Free The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

human foot has touched it in centuries. They come to a halt in front of a metal door. Norman lights a match, opens the door, and they find themselves in a tiny space that only has room for a camp bed, a wash-basin, a tiny wardrobe, a few books.
    ‘Raúl spent almost a month in here.’
    Carvalho tries to pick up some trace of the fugitive, some message left imprinted on the objects in the room. But he doesn’t feel the slightest vibration.
    ‘Did he tell you what he wanted to do, or why he had come back?’
    ‘He said it was on impulse. Partly it was because he was horrified that the military leaders had been pardoned, but I don’t know if that was the real reason. He talked about getting his daughter back, but I think it was he himself he wanted to rediscover, to find his role in the film of events again. He also talked about his father. The old man surprised me, he said. He didn’t realize that everything came to an end that night. In that freeze frame.’
    When Alma speaks, it’s with a bitter voice.
    ‘Write that down too, it’s brilliant.’
    She is caressing some of the books on the table. Picks up A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges. Then suddenly puts it down and turns to face the two men.
    ‘We have to start at the beginning. Some day he’s bound to come back and visit you, Norman, or the other two.’
    ‘Why not you?’
    Alma cannot look Carvalho in the face. Instead, she glances towards Norman, as if they’re sharing a secret. Norman replies for her: ‘It wouldn’t be good for him to see Alma. She looks too much like Berta.’
    But Carvalho cannot help staring at Alma’s tortured face, or listening for the words she finds it impossible to say.
    The dim lights of the Boca seem to have been reluctantly lit. They illuminate restaurant fronts that would be garish were it not for the eternal damp of the river. Away from the lights, the rest of the neighbourhood is mostly corrugated iron, with rusty patches that speak of having to survive without any sense of greatness apart from the soccer victories of Boca Juniors in a stadium that’s seen better days, and stands in the midst of a desolate hotchpotch of wasteland. The restaurant doors cast oblongs of yellow light on the pavements where Alma and Carvalho are walking. From inside they hear snatches of secret bandoneon music, smell the charcoal embers and the crucified carcasses of roasting lambs.
    ‘Remember Pignatari’s address, but don’t keep my piece of paper.’
    ‘We’re in a democracy now’
    ‘A controlled one. People are frightened of having any memory. Raúl’s return has stirred too many memories. Don’t think it’s a political problem: it’s a fear of remembering.’
    ‘The victors appropriate the memory of the defeated, and when they finally do get it back, it’s changed beyond all recognition. Do you think someone is really out to get him?’
    ‘It’s possible. Those rats, the ones he spent so long studying. He wrote a treatise on animal behaviour in completely alien situations. Theoretically, he was the best prepared of all of us to face what happened, but he broke down.’
    ‘What about Norman?’
    ‘He broke down too, but we all knew he would; Berta had already foreseen it. She thought she knew as much about militant behaviour as her husband did about rats. Norman was never a threat, and the military understood that. Now he’s abandoned architecture for the theatre. As a student, he wanted to build the utopiaLe Corbusier had imagined for Buenos Aires. He wanted to create the Ville Verte here where the soil is so rich and the trees are larger than life. Now he puts on plays in our Off Off theatres, plays that will probably never get a proper audience, and earns his living as a showman, presenting the acts in a tango cabaret in San Telmo: Tango Amigo, it’s called.’
    ‘There you go with the tango again. You refuse to accept it, you want to get away from it, and yet you always come back to it.’
    ‘The