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- Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
A former editor of Nuestro Tiempo magazine has been murdered, apparently during the course of a burglary gone wrong, but investigative reporter Verónica Rosenthal has her doubts. She becomes increasingly convinced that her old boss's death was connected to his investigation of a high-level corruption scandal, a complex web of deceit and power.
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Seitenzahl: 573
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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THE BEST ENEMY
Sergio Olguín
Translated by Miranda France
5
To Carolina Salvini, Paola Lucantis and Amalia Sanz 6
Contents
9
Isitmorefoolishandchildishtoassumethereisaconspiracy,orthatthereisnot?
china miéville,The City & The City
…alltheway upstairshe keptthinking whata shameitwasthatnoneofthenewspapershadanygutsanymore.Hewishedhe’dbeenlivingbackinthedaysofDanaandGreely,whenanewspaperwasanewspaperandcalledasonofabitchasonofabitch,andletthedeviltakethehindmost.Itmusthavebeenswelltohavebeenareporteron oneof those oldpapers.
horace mccoy,No Pockets in a Shroud
Whatwasittolovesomeone,whatwasloveexactly,andwhydiditendornotend?Thoseweretherealquestions,andwhocouldanswerthem?
patricia highsmith,The Price of Salt, or Carol
The dead mature;with them, my heart
salvatore quasimodo,Metamorphoses in the Urn of the Saint10
Prologue
the dead mature
I
In the duty-free shop of the Parisian airport of Charles de Gaulle, Peter Khoury bought M&M’s in a range of packages, along with some miniature Mars bars, a bag of Kinder Bueno and two more of Toblerone. He wasn’t a lover of sweets (he’d bought some tins of Planters peanuts and Blue Diamond almonds for himself), but he reckoned it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stock up for the children he was going to be treating in the next few years – not that the chocolates would last long. Like any good paediatric doctor – recently graduated, with honours, from Imperial College London – he knew the promise of a treat helped sweeten the consultation. Some children would arrive crying and leave happily clutching a Mars bar. Sweets like these had extra appeal because they weren’t usually available to the children he would be treating at Al-Shifa Hospital on the Gaza Strip.
At the age of twenty-six, Peter Khoury had decided to make a change in his life. The kind of change that marks you forever. In his family there had always been talk of returning to Palestine. His four grandparents and father had left Haifa when the Israeli troops entered the city in 1948. They’d had 12no choice but to go, with only the clothes on their backs. They had locked up their houses and taken the keys with them, in hopes of returning one day. Peter’s father was a baby when they arrived in England. His mother, like Peter, had been born in London. And yet all of them (including his siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins) had grown up with a nostalgia for the country lost after the Nakba.
While still a student, Peter had taken a course in emergency medicine at the University Hospital of North Norway. The course was led by Mads Gilbert, a renowned doctor known also for his activism; he regularly travelled to Gaza to give medical training. Gilbert was a very good teacher and Peter an outstanding student. Not surprisingly, an affection sprang up between them. At the end of one class, Gilbert asked him: “Khoury, your family are Maronite Christians from Lebanon, right? I’m guessing from your surname.”
“We’re orthodox Christians from Palestine. On my mother’s and father’s sides.”
“From which cities?”
“Haifa, both sides.”
Gilbert nodded. “Let’s go for a beer sometime, Khoury, and I’ll tell you about my own experience in Palestine. I think you’ll be interested.”
Peter was interested, of course, in whatever the Norwegian had to tell him, for example about the challenge of treating so many people with insufficient staff, supplies or medication. Or the fear that a person cured of pneumonia one day might die the next in a bombing. Gilbert knew Khoury was specializing in paediatrics.
“We really need paediatricians in Al-Shifa.”
“When the time’s right…”
Peter thought it would be years before that time came. He finished the course, returned to London, got his degree and 13began specialist training at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.
He planned to take a break in the summer: a trip through the Netherlands, Germany, northern Italy and France. Forty days alone with his backpack. As he was preparing for the trip he received a text from Mads Gilbert, his old Norwegian teacher. It wasn’t a private message but one that had obviously been sent to lots of people. It read: OnbehalfofDoctorMads Gilbert in Gaza, thanks for all your support. Two hours agothecentralfruitandvegetablemarketinthecityofGazawasbombed.80wounded,20dead.AllofthemwerebroughtheretoAl-Shifa.It’shell!We’redeepindeath,inbloodandamputations.Lotsofchildren.Pregnantmothers.I’veneverexperiencedanythingsohorrible.Evennowwecanhearthetanks.TELLpeople,passiton,shoutitout.Whateverittakes.Dosomething!Domore!
Peter decided that he must go to Palestine, the land his father had imagined, the one his grandparents yearned for. He thought of abandoning his trip and setting off for Gaza straight away, but his parents and grandparents persuaded him to do his European tour first. He wouldn’t have much time later on, and this would be a good way to bid farewell to his youth before entering the adult world once and for all.
After Europe, Peter would go straight to Palestine without returning to London. His grandparents gave him the keys to their houses in Haifa, although he wouldn’t be going to that city, which was now part of Israel.
“Many Palestinians have a key, but I have two. I’m a millionaire,” he told his paternal grandfather.
“We Palestinians are millionaires every time we dream.”14
II
There was a lot of turbulence on the flight from Paris to Tel Aviv, so much that Peter Khoury found himself praying, something he hadn’t done since he was twelve. He hated turbulence; it terrified him. The last few minutes of the flight, over Israeli territory, were reassuringly smooth, not that Peter ever felt reassured on a plane. When they finally touched down in Tel Aviv, he offered up thanks to the three versions of God he knew.
He had enjoyed his trip through continental Europe, visiting museums, bars and parks. He had met people from far-flung places and in every city he visited he had fallen in love and then tried to fall quickly out of it again. Those German, French and Italian girls had conquered his heart, but his soul was in the Middle East, in Palestine.
Now, in Ben Gurion airport, the events of a few weeks ago seemed distant, as though they had happened to a Peter who no longer existed, or who existed in another dimension, one in which he was still drinking beer, smoking weed and kissing blondes and brunettes who spoke a hesitant English.
His grandparents’ keys were in the backpack that had gone in the hold. As a precaution he had put some old keys with no value next to the other two on his key ring. Just as well, because at Customs the agents had decided to open his bag. The key ring caught their eye. “They’re for a cottage I have outside London,” Peter explained with an easy smile, one he had practised in the mirror.
The Immigration guy looked at him and saw a British man loaded down with duty-free, doubtless hoping to have some fun with Israeli girls. Peter carefully repacked the shirts and jeans and put the keys in his jacket. From then onwards he wanted to feel them close to his body.15
There were no problems at passport control. A tourist arriving from London didn’t attract much attention. Peter was asked where he planned to stay and for how long. He had deliberately booked a return ticket for ten days later, one he had no intention of using. He lied about his lodgings and length of stay, as he had been advised to do.
Outside the controlled area, he found himself in a hubbub of travellers reunited with their families, taxi drivers touting for work and tourists who already seemed lost. Peter looked around him, but it was Mads Gilbert who spotted him first and came bounding over to give his friend a warm embrace. He looked a little older, but preserved that youthful spirit Peter associated with Nordic men. Gilbert offered to carry his backpack. Peter handed over some of the duty-free bags instead. They walked towards the parking lot.
They must have looked like two Europeans without a care in the world. Gilbert asked him about the Champions League games and complained bitterly because there had been power outages the last few days and he had missed the round of sixteen away games. Despite being Norwegian (or maybe because of it, since Norwegian teams never went far in the Champions League), he supported Manchester United, whereas Peter was an Arsenal fan. Man U had drawn away to Milan, and Arsenal had won, at home, against Rome. Peter told Gilbert he had watched that match in a Roman bar, surrounded by the local tifosias they hurled insults at their rivals. “When van Persie scored I clutched my head so as to look distraught, but inside I was shouting ‘gooooaaal!’ I was weeping tears of joy.”
They arrived at Gilbert’s Hyundai Tucson. The car, which must have been at least five years old, was dusty and covered in scratches. They got in and drove out of Ben Gurion airport.16
“The drive’s about an hour, not including Israeli police checkpoints. We shouldn’t have any problems getting through the controls with our papers. Although you never know…”
In fact the journey took them nearly three hours. At every roadblock they were asked the same questions. Peter wasn’t a British tourist visiting the country’s natural attractions any more but a doctor heading for Gaza. There were no objections to his journey, though, just a lot of questions and wasted time.
And so they entered Gaza. The panorama of a desert with buildings in the distance was gradually replaced, first by one in which rubble from destroyed houses lined both sides of the road: a city both bombed and flattened by Israeli bulldozers. Then, like a miracle, out of the ruins emerged a teeming cityscape of precarious buildings mixed in with modern pizzerias, electronics and phone shops, even a school surrounded by walls painted with Palestinian flags and drawings of children’s faces. People moved calmly along the sidewalks and drifted into the streets, to the fury of drivers leaning on their horns.
“I wanted to show you around Jabalia before I take you to your apartment,” said Gilbert.
Peter had never been anywhere like this. In some ways it reminded him of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, which he had visited a few years ago. What he particularly noticed wasn’t the sheer number of people and precarious structures, but the bombed buildings, half destroyed yet still serving as homes.
“The refugee camp at Jabalia is one of the largest in Gaza,” Gilbert explained. “It’s overcrowded and there’s a lack of habitable rooms, gas cylinders, electricity and drinking water. Yet these people never stop trying to live with dignity. Oh, and we’ve got several hospitals.”
Peter looked around him in astonishment: the place was much poorer than what he had imagined, or seen in photos, back in London. 17
“I’ll take you to your apartment, it’s not far from Al-Shifa. Spend today resting, because tomorrow you’re going to start a new life.”
“I’ve already started,” ventured Peter.
III
Every day of the next five years Peter was busy saving lives, mostly of the children who came to Al-Shifa Hospital. A resident doctor in any part of the world can expect to come across every kind of sickness, disease and scenario, but in Gaza all these factors were multiplied by a hundred. It would be rare, in a hospital in Berlin or Buenos Aires, to see twenty children arrive on the same day with bullet wounds, or with the beginnings of asphyxia (because the Egyptian security forces attacked children who entered the tunnels), or collapsed lungs (because the Israeli navy shot at fishing boats). Gaza was overpopulated with children, and so everywhere they were victims. And that was without taking into account all the everyday, run-of-the-mill cases of malnutrition, chronic respiratory problems, endemic illnesses and deformities of the arms or legs.
There were operations that had to be postponed because Israel cut off the electricity supply; blood and plasma ruined for the same reason; poisoning caused by contaminated water; shortages of vaccines or of dental prostheses, knee and hip replacements. The outlook was bleak for a society essentially made up of children, adolescents and young people.
For the first few years Peter – dubbed “the English doctor” – worked alongside other professionals from around the world. A Brazilian surgeon, a Syrian epidemiologist, French orthopaedic surgeons, Israeli ophthalmologists, a South Korean dermatologist and many other clinicians from Médecins 18du Monde, Médecins Sans Frontières and Medical Aid for Palestinians. Some arrived in Gaza and couldn’t cope with the pressure. They would leave after a month, two months, six months. Others, either more courageous or more stubborn, lasted a year, maybe two. They were carrying out a vital mission in a country that urgently needed doctors. Afterwards they would return to their countries, write papers, give lectures. The clinicians came and went, but the English doctor stayed on in his small apartment, with a balcony from which he could watch Gaza in real time.
As time went on, the newly arrived doctors didn’t even know he was English because he spoke quite good Arabic (thanks to his grandparents and the family custom of keeping the language of the elders alive). Mothers would no longer say My son was treated by an English doctor. They asked for Doctor Khoury and assumed he was Libyan or Palestinian. And he was pleased by that confusion, because in five years he had grown a thicker skin, he had learned not to cry when a child died in his arms of blood loss; he had comforted mothers (the fathers rarely put in an appearance); he had made home visits, taking food and medication; he had even risked his life crossing the border through the tunnels that led to Egypt, in search of supplies for the hospital (and stocking up on sweets while he had the chance).
Life in Gaza was as close to miraculous as an atheist could credit. The blockade inflicted a form of collective torture rarely seen before. The Israeli armed forces achieved levels of refinement or barbarity for which it would be hard to find comparison.
The Israeli troops rolled in, demolishing the homes of suicide bombers (as punishment for the whole family), destroying flour mills and water sources, avenging the death of one of their own soldiers by killing dozens of civilians, older 19people, women and children. The death count was recorded everywhere, in newspapers and magazines, on websites and Wikipedia. For Peter those numbers were the bitter bread that fed his love for his family’s people.
It was only logical that he would fall in love with a woman from Gaza. Azima was a widow with two children, a surprisingly small family for a Palestinian woman. Peter had been a doctor to both her children – Nahid, a little girl of two who had been born after her father’s death, and Omar, a ten-year-old boy whom Peter called Messi because the first time he came to the hospital he was wearing a number ten Barcelona shirt. There was nothing seriously wrong with Omar at that appointment; he had bronchiolitis and was a little run-down. Peter made sure the girl got the right vaccines for her age and asked Azima to come back a week later for a check-up.
He wasn’t surprised to see Omar on the beach a couple of days later, playing soccer with some other boys his age. He was even wearing the same shirt. Peter liked seeing soccer played, so he stood to one side and watched these boys who dreamed of one day playing for Barcelona, or Juventus, and for Palestine. Omar scored a goal. When the game had finished the boy recognized him and came over.
“Doctor, Doctor, did you see the goal I scored?”
“It was very good, Messi, congratulations.”
The other boys also wandered over and Omar told them proudly: “He’s my doctor, aren’t you, Doctor?”
One of the boys, pretending to be worried, asked: “Is it serious? Will he die?”
Everyone laughed, Peter included.
At the next appointment, Azima brought lemons and garlic. They chatted about his encounter with Omar on the beach. She told him that she was a widow and lived with her mother and another sister, also a widow.20
Azima returned several times more on different pretexts, usually at Peter’s instigation. On one occasion she came without her children and in the company of a young woman she introduced as her cousin. Her name was Iman; she was twenty-two years old and studied nursing. Azima wanted to know if Peter could help her, and he suggested she come once a week to the hospital. They had no budget, but she would learn a lot helping in the emergency department. Iman was happy, even though Al-Shifa Hospital was a long way from her home in Rafah.
Peter, so quick when it came to solving problems in the hospital, took a long time to find the courage to ask Azima out on a date. And when he did, the young widow said no. Peter was disconcerted, even embarrassed. But then Azima invited him to eat at her house instead, in the Shati encampment, close to the hospital.
Despite all the years he had spent living in Gaza, Peter didn’t have a clear idea of what to expect. He realized this wasn’t going to be a romantic lunch for two; presumably at least the children would be with them, and most likely Azima’s mother, and perhaps the sister, with her own children. He was right to consider these possibilities, and yet he still fell short: there were also two brothers and an uncle – because a man couldn’t visit women alone at home – and Azima’s cousin Iman with one of her sisters.
There were also about ten children who would run in, cram food into their mouths, and run out again. The women were cheerful and good hostesses, but the men seemed more uncomfortable, as though they had been obliged to take part in the meal against their wishes. Peter had a knack for putting people at ease, so it wasn’t hard for him to win round the men of the family.
They ate a delicious maqluba, made with incredibly tender 21lamb, pine nuts and almonds. The saffron rice was infused with cinnamon. There were also cucumbers dipped in yogurt with mint and garlic, hummus, and the inevitable stuffed vine leaves. They finished the feast with sweets made from figs and honey. Later there was coffee and a hookah. Peter didn’t partake (he had never got the hang of this apparatus), but he was surprised to see both Azima’s mother and sister smoking, even though Hamas had forbidden women to use a hookah. Political prohibitions seemed to be ineffective, at least in this house.
The five women came outside to see him off and kept waving until he turned a corner and was out of sight. Peter had enjoyed the occasion, but he didn’t know what to make of it. He had been so careful, during his visit, not to keep staring at Azima, who seemed to him sweet and intelligent, and more and more beautiful. If only he could have had even two minutes alone with her, at least when they said goodbye. Had this been her way of showing him she wanted him only as a friend of the family? His doubts were dispelled when, minutes later, he got a text message from her: You’reawonderfulman.Inshallahwecanseeeachothersoon.Wouldyouliketowalkonthebeachtomorrowevening?
Of course he would.
Peter was on duty that night, but he swapped his shift with an American woman, also a paediatrician. Azima and he met late, walked on the beach beneath the moon and stars, talked a lot. Peter told her about his grandparents, about how they had left Haifa during the Nakba, about his life in London, how happy he was living in Gaza. She told him she had never left Gaza, and that was why she liked the sea at night, when you couldn’t see the Israeli patrol boats, because she could imagine a world out there that she might visit one day.22
They kissed and held each other. Peter quickly told her that he would be willing to marry her.
Azima had a beautiful laugh. “All in good time,” she said.
IV
Where might Azima and Peter first have slept together? In some corner of that almost empty beach? In his apartment, which was in a building mostly occupied by foreign doctors and therefore more tolerant than the Muslim neighbourhoods and settlements? Would they have married? Would they have had children? Four or five, like a typical Gazan couple? Would he have obtained a passport for Azima so she and her children could leave Gaza and visit his family in London? Would they have lived happily ever after, like in fairy tales?
Would Iman, injured by Israeli missiles at the door to her house, have finished her nursing studies? Or would the deaths of her mother and two siblings in that same attack have meant she attended the Rafah Community Centre for Mental Health only as a patient?
Omar runs with the ball along the beach, dribbles past one opponent and another, gets kicked. There’s an argument, shouting, then they resume the game. They’re exhausted. They throw themselves down on the sand. They make filthy remarks about the girls in their neighbourhood. They laugh raucously. They walk towards the jetty. Some of them get in the sea, the others look for cigarette butts in the sand. Omar goes off alone because he’s spotted something shining a few yards from where they are. He thinks it may be an emerald or a ruby. He could sell the precious stone, become a millionaire, buy his mother a house. But when he gets there he sees it’s only a piece of broken glass from a bottle. Omar is a believer, so he asks Allah what kind of gift this is. And the 23heavens seem to answer him, because right then there’s an explosion. He’s paralysed by terror. The thunder – because that’s what it seems like – strikes the beach where his friends were playing. It takes a second, less than a second. When he can, he turns towards the place where his friends were. And there are people there screaming, moaning, imploring God, clawing at their faces. Omar can’t recognize the bodies, but they are his friends. His best friend, Ismail Baker, nine years old, is dead. Ismail was with his cousins: Aed, ten years old, dead; Zacarya, ten years old, dead; Mohamed, eleven years old, dead.
Would Omar ever play for the Palestine team?
When the bombardment of the hospital began, would Peter have thought of his parents, growing old alone in their house in Islington, or of that girl he had met in Amsterdam five years ago, or of Azima holding him? Would he have thought he didn’t want to die, not that day?
And the skilful pilots of the F-16 planes that bombed, with surgical precision, the houses, mosques, universities and hospitals of the inhabitants of Gaza on those days in 2014? Would they later have nightmares, fears, moments of doubt?
And that person who gave the order to attack Al-Shifa Hospital, who ordered missiles to be shot at the children on the beach, what did he do after seeing his orders carried out, what did he eat, where did he travel, whom did he love?24
1 ThreeEscapes
I
The first time Verónica Rosenthal ran away from home she was five years old. This was no spontaneous flit but one that had required careful planning. She took the backpack she’d got as a birthday present and put into it everything she was going to need: underwear, socks, a magic wand with lights and sound effects, two small teddy bears (the big ones wouldn’t fit in), a Suchard cookie – which later became half a cookie, then one and a half when she managed to filch another – a toothbrush, her mother’s tweezers, a scrunchie, a fine-toothed comb for nits, and a packet of La Yapa sweets, left over from the birthday party of one of her nursery friends.
Verónica had a good reason for leaving home: she didn’t want her mother to treat her the way she treated Dani. Because, for their mother, Leticia was the perfect daughter: pretty, industrious, respectful. Whereas Daniela was a disaster: a messy, lippy dimwit. Verónica knew that when her mother’s gaze fell on her (up until now she had been ignored, or treated like one of the teddy bears), she’d realize Verónica was just like Daniela. For that matter, she wantedto be Daniela. That’s why she decided to go and live with her maternal grandparents. 26They would surely be thrilled to have her, since every time they visited Bubbe made strudel, with lots of Chantilly cream. And Zayde took her for rides on the merry-go-round and promised that when she was older Verónica could go with him to watch a game at his beloved soccer club: Atlanta.
For more than a month she had been stealing around twenty cents a day from Ramira, the woman who cleaned for them and looked after the girls when their mother was fed up. Now Verónica had amassed a fortune in coins and planned to spend it on a taxi to her grandparents’ house.
One morning, when she hadn’t gone to nursery because of chickenpox, Verónica saw her chance. She felt fine; her face, back and legs were still itchy, but she wasn’t allowed to scratch them because that would leave scars. Her sisters had already left for school, her mother must have been at the hairdresser, and Ramira was at the supermarket. Verónica found the spare key that was kept in the kitchen, shouldered her backpack and let herself out of the house. It was a beautiful sunny day.
Not wanting to be caught, or to run into her mother, she walked along Calle Posadas as far as Avenida Callao. She crossed the avenue – carefully watching the traffic lights – and began looking for a taxi with its red Free light illuminated. There were loads of taxis, so she picked one with a nice-looking driver, an older man with a white beard who could easily have been Santa Claus moonlighting as a cabbie to make enough money for Christmas presents.
When the taxi stopped, she got in, settled into her seat the way she had seen her mother do, then, trying to imitate her voice when they were out together, said: “To my grandparents’ house.”
The taxi driver didn’t know where her grandparents lived, and neither did she (her description of a house with big trees 27at the front didn’t help). So the man got out and went to fetch a police officer, who was standing at the corner. Verónica wanted to cry. They were going to take her to prison for stealing the coins and her mother’s tweezers, and for scratching her legs with no thought for the scars. In fact the officer simply asked where she lived. Verónica, unable to speak, pointed towards Calle Posadas. Then the police officer asked her to show him which house was hers. And she was so stupid, or frightened of going to prison, that she obeyed. He took her to the front door, rang the bell, and Ramira loomed up in the doorway, looking enormous. She hugged and squeezed the child, and wept, and thanked the officer, and then, as soon as the door was closed, spanked Verónica so hard that thirty years later it still hurt.
II
Caniggia first and foremost, then the others: Maradona, Goyco, Ruggeri, Olarticoechea, Burruchaga and even Basualdo. These were Verónica’s first idols. She was ten, the World Cup was taking place in Italy and, for the second time, she wanted to go and live with her maternal grandparents.
Her Grandmother Esther’s cooking – she made the best knishes in the world, an unforgettable gefilte fish with chrain, incredibly delicious varenikesand a sublime strudel – would have been reason enough for anyone to want to spend their days in the house on Padilla and Malabia, but Verónica had another motive: she wanted to be a boy. It was obvious to her that boys had a better life than girls. They got dirty, had fights, played soccer and hung around in the street until dark. And even though she never told anyone about her desire to be male, especially not her sisters, who were both so feminine (because by then Daniela had given in and started 28imitating Leticia in everything), Verónica discovered that her Grandfather Elías understood. That was why he talked to her about soccer, took her to watch games at Atlanta (her grandfather had been a director of the club in the 1960s, the glory days) and let her go to Parque Centenario to kick a ball around with the boys from the block. It was like a secret pact between them, because her grandmother (and her mother) thought she was going to play with Lucía, a neighbour one year older than Verónica. In reality both girls went to play soccer with Martín, Gonzalo, Hernán, Flavio and El Chino against boys from other blocks.
Gonzalo and Hernán, twelve at the time, were the eldest in the gang; Flavio was the youngest, at nine. El Chino, Lucía and Martín – who were twins – were eleven. When they took on another team, Lucía didn’t play, but Verónica did. If they were playing among themselves, Lucía joined in too. On the way home they would buy a litre of Coca-Cola at the newsagent. They would be dirty and sweaty, but nobody wiped the mouth of the bottle before taking a swig. What Verónica liked best was that the boys treated her like one of them; they never mocked her for being a girl, or treated her any differently: they burped, swore and cleared their nostrils with a farmer’s sneeze. Nobody used her full name; they called her Vero, perhaps because it sounded more masculine.
She used to see El Chino and Hernán at the Atlanta ground. They would go with a brother or an older friend and she went with her grandfather. According to family lore, Grandfather Elías first went to games with Grandmother Esther, until motherhood kept her at home. Then his son Ariel accompanied him, until Ariel got older and preferred to spend Saturday afternoons with his friends, rehearsing in a rock band. Elías’s last companion was the youngest daughter of his oldest daughter – Verónica.29
Whenever she stayed over at the house in Villa Crespo, Verónica slept in the room that once belonged to her Uncle Ariel, who had married her Aunt Lisa years ago. She loved that room full of posters and photos. There were the lucha libre wrestlers from Titanesenelring; the 1973 Atlanta squad; a promotional poster for Pink Floyd’s TheWall; a picture of the crowd in the Plaza de Mayo on 10 December 1983, the day democracy was restored; Maradona and the Hand of God. Verónica had decided this would be her room now and didn’t plan to change a thing, although perhaps she would add a photo of Caniggia celebrating his goal against Brazil with Maradona.
On the day Argentina was to play Yugoslavia, her grandfather came early to pick Verónica up from home. Although she didn’t want to say anything to anyone, she was feeling terrible. She had vomited and was shivering. She had secretly taken four children’s aspirin (not for the first time; she liked their fruity flavour) and, as she and her grandfather got into the taxi, managed to hide her sickness pretty well. Verónica watched the game alongside her grandparents, her Uncle Ariel and Aunt Lisa and their baby. She cheered the penalties saved by Goycochea. At lunch she barely ate, and her grandmother, realizing she wasn’t well, put her to bed in Ariel’s old room. Verónica begged Bubbe not to tell her parents. She told her grandmother she wanted to stay and live with them, and go to a school in Villa Crespo, and visit her parents on Sundays. Her grandmother stroked her brow and said yes to everything. That day and night Verónica had extraordinary dreams; she was very cold, then sweated buckets (her grandmother made sure she stayed covered), and her head hurt. By morning she felt better. Her grandmother made her a milky coffee and, since she no longer had a temperature, allowed her to eat a croissant. As she was getting ready to watch the 30day’s games, the doorbell rang. Her parents had come for lunch with Daniela and Leticia. When the time came to return to their apartment in Recoleta, Verónica tried to stay back, clinging to her grandmother, but Esther averted her gaze. Besides, her mother was showing Verónica the palm of her hand in a menacing way.
As they left she saw Lucía and Martín, coming out of the house next door, off to play in the park. The twins eyed Verónica with pity. She couldn’t have felt worse if the police had come to take her away.
All the same, Verónica was back the next week, and the one after, and the one after that. She continued to play soccer with the other children while knowing this couldn’t last much longer, that at some point she would grow up and wouldn’t be able to play with them any more. Verónica didn’t want to be a girl.
Despite the atheism inculcated by her family, she begged God not to let her body acquire a feminine form.
“Dear God, don’t let me get boobs, please, don’t let me get boobs.”
And that bastard God answered her prayers.
III
Verónica knew better than anyone that she had escapist tendencies. She could list them, classify them, analyse them. What she couldn’t do was avoid them. If the problem had been limited to running away from home, everything would have been simpler, but over the years Verónica had managed to evolve so many subtle forms of escape that she could have filled her hours talking over them in therapy – if she hadn’t been someone who disbelieved in religions and psychoanalysis alike.31
Every time she took (or didn’t take) a step in life, Verónica considered whether she might be running away from something. This process had become so byzantine that she sometimes wondered if she was running away from running away, that is, staying put out of cowardice. Was her life with Fede good, or was she simply running away from running away? Although an expert in self-interrogation, Verónica rarely came up with an answer. For that she had Paula, or any of her other friends, all of them ready with a prognosis much cheaper than one you’d get from a Lacanian psychoanalyst and much less boring than a priest’s or a rabbi’s.
The question wasn’t to do with Federico so much as with Verónica herself (she could honestly have told him “It’s not you, it’s me”). But what did she really want? As Verónica approached her thirty-fifth birthday, she felt that certain desires and aspirations were reaching their sell-by date. Should she rethink her life? Look for a better-paid job, become an editor, get married, have children, take tango lessons, improve relations with her sisters, write a book, have cosmetic surgery? If she thought about her life from the perspective of her twenty-five-year-old self, things hadn’t gone so badly. She had everything she’d dreamed of back then: her own apartment, a staff job on a magazine, fairly regular sex and a guy she both loved and liked. Apart from Atlanta’s promotion, eternally postponed, everything else she wanted had been achieved.
Because she loved Federico. Of that there was no doubt – or was there? She did sometimes wonder if they had got back together too soon, if it might have been better to reconcile in their forties, when life had calmed down a bit (if it ever did). She was at the stage where many couples decide to have a baby and channel their impatience into child-rearing. Should she do the same? It wasn’t that she wanted to play the field with other people or that she was dissatisfied with all Fede gave 32her. What she missed was that feeling of excitement at the beginning of a relationship, of falling in love, of discovering it was possible to share with another person a desire, a quest, an obsession. Perhaps having a baby would offer that: the chance to start a new story, to feel different, unexpected emotions.
She had been thinking about motherhood for some weeks now, but fearing rather than wanting it. There had been a few days when she had forgotten to take her contraceptive pill and they had decided to use condoms that month as a precaution. So it was just their luck that one should go and break. They must have been really going at it, because when Federico went to take off the condom, he discovered it was torn, and semen was spilling out. Fede wasn’t exactly a sexual superhero, though. The semen couldn’t have gone all that far, and there was no reason to fear it had fertilized one of her inattentive eggs.
Perhaps it was through some combination of false assurance and prejudice that Verónica neglected to take the morning-after pill, and the one for the day after that, and the one that works even at seventy-two hours. She was on a deadline, she had lots of stuff to sort out and, above all, she didn’t believe it was possible to get pregnant on the contents of a broken condom.
So Verónica forgot all about it for a few days, although anxiety lingered at the corner of her mind. As soon as emergency contraceptives were no longer an option, she began to feel pregnancy symptoms: morning sickness, tiredness; she was even convinced her ankles had swollen up. Her breasts were the same as always, and she didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed about that. When her period was late she started to panic. What more proof did she need?
Leaving the newsroom of NuestroTiempoafter an exhausting day of editing copy, Verónica dropped into the pharmacy 33and bought a pregnancy test. As she walked home, Pili called to ask if she wanted to go out drinking and she said no, to the surprise of her Spanish friend.
“You’ve turned into a boring old housewife, running home to make a stew for your husband.”
Verónica told her to fuck off, hung up, then carried on swearing for a few seconds, something she did often but which that night seemed like another symptom of unusual irritability.
Arriving at Federico’s apartment, she found him in the kitchen trying to follow a recipe for boeuf bourguignon on YouTube. Since they had started living together Federico had been making a big effort to learn to cook, and he liked surprising her with elaborate dishes. Verónica did her bit by mixing the drinks while he cooked. Unless it was one of those days when she was in a bad mood or stressed about some article she was writing, Verónica thought that having a man to cook for her was worth more than good sex, good conversation or anything else a partner might have to offer. That night she wasn’t inclined to be easily impressed (although the sauce certainly smelled good); she gave him a kiss and went to the bathroom.
She’d heard somewhere that it was better to do a pregnancy test in the morning, when the urine is more concentrated. Her anxiety about doing the test properly conflicted with her desire to have a peaceful night. The best thing would be to get up in the morning, urinate on the goddamn plastic, find out if she was or wasn’t, and get on with the day. A carefree dinner, an episode of TheWalkingDead, a more or less respectable fuck, a bit of time reading AspectsofLove– the David Garnett novel she was currently gripped by – then sweet sleep. Wait until tomorrow to deal with the formalities of her uterine situation.34
But who was she kidding. Better to get it over and done with.
Verónica went into the bathroom, threw the clothes from her bottom half into a corner, carelessly tore into the packet, read the instructions without understanding them (she never understood instructions, especially when she was nervous), pulled off the protective cover, positioned the reactive strip under the stream of piss for a few seconds, and put it on the side of the bath. Then she waited, sitting on the lavatory.
One minute, two, three. And two possible options.
A pink line: I’manidiot,inventingthingstoworryabout. Two pink lines: I’manidiot,inventingthingstoworryabout.
The instructions said to wait three to five minutes.
Minute four. OK. Time to check the result.
She held the test in her hands and looked at it. Two pink lines. Or rather two lines that were very pale pink, as though inhibited by the way Verónica was staring at them. Two little lines that showed she was pregnant, that inside her was an embryo fertilized by a sperm she couldn’t help imagining with Federico’s face and doggedness and an ovum needier than she was when drunk.
Now she would have to come out of the bathroom with the test in her hand, smelling of piss (not a big deal) and tell him, “Darling, I’m pregnant.”
They would hug and cry and laugh together, like in the movies, or as she imagined her sisters, so reliably fertile, would have done.
That cursed fecundity of the Rosenthal women.
Verónica put on her underwear, left the test on the basin and looked at her reflection in the mirror. She saw herself as old, flabby, her eyes bulging a little – not surprisingly – and she was tempted to cry, but the image in the mirror forbade it. She would keep her head held high.35
There were urgent decisions to be made. She thought rationally and came to some calming conclusions: the next step was to throw away the pregnancy test. Better to avoid a scene.
2 Nuestro Tiempo
I
In 1985, Patricia Beltrán was a journalist in her twenties trying to get a staff position in some newsroom while she freelanced for various publications in Buenos Aires. Like nearly all freelance journalists, she wrote on whatever subject she was commissioned to cover: politics, interviews with intellectuals or celebrities, culture, lifestyle, social issues, commentary. The only subjects not on her radar were crime and sports, which were usually left to specialists who didn’t look kindly on any trespassing by other journalists.
Her friend Carlos Arroyo worked on the morning edition of the daily newspaper LaRazón. So, whenever she was delivering a piece to their Arts or Society pages, she would take the opportunity to visit him on the International News desk. He had an easy smile and cheeks that would redden at the slightest thing, hidden behind a bushy moustache that called to mind a Genoese immigrant or a Soviet bureaucrat. It was Arroyo who, knowing about her work situation, recommended Patricia speak to a friend of his who was an editor at SieteDías.
“Call Homero Alsina Thevenet and mention my name. He’s Uruguayan like me, but older and grouchier.”
He wrote down the magazine’s telephone number and gave it to her. Then he started reminiscing about his homeland and the time a TV skit made fun of HAT (that was how Homero 37Alsina Thevenet signed off his famous movie reviews). The conversation turned to novelist Juan Carlos Onetti and his wives. Arroyo relayed these anecdotes with the delight of someone who knows he is passing on juicy gossip. Patricia left the LaRazónnewsroom feeling happy and with a hunch that she was going to get more work.
And so it proved. Old Homero, as bad-tempered and demanding as he was, soon offered her a job as journalist on the Society pages at SieteDías.This proved a fruitful time for Patricia, who wrote important pieces on the crises in children’s homes and in psychiatric hospitals, and on the first cases of trigger-happy officers in the Buenos Aires police force. She still wrote about politics sometimes, but gave up Entertainment for good. And with no regrets.
Meanwhile, Alsina Thevenet left SieteDíasto join the founding team of Página/12. As his replacement, the Civita brothers, owners of the magazine and of the publishing house Editorial Abril, brought in Andrés Goicochea, a promising young journalist, who had been linked to pro-government media and came from the Télam agency.
Goicochea was only a few years older than Patricia. He was tall, skinny and loose-limbed, with unruly blonde hair that soon began to recede. A chain-smoker, his voice was firm but somewhat loud, emphasizing his authority. He was clear about what he wanted, and opaque about what he desired. Patricia and he hit it off immediately: she had an easy way with complicated subjects, while he knew how to sniff out a story, something Patricia had always admired.
Good editors make their presence felt from day one: in the way they treat their team, what they’re looking for in a section, how they organize the work, whom they ask for what, how they protect their writers from the neuroses and nonsense of the bosses. Andrés Goicochea was one of the good ones. He had 38a natural talent that showed even in small gestures: the way he hovered near the journalists as they typed, or smoked as he thought up the best headline for an article.
They were both single, both lived for their work (although Andrés’s was more complicated because it involved meeting politicians and other powerful people). So it wasn’t surprising that one night, after a long press day, they had gone for drinks and ended up in his apartment. They slept together that night and on a couple of other occasions. There wasn’t enough spark for them to fall in love, though, or make something more serious of the relationship. Not long afterwards, Patricia met Raúl, an architect who became her first husband and the father of her older son.
The liaison with Andrés was forgotten, although neither of them brought what had happened in private into the newsroom. It was something Patricia was grateful to him for, and doubtless the feeling was reciprocated.
Andrés Goicochea didn’t last much longer at SieteDías. Fontevecchia took him to Perfil, where he worked his way through many of the company’s publications, before landing as a managing editor at Noticias. Patricia also left the magazine at the end of 1988 to join a new venture: Sur, a left-wing daily backed by the Communist Party. It was an experience as heady, and timely, as joining a tsarist newspaper in 1916.
II
The world of journalism is big enough not to bump into a colleague in the newsroom yet small enough for paths to cross in other professional and social activities. Although Patricia and Andrés didn’t work together again for many years, they saw each other at events, openings and colleagues’ birthdays. They would greet each other fondly, exchange a few words, 39then find they had nothing more to say to one another. Each would return to their own friendship group. Although she didn’t make a point of following his life and career, Patricia tended to know what her old friend and brief lover was doing. Andrés got married and divorced twice (just like her) and crested the waves of various different news publications, partly on his own merits as a journalist, partly thanks to his contacts in high places, whether political, business or institutional.
When Andrés joined the management of NuestroTiempo, he called Patricia and offered her a position as editor. The magazine was part of a small editorial group, Grupo Esparta, with ambitions to expand (it already owned two FM radio stations, a news portal, a trade magazine for doctors funded by a private laboratory, shares in some provincial newspapers and a media training company). Patricia had no hesitation in leaving a similar job at a weekly magazine owned by Publirevistas, and that was how, two decades on, she and Andrés began working together again.
The years had changed them. Patricia was no longer that redoubtable journalist who would do anything to get a story, but a lucid editor, albeit cynical when it came to talking about her work. As for Andrés, he was no longer the hot young thing obsessed with being the best. He had become urbane, suavely attentive to the powerful and influential people who visited or took him out to lunch, and an impatient, mistrustful boss. He didn’t want to put out the best magazine; it was enough just to put out a magazine that satisfied advertisers and the lobbyists dujour. With every passing year he took fewer risks. He knew that if he lost the job of editor, he’d be unlikely to find another one like it. On every birthday he said the same thing to Patricia: “I’m getting older and more expensive.” And no business wants old, expensive employees. But a journalist, however tamed and timorous they become once in a position 40of power, occasionally fulfils the fable of the scorpion, plunging a deadly sting into the mendacious and corrupt forces of society. Every now and then, NuestroTiempodared to strike at the jugular of a powerful man who had stepped over the line. And most of the time that venom was delivered from the Society section, where Patricia and some of her writers served to remind Goicochea why he had become a journalist in the first place.
Or at least that was how Patricia Beltrán liked to think of Andrés Goicochea. That he hadn’t given in despite his cowering, his capitulations to the powers that be and his fear of losing the small but solid fortune he had amassed in the last two decades.
The first years at NuestroTiempowent well. In journalism that means there were arguments, a lot of back and forth, veiled censorship, yet despite everything it was possible to work and to publish worthwhile copy, including articles that influenced society in different ways. The salaries may not have been spectacular, but they were always paid on time and at the end of the year everyone was given a box of Christmas goodies. Freelancers were paid late and little, as at all other publications. Then everything started to go wrong. First came the half bonus paid in two instalments, then salary arrears, elimination of per diems, voluntary redundancies with significantly reduced severance pay, freelance work curtailed, non-existent pay rises. The logical consequence of all this was union meetings, stoppages lasting hours and work that got held up because everyone was more focussed on what was happening inside the office than in the world outside it.
As things came to a head, the bosses of Grupo Esparta (Sergio Mayer and Aníbal Monteverde, fifty–fifty partners) announced two big changes: the arrival of a third partner, Ariel Gómez Pardo, who bought seventy per cent of Monteverde’s 41shares; and the replacement of the editor. Goicochea was going to leave, and Julio Tantanian, a journalist famous for having a cable programme nobody watched – but who regularly appeared on bizarre TV round-ups and gossip shows (his wife had once been a burlesque performer) – was taking his place.
There were many rumours about what happened in the highest echelons of power, and perhaps not all were true. Mayer and Monteverde were at loggerheads, barely speaking to each other. Apparently it was Mayer himself who had approached Gómez Pardo, an obscure gambling entrepreneur who owned casinos in several provinces, among other lucrative ventures. Now Grupo Esparta had three partners, Monteverde was frozen out of the decision-making and Gómez Pardo left all decisions to Mayer. At the same time, Mayer had other enterprises that were much more successful than the newspaper group. In fact, the magazines, the web portal and the radio stations were shock troops he used when he needed to put the pressure on.
Goicochea’s exit was not traumatic. He wasn’t a journalist his colleagues on the newsroom front line would have fought for. And now he had no political support outside the magazine either. Meanwhile, the media-friendly Tantanian arrived with a good chunk of advertising money for health insurance schemes from his trade union buddies, who would generously buy ads in return for being kept out of the news.
For Goicochea, the redundancy equated to early retirement. Old and expensive, he would no longer find a job in a different newsroom. But he had enough money to get by and could doubtless secure some consultancy work, or get his fix by teaching journalism in some university or other.
He left the newsroom one afternoon, bidding his colleagues a fond farewell. In an attempt to show there were no 42hard feelings, Human Resources laid on a leaving party with soft drinks and a finger buffet. Goicochea’s only condition was that Tantanian not be present on his last day. He had no desire to cross paths with that loathsome individual he considered more of a clown than a journalist. The petulant gesture carried weight all the same: he was going out on a high, honouring his profession while dismissing an arriviste.
III
Things gradually improved at the magazine. Once again staff got paid on time, expenses were available for certain stories and Human Resources pompously announced that, although the Christmas boxes weren’t coming back, supermarket discount vouchers would be handed out. The journalists’ mood also improved now that they could concentrate on reporting and writing their articles. The demands for pay rises continued, but people no longer feared that the magazine’s days were numbered.
Meanwhile, Patricia was told that although she couldn’t hire the new writer she had requested, she was allowed to bring in freelancers. That meant she could give work to Rodolfo Corso and María Magdalena Cortez. She had first met Rodolfo Corso several newsrooms back and had faith in his ability to get to the heart of a story. María Magdalena had done some investigative journalism with Verónica Rosenthal, and Patricia had been impressed by her good writing and willingness to engage with contentious issues, qualities that were evident in every piece she submitted. The addition of these two to her regular writers made for a good team.
Once things began to settle down, Patricia and Andrés met for lunch far away from the office at Prosciutto, in Congreso. The last images Patricia had of Andrés at the magazine were 43of a man overcome by reality: anxious, distracted, irascible. He looked much better now. He had regained his old composure, put on a little weight and let his beard grow. Although nearly sixty, he was an attractive guy.
They caught up on each other’s personal news: Andrés talked about his children and his new girlfriend, a lawyer and a court clerk who was nearly twenty years younger. She was more like a semi-girlfriend, he said, because she was still married and hadn’t yet separated. “I have to be discreet until she leaves her husband,” he added, with a wink.
Then Andrés tore into the owners of NuestroTiempo, mocking the new editor (he had it on good authority that the man secretly liked dressing up in the feather boas his wife used to wear in revues). He spoke with contempt about journalists who took money from the state and used it to advance their own careers (he could have done the same and had chosen not to). He told Patricia he was considering an offer to edit a newspaper in Salta, but that for now he was concentrating on other work.
“I’m carrying out an investigation,” he announced while the waiter served them coffee. “Like in the old days.”
“Fantastic. About what?”
“About the same thing as usual: the links between the powers that be and the criminal world. There’s a bit of everything in there: influence-peddling, international espionage, links with the Argentine state and complicit media.”
“Sounds great. If you don’t have anywhere lined up to run it, I’ll take it. We don’t pay much, though.”
“I get the feeling that showgirl they’ve employed as editor won’t bite. But let me see what I come up with. The information I have already is pure gold.”
They said goodbye, promising to reprise this lunch between old comrades at least every four weeks. Then, of course, 44they didn’t speak again for months. Every so often Patricia remembered about the investigation Andrés was doing and which she hadn’t seen published anywhere. Perhaps it hadn’t come to anything after all.
Late in October, on a cold and dreary afternoon of intermittent rain and strong wind, Patricia received a call from an unknown number. It was Andrés. He needed to speak to her urgently. That same afternoon. Not in a bar. He had to show her some very sensitive material, share some details from his investigation and ask her advice about what to do with it.
“Shall I come to your apartment?” she asked.
“I’ve moved out for a while. I’m staying at a house in Haedo. Note down the address. And obviously don’t tell anyone you’re coming to meet me.”
He sounded uneasy rather than merely anxious, and much more serious than usual. Patricia wished she could speak to someone about what was going on. She thought of Verónica Rosenthal, who was in the newsroom, but remembered Andrés had asked for maximum discretion, so instead went back home to pick up the car and set off towards Haedo. She didn’t like driving in the rain, but there was no other way to get to Greater Buenos Aires.
The GPS guided her through an area she didn’t know. She took the western access freeway, came off at a street called Dolores Prats and followed the signs until she reached a neighbourhood of nice middle-class houses. According to the GPS her destination was ahead on the left-hand side and Patricia found a place to park a few yards before it.
There was no let-up in the rain, and the inadequate street lighting meant she couldn’t see much in the dark. She stayed in the car for a minute, not because she was having second thoughts about meeting Andrés, but to get her thoughts in order.45
