beautiful. It was cheap. Liliana was renting a room in a farmhouse among the vineyards outside it. I got the impression Liliana would prefer to meet up with her friends first off without me hanging around with her. So I said, ‘Look, I’m tired after all the traveling. I’ll have dinner at the hotel tonight. Maybe we can have lunch tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘I’ll pick you up at noon, on the town square, just outside the Bar Bagatto. You can come and have lunch with us.’

  I was so relieved to be invited, I can’t tell you.

  So, on the Sunday, I took a walk around the town square: mist rising up off the hot sulfur pond, medieval walls with fancy food shops, pottery, gorgeously cut clothes. Opposite the Bar Bagatto, on one wall of the festival information kiosk, I saw a poster for a theater group called O Berimbao. That’s not an Italian name obviously. Well, I thought, it must be Portuguese with that ‘ao’ ending. This group was performing a new version of Medea, by a guy called Gerardo Fischer. It was on at the end of the week. I loved Greek tragedy but this seemed to be a new play by a guy I’d never heard of… Okay, why not? Here I was in Italy… experimental theater, a new life… Liliana pulled up next to me on the square. She leaned out of the car window.