A Quiet Flame

“Love is all the reason you need, angel. It’s the only reason in the world that exists for you to trust me. That might not be the kind of reason that would satisfy a Greek in a chiton. I don’t know if you could ever use that kind of reason as the basis for a truth that exists outside of ourselves. But all I know is that you have to give it a chance if you’re to know if someone is what we want or what we think we want. It needs a little time. Let’s just make it this. Come with me for just a few days. As if we were just going back on the train to Tucumán. And then, if it doesn’t work out, you can say to hell with you, Gunther, I’m going back to Buenos Aires because I’d rather die than be with a man like you. So, don’t say another word just now. Think carefully about what I’ve said. Speak to your father. I did. He’ll give you some good advice. Fathers usually do. I’ll buy you a ticket for tonight’s boat. We can be in Montevideo in less time than it takes to say that I’ll wait for you at the CNFA office.”

And then I left.

26 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

THAT NIGHT IT RAINED HEAVILY. The river was calm. The tide and the moon were full. Somewhere on the other side of the Plate was Uruguay. I stood in the office of the CNFA, staring out of the window at the pier and the boat and the waves lapping at the jetty. I kept half an eye on the clock. With each shuddering movement of the second hand, I felt my hopes ebbing away. I wasn’t the first man to be stood up by a woman. I wouldn’t be the last. That’s how poetry gets written.

What are you supposed to do when you know you’ll be murdered if you stay behind to be with a girl you love? Meet death together, like you were both in some crummy movie? It doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to walk out of the picture, hand in hand, to the sound of some invisible choir heralding your joint arrival in paradise. When death comes, it’s usually nasty and brutish and sharp. I should know. I’d seen it often enough.

A voice came on the Tannoy loudspeaker. The last call for passengers on the twenty-one hundred to Montevideo.

She wasn’t coming.

I walked along the pier and felt it move under my feet as if I had been standing on the breathing chest of some enormous giant. Rain sprayed my face. A melancholy rain, like the tears of the night wind that stirred my hair. I stepped off Argentina and into the boat. There were other passengers, but I didn’t notice them. Instead, I remained on deck, waiting for the miracle that wasn’t going to happen. I even started to hope that the colonel might show up to see me off so that I could beg for Anna’s life. But he didn’t come, either.

The rumbling engines roared into life. They were casting off our ties. Water stirred in a maelstrom underneath the boat, and we lurched away from the pier. From Buenos Aires. From her. We retreated into darkness like some abandoned, pagan thing, cast adrift from the world of men. Overwhelmed with self-pity and confusion and struggle and flight, I almost threw myself over the side and into the sea, in the hope of swimming to the vast edges of the shore. Instead, I went below.

In the galley, a steward lit a little gas ring to boil some water for coffee. The blue flame girdling the pot tickled it quietly. And I pictured that other flame. The small, quiet flame inside me that burned with neither joy, nor peace, nor hope, nor help from lonely pain. Not for Adolf Hitler. But for her. It burned for her.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I am indebted to Uki Goñi’s excellent book The Real ODESSA for much of my information about Nazis in Argentina. For anybody writing about this subject, it is the one indispensable source.

Directive 11, signed into existence by the Argentine foreign minister José María Cantilo, on July 12, 1938, condemned as many as two hundred thousand European Jews to death. Its existence is denied by some to this day.

Throughout World War II, rumors persisted of a concentration camp for Jews in Argentina’s remote forests. According to Uki Goñi, Argentine government ministers demanded a “solution to the Jewish problem” in the country. The existence of such a camp has never been confirmed.

According to Gerald Posner and John Ware’s authoritative biography Mengele, huge quantities of Nazi loot almost certainly fell under the control of the Peróns. Four of the Argentine-German trustees of the Nazi money were murdered between 1949 and 1952.

Eva Perón developed uterine cancer in 1950. Despite a hysterectomy performed by the eminent American surgeon George T. Pack, her cancer returned rapidly. She developed lung metastasis and was the first Argentinean to undergo chemotherapy (a novel procedure at the time). All available treatment notwithstanding, she died at the age of thirty-three, on July 26, 1952.