Who Is Vera Kelly? Read online

  “Your mother would like an apology,” Miss Kay said. “Maybe it would help to write it out. Could you try working on that at home?” I agreed to work on it at home.

  I’m sorry for scaring her because she thought I might die and also when she first got home she thought someone had broken into the house because the fish tank was smashed. I’m sorry for the consequences of my actions which are that she does not trust me home by myself and has to pay for extra hours from Mrs. Cooper in the afternoons and she lies awake at night worrying according to her. I’m sorry because I could have ruined my health and I am no longer trustworthy.

  JANUARY 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  I had found the apartment in San Telmo with the help of a motherly rental agent in a pink suit who had tried to cheat me on her percentage not once but twice, and reacted with a broad and charming laugh both times I pointed it out, as if we were flirting on a date and I was removing her hand from my thigh. It was on the third floor of a small building, so I could make it up the stairs when the elevator was out of service, which happened frequently because of the power outages. The other two floors were occupied by an optometrist and an elderly lady whose husband, now deceased, had been a well-known playwright. The rental agent told me all this in a whisper as we climbed the narrow stairs. I had told her I was a graduate student taking a year abroad, letting her catch an implication of family money in it, and she responded by vouchsafing the optometrist as an uncorrupting influence for a young single girl. My flat had a balcony, an old claw-foot tub, and not much of a kitchen, but the bedroom and living room—sonorously called el living—were spacious, and I liked the tiled floors and the tall windows. It was old and needed paint, but it had a faint air of glamour. The windows faced south and were hinged and latched, so I could swing them open in the mornings. I could swan around in a housecoat and drink coffee in a pool of light on the damask sofa. I paid the deposit in cash, with a bit extra so we could forgo the cosigner, and made the agent give me a receipt.

  After moving in, I ate a late dinner one night at a restaurant a few blocks away, a place with white tablecloths where the waiter brought me a dish of sardines and a glass of sherry while I waited for my roast chicken. On the way home, pleasantly full, I passed a bar that made me slow my pace. There was something about it that caught my attention, that slightly hushed air that I knew well, a bar with a hearty clientele who are trying to keep their voices down so the neighbors won’t complain to the police. A woman having a cigarette with the doorman saw me looking and winked at me, a lovely, slow wink. Her hair was short, swept back with pomade. I felt a burst of relief—a homey kind of recognition—and sadness, because I knew I could never go in. It was too risky for me on assignment. Things were lax in Buenos Aires, but the laws were sometimes enforced, and there were raids on bars like that.

  After a week in the apartment, I’d made some small marks on it. I’d taken down an oil painting in the bedroom of a lamb with an aggressively textured surface, each tuft of wool standing out a solid eighth of an inch, and had hidden it on top of the cabinets in the kitchen. I had left up a print of Water-house’s Lady of Shalott, because I’d always loved it, even if it was silly. It hung over the sofa, the anguished girl in her boat about to martyr herself for love of Sir Lancelot, the tapestry she’d been weaving in her tower trailing in the water.

  On the jamb beside the front door of the apartment, someone had written an exhortation in pencil. It was a single cursive word with the accent placed, in that odd Argentine way, on the third syllable: Apagála. Turn it off. Meaning the stove, I guessed. I imagined the housewife who had lived in the apartment before me putting the warning right there where she would see it while she was putting her coat on and digging out her keys. The stove was ancient, a narrow two-burner thing crammed in between a dwarf refrigerator and a scarred countertop, and I checked it obsessively myself since noticing once that the back burner emitted a faint smell of gas if it wasn’t turned an extra click.

  I didn’t have much to do until I met Nico at seven. I spent a while studying the street map of Buenos Aires that I’d picked up at the airport. I was trying to memorize the Centro, in blocks, and then work outward from there, although most of my assignment would take place within a mile or so of my apartment. I sat with it through a cup of coffee and then went down to the street to buy a newspaper. It was not yet ten, and the full force of the day’s heat was delayed for the time being by the deep shadows along Calle Humberto Primo. San Telmo was an old neighborhood, and on my walks I sometimes came across unexpected blocks of houses in the ancient Mediterranean style, with their rooms arranged around two central courtyards: one in the front for show, one in the back for servants and chickens. I had been in one or two of the grandest, which had been left behind by families that could no longer afford to live in such high style and which were now open to the public. Avocado trees grew in tubs along the porticos. Taxidermied parrots perched in cages among clumps of jasmine.

  The more ordinary blocks were lined with low apartment buildings like my own, with high arched doors peering down over balconies to the street, pale gray stonework stained with the tar runoff from the roofs. Many of the windows at street level were open to catch the brief coolness of the morning, and I walked past couples at breakfast in their front rooms, pouring their tea an arm’s length from the street, glancing out at traffic. Washington had the same heat but not the same closeness. The avenues are broad in DC, the houses at a polite distance from each other. I’ve always liked to look in windows.

  I stopped at a kiosk to buy a paper and a pack of gum from a man with a leonine beard. I pointed at the stack of newsprint and then began to dig in my pocketbook for coins. He leaned over the counter and said, “Which?”

  I looked at the papers for a moment, not sure how to choose between them, and then he leaned closer and said, with a smile that seemed to imply many unrelated things at the same time, “Left-wing or right-wing?”

  I was startled. For an instant I thought I had already been found out, that the entire neighborhood around my apartment had been seeded with counteragents. Then the newspaper man started to laugh, and I realized that the question wasn’t personal, that this was his routine with every foreign girl. He scooped up a copy of El País and folded it in half for me. “This is the left-wing one,” he said. “You’re young.” I mumbled “Gracias” and walked away quickly.

  I was left-wing in America; I believed in civil rights, and I had voted for Kennedy. But by Argentine standards, perhaps I was not left-wing. I stopped in the café on the corner of Chacabuco, a dark-wood place with BAR LAS FLORES written in gold script on the glass over the front door, and ordered a coffee. I took it to a table in a corner by the bar and opened the newspaper. The president of Argentina stared miserably across a conference table on the front page, slumping forward a bit, as if he were too tired to sit up straight. President Illia’s chin and nose pointed toward each other, which made him look even older and more unhappy than he was. He was a white-haired doctor, sometimes depicted in cartoons as a sad turtle. HAVANA MEETING YIELDS SECRET PLAN FOR LATIN AMERICA, read the headline, and below the fold the president’s spokesmen explained that the Communist powers that had recently met in Cuba were hatching a plot to foment Marxist revolution across the continent by encouraging the failure of moderate governments like Illia’s.

  “The Soviets wish to see a wave of right-wing coups across Latin America,” said the spokesman, “which will cause such misery among the people that revolutionary Communism will take hold.” Gerry had discussed this line of thinking with me. He thought it was ridiculous, an obvious misdirection from the KGB’s own coup activities.

  President Illia was a moderate conservative with a mild temperament, and he was weak. Please be reasonable, said the sad face and neat, back-combed white hair. Even his opponents didn’t have much hate for him. A few nights before, I had idly listened while a group of men getting drunk on rum in a bar near Avenida 9 de Julio called his
administration a disaster, a tumor on the body politic, an economic poison that had left the peso in free fall and the material wealth of Argentina in the hands of foreigners. But in the end the loudest one of them said, putting on his hat, that Illia was a nice old man and he felt sorry for him.

  I paged past a department-store insert of sack dresses with collars ribboned in white. The hems fell just below the knee. Direct from Paris, read the calligraphy above the models’ hats. On the following page, a wall of minute type: movie schedules. The capital was lousy with movie houses, and on the hottest days they were cooled by whirring fans that drowned out the dialogue. I had gone twice to see women’s pictures at the matinee, and housewives dotted the rows, neatly turned out with pressed curls and lipstick, faintly emanating perfume into the saturated air.

  Farmers were blocking the roads in the provinces. CORTA CAMINO, read the headlines in the national pages, and there was a photo of some men with scanty, windblown hair standing in front of a row of tractors. Policemen circled nearby. The article had a tone of treading ground that was already well-trod, the roadblocks being a news event that occurred and recurred, in which everyone played their appointed role: the farmers with arms crossed, saying they could hardly afford to feed the nation anymore with export prices so low; the local officials giving a press conference in the mud by the side of the road; the vacationers, cars packed with children, aggrievedly turning around to take the long route to the beach. The vacationers hinted broadly that Juan Perón was to blame for all this, somehow, though he’d been in exile in Spain for eleven years.

  Illia would be pushed out soon. The grumbling from the Argentine generals was growing louder and louder, and a hack magazine called Confirmado in Buenos Aires had been openly calling for a military coup for the last six months. Behind this, there were shadows moving—the Soviets, waiting for their moment. Gerry had told me in one of our phone-booth calls, three days before, that he had a name for me.

  “Román Orellanos,” he said.

  He was a law student at the Universidad Central, the son of a wealthy family from Rosario. The CIA had intelligence that he had recently taken a bus to the triple frontera—the triple border, where Argentina met Brazil and Paraguay at Iguazu Falls, an immense series of cataracts surrounded by tropical parkland. The triple border was a smuggling hub. A station chief in Brazil had picked up chatter that Mr. Orellanos had met a man on the Paraguayan side who dealt in cheap explosives. They didn’t know what he’d bought or how much of it or what he’d done with it. They only knew he’d taken an overnight bus back to Buenos Aires the next evening. He was known to be friends with Marxist students.

  “Orellanos is a big man on campus down there,” Gerry said. “He’s popular. He knows everybody and he’s planning something. Find out what.”

  In finding Mr. Orellanos, I was on my own. With surveillance, on the other hand, I had help. Nico would give me access to the buildings, the Congreso Nacional and maybe even the Casa Rosada, the Pink House, which was the presidential palace. His workmen would plant the bugs. And I would listen.

  NOVEMBER 1957

  CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND

  After the Equanil, everyone thought I was crazy. And as soon as my sanity was in question, everyone was suddenly very worried about what boys I knew and if I was ever alone with them and if I understood what would happen to me if I got pregnant. They managed to convey all this without ever saying the word pregnant. Miss Kay and my mother and the principal at school just started giving me the looks I’d seen them give other girls.

  I was sorry about the fish. I told my friend Angelina that, and she laughed in my face. I guess she thought I was colder than I was. There seemed to be a lot of people around who thought that.

  “How many were there?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Ten or fifteen. Hard to say. They kept having babies and eating them, and eating each other.”

  “Not much of a loss, then,” she said.

  “It’s not their fault, they’re just animals.”

  We were walking home from school down the avenue under the tall sycamores, which were bare. Angelina was smoking in her Grace Kelly way, which annoyed me. She held the cigarette up with a limp sexy wrist so it plowed ahead of her like a mermaid on a ship.

  “That must have been something,” she said. “When your mother walked in and they were all flopping around on the rug.”

  “Knock it off,” I said.

  “You’re tenderhearted,” she said. “You know, if you really were trying to kill yourself, you could tell me.” She pivoted to look into my eyes.

  “I wasn’t,” I said.

  “Maybe unconsciously you were,” she said. She’d been reading Freud, mostly to irritate her mother.

  I missed Joanne so badly that I found myself writing her letters at school, and when evaluated with a cold and neutral eye they looked an awful lot like love letters. I couldn’t explain this to myself or anyone else. I still wasn’t sleeping well, and school that year was less and less comprehensible to me. I was failing everything. I’d started failing everything in a spirit of experiment, thinking I could stop once I’d found out what would happen, whether the heavens would open above Bethesda-Chevy Chase, the walls come down like pasteboard, a team of psychiatrists arrive in a van, etc. I hadn’t realized that once you started failing it was very hard to stop. There was no time. Suddenly my Latin teacher was keeping me after class for a quick illustration, via percentages on the board, of how impossibly excellent I would have to be for the rest of the term to even pass. I had forgotten my declensions. The dumbest girls in the class were far ahead of me, skimming over the filthiest passages of Catullus. They were quoting Virgil in the washroom after class. I was an idiot.

  Calculus had entered a phase of squiggly lines. In European history I was four hundred years behind in memorizing lines of accession. Bethesda-Chevy Chase was very proud of its college acceptance rate, even for girls—there were many Seven Sisters graduates among the faculty, all of them slim, soft-haired, relentless women—and while I was falling down the class lists I kept finding teachers and administrators trying to push me back up. So I was in limbo, not quite flunking and not quite passing, not in and not out.

  JANUARY 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  There was a space-age ice cream parlor just off the Plaza del Congreso with a low white counter that swirled sinuously past the vats of ice cream, a subtle pearlized sheen in the plastic. Abstract shapes in mint green and tangerine and beige decorated the walls. There was a line out the door. I arrived early for my meeting with Nico, ordered a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of dulce de leche, and took the dripping cone out to the broad plaza. It was two blocks long, dusty and hot, with the national Congress looming at one end like a battleship at anchor. In front of it, a stone monument hefted a crowd of bronze figures toward the yellowing sky. I could make out a woman at the top, in a war helmet, raising a torch or a knife. A flock of pigeons excitedly traversed a dry pool that spread out from the base. A couple of small children were flinging bread to the birds, balancing on the concrete margin, while their parents watched from benches.

  I chose a spot in the shade of the squat, jolly-looking palo borracho trees and tried to finish my ice cream without getting it all over my blouse. I cleaned my fingers with a napkin and opened the newspaper from my bag, pretending to read.

  I took stock of the people nearby. Two women on a bench with a baby I dismissed immediately, along with a pair of teenagers creeping their hands under each other’s shirts. A priest slept with a black hat over his face. A man in a pink shirt and a chocolate-brown tie loitered near the rosebushes along Avenida Rivadavia, sunglasses on, sweat stains spreading from beneath his arms. I watched him check his watch a few times, pick at his nails, bend to tighten the laces on his shoes. Ten minutes went by before I realized he was loitering there for the purpose of watching the teenagers on the bench, the girl with her skirt hiked up and her leg slung over the boy’s lap, the boy rubb
ing her ankle under its white sock with a kind of fixed hysteria, the fingers of his other hand digging under her patent leather belt. I read the comics again.

  Nico materialized from the knot of traffic on the far side of the square at 7:15 and made his way toward me slowly, smiling, fanning himself with his hat. He was flushed, his skin pink against the dark mustache, and he was squinting across the raised dust of the square as if there were no person on earth he could be more delighted to see than myself. When he stopped in front of my bench, he put the hat on for a moment only so he could doff it with a gentlemanly sweep of his hand.

  “This weather is like standing in a puddle of piss,” he said.

  I watched his eyes move over my head to the glare of Rivadavia behind me, where the man in the brown tie was still standing in his voyeuristic stupor by the rosebushes. “He’s harmless,” I said. “Not police.”

  Nico laughed and slumped down beside me on the bench, which creaked. His trousers made the zzp-zzp sound of nylon. “Someone has painted Evita vive on the ass of that statue,” he said, pointing to a bronze casting of The Thinker, streaked white by pigeons.

  I laughed. “He seems concerned about it,” I said, looking at the statue’s furrowed brow.

  “He’s worried about the state of the nation.” Nico spread his arms along the back of the bench and cleared his throat. “I’ve made some progress. We’ve got a few ideas. The phone jacks, like you said. We can get into two offices that way: the scheduling secretary’s on the second floor and the senator from Buenos Aires Province on the third, because they’ve got work orders in. But there’s one more, the big fish—well, the second-biggest fish—and you can’t get in his office with some bullshit about the phone lines because he has them all checked every two months. He’s paranoid!” He grinned. “You know who.”