Money to Burn

by Ricardo Piglia

  Leaving, travelling against the one-way system on Canelones Street and going south, the Public Health ambulance headed towards Maciel Hospital at full speed. They haven't killed me, and they're not going to be able to kill me.' He could taste the flavour of blood on his lips and the pain of a smashed tooth and could see the whiteness of the afternoon through his clouded vision.

  'My mother always knew that I was destined to be misunderstood and nobody has ever understood me, but occasionally I've succeeded in getting someone to love me. Oh father,' he said as if it were a far-off echo, 'the skewbald horse will come and carry me away from here.' Then at last he could be reunited with the Kid Brignone, in the open country, out in the cornfields, out in the quiet nights. The ambulance siren retreated, and was lost as it turned the corner of the crossroads and Herrera Street was at last empty once more.

  Epilogue

  This novel tells a true story. It involves a minor case, already forgotten among police chronicles, which for me none the less, the more I investigated it, acquired the aura and pathos of a legend. The facts occurred in two capital cities (Buenos Aires and Montevideo) between 27 September and 6 November 1965. I have respected the continuity of the action and (wherever possible) the language of the protagonists and the witnesses of this history. Its dialogues and opinions do not in all instances correspond to the precise localities where they were first expressed, but I have always used original material in the account of the words and actions of its characters.

  Throughout the book I have attempted to maintain the stylistic register and 'metaphorical gesture' (as Brecht called it) of the social reports whose theme remains illegal violence.

  The mass of material documentation has been deployed as dictated by the plot, meaning that whenever I have been unable to confirm the facts with direct sources, I have opted to omit that particular version. This explains why the great unknown of the book (its 'fantastical instant') has to be the mysterious disappearance of Enrique Mario Malito, the gang's leader. Nobody really knows what happened to him in the hours following the siege. Numerous hypotheses exist regarding his fate but I have chosen to respect the intrigue woven by the story's protagonists.

  Some say he split from the gang at the moment when they were surprised changing the plates on the Studebaker and that he travelled in the Hillman to get away from Marmajará Street ahead of the confrontation with the police. He had a rendezvous arranged with Brignone for the next day, but the succession of captures and the siege of the block of flats cut their connection. The most plausible account assures us that, despite being isolated and without contacts, he managed to escape and cross to Buenos Aires and that he died in a shootout in Floresta in 1969. The most extravagant version recounts that he managed to flee over the rooftops just as the police arrived, and that he hid himself in a water tank where he remained alive for two days until he could escape to Paraguay where he lived in Asuncion until his death (from cancer) in 1982 under an assumed name (that of Anlbal Stocker, according to some sources).

  For his part, the Gaucho Dorda recovered from his wounds and was extradited to Buenos Aires where he died the following year, assassinated during a revolt that took place in Caseros jail (it would appear to have been initiated by a police infiltrator). During his stay in hospital and in prison (in Uruguay) in January and February of 1966, he was interviewed by the employee of the daily El Mundo from Buenos Aires, which published some of Dorda's statements in features published on 14 and 15 March 1966. In addition, I obtained access to the transcripts of Dorda's interrogation, which reside in the annals of the case and the psychiatric reports of Dr Amadeo Bunge. I owe a further debt of gratitude to my friend Dr Aníbal Reynal, a judge of the primary courts, for granting me permission to consult and index this mass of material. The assistance of the judge of Assizes of the 12th District of Montevideo, Dr Nelson Sassia, was of immense value, for he allowed me to work with the statements of witnesses and the clerks to the court used in the case. It was here I came across the testimonial accounts offered by Margarita Taibo, Nando Heguilein and Yamandú Raymond Acevedo, among others of those involved. In Buenos Aires, the lawyer Raúl Anaya permitted me to consult records of the interrogations of Bianca Galeano, Fontán Reyes, Carlos Nino and others implicated in the case. I also obtained access to the declarations of Police Commissioner Cayetano Silva in his internal summary when he was obliged to bring a defence in an internal inquiry mounted by the police on grounds of his presumed complicity (an investigation that reached no final conclusion on the matter).

  The remaining significant source for this book was the transcript of the secret recordings made by the police department on Herrera and Obes Streets, to which I obtained access thanks to an order of Dr Sassia, who facilitated my work with this confidential material. In November 1965 the Montevideo newspaper Marcha published a lengthy interview done by journalist Carlos M. Gutiérrez with the Uruguayan radio operator Roque Pérez, responsible for the technical control of all the recordings made in the apartment block at the time.

  Naturally, I also went to the archives of all the newspapers published during that period. In Buenos Aires there were the Crónica, Clarín, La Nación and La Razón de Buenos Aires; in Montevideo, El Dia, Acción, El Pais and Debate. Of particular usefulness were the accounts and additional notes signed simply E.R., who covered the assault and served as the Argentine paper El Mundo's special reporter on the spot. I have freely reproduced from these accounts, without which it would have been impossible to obtain an exact reconstruction of the facts narrated in this book.

  Thanks to the generosity of my friend the sculptor Carlos Boccardo, who lived in Montevideo throughout the events described on the corner of Herrera and Obes Streets, I was able to orchestrate the different versions of this same story from a variety of descriptions and evidence.

  My first link to the story as related in this book (as always happens in every non-fictional account) occurred by chance. One afternoon, at the end of March or beginning of April 1966, I took a train en route to Bolivia. There I met Bianca Galeano, called by the newspapers 'the concubine' of the gunman Mereles ('the Crow'). She was sixteen years old but looked like a woman of thirty, and was in the process of fleeing the authorities. She told me an extraordinary tale which I half-believed, tailoring it to elicit (as indeed it did) a quantity of meals taken in the train's buffet car. During the long hours of the journey, which lasted over two days, she told me that she had just been released from jail; that she had been held a prisoner for six months for associating with a gang of thieves who had robbed the San Fernando Bank; and that she was going into exile to live in the Bolivian capital of La Paz. She gave me a first, muddled version of the deeds I vaguely recalled having read in the dailies some months earlier.

  The girl spoke of a gangster who had taught her about the other side of life, and who had since died, brought down after having resisted like a hero for fifteen hours, and sparked in me the initial interest in her story. 'There were around three hundred cops, and they held out surrounded by the lot of them, but nobody could smoke them out of their lair,' the girl said in a vocabulary that sounded hostile, like words angrily used to describe a defeat that should have ended in victory. The kid had given up attending secondary school, become a cocaine junkie (as I could confirm after only a short time travelling together), though she described herself as the daughter of a judge, and swore that the Crow had left her pregnant. She spoke to me about the Twins, Kid Brignone and Gaucho Dorda, and about Malito and Twisty Bazán, and I listened to her as if brought face to face with the Argentine version of a Greek tragedy. The heroes were determined to confront and resist the insurmountable, and chose death as their destiny.

  I got out in San Salvador, in Jujuy province, because I wanted to reach Yavi for the Holy Week processions. The train stopped for half an hour for the railway gauges to be changed. She got out with me, and we bade one another farewell at the zinc counter of a bar alongside the platform, where we drank a Brazilian beer together. I reca
ll taking notes of what she told me both on the train and at the station, then again when I reached the hotel (for in those days I still considered that a writer had to go everywhere with his journalist's notepad). Then a while later (in 1968 or '69) I started properly researching the story, and wrote a first draft of this book.

  It will always remain a mystery to me why the motives for recounting particular stories lie dormant for years on end, awaiting the proper moment to make their mark. I left off the project in 1970 and stored the drafts and the supporting material at my brother's home. Some time later, in the midst of moving house, I came across the box containing the manuscripts and documents, including the first results of my research and the first version of my book. In the summer of 1995, I began writing it all over again, giving it a complete overhaul in order to be absolutely faithful to the facts. The events it recounted were now so distant and hermetically closed that they resembled the lost memories of a lived experience. I had almost forgotten what they were, so much so they appeared new and nearly unknown to me, after a period of more than thirty years. This distance has helped me to work with the story as if it were the account of a dream.

  It seems to me that this dream opens with an image. I would like to end this book with the memory of this image, meaning the memory of the young girl travelling on the train to Bolivia, leaning out of the window with a serious expression on her face, tranquil and without any parting gesture, while I, standing on the empty station platform, watch her recede into the distance.

  Buenos Aires, 25 July 1997

  About the Author and the Translator

  Ricardo Piglia is Professor of Latin American Literature at Princeton University and is the author, among other works, of Respiración artificial (1980) La ciudad ausente (1992) and Critica y ficción (1986) - a collection of interviews and essays on key Argentine writers such as Borges, Arit and Sarmiento.

  Amanda Hopkinson is a Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff University Her previous translations include José Saramago's Voyage to Portugal and Paul Coelho's The Devil and Miss Prym.

  {1} In August 1963 a fourteen-man commando unit robbed 14,000 pesos from the Bank's health centre in the district of Caballitos. All fourteen were members of the Tacuara gang', who took their name from the prison where they'd done time, in the town of the same name, Entre Ríos province in the northeast of the country. They were also the most dangerous of the extreme right-wing activists in the Peronist movement. On the one hand they were linked to the Arab League and on the other to the Nazi war criminals who had found a safe haven in the Argentine provinces. The common thread lay in violent action and crude anti-Semitism.

  {2} Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista, (ALN), Argentine fascist movement active between 1931 and 1955.

  {3} Founders of the National Liberation Alliance (ALN).

  {4} 'The Old Man': in his period of exile, in 1965, Perón was already seventy years old. He would make a triumphant return to office in 1973, dying six months later. The CGT (Confederación General de Trabajadores) was the Peronist-controlled Trades Union Congress.

  {5} Lit. a charrúa, of an 'indian' tribe north of the River Plate.

  {6} 'Che' - Ernesto Guevara notwithstanding - is not a proper name. It's what every Argentine male informally calls another. Something like 'mate'.

  {7} Ranquel or Mapuche tribes are, literally, 'people of the swamp', who settled in the northwest Pampa and south of Córdoba in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Coliqueo Indians' settled southwest of San Luis.

  {8} San Martin was the liberator of the Southern Cone from Spanish rule, and a brilliant military strategist. The most famous equestrian statue in Buenos Aires is dedicated to him, in the park at the centre of the Plaza San Martin.

  {9} Society of Musical Composers, also a coffee-house and meeting-place.

  {10} i.e. 3.3 kilometres out of town.

  {11} Mate is a typically gaucho drink, traditionally drunk from a gourd through a silver straw, at intervals through the working day.

  {12} Expressed in the original as a gauchada, an ironic reference to the fact that gauchos can always be counted on to honour pledges - and defend their honour - and that of others, particularly vulnerable women.

  {13} Cacho means a chub, as in the fish.

  {14} Movimentismo was the amalgamation of popular movements that Peronism sought to incorporate. It led to the formation of numerous 'fronts', military or not, but all rigidly disciplined and bureaucratized as branches of 'populism'.

  {15} Severino di Giovanni fled Italian fascism and joined an anarchist group in Buenos Aires in 1923. First he simply edited the flagship magazine Culmine, but Sacco and Vanzettťs execution in the States turned him to direct action, mainly through bombing North American business venues. Arrested by the police after a fusillade, he was executed on 1 February 1931. The Scarfó brothers were anarchist gangsters, a pair of brothers who raided banks, most famously the National City Bank in 1927. Juan Nicolás Ruggero (known by the diminutive Ruggerito) was the best-known member of a famous mafia family, who ran a gambling den at 400 Pavón Street. He was assassinated in 1933. Lezin, also known as 'the Astrologer', founded a terrorist group intending to seize political power in a putsch. Instead it declined into corruption and infighting and he was killed.

  {16} This is a deliberate pun: la generala is a game of five dice, where the winner is he who achieves the highest score of the same number. But la generala is also Evita Perón, nationalist heroine of the right-wing Peronistas.

  {17} In Italian in the original. Much of what is said takes place in lunfardo, harbour slang of the Neapolitan immigrants. E peccato, resonant of the Latin Mass, means both a sin and a shame in the colloquial sense of 'what a pity'.

  {18} A John Wayne film from 1949, where the action is set on a Japanese island. It was seized from the Japanese by the US forces in 1945 after battles that took over 100,000 Japanese lives. It was restored to Japan only in 1968.

  {19} Perhaps the most popular corrido (ballad) of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) and a staple of dancehalls thereafter. The cucaracha (cockroach) of the title was apparently President Obregón, famously addicted to his marijuana.

  {20} Servicio Oficial de Difusión, Radiotelevision y Espectáculos, answerable to Uruguay's Culture and Education Ministries.

  {21} It resembles the French boules, with a 'toad' instead of a 'pig' that has to be hit.