Timote: A Novel

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 He comes out and looks at his comrades. There they are, seated around the large dining room table, biding their time, like hunters ready to get on with it and get back to town, leave the jungle. The jungle is always dangerous—strange territory where you plunge in with courage but almost always exit defeated. The time has come. Let us suppose that Firmenich says, “We can’t continue to put this matter off.” Ramus picks up a bottle of beer and takes a long, hard swallow. Some foam comes out from the sides of his mouth, as though he were a mad dog. Something he’s not. He’s not mad. He only knows he doesn’t want to stay here. He sets the bottle down noisily and exhales violently. It’s not a burp but something like the sound of someone who’s fed up, a vulgar and expressive noise that only means one thing: now, immediately, let’s not waste any more time. Let’s dispatch the executioner to fucking hell. The other comrade, “Julio,” is not any gentler and doesn’t show any more patience. He even utters the harshest and most direct words, the ones that could most upset Fernando: “It’s only one shot, Fernando. One shot and we’re out of here.” Ramus doesn’t say a thing. Now, after a long reach, he’s started to read one of the many newspapers from Buenos Aires. He’s concerned his friend is letting him down. Maybe he’s taken josé pablo feinmann 184 | | pity on Aramburu. He talked to him too much. That was a mistake. If you’ve got to kill someone, kill him. If you start talking with him, he becomes something that’s hard to kill, something that upsets you and marks you: a guy, a human being. You’ve got to kill objectives, not persons. Ideologies, not human beings. If the guy you’ve got to kill, someone who’s a tactical means, becomes an end in himself, you’ve blown it. You make him strategic. You don’t kill him. Come on, you fool. Don’t kill Aramburu; kill the person who shot Valle. The person who organized the June 1955 bombing. The person who made off with Evita’s body. Damn it, Fernando, it’s not up to me to give you a list of what you already know by heart! We tried him and we condemned him on the basis of that list of atrocities. Stop digging into his soul, you jerk. What do you hope to achieve? To go back in time? To discover in some way his humanity. If he has one, it’s not been much good to him. It never kept him from being the first-class son of a bitch he always was. Fernando, despite feeling all those pressures weighing down on him, continues to exercise authority. He will do what he has to do. What he needs to do. Whether the others like it or not. To their surprise, he says, “I’ll be right back. Wait for me. I won’t take long.” “What are you going to do?” Firmenich asks. “Bad question, Pepe. Because there’s only one answer: it’s my business.” He walks away. He walks the long corridor in solitude and goes into a small room where he used to stay when he visited La Celma. In some way it’s his room. The one his friend and the Ramus family happily assign to him every time he shows up there. It’s got the bareness , austerity, and harsh minimalism of a cloister. He will search t i m o t e| | 185 there for that sacred entity of which he spoke so imprudently with the Catholic general, who had the temerity—half in a swaggering way and half in his simple, powerful belief as a practicing Catholic—to speak to him of the fear of God. The fear, as he is stunned and troubled to discover, is with him. The only way to confront it is to kneel down next to the bed and do something that he hasn’t done for a long time, something he always did as a child, from the time he was a kid, but which he will do once again, at that moment, before killing the General who is an assassin : pray. ...