Excerpt from Hades, Argentina by Daniel Loedel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But I must have had at least a hunch that the borders I'd cross on this journey weren't the standard ones. Since, on a semi-conscious whim I told myself was purely nostalgic, I wound up packing—stuffed into the bottom of my suitcase as if I were hiding it—the fake passport the Colonel had given me when I fled from Argentina, now almost exactly a decade before.

Two

I'd never flown into Buenos Aires, and I'd only flown out of it the once, making the experience of returning strange from the start. Everything at the airport gave off a sense of foreignness, uncharted waters. Though I showed my real, recently renewed Argentine passport to the immigration officer, for instance, he stared at it a while, seemingly uncertain what to do about the fact that his would be the first Argentine stamp on it. There was also the clerk at the currency exchange who looked at me suspiciously because I counted the bills she gave me so many times, convinced the exchange rate couldn't be the nearly one-to-one ratio it evidently was, and the chatty young cab driver who snuck a similar glance in his rearview mirror when I said I didn't want to talk, citing my fatigue.

That wasn't the real reason, obviously. Neither was my unexpected difficulty with the swirly up-and-down quality of his accent. It was the sights as we got closer, the city in bright 9am light. That time of day had bad associations for me here, filled me with a Pavlovian kind of dread. The loudness of passing Vespas and motorbikes, so much more frequent than in New York, the radios broadcasting from car windows, even the sweaters tied fashionably over men's shoulders—mine was crumpled into my backpack with the sleeves sticking out, and it felt like yet another way to mark me as an outsider.

I'd nourished hopes of taking a long walk like I used to, or sitting under one of those Coca-Cola umbrellas outside a café to have a coffee and reflect, give the journey a full-circle kind of feel. But instead I spent my first couple hours back in Buenos Aires in my stuffy hotel room, working on a translation with the shades drawn and the lamp on, much as I might at home.
And because everything seemed so weird and out-of-place to me already, I didn't dwell much on the brochure on the desk advertising tours of the Recoleta Cemetery, the last place I'd seen the Colonel before escaping Argentina. Nor, when I threw it out in the otherwise empty trash, the small, half-drained bottle of Johnnie Walker, his preferred liquor for special occasions. I merely thought, on confirming there looked to be a vacant spot in the minibar: I hope they don't charge me for this.

*

Hospital Alemán was just a twenty-minute walk from my hotel, but I took a cab nonetheless. I was still uneasy; for all the death I'd witnessed, I'd barely seen any in hospitals, and I hadn't spent much time in them since my college years, the result being I lost my way twice looking for Pichuca's room.

It was a private one, probably paid for by Pichuca's sister, Cecilia, and her wealthy husband. They were coldly conservative, the type that had called those in the movements fighting the regime terrorists, and at first I thought that was why they stared at me so intensely when I entered. Then I realized the whole room was staring.

The exception was Pichuca. She was a tiny, hollowed-out husk on the bed, covered in tubes, and her eyes were closed.

"Am I—?" I began, before the answer became obvious: of course I was too late.

"Tomás?" Cecilia said, making a show of squinting at me as she came closer. "Tomás Orilla?"
"Is he who Abuela was talking about?" a young girl asked behind her. She looked about ten, and though she'd implied Pichuca was her grandmother, I couldn't locate either daughter's features in her—no blue eyes or round cheeks or anything else. She was a brunette with a sharp chin and broad forehead, and she was studying me with even more curiosity than the rest of them.

Excerpted from Hades, Argentina by Daniel Loedel. Copyright © 2021 by Daniel Loedel. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.