ANDREW GRAHAM-YOOLL
393
the breeze sang a mournful tune in the trees and where families stopped
for picnics on Sundays.
The "mess"
(el lio),
as one policeman later referred to what had
once been a body, had been taken out of the gutted car. A wisp of smoke
rose from a smoldering cable under the half-open hood. The whole
mass of metal was still warm, radiating a heat that was suddenly
comfortable in that chill and shadowy place at the start of a very hot
summer day. The body was on a stretcher without a cover, waiting for a
medical officer to wave it away to a crematorium where the job could
be finished.
As 1 went closer, the two policemen, shivering more from the
nervous strain of being stationed there since the first gray light than
from the strange chill, aimed their guns at me and ordered that 1stop at
about six paces from the stretcher. 1was standing in the ashes of a wide
scorched circle of burnt grass. The leaves of the trees in a cluster fifteen
yards away were burned brown and, higher up, wilted right to the top
of the tallest eucalyptus. (I am worried that my memory no longer
holds a good picture of that place, a man-made wood, fifteen miles
from the center of Buenos Aires, 500 yards from the highway to the
airport. Groups, like bunches, of casuarina trees and eucalyptus rose
out of the long grass, with cedars and poplars adding shade.
It
had
beauty at a distance. But Sunday crowds, from the road and from the
nearby public swimming pools and sports grounds, littered it with
empty bottles, old cans, and newspaper used as an emergency substitute
for toilet tissue. But a description of the woods's garden charm mixed
with the residue of urban squalor escapes me.)
1 told the police that 1was a journalist and wanted to have a look. 1
still smoked then and had a pack of cigarettes. 1 lit one and offered the
pack, from six paces. "Or have you had enough smoke?" 1 cracked.
(Why do the crudest remarks always come to mind at times that
demand the caution of solemnity-or do they only come to my mind?)
"Don't laugh," 1 was scolded. "Can't you see how he is, poor thing
(pobrecito)?"
I was a little rattled that they should refer
to
it as "him."
"You mustn't laugh, because you never know what might happen to
you," one policeman said. "You never know who he might have been."
I shivered too. "He must have been involved," I said, trying to gain
their trust, though a little disgusted with myself for currying favor
with the two policemen by appearing to discuss what happened from
"their" angle. "You never know what people get involved in. That's
why one has to be careful nowadays," came one policeman's reply. "In
the old days my father kept me under close scrutiny and 1 respected
