The Crime of Julian Wells

8

In the great tales, she is always beautiful, of course, the one whose loss torments a man. Since Helen walked the ramparts of Sparta and equally dazzled the men of two opposing armies, we have given little value, in literature at least, to a plain-looking girl.

That is not to say that Marisol was plain, but simply to say that she was by no means a dazzling Helen or a fiery Antigone. She was Cordelia, the loyal daughter of King Lear, quiet, modest, motionless at her center, a pendulum at rest.

She came into the lobby of the hotel like a small breeze off the pampas, the sort that barely moves the grasses.

“I am Marisol,” she said in her softly accented English. “I am pleased to meet with you.” Her eyes were black, but striking, and her skin brown, but with a golden undertone, so that in a certain light, as Julian once observed, she seemed carved from a muted amber.

A week before, my father had contacted the American consulate in Buenos Aires, and someone in that office had recommended Marisol as a guide. She was fluent in English, according to the consulate, and others had been satisfied with her services. With a slightly comic edge, my father had added that Marisol had been properly vetted by the consulate, which meant, of course, that she was no female Che Guevara.

On that first morning, she wore a dark gray skirt that fell just below the knee, with a matching jacket. Her blouse was white, with a tailored collar, and she wore it open at the throat. The shoes were black and well polished, with a modest, businesslike heel. But such gestures toward urbanity did not conceal the depth of her indigenous roots. These were in the oval shape of her eyes and the width of her nose and the black panther sheen of her hair. Europe had made no invasion of her blood. For that reason one sensed in her, as I’m sure Julian did, a strange and unconquerable purity.

“I welcome you to Buenos Aires,” she added with a quick smile.

Where many of the women of the city wore a crucifix on a gold or silver chain, Marisol wore a simple string of wooden beads. From the beginning, Julian said, there was a no-nonsense quality about her, something steady, down-to-business, and in a way profoundly conservative, a brick in the sturdy wall, as he would later write of those who resist the excesses of revolutionary fervor, that slows the violent winds of change.

Julian offered his hand. “I’m Julian Wells, and this is Philip Anders.”

“Un placer,” Marisol said as she shook our hands. “I will teach you a little Spanish while you are here.” She gave each of us an evaluating glance. “That is okay?”

“Absolutely,” Julian told her. “Right, Philip?”

“Of course.”

She swept her arm toward the entrance to the hotel. “Come then. There is much to see in Buenos Aires.”

The day’s tour began with a long walk that took us from Casa Rosada all the way to La Boca, by which Marisol hoped, as she said in one of her rare misuses of English, “to integrate us.”

She was a woman of extended silences, I noticed, and she said very little as we walked the streets of La Boca, looking at its brightly colored houses. It was as if she understood that quiet observation was the key to knowing a place, perhaps even the key to life. In any event, she was careful to allow space for standing, sitting, seeing, so that we never felt rushed. Nor did she engage in the guidebook patter that can be so annoying. Marisol, as I would come to understand, was a shaded pond, calm and unruffled.

By evening we had found our way back to the hotel. The restaurant, Marisol said, had a good reputation, though she had never eaten there.

We took a table outside. It was early evening, that twilight interval between a city’s working day and its nocturnal life.

“By the way, where are you from?” Julian asked her at one point.

“I was always moving between Argentina and Paraguay,” Marisol answered. “I crossed this border many times as a child.”

“Why?” I asked.

“When my mother died, I was sent to my father in Paraguay,” Marisol answered. “At this moment, my father died, and I was sent to an aunt back in Argentina. When she was also dying, she took me to a priest, and it was this man who cared for me.”

The priest had lived in a part of northern Argentina that bordered on the Gran Chaco.

“It is very dry, with nothing, and for many years no one cared about it,” Marisol informed us. “Then they found oil.”

It was the struggle to possess this oil that had generated the Chaco War, she said, a conflict that had been unimaginably brutal.

“They died in great numbers, the soldiers,” she said. “So much sickness, and no doctors. You have not heard of it, this war?”

“No,” Julian answered.

Marisol didn’t seem surprised. “We are unknown to you, we who live down here,” she said. “To you, we are fallen off the earth.”

A silence settled over her, both somber and serene, from which emerged what seemed to be the central hope she had for her people, their one quite justified aim.

“All we want is a fighting chance,” she added softly.

Then her eyes abruptly brightened and she was our professional guide again.

“You must have a taste of Argentina,” she said. “Of our wine. It is called Malbec, and the difference in taste between the cheap and the not cheap, it is not so big.” She smiled softly, but it seemed an actress’s smile. “You will like it, I think. But just in case, you should order the cheap one.”

Only once more during that day did Marisol again leave her role as cheerful, uncomplicated guide. It was in answer to Julian’s question about her feelings concerning the current state of Argentina, then in the final throes of its Dirty War.

In response, Marisol’s gaze grew tense. “Here we say that Argentina es un pais perdido,” she said softly. “A lost country.” She shrugged. “And we have another saying. A funny answer when we are asked how we are doing.” She glanced about to make sure she could not be heard, then whispered, “Jodido pero contento.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She was suddenly hesitant. “I do not wish to be vulgar.”

“Oh, come on, Marisol,” Julian said. “We’re all adults here.”

“Okay,” she said, then laughed. “It means ‘screwed but happy.’”

We parted at around nine that evening, then met again the next morning, mostly for a tour of various museums, during which Marisol was very much the professional guide, talking of this artist or that one in the fashion of a museum brochure. There were also walks along the canals, a visit to Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires’s famed opera house. Our third day involved a ferry to Montevideo followed by a boat ride to the estuary where the Germans had scuttled the Graf Spee in December of 1939. Marisol was surprisingly knowledgeable and knew the exact coordinates beneath which the doomed vessel lay.

“The English tourists like to come here,” she told Julian by way of explanation. “Sometimes the Germans, too. So I discovered where it is and we are now exactly at this place.” She smiled brightly. “Knowing such a thing makes me a better guide, no?”

On the fourth day Marisol took us to the cemetery in Recoleta.

“This is a very quiet place,” Marisol said as she led us beneath the dazzlingly white arched entrance.

For a time we wandered silently among the mausoleums, moving slowly, but without a stop, until we reached Evita’s tomb.

“Eva Peron was a poor girl,” Marisol said softly when we paused before it. “Just another poor girl from Los Toldos.”

“Would you have voted for her?” Julian asked.

Marisol shrugged. “Now there is no voting here,” she said. “It is only between two bad things that we must choose.” She peered at the small plaque attached to the tomb. “Sometimes, when I bring the people here, I tell them what Borges said about life,” she went on. “This adds to me as a guide.”

“What did Borges say?” Julian asked.

Marisol, honest to the quick, said, “The English, it is not my translation.”

“Still, I’d like to hear it,” Julian insisted.

Marisol summoned this translation that was not hers, then said, “Okay, Borges said: ‘Our time on earth is divvied out like stolen things: a booty of nights and days.’”

Her eyes darkened slightly, and then, as if by an act of will, they brightened again, though this time something behind them remained in shadow. “Come,” she said. Then, very quickly, she turned and headed out among the tombs. “Come,” she repeated as she waved us forward. “A guide should be always smiling.”

She had only contracted for a set number of hours each day, but she went off the clock at six that evening, so we remained in the restaurant for a long time. We had dinner, then strolled along Calle Florida for a time, where we stopped to watch a couple of street performers dance the tango.

Marisol watched them for a little while, and during that interval I noticed her mood descending. “I do not like the tango,” she said as she turned and led us away from the dancers. “The man rushes forward. The woman pushes him away, then turns her back to him. The man rushes to her again and jerks her around with violence. It is disturbing to me, this dance. It is not romantic. It is-what is the English word? — prelude. Yes, it is the prelude to a beating.”

We returned to the hotel at around eight in the evening. I was tired, but Julian was full of energy, so we went to the lounge for a nightcap, where he talked of nothing but Marisol. He had seldom traveled since his father’s death, and I could see that her foreignness appealed to him: the fact that she was bilingual, which he was not, and perhaps even her indigenous facial features.

“Do you suppose she really isn’t political?” he asked. “That business of having only two bad things to choose from?”

“That’s what she said.”

“But coming from that poor background, she must hate the junta,” Julian said.

“Yes, but maybe she’s one of those people who look within themselves for a way out of oppression,” I told him. “That’s why they get on boats and sail to new worlds.”

Julian hesitated briefly, then said, “If someone like Marisol doesn’t have a fighting chance, then something’s very wrong, Philip.”

I smiled. “You’ll fix that when you’re secretary of state,” I assured him.

I’d meant this only half jokingly for at that moment it seemed quite possible.

“That’s not for me,” Julian said. “It’s all politics. Your father knows that. He’s had plenty of experience with it. You want to do good, but the policy is evil, and you must serve the policy.”

“What then?” I asked. “You have to do something with your life.”

“Something behind the scenes, I guess,” Julian said. “The secret gears.”

“The secret gears?” I asked, rather amused by how vague, yet adventurous it seemed. “You mean dark alleys and notes slipped into drop boxes? That’s the work of spies, Julian.”

“I suppose it is,” Julian said. “But it would be better than an office at Foggy Bottom.”

“It would also be more dangerous,” I reminded him.

“More dangerous, yes,” Julian agreed. “But only for me.”

And with that, he laughed.