Some time later, I learned from my wife that the U.S. Embassy had passage prepared for me on an American plane and a group of security officers ready to transfer me to Washington. I also found out that during the airplane stops—at Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Rome—police from various countries observed my presence in order to prevent any assault.
And I discovered from an article in an Argentine newspaper that fifteen minutes after the departure from my house, a group of military men arrived intending to kidnap me. On the helicopter trip, one policeman told me they had been unable to inform me at my house of my expulsion from the country because various security services had installed wiretapping devices that could have revealed I was leaving the country alive.
I’ve been in Israel for two days, and am spending Yom Kippur in the Ein Shemer kibbutz where one of my sons lives. I listen to the radio and hear my name and Argentina mentioned, along with that of General Menendez. I don’t understand Hebrew. Someone translates for me: General Menendez, head of the principal military association, has begun a revolution in an attempt to overthrow the government because of my release.
Since my reflexes are still attuned to Argentina, this gives me a scare. It seems real, plausible, inevitable. I had a feeling that I couldn’t escape. And yet General Menendez, who had acted like a god, who by a mere gesture could rule on the life or death of countless people in the concentration camp of “La Perla,” which he headed, was unable to reach me. He could still plunge Argentina into civil war, he could still dispatch numerous Argentines to torture chambers, crematorium ovens, throw them to the bottom of lakes, but he could no longer touch me. Or rather, his paranoia was within hand’s reach, though he himself was unable to harm me.
And it is with this sensation—of being distant from the Nazi paranoia that suddenly overcame the most advanced nation of Latin America, as it once overcame the most advanced nation of Europe—that I come to the end of my story.
I know there ought to be a message or a conclusion. But that would be a way of putting a concluding period on a typical story of this century, my story, and I have no concluding period. I have lost none of my anxieties, none of my ideology, none of my love or my hate.
I know too that the Argentine nation will not cease to weep for its dead, because throughout its often brutal history, it has remained loyal to its tragedies. I know that it will succeed in overcoming the paranoids of every extreme, the cowards of every sector. And it will learn how to be happy.
Have any of you ever looked into the eyes of another person, on the floor of a cell, who knows that he’s about to die though no one has told him so? He knows that he’s about to die but clings to his biological desire to live, as a single hope, since no one has told him that he’s to be executed.
I have many such gazes imprinted upon me.
Each time I write or utter words of hope, words of confidence in the definitive triumph of man, I’m fearful—fearful of losing sight of one of those gazes. At night I recount them, recall them, re-see them, cleanse them, illumine them.
Those gazes, which I encountered in the clandestine prisons of Argentina and which I’ve retained one by one, were the culminating point, the purest moment of my tragedy.
They are here with me today. And although I might wish to do so, I could not and would not know how to share them with you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jacobo Timerman was born in the Ukrainian town of Bar in 1923, and moved with his family to Argentina in 1928. A lifelong journalist, he founded two weekly news magazines in the 1960s and was a prominent news commentator on radio and television. He was the editor and publisher of the newspaper La Opinion from 1971 until his arrest by military authorities on April 15,1977. Released in September 1979, he lived in Tel Aviv, Madrid, and New York. He is the author of Chile: Death in the South and The Longest War.; which are also available from Vintage.
Mr. Timerman returned in 1984 to Buenos Aires, where he lives now.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Toby Talbot is the author of A Book About My Mother (1980). She is professor of Spanish at Manhattan Community College, and has translated Ortega y Gasset’s On Love and The Origin of Philosophy.
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