The Buenos Aires Quintet Read Online Free PDF

Carvalho’s first café. It’s called the Café Tortoni, and when Alma says the name, it’s as if she were describing a temple. In the Avenida de Mayo. Marble, painted skylights, interior lights softened by the carved wood, prints on the walls, romantic mirrors, red leather upholstery, at the back, billiard tables and private rooms for regulars. Also on the walls, pictures of the café through history, in the very place which seems to have managed to impose its own logic on time.
    It’s not far from the Plaza de Mayo where the mothers plod round and round, but emotionally those protests are at the far ends of the earth from these docile-looking ladies chatting over their coffee or hot chocolate. Carvalho wonders if any sense of the demonstrations down below in front of the Casa Rosada has seeped in here. But in among the noble woods perfumed with the smells of excellent coffee, liquors, cakes and ice-creams, there’s no room for History, and as ever men and women seem like nothing more than cheap traders – in their lives, in any other goods. ‘A few yards from here, there are mothers protesting about their dead children, but nobody in here spares them a thought.’
    ‘Nor out there either.’
    Alma seems taken aback at Carvalho’s sense of surprise. ‘As individuals we tend to forget the harm we do or that’s done to us. Why should it be any different for a society?’
    ‘Sometimes I get flashes of my old naïve secondary school feelings of revolt.’
    ‘Ah, the ethics of revolt. They’ll die with my generation, and my generation is on its last legs.’
    They set off down to the square. They come across a small group of women walking round and round. Some are holding placards, others wear photos of their disappeared children on their chests, like medals. Some seem as if they have a whole universe of emptiness on their shoulders. Few local people are looking on; only a few tourists who perhaps are ethical tourists, perhaps not. Feelings of emotion, curiosity and indifference in equal measure; there’s even a certain annoyance in the air among the passers-by, because of the ‘bad reputation’ this insistence on historical memory gives the city.
    ‘Have they explained why they go on doing this? Don’t they know their children are dead?’
    A flash of anger appears in Alma’s eyes. ‘If they accept their deaths, they can’t accuse the system any more. If they accept money in reparation, it would be exonerating the system. How many accomplices did the military have to help them do what they did? But you’re right, the mothers have almost become just another tourist attraction. I work with the grandmothers. They’re searching methodically for all the children adopted – that is, kidnapped – by the military. Like Eva María. Those children exist. They’re not spirits. My niece, for example. She must be twenty years old now. How could anyone recognize her?’
    The demonstration is almost over. Hébé Bonafini, the leader of the Mothers, grabs a megaphone and delivers the political message for today: we will come back again and again so that our children are not wiped from the memory of infamy. They were taken from us alive. They must be returned alive. In other countries of the world, mothers are looking for their children. The system and its barbarity goes on and on. Carvalho and Alma cross the street separating the square from the entrance to the Casa Rosada. Carvalho searches in his memory for everything stored there about one of the most famous presidential palaces in the world.
    ‘Do you want to go in? Or would you rather walk up to the Congress building? The old-age pensioners demonstrate outside it once a week. It’s like a complete collection of fantastic old people. Or would you like to see inside here?’
    ‘Is it that easy to get in?’
    ‘It’s full of former friends of mine. Some of them ex-revolutionaries. Menem wanted to undermine the left by incorporating them into the system, like the