My Best Man by Andy Schell (unputdownable books .txt) 📗

you might read a passion ate interview with Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers

of the kidnapped civilians who were accused of being subversives. Though the paper was committed to allowing all thought and debate, my father was employed to offer his opinion on the last page. He wrote political editorials that were most often open-minded. It was when he aligned himself with Las Madres that he got in trouble. He believed they were right to speak out about the disappeared. So the government disappeared him.”

He’s not crying, but he’s inside of himself now, below the equator, I suppose, in the land of his past. “What do you mean?” I ask.

“Los desaparecidos. The disappeared. Thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured, murdered. They simply disappeared. Those who were found were floating in barrels in the River Plata or dropped on top of refuse dumps. It is said there were groups taken to the sky in airplanes and thrown to their deaths. I’ll never know what happened to my father.”

“God,” I whisper, “there are some passengers on my flights I’d like to throw out of the plane, but I’d never do it.” He looks incredulous, confused by my remark. Shit, me and my mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it. Sometimes my timing is off. Why were they kidnapped? What did they do?”

“Nothing,” he answers, shaking his head. “The government called them subversives. But they were ordinary people, like you and me. Their biggest crime was that they had an opinion or belonged to a social group that helped others less fortunate or were lawyers with so-called subversive clients or whatever the excuse. It is hard to explain.”

I put my arm around him and stare at the wall, as he does, and try to imagine what he sees. “Is that why you came to America?”

“No. We came because of my sister. She was an artist who vowed to expose my father’s murderers. She was sure it was the work of the government. She blamed the federal police. But when she confronted them, in print and in her person, they cast the blame rllUU | VUIIVim on the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, who had written a strong rebuttal to one of my father’ seditorials, which was gladly published in Liberacion del Alma. But everyone knew the Alliance was the federal police, and they were making her walk in a circle, she believed, laughing behind her back. And when she pushed too hard and they weren’t laughing anymore, they disappeared her.”

“Your sister too?” All of a sudden the champagne and reefer is making me dizzy, uncomfortable. “Did you find her?”

He shakes his head no. “But my mother received word from a member of the Navy School, someone who called himself a friend because he was willing to offer the truth that both my father and sister were dead so we should not worry or try to find them. “Go on with your lives,” he told us, ‘but remain quiet.” My mother was devastating.”

“Devastated,” I correct. Then I think, maybe she was devastating, I’ve never seen her.

“Yes, devastated. So she did what only a woman in her shoes could do. She joined Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the group of women who publicly protested their disappeared family members only she knew something the other mothers did not know: Most of the disappeareds were never coming back.”

“She’s brave.”

“Yes,” he says, lost in a memory, “until they attempted to take me away.”

“You? Who?”

He snaps out of his trance, looks me in the eye. “I don’t know. It was the week of the World Cup games, 1978. Police in plainclothes grabbed my arms and legs while I was walking down the street and tried to force me into an unmarked government car.”

“You got away?”

“Yes, because there were so many turistas in town, and a group of Italians was on the street, and I started to scream to them in Italian. The police agents let me go, because they didn’t want to

make a scene in front of the turistas, in case someone from the international press could be watching. When I got home, I told my mother, and she broke down. She cried, a very broken woman. She made arrangements that week to get my brother and me and herself out of the country. She could suffer no more loss.”

I think about my perky mother and wonder how she would endure such tragedy and loss in her own family. Would she become a Mother of the Plaza by going shopping on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City? Treat herself to a Smoothie? Would she be devastating? No. I’m too hard on her. She would rise to the occasion, use her Midwestern pluck to live on, reinvent the family as best as she could. That’s my mother.

“So you see, Harry, I enjoy hearing the poetry of people’s homelands. Because mine is stuck inside of my heart and it will be a very long day before it will come out again.”

We’re silent for a few minutes while the candles flicker and the radio plays Eurythmics, “Here Comes the Rain Again.” It feels odd, lying here, holding hands, learning about the sorrowful past of this beautiful man beside me. But when Annie Lennox sings, “Talk to me, like lovers do,” I know that Nicolo is doing just thatqspeaking to me with the honesty of a lover. And the oddity of it falls away, and it feels just right.

Nicolo smiles, sighs. “This happens when I drink too much. I become lonely for my family. I’m sorry, Harry. You probably just wanted to get me in bed and taste the meat that Argentina is famous for. No?”

I smile, grateful that his sense of humor is intact. This time I kiss his hand. “Who’s left in your family?”

“My mother and my brother,” he answers.

He’s right. We are alike. Alike and so different.

He rolls off the bed, walks to the table, and carefully lifts the plate holding the burning candle. He