The Peacock Emporium(46)

Usually, anyway. This time, for Alejandro at least, the uncomplicated physical pleasures of the trip had been muted by the conversation that was yet to come, the knowledge that although his chosen career had been considered by his family the worst hurt he could inflict on them, he was about to do worse.

The trip had been complicated from the start: Jorge was unsure whether he should be seen to go, conscious that many of his friends were not just missing their own fishing trips and a retreat to the family estancia but, faced with devalued fortunes and inaccessible savings, were now considering ways to leave the country altogether. He was doing okay, he said, but he didn’t want to put his friends’ noses out of joint. It didn’t do to gloat about one’s good fortune when so many were suffering.

Alejandro had meant to tell his father on the walk from the lodge, but Jorge had been preoccupied by a bite that had made his foot swell, so Alejandro carried his things and said nothing. His hat was tipped low against the sun, his mind whirring with projected arguments, anticipated confrontation. He had meant to tell Jorge when his father had tied on his plug, a gaudy thing the size of a horseshoe, with Indian festival decorations, the kind of lure that made European anglers shake their heads in disbelief—until they hooked their own bass, of course.

He had meant to tell him when they hit the water, but the sound of the rushing creek and his father’s intense concentration had distracted him, forcing him to wait until the moment was lost. Then, on their favored quiet stretch between the derelict shack and the standing timber pile, just as Alejandro found himself choking on the words that were fully formed in his mouth, his father had hooked a great brute of a thing, whose eyes, briefly visible even from thirty feet, caught theirs with the same mute fury as Alejandro’s mother when Jorge announced he would be late home again. (It didn’t do to get too angry, she said, after she had replaced the receiver. Not with things the way they were, and he the only man they knew still making money. Not with all those putas floating around him with their plastic grapefruit tits and adolescent arses.)

This tucunaré, as the Brazilians called it, was big even by Alejandro’s father’s standards. He announced its arrival with the excited yelp of a surprised child, as the plug was assaulted in the water with a sound like an explosion, and he motioned his son over with a frantic head gesture—he had needed both hands on his rod just to keep it in his grasp. Whatever conversation had been planned was swiftly forgotten.

Alejandro dropped his own rod and sprinted for his father, his eyes fixed on the furious commotion just under the water. The bass leaped from the water and both men let out a gasp at its size. Then in the split second in which they were stunned into immobility by what they had seen, it bolted for the maze of rotting tree trunks, sending the drag into the high-pitched screech of an aircraft plummeting toward earth.

“?Mas rapido! ?Mas rapido!” Alejandro yelled at his father as the older man strained against his line, everything but that combative fish forgotten. Shaking its head, the bass dislodged at least one of the hooks from the bait, its bright orange and emerald green scales shimmering as it fought the line, the gold-rimmed black eye of its caudal fin taunting them as it flashed above the water, as aggressive and alluring as the peacock’s tail after which it was named. Alejandro felt his father falter a little, his mind spun by the sheer ferocity of their battle, and clapped him on the shoulder, glad for once that it was his father who had lured the magnificent fish, glad that it was he who had a chance to display his superiority in the water.

“Mierde, Ale, have you got your camera?” Finally, spent, they half sat, half lay together on the riverbank, the fish like a sleeping baby between proud new parents. Jorge caught his breath, then struggled to his feet. As he held it, still blank-eyed and furious in death, his middle-aged, tanned face was illuminated with hard-won triumph, a rare unguarded joy, his arms sore and flexed under each end as he held it up to the gods. It was the best day he had had in years, he said. A day to remember. Wait till he told them at the club. Was Ale sure he had the pictures?

Alejandro asked himself several times, afterward: How could I have told him then?



* * *



—

Jorge de Marenas decided to pop into his office before going home. The traffic headed out to the Zona Norte was always terrible at this time, and since the trouble had started, even a man like Jorge didn’t feel safe sitting in a jam.

“Luis Casiro got his new Mercedes stolen, did I tell you? Didn’t even have time to get his gun from his jacket before they had pulled him out. Hit him so hard he needed fourteen stitches.” Jorge shook his head, gazing out at the traffic around him. “Fernando de la Rua has a lot to answer for.”

To the right, Alejandro could see the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo through the smoked-glass window, their headscarves white against the greenery around them, embroidered with the names of the Disappeared. Their apparently peaceful demeanor was deceptive, belying the thousands of photographs that had decorated the park for over twenty years: sons, daughters, whose murderers, each knew, might have passed them in the street. The economic downturn had not deterred them, but it had given the rest of the city’s inhabitants a new focus, and they looked tired and ignored, upholders of yesterday’s news.

Alejandro thought briefly of the baby girl he had delivered almost three months ago, those he had seen handed over subsequently, their births christened with tears, then pushed the thought from his mind. “Pa?”