–Garcia Mejuto, he said, the anguish hidden by the sweets he rolled between his teeth and the handkerchief covering the mouthpiece. 
Note down the spot where you’ll leave the money, thirty thousand pesos. And don’t try to be clever***
Alicia Plante’s book has two settings, one in Tigre, on the Tigre delta, a town 30 kilometres north of Bueno Aires Where a labyrinth of canals twist and turn between the islands and where the wooden houses built on stilts and much appreciated by the city dwellers, the second setting is in Buenos Aires itself.
This book was read as part of Spanish lit month 2017
There are two stories that will meet up later in the development, an initial story having its roots in the dictatorship, Raúl lived with his mother in Buenos Aires and remembered one day, when he was young, having seen his neighbour the Gallego , who had been a supporter of Franco coming home with a young baby, this was Uruguay in the mid seventies and Raúl’s mother was sure it was a stolen baby:
–She had heard things about this, friends from the parish knew women who had grouped together to look for their missing children, young women, mostly students or workers who weren’t in agreement with the military takeover….And she had also heard that when the young women were pregnant, their new burns were taken away from them and the military kept them for themselves.***
The second story was of a couple who had committed suicide in their wooden house in Tigre. Julia who also owned a house nearby was talking with Cadenas, the local handy man, who doesn’t believe the official version of the man shooting himself and also the blond he was found with:
–A bloke who every chance he gets comes to sleep in his run down house “to make the best of it”, he said, and who turns up one morning on the water bus with his clothes, his wellington boots some books and a type writer…Did you know he was a writer? Anyway what I wanted to say, Julia, was I don’t swallow that story, this bloke who was happy, all of a sudden he shoots himself…and whilst he was about it he bumps of the blond in the high heels***
As these two stories wind towards each other, we learn that there is only one story and it doesn’t reinforce our faith in human nature. Alicia Plante puts together some very good descriptions of people as crimes from the murky past come to the surface and those involved will use their old methods to keep them hidden.
First Published in Spanish as “Una Mancha Más” in 2011 by Adriana Hidalgo S.A.
Translated into French by François Gaudry as “Les Eaux Troubles du Tigre” and published by éditions Métailié in 2016
*** My translation
South of Paris books 