13
I was born in December 1975, which means I was conceived around March of that same year, slightly less than a year after the death of Perón and just a few months after the dissolution of the organization my parents were part of. I like to ask people I meet when they were born; if they are Argentines and were born in December 1975, I think we have something in common, since all of us born in that period are the consolation prizes our parents gave themselves after failing to pull off the revolution. Their failure gave life to us, but we also gave them something: in those years, a child was a good cover, a sign of a conventional life, far from revolutionary activities; a child could be, at a checkpoint or in a raid, the difference between life and death.
14
A minute. A minute was a lie, a cover story that my father and his coworkers were constantly inventing in case they were arrested; if the minute was good, if it was convincing, maybe they wouldn’t be killed immediately. A good minute, a good story, was simple and brief but included superfluous details because life is full of them. Anyone who told his story from beginning to end was doomed because the ability to speak without hesitation—which is so rare in people—was, to their persecutors, much stronger evidence of the story’s falseness than if it was about aliens or ghosts. In those days, a child was that minute.
15
Of course, a minute couldn’t be told in a linear way, and I’m assuming my father had that in mind when he told me he would have liked to write a novel but not a straightforward one. I couldn’t have been consistent with what my parents did and thought if I’d told his story that way; the question of how to narrate his story was equivalent to the question of how to remember it and how to remember them, and gave rise to other questions: how to describe what happened to my parents if they themselves hadn’t been able to do so; how to tell a collective experience in an individual way; how to explain what happened to them without its looking like an attempt to turn them into the protagonists of a story that is collective; what place to occupy in that story.
16
In my parents’ house I found some books on their organization, about which little has been written. In the days that followed, I read them in the hospital while I waited for someone to arrive with news, whether bad or good, and for that news to put an end to this period of uncertainty, this time outside of time that had begun its motionless voyage when my father got sick. In those books I discovered information I had only known in a vague way through what my parents had told me and through my own perception of fear. Here are the notes that flesh out what was written previously.
1. The Romanian Iron Guard was a religious organization on the extreme right of the political spectrum between the world wars and deeply anti-Semitic; its founder was Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (9/13/1899–11/30/1938).
2. Actually, my parents came out of the National Student Front (FEN), which was a Marxist organization and converged with the orthodox Peronism of the Iron Guard in a coalition called the Single Organization for Generational Revitalization (OUTG), created in early 1972.
3. In practice, its leadership continued to be a paranoid Leninist minority.
4. In that sense, its enemies were humanists and Catholics, who are usually the correct enemies in all periods and circumstances.
5. The Resistance was a disjointed and plural movement that emerged spontaneously as an answer to Juan Domingo Perón’s removal from power in June 1955 and his exile, the ban on his political party and the prohibition of the use of the name Perón and his image, as well as Peronist iconography in general. The methods of the Resistance were basically industrial sabotage, strikes and demonstrations; the most intense period of struggle was between the years 1955 and 1959, during which the movement came under the influence of John William Cooke.
6. An alliance between the Iron Guard and the Montoneros was discussed throughout 1971, and its main purpose was to endow the former with firepower and the latter with more influence and members: at its height, the Iron Guard had more than three thousand leaders and fifteen thousand militants and activists; my father was among the first group and my mother among the second, I believe.
7. Former members of the organization remember their main tasks as being agitation and propaganda in underprivileged neighborhoods, also at a school.
8. Apparently, the earliest members fantasized about the possibility of receiving military training in Algeria or Cuba but were dissuaded by Juan Domingo Perón himself.
9. Another difference between the two organizations: the leaders of the Iron Guard didn’t abandon their followers or force them to die in the name of an idea they no longer believed in, as the Montoneros did after ordering a shift underground, leaving its militants unprotected, easy targets for their murderers.
10. On occasion this is also called a “strategic reserve of Peronism.”
11. More specifically, their political project consisted of insinuating themselves into communities of Peronists (or the people, the term my parents preferred) once their political and revolutionary consciousness—which, according to the organization, already existed and therefore did not need to be taught—had been heightened.
12. One might say that its leadership hit a dead end long before, when reflection on the facts became more important than the facts themselves in the framework of the organization. In that sense, its role in Perón’s disastrous arrival at Ezeiza International Airport on June 20, 1973, presaged what would happen to the entire organization: caught between the Peronist right associated with unionism and the left represented by the Montoneros, it had to retreat.
13. The Iron Guard dissolved between July 1974 and March 1976; during that period, its leaders tried to preserve the institutional order but they were pragmatic, perhaps for the last time in their history, and worked under the assumption that there would be an imminent coup d’état, negotiating with the forces behind the coup for the protection of their members. Some remember that during the meeting in which the group was officially disbanded, the leaders asked for everyone’s names and contact information; some even claim that those lists were given to the navy and that was what saved all their lives.
14. The organization’s dissolution was an extraordinary event in the political life of Argentina, or any other country for that matter; it’s difficult to imagine how an organization that, like this one, spent more than a decade—from 1961 to 1973—devoted to amassing power could then renounce that power following the death of its leader.
18
My memory, which had been interrupted for long years, began to function again as I remembered those facts, but not in a linear way: it regurgitated images and recollections that violently displaced what I was seeing and doing in the moment they took place and kept me from living entirely in the present, which was uncomfortable and sad, but at the same time they were unable to take me entirely back into the past. Of course, there was an unquantifiable percentage of interpretation and perhaps of invention in what I was remembering, but someone once told me that no matter how imaginary the cause, the consequences are always real. The consequences of what I’d experienced were fear and a series of memories gathered over the years, which had remained in my mind in spite of all my attempts to eliminate them. This was a revelation for me, a revelation that took place in the hallway of a hospital in a city and in a country that I had never wanted to return to, while I held my father’s hand in a way I had never wanted to hold it, as I started to learn who my father had been when it was already too late for all of us, but especially for me and for him.
19
Among the things I was remembering were the stories my father’s comrades told about the flurry of activity in the city of *osario during that period and how students and workers marched side by side in their demonstrations. Tapes of speeches by Juan Domingo Perón that he recorded in exile in Madrid and that periodically, through more or less mysterious channels, came into the hands of members of the organization, who spread them around the neighborhoods; by this I don
’t mean the content of the tapes—which I seem to remember my parents’ comrades had forgotten—but rather their physicality, the tapes in their reels and the devices used to reproduce them, including one particular device that I used during my childhood and was black and white and often didn’t work. A monument in the shape of an inverted spider that my parents and their comrades called the Mandarin, in a working-class neighborhood beside a stream of polluted water filled with prodigious fish. The stories of belonging to the organization, of its members’ private lives, including the story of one comrade who had been expelled for having gone to bed with a member of a rival organization. The defections of some of its members, described with indignation but also with something like bafflement and compassion for their former comrades. A statistic—one hundred fifty members of the organization dead during the illegal crackdown—that had been determined by human rights organizations. My mother explaining to me one day how to create a barricade, how to unhitch a trolleybus and how to make a Molotov cocktail. The memory, real or imagined, of my father telling me that he had a press pass for the box where Perón was supposedly going to speak when he arrived at Ezeiza (this is the real part of the memory), and that, when the crossfire began, he hid behind the case of a double bass in the orchestra pit (in what might be the imagined part of the memory). Also my mother’s stories about her march to meet Perón on his first return in 1972, her crossing the Matanza River with its thick rotten water up to her waist and some white pants she’d had to throw out, her stories and the stories of her girlfriends about Perón’s death on July 1, 1974, and the lines to bid farewell to the great man in the cold driving rain that covered their tears, and the people approaching the young folks to give them food or a cup of coffee as they waited their turn out in the rain, more exposed to the elements than they’d ever been before; and later, the return by train, a train with broken windows that let in the cold and rain and all the death that would take place in the months and years to come; and the sadness and the crying and the feeling that everything had ended. I also remember the death of one of my parents’ comrades, which they had once told me about; it happened in January 1976 and sent my mother into hiding at my paternal grandparents’ house. When my father took her there, he told her: If you haven’t heard from me in a week, don’t look for me, and my mother stayed there, in that town, with my father’s parents, drifting through the days of that week with her eyes closed. Then, the powerlessness in the face of everything that was happening and the fear, which as a child I’d thought my parents didn’t feel and yet they felt much more than I’d thought: they lived with it and fought against it and they held us in it like one holds up a newborn in a hospital room so that the baby becomes one with the air that surrounds him and will surround him and therefore lives; and the lack of an organization, which in those years meant a lack of boundaries and of direction and of binding ties, and friends who couldn’t be seen again because of the risk that such meetings would be interpreted as a return to the struggle, and the loneliness and the cold. Also, the private rituals that were going to end up leaving marks on all of us, particularly those of us who were children at the time: the ban on parties, the precautions in using the telephone, the compartmentalization, my father walking to the car every morning, my siblings holding hands and avoiding objects on the sidewalks, my walking against traffic and lowering my head whenever a police car passed, sharing the silence with my parents and my siblings, being somewhat perplexed every time that—but this happened many years later—my parents got together with their comrades and the painful memories and the happy ones were layered in their voices, along with the nicknames or noms de guerre that they still used, and got mixed up and melded into something difficult for me to explain and perhaps inconceivable to their children, and that was an affection and a solidarity and a loyalty among them that went beyond the differences they might have had in the present and which I attributed to a feeling that I too could have had toward other people if we’d shared something unique and fundamental, if—and this, of course, sounds childish or perhaps metaphorical, but it’s not in the least—I’d been willing to give my life for people and those people had been willing to give their lives for me.
20
There was also a phrase that stood out against a distinctive profile, a profile every Argentine knows because it is Juan Domingo Perón’s profile. That profile is beloved or despised, but it could replace the drawings of the fatherland they made us do in school as one of the most recognizable symbols of Argentina; the phrase was a quote by Perón himself, and its presence in my parents’ living room made it sacred and forced us to memorize it. I still haven’t forgotten it: “As a man of destiny I believe that no one can escape it. However, I believe that we can help it along, strengthen it, and turn it in our favor until it becomes synonymous with victory.”
21
What could I do with that mandate? What could my brother and sister do with it, and what about all the others I would later meet, the children of militants in my parents’ organization but also those of members of other organizations, all lost in a world of dispossession and frivolity, all members of an army defeated long ago whose battles we can’t even remember and our fathers don’t even dare to face? The Greek historian Xenophon told the history of an army like that, some ten thousand Greek soldiers who failed in their attempt to install Cyrus the Younger on the Persian throne and so were forced to cross almost four thousand kilometers of enemy territory before reaching the refuge of the Greek colony of Trabzon. The march described by Xenophon, one of the most terrible in history, lasted barely a year, but to understand the true dimensions of what happened to us I would have to imagine that it lasted several dozen years, and I would have to think of those soldiers’ children, raised among the instruments of a defeated army who had crossed the deserts and snowy mountain caps of a hostile territory, burdened with the inevitable weight of defeat and without even the comfort of the memory of a period in which defeat wasn’t imminent and everything was still to come. When they reached Trabzon, the ten thousand soldiers Xenophon told of were barely half their number, just five thousand men.
22
I wondered what my generation could offer that could match the exuberant desperation and thirst for justice of the preceding generation, our parents’. Wasn’t it a terrible ethical imperative that generation unintentionally imposed on us? How do you kill your father if he’s already dead, and in many cases died defending an idea that seems noble even if its execution was remiss or clumsy or wrongheaded? How else could we measure up if not by doing as they did, fighting a senseless war that was lost before it began and marching into slaughter to the sacrificial chants of disaffected youth, arrogant and impotent and stupid, marching to the brink of civil war against the forces of the repressive machinery of a country that, in essence, is and always has been conservative? Something had happened to my parents and to me and to my siblings that prevented me from ever knowing what a home was or even what a family was, though everything seemed to indicate I had both. Once, my parents and I had an accident that I wasn’t able to or hadn’t wanted to remember: something crossed our path and our car spun around a few times and went off the highway, and we were now wandering through the fields, our minds blank, that shared experience the only thing uniting us. Behind us there was an overturned car in a ditch on the side of a country road, bloodstains on the seats and in the grass and on our clothes, but none of us wanted to turn around and look back, even though that was what we had to do and that was what I was trying to do as I held my father’s hand in a hospital in the provinces.
24
A conversation one night with my sister, in the hospital: I asked her about the names I’d found on a list among my father’s papers, the names of those who had participated in that first newspaper he’d started, and what Alicia Burdisso was doing there. Those are names of people from the town, answered my sister; many of them were politically active and one of them was Alicia. Then I said: That’s why he was
searching for her, after so long; because he’d gotten her into politics and he was still alive and she was dead. My sister laid her hand on my shoulder, and then she went to the end of the hallway, where I could no longer see her.
27
In one of my parents’ books I found some passages about the last place Alicia Burdisso had been seen alive. My father had underlined, in pencil and in a trembling hand:
Central Police Headquarters, Radio Patrol Command, Firemen’s Barracks and the School of Physical Education, all located in the capital of the province [of Tucumán]. La Compañía de Arsenales “Miguel de Azcuénaga,” El Reformatorio and El Motel on the outskirts. Nueva Baviera, Lules and Fronterita in various locations in the interior. […] double barbed-wire fence, guards with dogs, heliports, surveillance towers, et cetera. […] The detainees who passed through those places mostly did so for short periods, and were later transferred. There is a serious possibility that, in many cases, the transfer culminated with the prisoners’ murder. “The prisoners were taken to the ‘Escuelita’ in private cars either in the trunk, in the backseat or lying on the floor. Then the prisoners were taken out, and from the little we knew, when that happened, most of them were executed. If a detainee died, they waited for nightfall, and after wrapping the body in an army blanket, they stuck it into one of the private cars that were headed who knows where” (from the testimony of Officer Antonio Cruz, Dossier 4636). “They put a red ribbon around the necks of those sentenced to death. Every night a truck picked them up to take them to the extermination camp” (from the testimony of Fermín Núñez, Dossier 3185). […] Right in the center of the city of San Miguel, the Central Police Headquarters, which was already functioning as a torture center, became […] a Clandestine Detention Center. In that period Lieutenant Colonel Mario Albino Zimermann was the Chief of Police in Tucumán […]. He was joined by Commissioner-Inspector Roberto Heriberto Albornoz […] and Captains José Bulacio […] and David Ferro […]. The army maintained control of this place through a military supervisor. The person in charge of Security Area 321, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Arrechea, of the 5th Brigade, would visit the center and attend torture sessions […]. The neighbors heard the moans and screams of the victims and, often, shots fired in bursts that were either simulated executions by firing squad or, simply, executions.
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