CROCODILE
TEARS
Mercedes Rosende
Translated by Tim Gutteridge
5
Abracadabra Offering
Oh gloomy rose exuding musk
and seer of Libyan reveilles,
to Gonk-Gonk you offered warm entrails
and hearts of panthers dark as dusk.
You called forth spirits of the rains
and sang of dead debaucheries
’mid tepid bones and mortuaries
and captive fair-haired damsels’ manes.
Thunder roared. To dying spates
of fire and blood in mystic hush
the addled idols did abate…
The rain fell sharp in crackling files
and in the distance softly sighed
the languid tears of crocodiles.
julio herrera y reissig
(1875 – 1910)
7
9
The women arrive, tired from their early start, the journey, the queue. Leaving the humiliation of the police search behind them, they enter and look to either side and then at each other with an air of futile defiance, of bewilderment and poverty, of hatred. In the visiting shed, plastic tables and chairs have been set out in groups and the visitors break these up and reorganize them, dragging chairs to and fro, lifting and dropping them with a clatter. The shed is big, some fifty yards by twenty, with a corrugated iron roof that leaks at the slightest hint of rain, a bare floor, walls scrawled with names and prayers and songs, daubed with drawings of hearts and crucifixes and genitals. The only window looks onto a cement yard and a dirty grey sky: there seems to be no horizon between the two. The bathrooms are on the north side. The door of the men’s cubicle has come off its hinges and is propped against the frame, barely concealing half the toilet bowl. There is a dense odour in the air.
A policeman stands at the door, picking his teeth, spitting out pieces of wood or bits of food.
Diego, waiting for his lawyer, has taken a seat as far as possible from the other prisoners, in a gloomy isolated corner. 10He’s wearing faded blue overalls, his stubble is flecked with grey, his fists are clenched. His throat is tight.
The women open old ice-cream tubs filled with cold pasta stew, tough breaded cutlets and polenta with meat sauce; they bring out bananas, packets of yerba mate and tobacco, lemons and mandarins, soft-drink sachets. From outside comes a dry repetitive sound, a ball bouncing against a hard floor, while inside the voices grow, the volume and pitch rising. The world is a little worse in this place, Diego thinks.
That man walking down the corridor, with his hair combed and slicked with gel, a burgundy tie and Ray-Ban glasses, that is Antinucci. The small scar above his right eyebrow, halfway between his nose and his hairline, looks as if it was made by a fist, although it must have happened a long time ago because the skin is tight and shiny around the mark. Although he isn’t ugly or old, that’s the impression he gives; it’s hard to say why. His eyes are his most noticeable feature, large, bulging, pale grey and with fleshy lids. Sometimes they become smaller, flattening, narrowing until they are just two lines. Right now they are hidden behind the Ray-Bans, very dark in this half-light. He carries a briefcase that the guards don’t check. Ever.
“In you go, sir.”
“Thanks, boys.”
Diego hears loud decisive steps, heels clicking along the corridor. He looks up and sees Antinucci approaching. It’s as if a military march is playing inside the man’s head. Antinucci greets Diego with a martial nod, and Diego observes the hand moving forward with a precise movement, like a switchblade. The lawyer takes Diego’s hand slackly; the contact is flaccid and cold, a jellyfish that passes, touches and then goes on its way. Antinucci places his chair so he is 11sitting directly opposite Diego. He sits down and opens the leather case, takes out a folder, also leather, which he places neatly on the table. He opens it and extracts a few sheets of paper. The cartapacio, thinks Diego, as he recognizes the worn dark leather spine that he has already seen before, on another visit; the lawyer guards this folder the way he guards his own life, or the way he thinks he should guard his own life. The object makes Diego shiver. Who knows why? The lawyer’s Ray-Bans erect a barrier between the two men. Diego has no way of knowing where the eyes behind the lenses are focused. He doesn’t know if the eyes are looking at him or are attending to the precise ritual of laying out each individual sheet of paper, a pencil and a couple of ballpoints, blue and red, a mobile phone, an eraser – and a watch that he removes from his wrist and places behind everything else, propped up so it is facing him. Diego prefers to believe that the lawyer is not looking at him and he, in turn, avoids looking at the glasses; he avoids them the way somebody avoids a revelation he knows he will, ultimately, have to hear.
Antinucci places the case on the floor, upright, perfectly parallel to the chair; he crosses his legs, takes a mint from his pocket and slowly removes the wrapper, pops the sweet into his mouth and folds the wrapper four times.
“You’re a patsy,” says Antinucci, and he pronounces the word slowly as if savouring the way it sounds.
Without looking away, he puts the folded wrapper in a plastic bag, which he puts in his pocket; he takes out a pack of cigarettes and an expensive lighter; he lights a cigarette, takes a couple of drags and blows the smoke in Diego’s direction. The laws that forbid smoking in public spaces haven’t reached Guantánamo Bay or the jails of Istanbul. And they 12haven’t reached the prisons of Uruguay either. Silence settles between them, thrumming like an old engine. Diego would like to speak but the words trip each other up and refuse to come out of his throat. He looks at the policeman standing at the door, picking his teeth, spitting out splinters of wood or shreds of food or both.
“And Sergio, your partner in Santiago Losada’s kidnapping, is living it up somewhere in the world with the cash he got from his victim.”
He taps the ash onto the floor, well away from his case.
“I said you’d be out soon and I wasn’t wrong. I’m never wrong. You’ll be out in a few days.”
Diego thinks he should be happy, smile, stand up, pat the lawyer on the back, shake his hand or even give him a hug, burst out laughing, applaud. But he does none of these things because he doesn’t feel happy or even enthusiastic, he just feels a faint sense of relief, which comes over him gradually. The prison night gets inside you and no daylight, no good news, is enough to get rid of it, the way you’d get rid of a patch of dust on your clothes. He barely even feels relieved.
“Bizarrely enough, the victim’s statement helped you. That’s right. Losada said just those words to the judge: that you were a patsy. That the other kidnapper, Sergio – who worked for Losada’s company, who fled with the loot – was the brains behind it all. He set you up, didn’t he? He left you waiting with the captive while he disappeared.”
Diego doesn’t know what he’s expected to say. He stares at his hands while he tries to think of an answer to a question he doesn’t understand, and Antinucci goes on.
“Listen to me carefully. Do you want me to tell you something? Losada even went so far as to say you weren’t