Holy City by Guillermo Orsi

wasn’t even Bolivian. He was from Jujuy in Argentina, but all indians are the same, aren’t they? If you follow me.”
    â€œYes, I follow you … mind out for that bus, it’s almost on top of us!”
    Chucho swung his arms and returned to more important matters.
    â€œThe
mestizo
did his best to ingratiate himself, but their dirty blood always gives them away. Those shifty eyes they have, they never look you in the face. When he had the nerve to ask me for Catalina’s hand—I’m the eldest, you see, and with the old man pushing up the daisies I’m the one in charge in the family—I bust his nose with this fist here, see?” He shows Verónica his left hand, taking it off the steering wheel to do so. The car bounces off the avenue’s central reservation. “I hit him with the jack I use for the car. He didn’t cause any more trouble. He disappeared for good.”
    â€œWhat about Catalina?”
    â€œShe cried for a while, but now she’s got a proper boyfriend, a skinny guy from a good family. They live out in San Isidro, but he’s not one ofthose long-haired youths you often get there. He’s a skinhead and knows what’s what.”
    â€œI can imagine.”
    â€œYou should see him! I think the kid’s German, or ought to be. He knows the whole history of Germany. Those are proper countries, aren’t they,
doctora?
No nonsense from Jews or Commies: look how they pulled down the wall they’d built. There may be democracy here now, but it won’t last.”
    â€œSo the boy’s from a good family?”
    â€œThe best in San Isidro.”

5
    Not all the vehicles unload their contents at the market. One gray pickup, with seats for carrying workmen, turns left a few meters before it reaches the stalls. It travels along a track for another five hundred meters, then makes its way into the Descamisados de América shanty town, a running sore on the wet ground close to the bank of Argentina’s most polluted river; a tumor made up of hundreds of shacks, most of which are built out of cardboard, wood from fruit crates, planks stolen from construction sites and lots of bits of metal. Some of the roofs are corrugated iron, but the rest is scrap from the clandestine car yards which abound in the desolate realms of Buenos Aires Province.
    The pick-up which turned left is a latest model Hiatsu 4×4. Air conditioning on so that the German couple inside reach their destination comfortably and without becoming dehydrated. Their carefree wandering round the newly laid-out streets of Puerto Madero in thecenter of Buenos Aires was rudely interrupted by four armed men who abducted them in broad daylight, wearing no masks and only two hundred meters from a naval guardhouse.
    The German couple had left their five-star hotel at 10 a.m., following the sort of abundant breakfast that only northern Europeans can stomach. They wanted to stretch their legs for a while before they sat down again in a restaurant where for a modest twenty dollars tourists can stuff themselves with the kind of juicy rump or sirloin steaks they could not get for three times as much in Europe.
    The language of Goethe is not very popular in Argentina, despite the considerable number of German immigrants who settled in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires and in the provinces of Córdoba and Rio Negro, drawn to Argentina by the fall of the Third Reich and guarantees from the government of the time that they would not be bothered by the fanatical Jews who after the war tried desperately to seek redress for some of the Nazi atrocities. The couple cried out for help in German, but before any polyglot could translate their pleas, they were beaten into silence and forced into the Hiatsu. Several passersby looked on indifferently, turning away from them just as their parents had done back during the dictatorship in the 1970s, even though the people being kidnapped then were