by Caryl Ferey
My heart started beating so hard that I almost dropped my food bowl: had Papa let himself be captured in order to find us, his kidnapped children? What madness!
The World Cup was in full swing, the pressure put on us by the guards had let up a little, or rather it had shifted to the Argentine team. July 17, 1978, the day I turned fifteen. A new detainee was handing the soup in through the hole in the door, closely supervised by El Turco, the jailer. I was about to go for the bits of meat that were floating on the surface when I saw the little aluminum ball mixed with the sticky mess. I licked it off in my mouth before carefully unfolding it: it was a piece of aluminum foil off a package of cigarettes and contained, on its opposite side, a treasure. A poem, little sister, scribbled in tiny letters, on the inside of the foil.
Don’t be afraid
Of buried giants
It’s the lightning that’s decapitated
To warm matter
Look,
The stars’ skin is soft
The plains are naked of it
Walk little man,
Walk:
The same hand caresses and kills
The memory of the knife . . .
Only the two of us remain
In the lion’s den,
There I see the ruins
Of cathedrals
Luminous signals,
It’s the lighting following us,
Look,
The war is over
The forest has gone silent
Go, little man,
Go
The same hand caresses and kills
The memory of the knife!
A poem by Papa, for my birthday. My fifteenth birthday. The last poem by Daniel Calderón. I couldn’t destroy it, little sister, that poem was my life. I read it dozens and dozens of times that evening, with a sick joy, and I learned it by heart, then I rolled it up in a ball and hid it in a crack in the wall of the cell. Invisible. The torturers had stolen our freedom, our integrity, but not our love. A week later, in the middle of the night, the guards carried out a meticulous inspection of the cells, throwing the prisoners out in the corridor. It was there, between two salvos of blows, that I saw Papa’s bearded face. He had been tortured, but I knew he had held up. We said nothing to each other, he had just given me a calming sign (he must have known that I was in the neighboring cell) when a hand grabbed me by the hair.
“What’s this?”
They had just discovered the little paper hidden in the wall: my treasure.
Daniel Calderón, number 563, was not afraid of dying: he knew why he was there. Not only did he refuse to talk, but by writing a poem he had broken the rules. He was defying authority, seriously. In addition to the usual treatment, beatings and the picana, they decided to starve him.
The torturers were not all sadists or confirmed rapists; many were just ordinary brutes who had been given free rein; El Turco would be their puppet. Days went by, then more days. Weakened, “the Poet,” as they called him sarcastically, could not hold out much longer. I had known that obsessive hunger in the lion’s cage where they had kept me lying down for days. The hardest part was mealtime, when the clicking of the spoons ate away at your stomach and made tears come to your eyes. El Turco and the others made it worse, taunting them through the hole in the door, laughing, moronic and having eaten their fill. Finally the great day came, the one that the whole country was waiting for: June 25, 1978. The guards, the interrogating officers, everyone was talking only about the upcoming match: Menotti’s team was going to win that damned final. We heard them braying in the break room, where they had put the television set. Whether it was the end of the forced diet or an offering to the gods of football, that night a bowl of “tumba” was given the Poet. The guards shouted: one goal each at the end of regulation time, Argentina and Holland would play overtime. Taking advantage of the pause, El Turco and his gang broke into Papa’s cell: they saw the empty bowl, licked clean, and began to laugh like hyenas. I heard their comments in the corridor, but I didn’t understand what made them so mocking.
The television was howling when an enormous clamor greeted the third Argentine goal. The guards were exultant, bellowing with a taurine joy: “Argentina! Argentina!” The roar of victory rose up from the avenue. The River Plata stadium where the final was being played was quite close to the ESMA: the guards in the room with the television set were shouting too loudly to hear it, but the muffled noise that came from the neighboring cell, a compact noise, I was able to clearly identify: it was Papa’s head banging against the intervening wall.
The man was fracturing his skull and moaning like a puppy. It was him, little sister.
El Turco and the others came to see me shortly afterward. They had waited until the Poet had finished his revolting stew to show him what they were hiding behind their backs, and what they now exhibited before my livid face: your head, little sister. Your child’s head that they brandished like a trophy. The ogres had left your hazel eyes open: the momentary stupefaction that had gone through your mind at the instant they decapitated you could still be read in them.
Die or go mad: Daniel Calderón had chosen to die. Anyway, his head was no longer banging against the wall of my cell. The Poet had died of indigestion with the world, and you in the form of boiled meat that El Turco and the others had made him swallow, mixed with the “tumba.”
No, men’s cruelty has no limits.
They released me two days later, amid the national happiness, so that I would tell your story. But I won’t say anything, little sister, ever. Never to anyone but you. My little poppy.
*
Jana closed the notebook, her eyes staring, chewing her little clots of hatred. No, men’s cruelty had no limits.
The stars were tumbling down over the glowing rock, but she could no longer distinguish the colors, the birds soaring off the snowy peaks, the tints of the desert at sunset. She no longer saw anything but that poor girl and her fifteen-year-old brother in the putrid jails of the ESMA, all that love decapitated, which made her weep cold tears. Pale, she closed the accursed notebook where his nightmares lived. Die or go mad! Rubén had survived. Alone.
A blue-gray wave was watering down the sky when the Mapuche raised her head. Rubén was just then walking back to their improvised camp, a few stunted branches in his hands. Jana swallowed the rage that was breaking her heart and stood up as he approached.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked him.
Rubén’s face was pale under the moon. He threw his measly branches on the stones.
“No.”
“I did,” she said.
Jana took off the tight-fitting tank top, let it drop to the ground, and turned to face him. Her scrawny breasts poked out, two little monsters in the starlight. Rubén felt no pity on looking at the Indian’s amputated body: her unhappy beauty dazzled him.
Jana took him in her arms first, pressed her chest against him and kissed him. She wasn’t afraid of the winka who had tried to destroy them. The Mapuches had resisted the Incas, the conquistadors, Argentine army regulars, the estancieros and the Indian hunters paid by the number of cut-off ears, the carabineros, the political and financial elites that had bled the country dry: she was a descendant of survivors. Their feet danced a moment on the sand, Jana kissed him, kissed him again.
“Come,” she said, detaching herself, “come . . . ”
Their clothes disappeared, thrown away, their modesty, the past, the future, whether they would live together or not, the eternal solitude and the words that were never said: they made love, trembling, standing up, holding each other with their eyes as if they might lose each other, entwined so tight it hurt in order to ward off the death that was gripping them, and came together, like demons.
8
Elsa Calderón was one of the hundred and seventy-two children murdere
d during the Process.
Having no news of her family, Elena had joined the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo two months before the famous World Cup. Through her knowledge of the enemy, Elena Calderón had quickly become one of the main intellectual leaders of the Association for the Defense of Human Rights. They were the ones who were the military’s primary targets. A first roundup had taken place after Astiz’s infiltration; he had passed himself off as the brother of a desaparecido when twelve persons were kidnapped on coming out of the church of Santa Cruz, among them the first president of the association and two French nuns. End of 1977. To incriminate the Montoneros, the junta had had a false document published, a rather crude photomontage that was disseminated around the world, but the ruse hadn’t worked. Voices were raised. The international community got involved. The emotion elicited by the disappearance of the first Mothers threatened to spoil the soccer triumph, so it was decided to use a more subtle method to do away with these madwomen who dared to defy the government. Since their threats had had no effect, the oppressors had thought up an attack by several gangs that would hit them hard, especially Elena Calderón.
The abductions, illegal detentions, and systematic torture were a parallel structure of an effective bureaucratic and hierarchical coercion capable of sowing unprecedented terror among the population; the goal was also to torment the imagination of the living. Of the survivors. Rubén knew that the staging of Elsa’s execution and the suicide of the Poet-cannibal could not have been hatched in the minds of the jailers. El Turco and his henchmen were just ignorant, obedient animals. By releasing him, the instigators of this machination hoped to make him their messenger of pain, the surviving witness who would tell his crazy mother how her dear family members had died, sure that the truth would kill her, just as it had killed her husband.
Die or go mad. Rubén had kept quiet, obstinately.
For thirty years, every Thursday, he saw his mother walk around the obelisk in the Plaza de Mayo, unbending in her battle for the truth: there was nothing and nobody who could make her give up, that was the pact. It was impossible for her to break this pact.
Nakedness, bodily contact, sounds, smells—it had taken Rubén years to be able to endure situations associated with torture. Beyond the physical trauma, the psychic wounds had taken the longest to heal over: an acute mental suffering then replaced the suffering of the tortures endured, horror rushed into the breaches to the point of making him want to commit suicide as a last act of autonomy. Daniel Calderón had understood that: he had immediately killed himself, fracturing his skull against the wall of his cell.
Not him.
Rubén lit a cigarette, pensively.
Darkness was drawing across the Andean desert. Jana was lying near the fire, wrapped up in the blanket. The flames were giving a reddish hue to her face, calmed after making love, and he couldn’t sleep. Images passed through his mind, a confusion of feelings and times in an endless circle. The melancholy his father tried to instill in him had disappeared one night in June 1978, a night of happiness. Words had betrayed him, those of his father’s birthday poem, which Rubén had not been able to bring himself to destroy. He had written the Sad Notebook years later, in one sitting, as one tears oneself away from a lethal passion, in order to exorcize the core: he had hidden their memory among his little sister’s dresses in the apartment across from the intersection where they had been kidnapped, and had never written anything again.
That night, everything was changing.
Rubén put the last log on the campfire’s embers and by the light of the flickering fire did something he had thought he would never do again. Jana asleep in his line of sight, he opened Elsa’s notebook to the last page and began to write. An hour went by, perhaps two. Abstract time, that cared little for periods, children’s ghosts, or death. When it was all finished, Rubén tore out the page and stood up in the moonlight. Jana was still asleep curled up on the sand, her hands balled into fists. He pressed the school notebook in his hands for the last time.
My sweet . . . sweet little sister.
Then he threw it into the fire.
*
The Rock of Seven Colors stretched at the end of the canyon. They woke together, rolled up in the blanket. The logs were just ashes among the blackened stones of the camp. Dawn was growing on the steep ridges. They embraced to ward off the cold that had gripped them, and kissed as a welcome.
“Your butt’s frozen,” he said, as his hand slipped into her pants.
“And your hand is warm. Brrr!”
She burrowed into him. Rubén was not thinking about what had happened during the night, Jana’s face was already radiant, a miracle of youth.
“Sleep well?”
“Yes.”
She got up in the pale rays of the sun, her legs bare, and rubbed her nose, which was wet after a night under the stars.
“I’ve got sand everywhere,” she said, shaking out her tank top.
She took off her panties, dusted them off in turn, then exchanged them for another pair taken out of her bag, a triangle of black cotton that she put on without false modesty.
“What?” she asked, sensing that he was watching her.
“Nothing,” he said. “You make me laugh.”
“Right. Right,” she repeated, “don’t ever forget that.”
He would try. He promised.
The breeze was growing warmer as the sun rose, the mountain range was deploying its stone rainbows. Rubén was picking up the remains of the food that were being attacked by ants when Jana found the sheet of paper folded in two under her bag, which had served as her pillow: a page torn out of the school notebook that had disappeared under the ashes. Jana unfolded it, and her throat slowly closed up:
Seeing nothing in the dew
But the
Dawn split
Like a log.
Nothing remains of the horizon
But the bark,
Cracks,
Images of lice,
Bones . . .
Who kills the dogs
When the leash is too short?
The birds have fled the sky
In the painted landscape
Traces of wings.
Of silence
There remains only the murmur
Implicit,
Cracked clouds
Images of lice,
Bones . . .
Who kills the dogs
When the leash is too short?
Biting words in the mouths of others,
It’s like the shadow in your eyes,
I cling to it,
I slip into it on my knees without prayers
To love you inside,
The bottoms of the stars glow there,
Your skin, look, it scintillates as soon as
I touch it
Graze it,
Feed on it,
Still,
It’s your heart, more or less,
A sorrow on the straw,
Halfway from nothing at all,
I loiter in you like a path at the
End of the day,
Your hands your fingers your thighs
I love it all,
See,
My wrinkled tears in you
rush down,
Washed-out glaciers,
A disaster at work, it amounts
To the same thing,
And delayed lightning bolts that
Exhaust themselves