Angel Eyes Read Free Page B

of the portenos were born. From death to life: there was a certain poetry to the notion, at least from an Argentine point of view.
    The jacarandas dripped moisture, but rain was on the way. A low rumble filled the air, its echoes reluctant to fade away.
    Ariel led the way as if he were a frequent visitor here. The oppressive darkness of marble and stone ornately carved in the French and Italian Renaissance styles gave way to a soft glow, increasing as they went forward.
    Soon they had come upon a crypt. Around it were laid out wreaths woven of flowers, bouquets, bunches of wildflowers. Under the trees where the rain could not penetrate, the flames of perhaps a hundred candles flickered. Into the crypt's face was carved, simply, Eva duarte.
    "Here is myth," Ariel said, pointing to the last resting place of Eva Peron. "More has been written-quite erroneously-about her than anyone in this country. Was she saint or demon?''
    "Perhaps she was neither," Tori said. "Perhaps she was just a woman."
    "Well, don't let the descamisados, the shiftless ones, hear you say that.'' He was speaking of the workers who had slavishly followed their hope, the Perons. "It would not be enough for them." Ariel turned to look at her. It had begun to rain, a fine pattering through the trees that made Tori think of airports and farewells. "You think it is not understandable? Everything else has been taken from them."
    "Even their children," Tori said. "Their future."
    "In a very real sense, yes. Those that disappeared in the night during Argentina's reign of terror will never be heard from again. The disappeared are now only mute witnesses to this country's savage history. Oppression stilled their voices forever." Ariel looked out across the sea of baroque headstones and crypts. "It's quite sad."
    Stone angels surrounded Tori and Ariel, their tiny carved wings encrusted with the soot of the city. Rain rolled down their cheeks like tears as they remembered the dead. The polished marble of the necropolis was milky, eerily luminous in the aqueous light from the massed candles.
    "Does this display mean that after all this time Peronism still lives?"
    "Only in a sense," Ariel said. "It is like a dream, you see. The descamisados continue to hope, but now the new leaders of Peronism veer from one political platform to another instead of facing the truth: that the true essence of Peronism is today an anachronism."
    Tori stared into the candles' flames. "Here the children paid for the sins of their fathers." She turned to look into his face. ''Where is the justice in that?''
    "We are in Argentina," Ariel said. "A place where justice is, at best, misunderstood."
    The rain drowned the candles' flames, and darkness once again enwrapped the city of the dead. Tori had the abrupt feeling that she and Ariel both knew what the worst was: justice used as a weapon to destroy, and as a shield behind which to obscure culpability.
    Ariel shivered as if the night had suddenly turned cold or a spirit had touched the back of his neck. "Perhaps it was a mistake to come here tonight," he said.
    * 'Do you mean Estilo's party or the Recoleta cemetery?'' Tori asked.
    Ariel smiled, and Tori realized that she liked his face. In repose it was a formidable visage: stern, strong-willed, with an almost defiant edge-seemingly far from the bored businessman he claimed to be. But when Ariel laughed, the forbidding cast disintegrated into a kind of boyish charm she found irresistible.
    She felt this last odd and a bit discomfiting. It had been a long time since she had found anyone irresistible.
    Ariel looked at her. "I believe you have the most extraordinary eyes I've ever seen," he said. "This afternoon they were turquoise, green, I thought. Now they are the color of cobalt."
    Tori laughed. "My father used to call me Angel Eyes. My brother and I had the same eyes."
    "Had?" Ariel had caught a tone as well as a tense.
    Tori put her head down into darkness. "My brother's dead."
    "I'm