Hades, Argentina

by Daniel Loedel

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Hispanic & Latino; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD FINALIST

CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE LONGLIST

“A debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike.” —Seattle Times

A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love.

In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both?

It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.

Release date: January 12, 2021

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

One

*

I’d spent eight years officially disappeared. At least as far as I knew; I hadn’t been back to Argentina since’76, and even after the ostensible resumption of democracy in ’83, no one from the government ever managed to confirm my existence. Only in the ninth year, when I married an American and had to get certain papers in order for my green card, did Tomás Orilla return to documented being.

But the interval in between wasn’t merely a bureaucratic absence. I’d shut myself off completely until I met my wife, and even then—by our first anniversary, I was already sleeping on the couch. The affair was hers, but the fault, I acknowledged tacitly, was mine. I’d never been truly present. Kind and available, yes. Committed too. Even making plans for the long term—a joint savings account, my citizenship application, and, most recently, conversations about children. But it was always an effort, a mask I put on. If I blamed Claire for anything, it was that she saw it for what it was and let me wear it anyway.

That’s one reason I went back, when I got the call Pichuca was dying: it’d mean a break from our problems. But like all things, it was a combination, a messy one. The timing contributed: presumably it would be safer for me in Argentina now, three years into non-military rule. So did the fact that my work was portable. The notorious lure of the past—especially amidst all that secretly uncomfortable talk of the future—was certainly part of it as well.

There was also the call itself. Pichuca made it unassisted, rambling half-intelligibly through a patchy connection that left her sounding older than her sixty years, and a good deal crazier. Not at first, when she told me it was pancreatic cancer and she had little time left, nor when she gave me the logistical details I needed in order to visit. But at the end, when she told me over an increasingly scratchy line that Isabel could come back as well, despite the fact that Isabel had been disappeared as long as I had.

I chalked up the delusion to Pichuca’s illness. But the idea still held symbolic appeal, the kind to do with closure and redemption, putting stubborn ghosts back in their graves.
Only when I hung up did I wonder: My departure from the country had been almost traceless. I left behind no forwarding address or number. I didn’t notify anyone, regrettably not even my mother, who died several months later. How Pichuca had found me—how anybody could have—was a mystery.

A small one maybe. Getting those citizenship forms in order had led me to fill out others, and more paths to me had opened up than I liked. There were census questionnaires, banks and lawyers contacting me about my mother’s unclaimed assets, and requests for an interview from CONADEP, the country’s newly founded commission investigating the military government and disappeared persons. Their inquiries had been the most difficult to navigate, as Claire had seen one of the envelopes. She knew more than the broad contours with which most Americans were familiar—Cold War, U.S.-backed authoritarian regime kidnapping and killing tens of thousands at will in the name of fending off communism. She was aware of my time in detention, had heard me recount certain nightmares and encouraged me to confront them. Yet my honesty with her remained selective, and the full, fleshed-out story still wasn’t one I was eager to examine, much less hand over.

The point is, I could reason out ways of tracking me down if I tried. But mostly they involved big investigative bodies and the kind of resources someone like Pichuca would never have had at her disposal. So the question of how she managed it proved to be its own draw. And though I could have called back—she’d told me what hospital in Buenos Aires she was in, the room number as well—I didn’t. Instead I simply told Claire my plans and booked my flight and hotel.
But I must have had at least a hunch that the borders I’d cross on this journey weren’t the standard ones. Since, on a semi-conscious whim I told myself was purely nostalgic, I wound up packing—stuffed into the bottom of my suitcase as if I were hiding it—the fake passport the Colonel had given me when I fled from Argentina, now almost exactly a decade before.

Two
*

I’d never flown into Buenos Aires, and I’d only flown out of it the once, making the experience of returning strange from the start. Everything at the airport gave off a sense of foreignness, uncharted waters. Though I showed my real, recently renewed Argentine passport to the immigration officer, for instance, he stared at it a while, seemingly uncertain what to do about the fact that his would be the first Argentine stamp on it. There was also the clerk at the currency exchange who looked at me suspiciously because I counted the bills she gave me so many times, convinced the exchange rate couldn’t be the nearly one-to-one ratio it evidently was, and the chatty young cab driver who snuck a similar glance in his rearview mirror when I said I didn’t want to talk, citing my fatigue.

That wasn’t the real reason, obviously. Neither was my unexpected difficulty with the swirly up-and-down quality of his accent. It was the sights as we got closer, the city in bright 9am light. That time of day had bad associations for me here, filled me with a Pavlovian kind of dread. The loudness of passing Vespas and motorbikes, so much more frequent than in New York, the radios broadcasting from car windows, even the sweaters tied fashionably over men’s shoulders—mine was crumpled into my backpack with the sleeves sticking out, and it felt like yet another way to mark me as an outsider.

I’d nourished hopes of taking a long walk like I used to, or sitting under one of those Coca-Cola umbrellas outside a café to have a coffee and reflect, give the journey a full-circle kind of feel. But instead I spent my first couple hours back in Buenos Aires in my stuffy hotel room, working on a translation with the shades drawn and the lamp on, much as I might at home.
And because everything seemed so weird and out-of-place to me already, I didn’t dwell much on the brochure on the desk advertising tours of the Recoleta Cemetery, the last place I’d seen the Colonel before escaping Argentina. Nor, when I threw it out in the otherwise empty trash, the small, half-drained bottle of Johnnie Walker, his preferred liquor for special occasions. I merely thought, on confirming there looked to be a vacant spot in the minibar: I hope they don’t charge me for this.

*

Hospital Alemán was just a twenty-minute walk from my hotel, but I took a cab nonetheless. I was still uneasy; for all the death I’d witnessed, I’d barely seen any in hospitals, and I hadn’t spent much time in them since my college years, the result being I lost my way twice looking for Pichuca’s room.

It was a private one, probably paid for by Pichuca’s sister, Cecilia, and her wealthy husband. They were coldly conservative, the type that had called those in the movements fighting the regime terrorists, and at first I thought that was why they stared at me so intensely when I entered. Then I realized the whole room was staring.

The exception was Pichuca. She was a tiny, hollowed-out husk on the bed, covered in tubes, and her eyes were closed.

“Am I—?” I began, before the answer became obvious: of course I was too late.

“Tomás?” Cecilia said, making a show of squinting at me as she came closer. “Tomás Orilla?”
“Is he who Abuela was talking about?” a young girl asked behind her. She looked about ten, and though she’d implied Pichuca was her grandmother, I couldn’t locate either daughter’s features in her—no blue eyes or round cheeks or anything else. She was a brunette with a sharp chin and broad forehead, and she was studying me with even more curiosity than the rest of them.
“I guess he is,” Cecilia said, appraising me. “We thought Pichu was hallucinating about you like she was everybody else. This business about calling you—I thought it was one of her stories. She fell into a coma last night,” she added, with a hint of relief.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, though I was more than that. All those lingering questions of mine would remain unanswered now. The only solved mystery was how she’d survived the heartache of losing two daughters when my mother couldn’t handle the disappearance of a single son: this granddaughter of hers. While I weakly shook hands with everyone in the room, giving terse replies about the last ten years—no, I didn’t tell anyone when I left in ’76, or afterward; yes, it was strange, and yes, it was strange to be back now, for another death—the little girl never stopped staring at me.

When it was her turn for my poor condolences, she ignored the hand I offered and said, “Abuela said you’d get a do-over.”

“What?”

“Like in a game,” she said, before Cecilia shushed her aggressively.

“Don’t trouble him with that nonsense, Vivi. I’m sorry, Tomás,” she went on. “Pichuca raised her, spoiled her really, so you can imagine it’s hard for her. Seeing her like this, hearing all the nonsense she was saying. It’s not easy.”

“She’s Nerea’s daughter?” I asked. I’d known Nerea was pregnant when they kidnapped her, but I’d always assumed the baby disappeared along with her.

Cecilia nodded. “Born in a detention center. All these terrible things they say about the military, stealing babies to raise as their own and what not, but just think: some young soldier brought her straight to Pichuca’s door. It was such a blessing for her.”

 It didn’t seem to be much of a blessing to Cecilia. Nor possibly for the girl, who’d started pouting, her head low.

“Come on,” Cecilia told her, forcing the girl’s fingers into her own. “Why don’t we go outside and give Tomás and Pichu some time alone together. What do you think?”

She didn’t get a chance to say what she thought, and neither did I, since Cecilia was already dragging her away. The others filed after them, and soon I was alone with the woman in a coma. I pulled up a chair and sat at her side, close enough to catch the stink of decay.

*

It shouldn’t have, but it felt so unanticipated. All those exchanges I’d played out in my head on the flight, and here I was, unable to utter a single phrase. I’d seen Pichuca go mute grieving for others, but, stupidly, I’d pictured her own death as a more animated affair. “Are you married, Tomás?” I’d imagined her asking me. “What about children?” After telling her we were trying—it wasn’t technically untrue; we’d been trying to have children and now were trying to stay married—I’d envisioned her sighing wistfully, a sparkling, movie-like tear in her eye as she said, “It should have been you, Tomás. I wish it was you ended up with my Isabel.”

But Pichuca didn’t say a word.

Neither did I; ultimately I concluded it’d be a lie to try, that I should have told her whatever I had to while she was still conscious to hear it. So instead, in homage, I mentally recounted what fond memories I could—dinners in Pinamar and her house in Palermo, the many times in ’76 I called for Isabel and she picked up—until they spiraled to graver recollections, and I found myself alternately watching her slow, aided breathing and the equally slow clock on the wall hoping the others would come back in.

I left as soon as Cecilia returned, giving her my number at the hotel and saying I’d be back the next day. In the hall I saw the girl lying across a row of chairs, asleep, someone who was a stranger to me petting her hair. I wanted to ask her what else Pichuca had said about me, but I knew it would be wrong to wake her.

*

Without the excuse of being there for Pichuca, it was like some protective façade had dropped. I felt exposed, naked before the peering eyes of this city and all those pesky demons of mine I’d come to satisfy. For that was how it felt: like I owed them something, a psychic tax of some kind I’d have to pay now that I’d returned. I stepped through the sliding doors into the twilit air and late November heat.

At first the sight of her confused me; I assumed it was a look-alike, the product of some mental overreaching. But when she languidly raised her eyes at my approach, there was no question, only a rush of emotions I couldn’t disentangle or describe, except to use her name:
Isabel. She was just standing there smoking a cigarette.

Or had been—when I reached her, she threw it away almost unburned and gave it a stomp, saying, “Tastes like shit.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Don’t you, though? You’re here,” she pointed out. “Do you want to get a drink? I haven’t had one in ages.”

She went ahead without waiting for my response. And why wouldn’t she? It was the most obvious thing in the world that I’d follow her wherever she went. I always had.