Operation Massacre (6 page)

 

7.
Warnings and Premonitions

There is one man, at least, who seems to see it coming. He will pass by Lizaso's house once, twice, three times, to look for him, to take him away, to steal him from death, even though the latter extreme hasn't yet crossed anybody's mind. And it will all be futile.

This man—who will later turn to terrorism and go by the name “Marcelo”—plays a curious role in the events. He is a friend of both the Lizaso family and some of the other main characters. He feels like a father to Carlitos, an affection that time and misfortune will turn sour. This man knows what's going on. That is why he's afraid and why he wants to take the young man with him. But he will keep finding him entertained, engaged, chatting, and he'll let himself be deterred by the same promise again and again:

—I'll leave in ten minutes . . .

“Marcelo” isn't happy with this. Before leaving for the last time, he turns to the man who he considers responsible for the confusing situation that seems to be developing in the apartment. He knows him. He takes him aside and they speak softly.

—Do any of these people know anything?

—No. Most of them don't know anything.

—So what are they doing here?

—What do I know . . . They're going to listen to the fight.

—But you, sir —“Marcelo” insists, now irritated— why are you letting them stay here?

—You want me to throw them out? I'm not the owner here.

The conversation becomes unpleasant. “Marcelo” sharply interrupts it.

—Do what you want. But that guy there —he tilts his head towards Lizaso, who is standing a ways away, talking with a group of people— you don't take him anywhere, you hear me?

The man shrugs his shoulders.

—Don't worry. I'm not going to take him anywhere. And besides, at this point, nothing's going to happen tonight.

 

8.
Gavino

“At this point, nothing's going to happen tonight,” Norberto Gavino tells himself again. That piece of news should have been broadcast on the radio a while ago already. For a moment, he thinks “Marcelo” is right. But then he brushes it off. If nothing's happening, then no one's in danger. Many of them have simply stopped by, people he doesn't even know; it'd be ridiculous to say: “Get out, I'm about to start a revolution.”

Because there's no question that Gavino, despite being out of the loop and not knowing what to expect,
is
a part of the uprising.

Gavino is about forty years old and has an average but athletic build. He was once an NCO of the National Gendarmerie and later started selling plots of land. Sharp, short-tempered, and prone to bragging (as well as to the dangerous missteps that it can lead to in a life like his), Gavino has been conspiring for some time now, and at the beginning of May, an upsetting incident sealed him on this path. His wife, completely unaware of what her husband was up to, was thrown in jail as a hostage. Gavino found out that they would only set her free when he turned himself in. From that moment on, he thought only of revolution.

He had been on the run ever since, and believed military authorities and the police were after him. With very good reason. Everything that happened that night, the press that came out about it in the days that followed, and other pieces of evidence confirm this.
11
He couldn't come up with a better way to avoid the siege than to take refuge in his friend Torres's apartment.

And that's where he was now waiting, nervously, for the news that he would never hear.

Footnotes:

 

9.
Explanations in an Embassy

This brings us to the character that plays a large part in the tragedy—Torres, the tenant who lives in the apartment in back.

Juan Carlos Torres lives two or three different lives.

To the owner of the building, for example, he is an ordinary tenant who pays his rent on time and doesn't cause any problems, though sometimes he does disappear for a few days and, when he comes back, doesn't say where he's been. To his neighbors, Torres is an easygoing, fairly popular guy who likes to have people over for barbecues and gatherings where nobody talks about politics. To the police, in the period after the uprising, he is a dangerous, elusive, vainly and tirelessly sought-after individual . . .

I found him, finally, many months later, taking asylum in a Latin American embassy, pacing from one side to the other of his forced enclosure, smoking and gazing through a large window at the city, so near and so inaccessible. I went back to see him several times. Tall and thin, with a large head of black hair, a hooked nose, and dark, penetrating eyes, he gave me the impression, despite being holed up in there, of a resolute, laconic, and extremely cautious man.

—I don't have any reason to lie to you —he said.— Whatever damning thing you manage to get out of me I'll say is false, that I don't even know who you are. That's why I don't care if you publish my real name or not.

He smiled without animosity. I told him I understood the rules of the game.

—There was no reason to shoot those men, —he then went on.— Me, okay, I'll give you that, since I was “there” and they found some papers in my house. Nothing more than papers, though, no weapons like they later said. But I escaped. And Gavino also escaped . . . 

He paused. Maybe he was thinking about those who hadn't escaped. About those who had nothing to do with it. I asked him if there had been talk of revolution.

—Not even remotely —he said.— For those who were really involved, namely Gavino and me, all we had to do was give each other one look to communicate. But neither he nor I knew if we were even going to act, or where. We were waiting for a sign that never came. I found out what was going on when Gavino asked me for the key to the apartment because the police were after him. We were friends, so I gave it to him. It's possible that someone else who was in on it had come by wanting to know more.

His tone turned somber.

—The tragedy was that other guys from the neighborhood also showed up, guys who saw people gathering at the house and came in to hear the fight or play cards like they always did. People were always coming into my house, even if they didn't know me. Two undercover cops were there that night and no one even noticed. That guy Livraga, the one the papers are talking about—the truth is that I didn't know him, don't even remember having seen him. The first time I saw him was in a photograph.

A heavy question hovered between us. Juan Carlos Torres went ahead and answered it.

—We didn't tell them anything —he said sorrowfully— because the reality was that, up until that point, nothing had happened. As long as we didn't get any concrete news, it was still a night like any other. I couldn't warn them or tell them to leave because that would've raised suspicions, and I tend not to talk more than necessary.

“A few minutes more, and every one of them would have gone home and nothing would've happened.”

A few minutes more. In this case, everything will revolve around a few minutes more.

 

10.
Mario

Mario Brión lives at
1812
Franklin Street. It is a house with a garden, almost at the corner, less than a hundred meters from the fateful house.

On the afternoon of June
9
, Brión is thirty-three years old. He is a man of medium height, blond, mustached, and starting to bald. A certain melancholy, perhaps, exudes from his oval face.

A serious young man and a hard worker, the neighbors say. We gather that his has been a normal life, with no bright highlights or dazzling adventures. At the age of fifteen he becomes an office clerk while staying in school, takes courses in English (which he will come to speak with a certain fluency), and graduates from high school with a commercial degree. He seems to have set a life plan for himself with clear stages that he goes about completing one by one. He uses his savings to buy a plot of land, build a house. Only then does he decide to get married, to his first girlfriend. Later on they have a son: Daniel Mario.

From his father, a Spaniard who learned to make a living in tough trades, he has inherited a wide-ranging love of reading. It's surprising to find Horace, Seneca, Shakespeare, Unamuno, and Baroja in his library next to the cold collections on accounting. There are also those books of inevitable American provenance, all of varied titles that could be summed up in one:
How to Succeed in Life
. These books suggest, more than the dubious results that they promise, what Mario's aspirations were: to work, to advance in life, to protect his family, to have friends, to be appreciated.

He would not have had to do much to achieve all of this. His company had offered him a position as head of his section. He made good money: his home did not lack any comforts. Whatever useful initiatives there were in the neighborhood came from him alone. A small paved road that joins the corner of his house with San Martín Avenue is a reminder of this. He is the one who collected the money, he is the one who gathered the neighbors to work on Sundays and holidays.

Mario Brión—people say—is a happy guy who is kind to everyone and a bit shy. He neither smokes nor drinks. The only things he does for fun are go to the movies with his wife or play soccer with his friends from the neighborhood.

That night, he has eaten his dinner late, as usual. Afterward he leaves to buy the paper. This, too, he always does. He likes to read the paper, in an armchair, while listening to a record or some program on the radio. On the way, he runs into a friend or an acquaintance. We won't know who it was.

—They want me to come hear the fight —he announces to his wife, Adela, when he returns.— I don't know if I should go . . .

He's indecisive. In the end he makes a decision. After all, he had also been thinking of tuning into the fight.

He gives a kiss to his son Danny—who is already four years old—and says goodbye to his wife.

—I'll come back as soon as it's over.

Despite the cold, he doesn't put on an overcoat. He wears only a thick white cardigan.

He walks to Yrigoyen Street and enters the long corridor. A last-minute witness will see him standing next to the radio receiver, smiling and with his hands in his pockets, a bit isolated, a bit removed from the other groups that are talking and playing cards.

 

11.
“The Executed Man Who Lives”

At number
162
4
on Florencio Varela Street, in the Florida district, stands a beautiful California-style house. It could be the home of a lawyer or a doctor. It was built by Mr. Pedro Livraga, a quiet man getting on in years, with his own two hands. In his youth he was a building laborer and later on, through the gradual mastery of the job, ended up as a contractor.

Mr. Pedro has three children. The oldest daughter is married. The two sons, on the other hand, live with him. One of them is Juan Carlos.

He is a thin man of average height and ordinary features: grey-green eyes, brown hair, and a mustache. He is a few days shy of turning twenty-four.

His ideas are entirely commonplace and shared by other people in town: they are generally correct regarding concrete and tangible things, and more nebulous and random in other arenas. He has a reflective, even calculating temperament. He will think a great deal about things and not say more than is necessary.

This doesn't take away from a certain instinctive curiosity he has, a deep impatience that manifests itself not so much in his smaller acts, but rather in the way he goes about adjusting to the world. He dropped out of high school after finishing his freshman year. Then, for several years, he was a clerk at the Aviation Authority. Now he works as a bus driver. Later on, once he is already “brought back from the dead,” he will join his father in construction work.

He is a fine observer, but he might trust himself too much. Over the course of the extraordinary adventure that he is about to experience, he'll catch some things with such exceptional precision that he'll be able to draw up very exact diagrams and maps. Other things he will get wrong, and he will be stubborn about sticking to his mistakes.

He will prove to be lucid and calm in the face of danger. And once the danger has passed, he will show a moral courage that should be noted as his main virtue. He will be the only one among the survivors or the victims' family members who dares to come forward and demand justice.

Does he know anything, on that afternoon of June
9
, about the rebellion that will take place later on? He has come home before his shift is over, which could seem suspicious. But it turns out that the bus he drives—number five of all the buses that run along the
10
line in Vicente López—has broken down on him, and the company will confirm this detail.

Does he know anything? He will flatly deny that he does. And he will also add that he doesn't have a record of any kind—criminal, legal, professional, or political. This claim will also be proven and confirmed.

But despite all that, does he know anything? Many people in Greater Buenos Aires know about it, even if they aren't thinking of taking part. Still, of the numerous testimonies we collected, there is not one that suggests Livraga was involved or informed.

It is after ten o'clock at night when Juan Carlos leaves his house. He turns right and goes down San Martín Avenue, heading towards Franklin, where there is a bar he often goes to. It's cold and the streets are not very busy.

A certain indecision overtakes him. He doesn't know whether to stay and play a game of pool or go to a dance that he promised he would attend.

Chance decides for him. Chance that appears in the form of his friend, Vicente Rodríguez.