His Own Man Read online

  It was my turn to stand. I felt more nauseated than tired. I hadn’t had that much to drink. Or so I thought. I took a few steps across the lawn, breathing deeply, while Max, who remained where he was, appeared to be looking for the other guests. He hadn’t noticed that we were alone in the garden, lost like two ghosts in a landscape overtaken by darkness. He made his way over unsteadily and placed his right hand on my shoulder, probably hoping we might still salvage some vestige of friendship between us.

  Unable to move, I decided to react. “Not everyone, Max,” I managed to say. “Not everyone, to use your words, tried to get on with their lives as best they could. More than six thousand people were thrown in jail in the two weeks following the coup. Those who remained incarcerated, for months or years, or who eventually died from mistreatment or starvation, left behind families who couldn’t rebuild their lives.”

  To my relief, since I no longer had the energy to duel with him, Max nodded. Whether it was in agreement or from drink, I couldn’t guess.

  “The others resisted in their own way,” I went on, more forcefully, gradually regaining my strength and, with it, a certain degree of lucidness. “Without taking up arms but defending their principles. They too would pay a high price. University professors were fired. They survived by giving private classes. I studied with several. Hundreds of members of parliament were ousted and had their political rights suspended. For ten years — an eternity, considering they were in the prime of their lives. Ten years … Union leaders were tortured. The ones who survived quickly learned to keep their mouths shut.”

  Max kept nodding, as if he could read my mind and was already waiting for me at the finish line. I forged ahead nonetheless. “Liberal professionals lost their contracts and saw former associates crossing the street to avoid them. I knew of dozens of such cases. Shameful, humiliating cases, because the damage affecting us seldom had anything to do with blatant violence. It happened in out-of-the-way places, sometimes in modest home settings frequented only by the victims and their closest kin. In alleyways, rather than in the town streets or squares. Beneath torches, so to speak, not searchlights or high beams.”

  I was inspired. If Max was awaiting me somewhere, he’d best set up camp. “Others had their loan applications denied. Your ex-father-in-law’s bank was one of the few that continued to help those it shouldn’t have, according to the regime. This led to bankruptcy. Many of my friends had to pull their children out of school. Others had to move to a different neighborhood or city. Marriages fell apart, from pure tension or fear, leaving behind a legacy of lost, insecure children. A considerable number of these people went into exile, uprooting entire families. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of human beings, Max.”

  Here he held up his free hand, in a clear sign of assent, implicitly recognizing the validity of the points raised — as well as of others I might yet wish to bring up. “Almost everyone, if you prefer,” he amended. “Almost everyone tried to get on with their lives as best they could.”

  We took a few steps toward the house, his hand still resting on my shoulder. He seemed pleased with the fact that some scrap of conversation could still take place between us. And when he began to speak again, his voice sounded untroubled for the first time. Not aggressive or annoyed, nor impatient or ironic — but tranquil and thoughtful.

  “In general, engineers and architects constructed buildings that were praised and inhabited by numerous families, doctors and dentists treated their patients, teachers gave their classes, farmers and workers planted soy and coffee, lawyers practiced law, judges judged, bureaucrats clocked in, without ever failing to take their vacations and sabbaticals. And virtually all received their salaries at the end of the month, including you and me. Almost all, for twenty years. Almost all stood by. Some out of conviction. Others, I recognize, because they had no other option. Or because they imagined that things would change over time. Just as we at Itamaraty did, living isolated from the real world, moreover. Here and abroad.”

  Under the pretext of drawing a cigarette from my jacket pocket, I managed to free my shoulder from his hand. Isolated from the real world … Might as well give up, I decided, flicking my lighter. And, for the last time that night, I contemplated the stars. As if, from the universe beyond, they could deal with the frustration I felt. Meanwhile, Max allowed himself to slump into a chair. He appeared to be on the verge of surrendering. To fatigue, however, never to me. Only it was a fatigue far greater than I could ever have imagined, nearly two decades old.

  “We’re going to have to wait and see,” he said quietly. “It will take the Argentineans a long time to overcome the nightmares they were victims of. What happened among them was beyond terrible. The scars remain deep and won’t heal quickly. Two long and brutal periods of dictatorship, separated by a short neo-Peronist interval and capped by a ridiculous war. Thirty thousand dead in seventeen years … No election can fix that. President Alfonsín will take over chained to cadavers; he’ll govern amid ghosts. The smell of death hangs over the country.”

  He might as well have been talking about something that had happened on Mars, the mere fault of inattentive gods.

  He continued in the same tone. “The Chileans will live through their hell for years to come. There, they talk of five or six thousand dead — for now. Because, unlike Brazil” — he allowed himself a glance in my direction, to verify that I was following closely — “in Chile there’s no solution in sight. From what I could understand of the country during the time I lived in Santiago, the right is entrenched. It will hold firm for a long while. When inspired, my ex-boss in Montevideo used to assert, ‘If there are worthy disciples of the old Prussian military school remaining anywhere in the world, it’s in Chile.’ He would say this with pride, as if he himself were Chilean.”

  With tenderness, he went on to touch upon the least dramatic of the tragedies — in his view, at least. “The Uruguayans suffered even greater human losses, proportionally speaking. But the chaos took a different toll there. For a nation that proudly flaunted the most democratic traditions on the continent, those were eleven long years. Enough time to affect the population’s most precious resource: its pride, its dignity. We, on the other hand …” He’d come full circle and was now reaching what he took to be the crown jewel. His tone was no longer distant. As if the entire region he had referred to — its dead and its disappeared included — had become part of the same mural, set on a curved wall in a museum. “We will solve our problems easily … despite these never-ending twenty years.”

  He grew quiet, then straightened up in his chair and gave a forced yawn to downplay his remarks. The performance didn’t hide the essential: Max was moving on, taking his first steps toward the future. Just as he’d done years before in a moment of inspiration, kissing the ring of the Cardinal Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro. It was a fascinating and pathetic moment to witness. A moment that, in the case of some animals, involves shedding fur or a skin, but for humans occurs on a subtler level — when some sense of the self survives personal devastation.

  Max’s revelation seemed to represent a tribute to me, a proof of trust. It was, at heart, a final demonstration of friendship. In a matter of minutes, we were going to go our separate ways. And many years might pass before we spoke again. Whenever it was we next met up, he would be another person. A brand-new Max, brilliant and shining. The Max of my younger days, I thought, overcome by sadness. The Socialist Max who had joined the office of the country’s last progressive foreign minister. If I met him again at this new stage, and closed my eyes, who knows? Maybe I would see him as he had once been.

  I felt a little dizzy from the liquor and from certain verses running through my head that we used to recite at Itamaraty, while strolling in the shade beneath the imperial palms of the old palace, circling the reflecting pool where swans glided:

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future

  And time future contained in time pas
t.

  Perhaps Eliot would open the way for our reconciliation? All I had to do was forget the current Max and concentrate on the former one, who had just been reborn in front of me. Just as the country was preparing to do: to rescue the future from the past. I noticed that one of the porch doors at the house had opened, casting an intense yellow beam across the lawn. This was soon filled by a shadow, which, after a brief pause, had taken on contours and become a silhouette. The shape began to move toward us, with such languidness that identifying its sex was unnecessary. Max slowly rose from his chair.

  “Goodbye,” I whispered.

  “Goodbye,” he replied.

  18

  My conversations with Marina and Max, just months apart, led me to address at last my misgivings concerning my old companion’s contradictions. Since no one holds on to a friendship poisoned by doubt, I decided to shake off my lethargy — which, at this stage, was bordering on complicity. I began to give greater credence to the rumors circulating about Max and recalled some of the ambiguous comments he had made during our past discussions.

  Over the years, I investigated various sources in piecing together the puzzle that was Max. And in 1993, I came across what I later realized was the most damning one, an article in Foreign Diplomatic Review titled “Operation Condor.” The report had been written based on the dreaded secret organization’s archives unearthed in Paraguay by one of the operation’s victims. “Prisoners thrown from airplanes into the sea,” blared the headlines. “Thrown alive … Bound or stuffed into burlap sacks. Still conscious, hurled from five to eight thousand meters up …” And this was merely one aspect of the famed operation, whose name derived from a bird that fed off dead flesh. It was all there: the monthly frequency of the missions, the number of prisoners loaded onto each flight, the drugs administered to the victims before departure “to sedate them without their losing awareness of what was happening.”

  But the report didn’t end there. On a list topped by Argentina’s notorious Angel of Death, and followed by references to the infamous DINA gang — the Chilean National Intelligence Directorate, with its chief, Contreras, up front — the names of Brazilian torturers and agents figured prominently. Among them was Colonel Cordeiro, in thirty-seventh place, just below his near namesake, the Uruguayan Manuel Cordero.

  Although shaken by the piece, I didn’t associate it with my friend — despite his connection with the man from the Coffee Institute. For me, the article merely represented an extreme example of the macabre shroud that had been lowered over the region for thirty years. I filed it away, but it stayed in the back of my mind.

  Two years later, though, whatever had seemed vague or incoherent acquired an unexpected shape and gained a sense of urgency. It all happened thanks to a colonel from Rio I met in Vienna — a man with whom I forged a strange and short-lived friendship. His name was João Vaz.

  It was 1995, and more than a decade had elapsed since the end of the dictatorship. The colonel and I were part of a delegation in charge of drafting a convention on international crime at a dull UN meeting. Already retired by then, he had been included in the group as an adviser. One night, we wound up having dinner together. The colonel was much older than I, and in his burliness and gait reminded me of an old circus bear, the kind that develops a gentle temperament with age. One of the most disturbing novelties of those years of political transition was, for me, at any rate, the sudden humbleness and congeniality that military personnel of nearly all ranks now tried to project when in contact with civilians, as if their constant smiling indicated that none of them had been at all involved with the terror the country had gone through.

  That night, however, this thought didn’t even cross my mind. I was simply happy not to be dining alone yet again. As is fitting in Viennese restaurants in the wintertime, my companion and I exchanged pleasantries in front of the fireplace. We spoke of family first. And soon afterward, of our travels, of the countries in which we’d lived. Remembering the years he had worked at our embassy in Uruguay, the colonel casually brought up Max’s name. He asked if I knew him. I said yes but without going into detail.

  “What a character,” murmured the colonel, without shifting his gaze from the flames in the fireplace.

  I instinctively straightened up in my chair and, for the first time, faced the colonel with my full attention. I awaited some other sign from him, slight as it may have been, something that would better explain the strange look in his eyes.

  “He worked for the British,” remarked the colonel, as though addressing the fireplace.

  “For the British?” I couldn’t help but exclaim, letting out a surprised laugh.

  “That’s right, MI6,” continued the colonel. “He was working for the British secret service. Working may be an overstatement. Let’s say he was cooperating with them. The ones who alerted us were our friends in” — he tapped my arm with a familiarity that boded well — “Washington! We at the SNI were informed by the CIA! Isn’t that something?”

  “Unbelievable!” I cried out.

  “You knew, at the ministry, that he was part of the system, didn’t you?”

  “Of course,” I answered without hesitation, adding in the same tone, “But this story about MI6 … To my knowledge, no one at the ministry ever knew that.”

  “It took us two years to find out. And when I think that we even played poker twice a week at my house …”

  “Poker!?” My attempt at nonchalance barely hid my surprise. It was a miracle I hadn’t choked on my wine.

  “Max was the only diplomat at our table. He almost always lost, but he was a good loser. At any rate, we didn’t play high stakes. A hundred dollars or so was the most he’d wager per night. At the time, that was still real money, considering that we played twice a week.” He frowned. “Sometimes he did win.” Then an almost heartfelt admission: “But I never caught him bluffing!”

  Fortunately, the UN conference would go on for eight more days. During that time, to the growing satisfaction of the colonel, who had found in me a friend always willing to listen to the recounting of his adventures, we dined together on three other occasions. The Max I discovered thanks to my dinner companion turned out to be a far more complex figure than the one with whom I had developed a fine friendship early in my career. He had split his personality in 1964 and, apparently unsatisfied with that particular accomplishment, had subdivided it further in Montevideo, as though trying to progressively reduce his individuality into less and less visible niches.

  But when I raised this theory with the colonel on our last night — when we’d drunk champagne as well and our tongues were wagging loosely — my companion managed to briefly set aside the effects of the alcohol he’d consumed and threw me a bitter look. “Could be,” the colonel admitted, “but, from what I knew, he never lost sight of his own objectives. He never played fair with his bosses; his peers; us; the Brazilians, exiled or not; the Uruguayans; or even the Brits. And he didn’t toy with the Americans, because he sensed that’s where he would get burned. That bunch was too powerful to mess with. His actions were …” He paused, in search of the expression that would best convey his thought. “His actions were those of a strategist with a personal agenda. Max’s team had only one player: himself. Our friend realized very early on that his superiors, within and outside the ministry, would come and go and lose power and prestige, gradually disappearing, whether from age or ill-formed alliances, while he advanced in his career. So he used them strictly for his own needs. No more, no less. He gave each an amount of attention proportional to his potential usefulness. And he knew better than anyone how to buy low and sell high.”

  After signaling to the waiter for some water, he asked, “Did you know him well?”

  “Yes … and no …”

  “Funny, you sounded just like him then. Depending on the subject of discussion, that’s how Max would often reply. In that regard, he reminded me of an American I got to know pretty well in Montevideo. A true friend I still keep i
n touch with these days. Whenever I asked him about certain topics, he would almost always respond, ‘Yes …,’ then pause and add with a sly grin, ‘and no …’ ”

  The colonel hesitated, staring at me somberly through the haze of whiskey, wine, and now champagne, as if weighing the pros and cons of continuing. Then he shrugged. All things considered, he was much closer to the end of his life than to its beginning and no longer feared anyone.

  He leaned forward. “Eric Friedkin, that was my friend’s name. We remained in touch, even after we were retired. Our girls attended the same school. A very expensive American school, I might add.”

  He lifted the champagne bottle from the bucket and, after glancing over at my glass, which was still full, topped off his own.

  “He was the agricultural attaché at the American embassy. Actually, as I quickly surmised and eventually confirmed as we became better friends, he worked for the CIA.”

  I greeted the new topic of conversation with a generous gulp of champagne.

  “Eric headed the CIA office for all of South America. In other words, the supposed agricultural attaché at the US embassy reported directly to James Pyne in Washington, the same guy who had alerted Kennedy about the existence of Soviet warheads in Cuba during the missile crisis. And just as I’m doing with you now, here in Vienna, although without this beautiful fireplace —”

  “And without the champagne …”

  “Without the champagne,” he echoed, before taking another brief pause. “I remember we were in a bar when Eric spoke to me for the first time about Max. Among other things, he told me that he spent countless hours discussing with his colleague from MI6 which of the two secret services should approach Max, the Americans or the British. That’s how highly Max ranked in everyone’s eyes.”

  “Approach Max?” I asked, unable to contain my disbelief. “But for what?”