The Buenos Aires Quintet Read Online Free PDF Page A

believed in anti-psychiatry. By the way, it wasn’t Laing who invented the phrase. It was Cooper who started using it to describe what Laing and other experimenters like Basaglia were doing. But madness does exist. Evil exists.’
    ‘And good?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Why did your brother-in-law Raúl come back?’
    Font y Ruis stops signing his bills. He seems to hesitate, looks up suspiciously. ‘I don’t know. He sat in that chair you’re in, and stared at me. He didn’t say a word. Then he left, and never came back. Typically depressive behaviour, a mixture of discharge and concealment; but not necessarily pathological.’
    ‘You mean to say that your former brother-in-law Raúl manages to escape to Spain some years after the death of his wife and the disappearance of his daughter, and then one fine day he comes back. He pays you a visit. And according to you, you say nothing to each other. He gets up and goes, and that’s that.’
    ‘It may seem incredible, but that’s how it was. We didn’t talk of anything because he could hardly get a word out. All he did was shout insults and cry’
    ‘Who did he insult? Why did he come to see you rather than Alma? Why was he in tears?’
    ‘He insulted the murderers of the Process.’
    ‘What Process?’
    ‘In Argentina we invented a euphemism for our dictatorship. The military called it the Process of National Reorganization. To some it meant the process of returning the country to normal. To others it meant the process of extermination. All dictatorships cover their image in a mask, and language is a means to help the cover-up. If you call cruelty firmness, it’s no longer cruelty’
    ‘That’s true. In Spain we had a king who right-wing historians called “The Lawmaker”, and others called “The Cruel”.’
    ‘See what I mean?’
    ‘Who else did he insult?’
    ‘All of us. He’s suspicious of those who survived. Maybe he didn’t go to see Alma because she reminds him too much of Berta, or because he didn’t want to insult her.’
    ‘What or who was he crying for?’
    ‘I think he was crying for himself. Although sometimes it seemed it was for his daughter.’
    ‘Did he make a point of insulting you in particular? Why would that be?’
    ‘Because I refused to disappear. All of them are the disappeared. Have you met Alma? She seems real, doesn’t she? But she’s not. They all disappeared more than twenty years ago. When they refused to grow up.’
    ‘Is that why you separated from Alma?’
    ‘The military separated us. In other words, history. Because all that’s history now. History that interests fewer and fewer people. All you have to do is calculate the difference in numbers between those who disappeared and those of us who didn’t. Those who refused to disappear will always win.’
    ‘And the girl?’
    ‘Alma searched for her desperately. She’s still looking for her through the grandmothers of disappeared children.’
    ‘The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo?’
    ‘No, they’re just symbolic folklore these days. They really are mad.’
    Through the garden window they can see the more conventionally mad people walking round and round. The psychiatrist grasps the association of ideas and images that must be going through Carvalho’s mind. Perhaps he’s sorry for what he said. ‘Those women are crazy from loneliness and impotent rage. Every time they meet up in the Plaza de Mayo it’s as if they were calling up the ghosts of their children. It’s a magic rite.’
    This is Carvalho’s baptism into the culture and love of Buenos Aires cafés. Their wonderful atmosphere is far removed from the ghastly functionality of most Spanish cafés; they’re like serpents biting their tail on past time: art nouveau, art deco, modernist styles abound. And wood, wood, wood. Argentina’s generous forests converted into décor to have tea or coffee in, while the conversation flows along in a musical Spanish that’s full of Italian overtones. It’s