Who Edu Was

Sanaë Lemoine assembles the fickle pieces of one particularly elusive man’s identity in a short story from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”

By Sanaë LemoineAugust 23, 2024

• LARB Lit

This story is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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WHAT DID YOU love about your father, I asked Camila, although she was three when he was disappeared. Would she have her own recollections or just the stories others told her, their memories shaping his imprint? Nine years of adults telling her who Edu was.

Without hesitation, she answered: How he took care of his shoes. He never wore the same shoes two days in a row, so they had time to breathe between. He would polish them once a week, wiping away the dirt and dust, polishing the tops until they shone but not too much, one shouldn’t draw attention to their gloss. Only the soles, unevenly worn down from his distinct way of walking, showed their age.

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I asked Maricel what she missed the most about her husband.

His voice. The way it was thick in the morning, how the first words caught in his throat, like moving through wet sand, and once it had cleared, it was the most beautiful sound, a sound that came from his wide chest, the chest of a former rugby player. A small cathedral producing a deep and rich melody that grounded me. It was a centrifugal force. How could I not anchor myself there?

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That he comforted me at night when I had nightmares, Camila said. Mamá would send me away without opening her eyes: Go to your bed! she’d say, in her commanding voice.

Camila learned to visit her father’s side and tap his face without rousing Maricel, who slept beside him. He would make a space for his daughter and, in the early hours of dawn, return Camila to her bed. It was their secret.

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Milo described how his brother would run baths for him. Edu was 11 years older, the firstborn and for a long time an only child. Their mother had endured several miscarriages, one in her second trimester, and when Milo stayed inside, it seemed like no small miracle. They waited for his arrival, counting the days and their luck. Edu’s task was to bathe his brother.

Imagine, while his other friends were out at the movies or chasing after girls, he stayed at home and prepared my bath. But he was distracted, listening to his records or lost in a book, and he would forget about the bath, so the water overflowed. We would run to sop up the water before it reached the wooden floorboards of the hallway. I had this impression of a neglectful brother who resented taking care of me, who never remembered to turn off the water. And then recently, I found a photo of us in the tub. I’m around four and Edu must be 15. We’re both naked and Edu sits behind me with his arms resting on the sides of the bath, to shield me from the hard ceramic edges. If you could see the look of pure delight on my face. It’s obvious that he took his job seriously.

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The thing about Edu, a close friend told me, is that he was kindest to Maricel. Not to everyone. This is an important distinction. He knew when to put down or set aside others to lift Maricel up. She was his priority. He would have thrown himself in front of a truck to save her. Once the three of us crossed the street and a car stopped at our knees, and Edu grew three feet taller, slammed his hand on the hood. This side appeared when he sensed Maricel was in danger, because otherwise Edu was gentle.

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What was he scared of? I asked his father. I’d caught him alone in the hallway, just as we finished lunch.

Dogs. Not of spiders or snakes or creatures you might typically fear. When Eduardo was little, my friends Osvaldo and Luisa invited us to lunch. They had a big dog who would often get into trouble for biting people. But they loved their dog, and so when guests came over, they tied him outside in the garden. The dog would circle around a tree, barking. And because they adored the dog, they also wanted to show him off; they couldn’t help it. That day, the dog—his name was Rolo—seemed subdued. They untied his leash and brought him inside. Eduardo was standing next to me. He was five or six, his head no higher than my hip. The moment our friend left the room, Rolo lunged forward and bit my leg. What good fortune that he bit me and not Eduardo, but of course, the blood staining my jeans impressed him. He was stunned by Rolo’s strength. Yes, the dog’s teeth broke the fabric of my jeans. Even years later, my son would tense at the sound of a distant bark.

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In my two weeks with Maricel, friends of hers visited and spoke to me as though I was one of theirs. They knew I had never met Edu, that this was my first time in their wrecked country—a word spoken with affection and irony. Perhaps because I was a new friend, flown in from across the world, they confided in me with unforeseen ease.

This is how it happened. First you were kidnapped, then brought to a secret detention center or camp where you were tortured. It didn’t matter that Edu came from a wealthy family of landowners with ties to the military. He taught history at the university, and perhaps that alone made him a subversive. After two months of being desaparecida, Maricel reappeared in a state prison where she awaited a trial that never came. Why she survived was not a question anyone dared ask.

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I was most afraid that he was not the person I thought him to be, Maricel said. When we met, he was older, in his thirties, and had lived through a marriage to someone I would never see and learned about through glimpses provided by friends. I knew his ex felt wronged and unloved; she had banished Edu from her life. It wasn’t just this troubling past, and a whole stretch of adulthood I had yet to experience, but an opaqueness that my close friends also noticed. The possibility of Edu withholding a part of himself. The rumors of him as a younger man didn’t surprise me. He danced with confidence and gave terrific embraces, and although he was rarely the most handsome man in the room, women wanted him. I worried that one day we would be in a situation where he could no longer keep his secret side tucked away. I would see it and we would both be confronted with whatever it was. I was most afraid of how I might act in that instant, my inability to forgive or the lengths to which I would go to protect myself.

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How much he loved Maricel, her childhood friend said. This was no ordinary love; it was complete admiration. On days when he didn’t teach, he rode the bus with her to work just to spend another hour in her presence, and then he read student papers on the return, even if it was rush hour and he was stuck in traffic. Whenever they said goodbye in public, he would follow her with his eyes until she disappeared behind a corner or into a building. Sometimes she turned around to check that he was still looking. And that moment, when they caught each other looking, was enough to make you embarrassed of your own marriage. My husband certainly never glances at me that way.

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Early in their relationship, Edu lied to Maricel.

I asked him a simple but serious question, and he looked into my eyes and answered with a lie. There was no pause; the lie came out naturally. And later, when I discovered it, he insisted it was an omission, a half-truth, nothing to be up in arms about. The more we spoke and the more I pushed back, describing the betrayal I felt, how I’d put myself blindly in his hands, the more he agreed with me. It was a blatant lie and he had not been forthcoming. Edu spent the rest of his life proving to me that I could trust him, sometimes telling me things I didn’t need to know, but I never shook this feeling of suspicion. Whenever I remembered how I had gulped his words the way one breathes air, I would shudder.

And why do you think he lied to you?

Because he was afraid of losing me. We had been together a few months, our bond was fragile, and he sensed that it would not withstand the truth. He was right—had he told me the truth then, I would have walked away.

Did you tell him that?

Yes, Maricel answered.

I wondered if knowing this made Edu more likely to conceal himself.

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Not long after Maricel was released from prison in 1982, a man came to see her.

He stopped by the building and told the portero he was a friend of ours, so I let him in. I didn’t recognize this man. Somehow he had found my new address. He claimed to be a close friend of Edu’s, said they belonged to a swim club in the ’70s. I’d never known Edu to be part of a club, but this man insisted that they met once a month to swim laps for a half hour, and then drank beer at a nearby restaurant. He recounted specific details that only someone close to him would have known: that he drank his coffee very sweet, like his maté; that he read everything, even poetry and magazines, with a pen, writing in the margins; that he hated the feel of salt on his skin and needed to wipe it off or rinse immediately after being in the ocean. We spoke for an hour. I told him Edu had been missing for six years. He nodded, saying he had wanted to meet me because Edu so often spoke about how intelligent and beautiful I was. The man laughed, saying he would tease his friend. Since he’d never met me, he thought I must be an imaginary wife, an idealized version, but now he could see those qualities Edu had described over and over again. At your swim club, I said, staring at him. As the man stood to leave, he asked if I knew that my husband was afraid of the dark. I was surprised. It didn’t sound like him, but we had never been confronted with pitch-black darkness; there was always some streetlight coming through the windows. I’d never blindfolded him. Yes, the man said, being in the dark annihilated him. I thought that was a strange word, but the man had already pressed the button for the elevator. Edu loved the sun, I replied, unsure of what else to say. Before the elevator doors closed, the man said he would come back. It occurred to me that perhaps he had known Edu not from a swim club but from the detention center. I’ve tried to find him. All I remember is his name, Carlos, and the first letter of his last name, P.

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The entrance to our old apartment building had high ceilings and mirrors on all the walls. I would scream at the top of my lungs, staring at my reflection, listening to the echo of my voice. He didn’t care and he let me scream even when the neighbors walked by, shaking their heads in horror.

Edu, you really need to restrain your daughter, Camila said, imitating them.

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Former students told me about his calm demeanor, how they were very anxious in the weeks after the military coup, when abductions became more frequent. How terrified they were to walk down the street. Edu never lost his composure. Day after day, he reassured them: There will always be a solution, we are here to think and learn. His optimism and belief in the present buoyed them until one day when he did not come to class. Our professor was taken in broad daylight, the students said, they opened the door and pulled him out of his car.

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When he woke up, Edu would say: Good morning, my love, how did you sleep? It was imperative that I tell him how I had slept, a ritual of sorts, and sometimes I lied to him, saying that I had slept poorly when in fact the night had been one long stroke. After he was taken, I struggled to stay asleep. Often the exhaustion bludgeoned me, but then I would wake at two or three in the morning, my body full of adrenaline, heart banging into my ears.

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No one was as skilled at ironing and folding clothes, Camila said. If only you could’ve seen those shirts.

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When he felt threatened, Maricel told me, he would become a little boy. It was instantaneous, how quickly he went from the mature, reasonable Edu to a sullen child with the shortest fuse. He would want to leave right away; in seconds, he’d throw on his jacket and step into his shoes and be almost out the door, as though the argument had caused irreparable offense. But all I had to do was say one word, give him the slightest opening, remind him of my love, and then he returned. Sometimes we would start making love with his jacket and shoes still on.

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After the charges were dropped and Maricel was released, she had felt depressed. She’d lost years of her life and her husband was gone. How could she not see it that way? She carried psychological and physical wounds from the torture: irregular heartbeats, sudden pain in her chest. During that first week, as she settled into a temporary apartment, she had gone to a café she and Edu had loved. It was a short walk from their old home where Camila was born and raised until she went to live with her great aunt in La Plata while Maricel was imprisoned.

She was worried that it would feel different, the memory not aligning with the reality six years later, but it was the same as before, even the servers, barely aged. Every day she returned to the café and ordered a coffee and medialuna. She sat outside across the street from a plaza filled with trees. By late morning, the sun had shifted from behind a large tree and shone onto the front tables where she sat.

I can’t find the words to describe the particular warmth of light as it shines through the leaves and hits your bare skin. In prison, I told myself that all I needed was to be outside with one tree. And there I was, with more trees than I could count.

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That night, as though she could peer into my head, Maricel said: Ama, you and Edu would’ve gotten along.

It reminded me of how she spoke when we first met, almost six months ago—with authority and often saying my name at the beginning or end of a sentence. Later, I learned it was the way she addressed all her friends, and I wondered if it was a mark of affection, to make us feel at the center of her world, or perhaps it was nothing more than a thoughtless mannerism.

What makes you think that? I asked, touched by her declaration.

Because he loved to tell stories and you are an attentive listener. Because you are gullible and love to be carried away by someone else.

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Featured image: Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. A Dance in the Country, ca. 1755. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 1980, the Met Museum (1980.67). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed August 20, 2024. Image has been cropped.