Lunch with the Generals Read online

  Rosa’s father gave up trying to understand her. He gave her an allowance instead. As soon as she was old enough he packed her off to the University of Buenos Aires, hoping that noble institution would put some sense into her where he had failed. It was a curious decision although, to be fair, his options were limited.

  It was the time of violent conflict between students and the Peronist labour unions. Though most of the fighting took place in Cordoba, Corrientes and Rosario, the University of Buenos Aires had its own activists and underground movements, each infiltrated to some degree by the other and by the military. Even then, in the early seventies, political activism was a significant cause of death, though it was to get much worse later, under Rafael Videla and Galtieri.

  The University of Buenos Aires spread its faculties throughout the city and had no campus. Even so, the students had chosen various places in Reconquista and La Boca which they made their own. Rosa’s instincts led her straight to them.

  When Rosa saw the social and political maelstrom to which her father had consigned her, she thought he had finally come to understand her and that this was his way of showing it. Tears of love welled in her eyes. She wrote him a long letter thanking him profusely and begging his forgiveness for her earlier excesses. Her letter oozed love and sincerity which pleased her father but left him totally confused.

  It seemed that most students belonged to one faction or another, though the ones that interested Rosa weren’t the kind to advertise their presence. For a while she flirted with the leftist Peronista, but her nose for the illicit and mysterious sniffed out the small and, she thought, extremist Trotskyite group, the People’s Democratic Movement. Rosa thought that they’d be the most exciting to join because they were the most elusive. And membership, therefore, the most perilous.

  She made enquiries, probably too many. When a soldier of the movement, a young woman dressed in battle fatigues, made contact with her, it may only have been to shut her up.

  ‘Rosa Angelica,’ the young revolutionary said as she ghosted up alongside her. ‘We must talk. I am from the movement, I am instructed to bring you to the leader of our cell.’

  ‘My God! Do I have to wear those appalling clothes?’ asked Rosa.

  Rosa was taken through a bizarre series of switch-backs and one-stop rides on the colectivos—the privately owned buses which swarm around the suburbs—in an attempt to shake off anyone bored enough to follow them. Finally, in the poorest part of San Telmo, she was led down chipped and broken steps to a dingy basement room.

  It was cold, damp and smelled of cats. It screamed poverty and deprivation, and failed even to whisper excitement. Rosa was told to wait while her companion beat a complicated rhythm on a slatted timber door as a prelude to gaining entrance. She waited. And waited. After ten minutes of cats’ piss and boredom, she was ready to head off and catch the first colectivo that happened to pass. But then the door opened once more and she was admitted.

  She found herself facing an intense young man only a year or two older than herself. His ordinariness disappointed her—she had expected to meet a clone of Che Guevara. Yet he was not unattractive and he had the most piercing blue eyes she had ever seen. They stared at her, examined her minutely, and she had the disconcerting feeling that he could see through her clothes. She wished she’d worn a bra.

  ‘Why do you wish to join our movement?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘The poor are too poor. And the rich are too rich.’

  Silence filled the room. Rosa hadn’t really thought beyond that, and tried desperately to recall some of the more extreme slogans of the Peronist left.

  ‘Go on.’

  The blue eyes never wavered. Rosa realised with surprise that this man was genuinely interested to hear what she had to say.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?’

  Rosa heard a sharp intake of breath from her escort. The man continued to stare at her as if nothing had been said. Then he smiled. Could anybody really be so gauche? The evidence stood before him. That is why he smiled.

  ‘Forgive me. Sometimes we neglect common courtesies. Sometimes it is not wise to know the names of others. I am Victor.’ He looked past Rosa to her keeper. ‘Thank you, Lydia, you can leave now. Our newest candidate poses no threat.’

  ‘Leader,’ she responded, unable to disobey yet unwilling to go. But go she did.

  ‘Now please continue,’ said Victor. ‘And please sit down.’

  Rosa pulled the little bentwood chair across in front of his desk until she sat directly opposite him. She gazed around the tiny room as she stalled for time, hoping to find inspiration. But what inspiration could anyone find in a naked bulb dangling on a dangerously worn flex from a sagging, mould-spotted ceiling?

  ‘The poor are too poor,’ she repeated, ‘and the rich too rich. Surely that is the crux of the matter. Solve that and you solve all of Argentina’s problems.’

  Victor nodded. If her answer was simplistic, it was also valid. Rosa was no intellectual giant, he saw that clearly. But doubtless she would respond to their teaching. Victor had the dedication and single-mindedness that makes martyrs of men. He was too ready to trust and too unwilling to suspect others of ulterior motives. His politics were not a product of a deprived upbringing, but of a well-educated mind that cried ‘foul’ in the face of injustice. He was an idealist, and for all his political sophistication, he was still an innocent. He was ill equipped to cope with a woman as formidable as Rosa.

  He started to tell Rosa of their mission to create a better, more equitable Argentina, when she shifted position and crossed her legs. It was a nothing gesture yet it unsettled him. He told her about communising the estancias, the great cattle stations of the pampas, of the greed of their owners, and her lips moved as if she was about to speak. He spoke of the untapped oil and minerals beneath the wilderness of Patagonia and how exploration monies were dissipated by corruption, when she leaned forward and took his hand in hers. He was about to tell her of the natural gas resources of Tierra del Fuego, which were being senselessly burned off, when his mouth dried up and his words with it.

  Victor never understood what she did or how she did it, but the prospect of a more equitable Argentina was quickly subordinated to the prospect of what Rosa offered. They made love there and then, upon the revolutionary desk, with Rosa astride him, skirts hoisted high. Victor’s trousers never got past his knees. He reached his hands up inside her blouse to her bobbling breasts and hung on, it seemed, for dear life.

  Whether or not Rosa really embraced the politics of the left is arguable. Some, like Lydia, claimed she’d only attend demonstrations that passed by her hairdresser, whereupon she’d slip in through the doors and keep her appointment.

  Still, she stayed close to Victor and Victor stayed close to his mission. As it transpired, the People’s Democratic Movement were extreme only in their beliefs, and moderate, even pacifist, in their actions. Once again, Rosa’s impetuousness had let her down. She’d thought she was joining the Buenos Aires chapter of the hardcore People’s Revolutionary Army, a militant and violent group which had the arms and audacity to take on the military in set-piece battles. It’s as well she didn’t. If the People’s Revolutionary Army had allowed her to join, it would only have been to sacrifice her later. Argentinian politics is like that.

  So Victor fell prey to Rosa, but Rosa was herself about to be preyed upon, by a fellow student called Jorge Luis Masot. He was the man Rosa should have married. Victor was just too serious and too responsible. Worst of all, where a girl like Rosa was concerned, too frugal. Committed leftists simply don’t splash out and indulge in bourgeois pleasures. Rosa should have realised that.

  At first there was the flush of new love made all the sweeter by the jealousy of Lydia and other bright-eyed hopefuls in the movement. They thought Rosa shallow and bitterly resented the fact that their leader had fallen for her. ‘Anyone but Rosa,’ they said in their anguish. ‘Dear God, anyone but her.’ There was also the thri
ll of being part of a big secret, of covert meetings, code words, subterfuge and intrigue.

  But it was all a game to Rosa and she grew weary of it. There were lighter moments. Evenings spent debating over cheap red wine, while the problems of Argentina defined themselves with crystal clarity, and were resolved in wisdoms which evaporated with the morning sun.

  Sometimes they went dancing, and tangoed to popular melodies doctored with revolutionary lyrics and sung in lunfardo, the half-Spanish/half-Italian slang of Buenos Aires. But the occasions were all too few. Rosa was a true porteña, and like all porteños, as residents of Buenos Aires are called, she lived for the night. For the clubs and the bars that rage till dawn. In her heart she heard the call of the bandoneón, the concertina-like instrument inseparable from the tango, not the call of a new order.

  Rosa would have drifted away from the movement but for Victor. He loved her. Oh, yes! He loved her. Completely and utterly, without guile or condition. Poor Victor worshipped her, and in his innocence assumed she loved him equally. Rosa liked Victor, and she liked being loved. But she didn’t love him. She was ready for the intervention of Jorge Luis Masot.

  Chapter Three

  Jorge Luis Masot was a child of privilege. He was born on the family estancia near Pergamino, in the humid pampas. He should have been born two hundred and fifty kilometres away in Buenos Aires, in the finest hospital attended by the most eminent doctors, but he had the presumption to arrive three weeks early. The birth was attended by a local doctor who smelled of whisky, and a midwife who was given to invoking God’s saving grace at the slightest provocation. Fortunately for his mother, the child was in a hurry and the birth was as easy as any birth could be, where the only pain management is a whisky-flavoured exhortation to ‘take a deep breath’ and a prayer offered in the hushed tones of the last rites.

  The pain and the indignity caused Jorge’s mother to decide enough was enough, and so he became the last and youngest of four children, all boys. Perhaps if he’d been born a girl, his mother would have shown more interest, though it seems unlikely. Jorge was handed over to a nanny, as his brothers had been before him, and her first task was to wean him off the breast milk his mother expressed and onto cow’s milk. Jorge couldn’t know it at the time, but his mother would never take him in her arms again.

  The family moved from the estancia to their home in Buenos Aires and back again, depending upon the season or the whim of Jorge’s mother. Of his two homes Jorge preferred the estancia, and most of the first five years of his life were spent there. The ranch house was palatial, as grand and stately as colonial architects and money could make it.

  It was built within a perfect square, its four single-storey sides enclosing a courtyard which was grassed and cut by diagonal pathways. Each exterior wall had an entrance, flanked on either side by four shuttered windows. One entrance led from the driveway and this was the grandest, as its approach suggested it would be. The driveway, arrow straight, was guarded on either side of its half kilometre length by cypress trees. Another entrance led onto the sweeping lawns which surrounded the house. A third provided direct access to the inner courtyard past timbered gates that needed the combined strength of two men to move. The fourth led to an extension which would have dismayed the original architects had they still been alive.

  It was a two-storey building which housed all the servants and a kitchen which would not have been out of place in a five-star hotel. It was Jorge’s favourite part of the house because it was where his adoring nanny and all his friends lived.

  His friends were the servants whose responsibilities included keeping the boys safe, entertained and out of the way. They taught Jorge to swim in the fifty-metre swimming pool, which nobody ever used except the boys and those servants fortunate enough to give them swimming lessons. They taught him to play tennis on the court made of pulverised reddish-brown stone and kept as immaculate as the gardens. They taught him to ride his pony, knowing that a fall would bring punishment or even their dismissal. So they taught him well, and breathed a sigh of relief when he displayed the same natural balance and athleticism as his brothers.

  Jorge had everything a boy could ask for, except loving attentive parents. But what more could he expect, given that his father was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Argentina and his mother a leading socialite?

  From the age of five, Jorge’s time was spent at school in Buenos Aires or holidaying at the estancia, or at the seaside resort of Mar del Plata. At various times he appeared to show promise as a swimmer, a tennis player, and, as fitting testimony to the effort that went into teaching him to ride, a polo player. But it was at schoolboy rugby that he excelled.

  He made the school’s first fifteen at the age of fourteen and one week. He was one of the youngest ever to be capped. Even more remarkably he won his promotion in the critical position of five-eighth.

  Jorge was a natural. He could read a game as easily as others read books. He knew exactly when to unleash his backs, and when to turn the ball back into his forwards. He knew when to hold onto the ball, too, and this is what pleased the crowd. He had speed, a deceptive side-step off both feet, and a swerve and change of pace that left defenders looking leaden and foolish.

  He also had an incentive to do better than any other boy on the field. One day he had used his skills to perfection. He broke the defensive line with sheer acceleration, dummied the cover defence, then side-stepped the fullback to score under the posts. He knew he’d done well. The cheers from the sideline and the back-slapping from his team-mates confirmed this. He looked for his coach. All players, from the great to the plodders, look to win the approval of their coach. There is no higher praise.

  But on this day for the young Jorge there was. He recognised the figure standing next to the coach and applauding the try. It was his father. He could scarcely believe his eyes. His father was applauding him!

  His father became a regular spectator at Jorge’s games. What’s more, his father seemed impressed by what he saw. Jorge would have happily kneed, gouged and stomped his own coach if he had thought that would increase his father’s approval. He played every game as if the survival of the world depended on his efforts. At the end of each game, his father would nod to his son, shake hands with the coach, and disappear into his Mercedes with his minders. Jorge would glow with pride.

  In his final year of school, as he prepared for university, a fellow student was kidnapped, ransomed and finally executed by a group purporting to be fund-raisers for the People’s Revolutionary Army. Perhaps they were, but no one will ever know for sure, because they were comprehensively shot in the process of being arrested. Probably everybody in Argentina, bar the victims and their relatives, approved of the police action.

  ‘Let that be a lesson,’ they said righteously, without ever knowing at whom the lesson was aimed.

  The event, quite understandably, brought the spoilt, indulged child abruptly into the real world. He did something neither he nor his brothers had ever done before. He rang his father in his office.

  ‘I wondered if you would call,’ his father said, and Jorge would never know whether he had or not. Nevertheless, it put him at his ease and made him feel special. He told his father about the boy who had been abducted.

  ‘I am aware of this incident,’ his father said. ‘Now tell me, what has it taught you?’

  Jorge thought for a moment, his brain racing, knowing his father would judge him on his response.

  ‘I think your sons would do well to conceal the true identity of their father.’

  ‘Yes. Go on.’

  ‘Your sons would do well to be cautious with money and selective of their friends.’

  ‘Yes. And …?’

  Jorge didn’t know what to say next.

  ‘Perhaps your sons should have bodyguards,’ he blurted.

  ‘All my sons have bodyguards.’

  Jorge was dumbstruck. Who were they? He dared not ask, for if he was supposed to know his father wou
ld have already told him.

  ‘There is one more thing my sons would do well to observe. Do not discuss your past. Never mention the family home in La Recoleta nor the estancia. Do not discuss your father’s business either directly or indirectly. Do not discuss your friends. Your friends will be similarly instructed. Soon you will have your own apartment when you attend university. However, you will not go to Belgrano or St Andrews as you had planned. If these kidnappings continue, the private universities will be the first targets. It is too late for your brothers, but not for you. You will go to the University of Buenos Aires. There you will meet new people and widen your circle of acquaintances, and your past will lose its hold on you. Encourage this. You have done well to ring me and your answers show that your education has not been wasted. One more thing. Do not allow your socks to fall down around your rugby boots. It is undignified. Either endure the cramps or loosen your garters. Goodbye now.’

  Jorge’s father hung up, but even that failed to bring Jorge down from the clouds. He thought his father was the most wonderful man in the world. He couldn’t recall his father ever speaking to him for so long before.

  Three years would pass before he met Rosa. He spotted her in a student nightclub in Reconquista, and her sensuality reached across the crowd between them, igniting his nerve endings and turning his spine to jelly. Who knows what it is that one person sees that another misses? Why a glance can excite passions in one yet pass others by? Whatever Rosa did, it worked on Jorge. He began to stalk her, to hang out in places he knew she’d be. He’d follow her and spy on her. His head swam with her image. She consumed his thoughts. Nature had shaped her to attract a mate as surely as blossoms attract bees, and her particular blossom attracted Jorge.

  She wasn’t slim in the then fashionable Shrimpton mould. Her figure was far too full for the fashion gurus of the sixties, and nothing could conceal the majesty of her breasts or the outrageous curve of her hips. Jorge followed her to the cafeterias, and sat where he could watch her. She was animated and carefree, and unselfconscious in the way she’d play with strands of her long auburn hair. She drove Jorge mad.