Excerpt
Prologue
News of the June 1956 secret executions first came to me by chance,
toward the end of that year, in a La Plata café where people played
chess, talked more about Keres and Nimzowitsch than Aramburu
and Rojas, and the only military maneuver that enjoyed any kind
of renown was Schlechter’s bayonet attack in the Sicilian Defense.1
Six months earlier, in that same place, we’d been startled around
midnight by the shooting nearby that launched the assault on the
Second Division Command and the police department—Valle’s
failed rebellion.2 I remember how we left en masse, chess players,
card players, and everyday customers, to see what the celebration
was all about; how, the closer we got to San Martín Square, the
more serious we were and the smaller our group had become; and
how, when I finally got across the square, I was alone. When I
reached the bus station there were several more of us again, including
a poor dark-skinned boy in a guard’s uniform who hid behind
his goggles saying that, revolution or not, no one was going to take
away his gun—a handsome 1901 Mauser.
I remember finding myself alone once more, in the darkness of
Fifty-Fourth Street, just three blocks away from my house, which I
kept wanting to get to and finally reached two hours later amid the
smell of lime trees that always made me nervous, and did so on that
night even more than usual. I remember the irrepressible will of
my legs, the preference they showed at every street for the bus station,
returning to it on their own two or three times. But each time
they went a bit farther before turning back, until they didn’t need
to go back because we had gone past the line of fire and arrived at
my house. My house was worse than the café and worse than the
bus station because there were soldiers on the roof and also in the
kitchen and the bedrooms, but mainly in the bathroom. Since then
I’ve developed an aversion to houses that face police departments,
headquarters, or barracks.
I also haven’t forgotten how, standing by the window blinds,
I heard a recruit dying in the street who did not say “Long live
the nation!” but instead: “Don’t leave me here alone, you sons of
bitches.”
After that, I don’t want to remember anything else—not the
announcer’s voice at dawn reporting that eighteen civilians had
been executed in Lanús, nor the wave of blood that flooded the
country up until Valle’s death. It’s too much for a single night. I’m
not interested in Valle. I’m not interested in Perón, I’m not interested
in revolution. Can I go back to playing chess?
I can. Back to chess and the fantasy literature I read, back to the
detective stories I write, back to the “serious” novel I plan to draft
in the next few years, back to the other things that I do to earn a
living and that I call journalism, even though that’s not what it is.
Violence has spattered my walls, there are bullet holes in the windows,
I’ve seen a car full of holes with a man inside it whose brains
were spilling out—but it’s only chance that has put all this before my
eyes. It could have happened a hundred kilometers away, it could
have happened when I wasn’t there.
Six months later, on a suffocating summer night with a glass of
beer in front of him, a man says to me:
—One of the executed men is alive.
I don’t know what it is about this vague, remote, highly unlikely
story that manages to draw me in. I don’t know why I ask to talk to
that man, why I end up talking to Juan Carlos Livraga.
But afterward I do know why. I look at that face, the hole in his
cheek, the bigger hole in his throat, his broken mouth and dull eyes
where a shadow of death still lingers. I feel insulted, just as I felt
without realizing it when I heard that chilling cry while standing
behind the blinds.
Livraga tells me his unbelievable story; I believe it on the spot.
And right there the investigation, this book, is born. The long
night of June 9 comes back over me, pulls me out of “the soft quiet
seasons” for a second time. Now I won’t think about anything else
for almost a year; I’ll leave my house and my job behind; I’ll go by
the name Francisco Freyre; I’ll have a fake ID with that name on it;
a friend will lend me his house in Tigre; I’ll live on a frozen ranch
in Merlo for two months; I’ll carry a gun; and at every moment the
characters of the story will come back to me obsessively: Livraga
covered in blood walking through that never-ending alley he took
to escape death, the other man who survived with him by running
back into the field amid the gunfire, and those who survived without
his knowing about it, and those who didn’t survive.
Because what Livraga knows is that there was a bunch of them,
that they were taken out to be shot, that there were about ten of
them taken out, and that he and Giunta were still alive. That’s the
story I hear him repeat before the judge one morning when I say I’m
Livraga’s cousin so they let me into the court where everything is
infused with a sense of discretion and skepticism. The story sounds
a bit more absurd here, a little more lush, and I can see the judge
doubting it, right up until Livraga’s voice climbs over that grueling
hill, to where all that’s left is a sob, and he makes a gesture to take
off his clothes so that everyone can see the other gunshot wound.
Then we all feel ashamed, the judge seems to be moved, and I feel
myself moved again by the tragedy that has befallen my cousin.
That’s the story I write feverishly and in one sitting so that no
one beats me to it, but that later gets more wrinkled every day in
my pocket because I walk around all of Buenos Aires with it and
hardly anyone wants to know about it, let alone publish it. You
begin to believe in the crime novels you’ve read or written, and
think that a story like this, with a talking dead man, is going to be
fought over by the presses. You think you’re running a race against
time, that at any given moment a big newspaper is going to send out
a dozen reporters and photographers, just like in the movies. But
instead you find that no one wants anything to do with it.
It’s funny, really, to read through all the newspapers twelve years
later and see that this story doesn’t exist and never did.
So I wander into increasingly remote outskirts of journalism until
finally I walk into a basement on Leandro Alem Avenue where they
are putting out a union pamphlet, and I find a man who’s willing to
take the risk. He is trembling and sweating because he’s no movie
hero either, just a man who is willing to take the risk, and that’s
worth more than a movie hero. And the story is printed, a flurry of
little yellow leaflets in the kiosks: badly designed, with no signature,
and with all the headings changed, but it’s printed. I look at it affectionately
as it’s snatched up by ten thousand anonymous hands.
But I’ve had even more luck than that. There is a young journalist
named Enriqueta Muñiz who has been with me from the very beginning
and has put herself entirely on the line. It is difficult to do her
justice in just a few sentences. I simply want to say that if I have written
“I did,” “I went,” “I discovered” anywhere in this book, it should
all be read as “We did,” “We went,” “We discovered.” There were several
important things that she got alone, like testimonies from Troxler,
Benavídez, and Gavino, who were all in exile. At the time, I didn’t see
the world as an ordered sequence of guarantees and certainties, but
rather as the exact opposite. In Enriqueta Muñiz I found the security,
bravery, and intelligence that seemed so hard to come by.
So one afternoon we take the train to José León Suárez and bring
a camera with us, along with a little map that Livraga has drawn
up for us in pencil, a detailed bus driver’s map. He has marked the
roads and rail crossings for us, as well as a grove and an X where
it all happened. At dusk, we walk about eight blocks along a paved
road, catch sight of the tall, dark row of eucalyptus trees that the
executioner Rodríguez Moreno had deemed “an appropriate place
for the task” (namely, the task of shooting them), and find ourselves
in front of a sea of tin cans and delusions. One of the greatest delusions
was the notion that a place like this cannot remain so calm, so
quiet and forgotten beneath the setting sun, without someone keeping
watch over the history that is imprisoned in the garbage that
glistens with a false tide of thoughtfully gleaming dead metals. But
Enriqueta says “It happened here,” and casually sits down on the
ground so that I can take a picnic photo of her because, just at that
moment, a tall sullen man with a big sullen dog walks by. I don’t
know why one notices these things. But this was where it happened,
and Livraga’s story feels more real now: here was the path, over
there was the ditch, the garbage dump and the night all around us.
The following day we go see the other survivor, Miguel Ángel
Giunta, who greets us by slamming the door in our faces. He doesn’t
believe us when we tell him we’re journalists and asks for credentials
that we don’t have. I don’t know what it is that we say to him
through the screen door, what vow of silence, what hidden key, that
gets him to gradually open the door and start to come out, which
takes about half an hour, and to talk, which takes much longer.
It kills you to listen to Giunta because you get the feeling you’re
watching a movie that has been rolling and rolling in his head since
the night it was filmed and can’t be stopped. All the tiny details are
there: the faces, the lights, the field, the small noises, the cold and
the heat, the escape from among the tin cans, the smell of gunpowder,
and panic. You get the feeling that once he finishes he’s going
to start again from the beginning, just as the endless loop must
start over again in his head: “This is how they executed me.” But
the more upsetting thing is the affront to his person that this man
carries within him, how he has been hurt by the mistake they made
with him, because after all he’s a decent man who wasn’t even a
Peronist, “and you can ask anybody, they’d tell you who I am.” But
actually we’re not sure about this anymore because there appear to
be two Giuntas, the one who is talking fervently as he acts out this
movie for us, and the other one who is sometimes distracted and
manages to smile and crack a joke or two, like old times.
It seems like the story could end here because there is no more
to tell. Two survivors, and the rest are dead. I could publish the
interview with Giunta and go back to that abandoned chess game
in the café from a month ago. But it’s not over. At the last minute
Giunta mentions a belief he has, not something he knows for sure,
but something he has imagined or heard murmured: there is a third
man who survived.
Meanwhile, the great picana god and its submachine guns begin
to roar from La Plata.3 My story floats on leaflets through corridors
at Police Headquarters, and Lieutenant Colonel Fernández Suárez
wants to know what the fuss is all about. The article wasn’t signed,
but my initials appeared at the bottom of the original copies. There
was a journalist working at the newspaper office who had the same
initials, only his were ordered differently: J. W. R. He awakes one
morning to an interesting assortment of rifles and other syllogistic
tools, and his spirit experiences that surge of emotion before the
revelation of a truth. They make him come out in his underwear
and put him on a flight to La Plata where he’s brought to Police
Headquarters. They sit him down in an armchair opposite the Lieutenant
Colonel, who says to him, “And now I’d like you to write
an article about me, please.” The journalist explains that he is not
the man who deserves such an honor while quietly, to himself, he
curses my mother.
The wheels keep turning, and we have to trudge through some
rough country in search of the third man, Horacio di Chiano, who
is now living like a worm underground. It seems as though people
know us already in a lot of these places, the kids at least are following
us, and one day a young girl stops us in the street.
—The man you’re looking for —she tells us— is in his house.
They're going to tell you he isn't, but he is.
—And you know why we’ve come?
—Yes, I know everything.
Okay, Cassandra.
They tell us he’s not there, but he is, and we have to start pushing
past the protective barriers, the wakeful gods that keep watch
over a living dead man: a wall, a face that denies and distrusts. We
cross over from the sunlight of the street to the shade of the porch.
We ask for a glass of water and sit there in the dark offering wheedling
words until the rustiest lock turns and Mr. Horacio di Chiano
climbs the staircase holding onto his wife, who leads him by the
hand like a child.
So there are three.
The next day the newspaper receives an anonymous letter
that says “Livraga, Giunta, and the ex-NCO Gavino managed to
escape.”
So there are four. And Gavino, the letter says, “was able to get
himself to the Bolivian Embassy and was granted asylum in that
country.”
I don’t find Gavino at the Bolivian Embassy, but I do find his
friend Torres, who smiles and, counting it out on his fingers, says,
“You’re missing two.” Then he tells me about Troxler and Benavídez.
So there are six.
And while we’re at it, why not seven? Could be, Torres tells me,
because there was a sergeant with a very common last name, something
like García or Rodríguez, and no one knows what’s become
of him.
Two or three days later I come back to see Torres and hit him
pointblank with a name:
—Rogelio Díaz.
His face lights up.
—How’d you do it?
I don’t even remember how I did it. But there are seven.
So now I can take a moment because I have already talked to
survivors, widows, orphans, conspirators, political refugees, fugitives,
alleged informers, anonymous heroes. By May, I have written
half of this book. Once more, roaming around in search of someone
who will publish it. At about that time, the Jacovella brothers had
started putting out a magazine. I talk to Bruno, then Tulio. Tulio
Jacovella reads the manuscript and laughs, not at the manuscript,
but at the mess he is about to get himself into, and he goes for it.
The rest is the story that follows. It was published in Mayoría from
May through July of 1957. Later there were appendices, corollaries,
denials, and retorts that dragged this press campaign out until April
1958. I have cut them all out, together with some of the evidence
I used back then, which I am replacing here with more categorical
proof. In light of this new evidence, I think any possible controversy
can be set aside.
Acknowledgements: to Jorge Doglia, Esq., former head of the
legal department of the Province’s police, dismissed from his position
based on the reports he gave for this case; to Máximo von
Kotsch, Esq., the lawyer for Juan C. Livraga and Miguel Giunta; to
Leónidas Barletta, head of the newspaper Intenciones, where Livraga’s
initial accusation was published; to Dr. Cerruti Costa, head of
the late newspaper Revolución Nacional, which ran the first articles
about this case; to Bruno and Tulio Jacovella; to Dr. Marcelo Sánchez
Sorondo, who published the first edition of this story in book
form; to Edmundo A. Suárez, dismissed from his position at State
Radio for giving me a photocopy of the Registry Book of Announcers
for the broadcast that proved the exact time when martial law
was declared; to the ex-terrorist named “Marcelo,” who took risks
to get me information, and who was horribly tortured shortly thereafter;
to the anonymous informant who signed his name “Atilas”;
to the anonymous Cassandra who knew everything; to Horacio
Maniglia, who gave me shelter; to the families of the victims.
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