Operation Massacre (11 page)

 

23.
The Slaughter

. . . The moment has come. It is signaled by a short, remarkable exchange:

—What are you going to do to us? —one of them asks.

—Keep walking! —they reply.

—We are innocent! —a number of them shout.

—Don't be afraid —they answer.—
We're not going to do anything to you
.

WE'RE NOT GOING TO DO ANYTHING TO YOU!

The guards steer them like a terrified herd toward the garbage dump. The van comes to a stop, shining its headlights on them. The prisoners seem to be floating in a glowing pool of light. Rodríguez Moreno steps out, gun in hand.

At this moment, the story ruptures, explodes into twelve or thirteen nodules of panic.

—Let's make a run for it, Carranza —Gavino says.— I think they're going to kill us.

Carranza knows it's true. But the slightest hope that he's mistaken keeps him walking.

—Let's stay . . . —he murmurs.— If we run, they'll shoot for sure.

Giunta is walking sluggishly, looking back with one arm raised to his brow to shield his eyes from the blinding glare.

Livraga is stealthily making his way over to the left. Step by step. Dressed in black. Suddenly, it's like a miracle: the headlights leave him alone. He has stepped outside their range. He is alone and almost invisible in the dark. Ten meters ahead, he can make out a ditch. If he's able to reach . . .

Brión's cardigan shines in the light, an almost incandescent white.

In the assault car, Troxler is sitting with his hands resting on his knees and his body leaning forward. He looks out of the corners of his eyes at the two guards who are watching the nearest door. He's going to jump . . .

Facing him, Benavídez is looking at the other door.

Carlitos, bewildered, can only muster a whisper:

—But how . . . They're going to kill us like this?

Vicente Rodríguez is walking slowly along the rough and unfamiliar terrain below. Livraga is five meters away from the ditch. Mr. Horacio, who was the first to get off, has also managed to make his way ever so slightly in the opposite direction.

—Halt! —a voice commands.

Some of them stop. Others take a few more steps. The guards, on their part, start to retreat, taking some distance, the bolts of their Mausers in hand.

Livraga doesn't look back, but hears the turn of a crank. There's no time to make it to the ditch. He's going to throw himself on the ground.

—Forward, line up side by side! —shouts Rodríguez Moreno.

Carranza turns around, his face contorted. He drops to his knees before the firing squad.

—For my children . . . —he weeps.— For my chil . . .

Violent vomiting cuts his plea short.

In the truck, Troxler has pulled the bow and arrow of his body taut. His jaw is almost touching his knees.

—Now!
—he howls and hurls himself at the two guards.

He holds a rifle in each hand. And now they are the ones afraid and begging:

—Not the guns, mister! Not the guns!

Benavídez is already up and grabs Lizaso by the hand.

—Let's go, Carlitos!

Troxler brings the heads of the two guards together and throws each one in a different direction, like dolls. He leaps up and is swallowed by the night.

The anonymous NCO (or is he an apparition?) is slow to respond. He tries to get up too late. A third guard is aiming his rifle at him from the front end of the vehicle. A shot is heard. The NCO lets out an ‘Aaah!' and sits back down, just as he was. Only dead.

Benavídez jumps. He feels Carlitos' fingers slipping away from his own. In a state of desperate helplessness, he realizes he has lost him, that the boy has been buried beneath three bodies that are holding him down.

The policemen on the ground hear the shot behind them and hesitate for a fraction of a second. Some turn around.

Giunta doesn't wait any longer. He runs!

Gavino does the same.

The herd begins to separate.

—Shoot them! —screams Rodríguez Moreno.

Livraga throws himself headfirst to the ground. Farther ahead, Di Chiano also takes a dive.

The shots thunder in the night.

Giunta feels a bullet whiz by his ear. He hears a commotion behind him, a low moaning and the thump of a body falling. It's probably Garibotti. An amazing instinct tells Giunta to drop to the ground and not move.

Carranza is still on his knees. They put a rifle to the nape of his neck and fire. Later they riddle his entire body with bullets.

Brión has little chance of escaping with that white cardigan that shines in the night. We don't even know if he tries.

Vicente Rodríguez has dropped to the ground once already. Now he hears the guards running toward him. He tries to get up, but can't. He has tired himself out in the first thirty meters of his escape and it isn't easy to move all one hundred of his kilos. By the time he gets going, it's too late. The second round of shots takes him out.

Horacio di Chiano rolled over twice and froze, playing dead. He hears the bullets destined for Rodríguez whistle overhead. One cuts very close to his face and covers him in dirt. Another rips through his pants without wounding him.

Giunta stays glued to the ground for about thirty seconds, invisible. Suddenly he leaps up like a hare and starts to zigzag. When he senses the shots coming, he throws himself back on the ground. Almost instantaneously, he hears the astounding whir of the bullets again. But by now he is far away. He is nearly safe. When he repeats his maneuver, they won't even see him.

Díaz escapes. We don't know how, but he escapes.
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Gavino runs for two or three hundred meters before stopping. At that moment, he hears another series of explosions and a terrifying shriek that tears through the night and seems to last forever.

—May God forgive me, Lizaso —he will later say, weeping, to one of Carlitos' brothers.— But I think that was your brother. I think he saw everything and was the last to die.

Up above the bodies stretched out in the garbage dump, where the caustic smoke of the gunpowder still burns in the glow of the headlights, a few groans hang in the air. A new burst of bullets seems to put an end to them. But then Livraga, who is still frozen and unnoticed in the spot where he fell, hears the bloodcurdling voice of his friend Rodríguez, who says:

—Kill me! Don't leave me like this! Kill me!

And now they do show him mercy, and they execute him.

Footnotes:

 

24.
Times Stands Still

Horacio di Chiano is not moving. His mouth is wide open, his arms bent at his sides, his hands on the ground beneath his shoulders. By some miracle, he hasn't broken the glasses that he is wearing. He has heard everything—the shots, the screams—and isn't thinking anymore. His body is the domain of a fear that penetrates him to his very bones: all of his tissues are saturated with fear, in every cell a heavy drop of fear.
Don't move
. All the wisdom that mankind has accumulated can be condensed into these two words. Nothing exists aside from this atavistic instinct.

How long has he been this way, playing dead? He doesn't know anymore. He'll never know. He only remembers that at a certain moment he heard the bells of a nearby chapel ringing. Six, seven times? It's impossible to say. Maybe he dreamt those slow, sweet, sad sounds that were falling mysteriously from the darkness.

Ringing out endlessly all around him are the echoes of the horrific carnage, the rushing of prisoners and guards, the explosions that terrorize the air and reverberate in the mountains and nearby country houses, the gurgling of dying men.

At last, silence. Then the roar of an engine. The van starts up. It stops. A gunshot. Silence once more. The engine starts humming again in an intricate nightmare of stops and starts.

In a moment of clarity, Mr. Horacio understands.
The coup de
grâce.
They are going from one body to the next and killing off those who show any signs of life. And now . . .

Yes, now it's his turn. The van comes closer. The ground beneath Mr. Horacio's glasses vanishes into chalky specks of light. They are shining a light on him, aiming at him. He can't see them, but he knows they are aiming at the back of his neck.

They are waiting for some sign of movement. Maybe not even that. Maybe they'll shoot him regardless. Maybe they think the very fact that he's not moving is strange. Maybe they'll figure out what is already obvious, namely that he isn't wounded, that he's not bleeding at all. A terrible nausea rises up from his stomach. He manages to stifle it with his lips. He wants to shout. Part of his body—his wrists resting like crowbars on the ground, his knees, the tips of his feet—would like to make a crazed run for it. The other part—his head, the nape of his neck—keeps telling him: don't move, don't breathe.

What does he do to stay still, to hold his breath, to keep from coughing, to keep from howling out of fear?

But he doesn't move. And neither does the light. It guards him, it watches him, like a game of patience. In the semicircle of rifles that surround him, no one says a word. But no one shoots. Seconds, minutes, years pass like this . . .

And the shot does not come.

When he hears the engine again, when the light disappears, when he knows that they are moving away, Mr. Horacio starts to breathe, slowly, slowly, as though he were learning to do it for the first time.

Closer to the paved road, Livraga has also stayed still but, unfortunately for him, in a different position. He is lying with his face up to the sky, his right arm stretched out and back and his chin resting on his shoulder…

He not only hears but also sees much of what is happening: the flashing bullets, the running guards, the exotic
contradanza
of the van that is now pulling back slowly in the direction of the road.
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The headlights begin veering to the left, toward him. He closes his eyes.

Suddenly he feels a burning tickle, an irresistible stinging in his eyelids. Wild violet figurines dance in an orange light that penetrates his eye sockets. An unstoppable reflex makes him blink beneath the blazing stream of light.

The command strikes like lightning:

—Get that one, he's still breathing!

He hears three explosions go off at point-blank range. With the first one, a spurt of dust shoots by his head. Next he feels a searing pain on his face and his mouth fills with blood.

The guards don't bend down to check if he's dead. It is enough for them to see that ripped up and bloodied face. So they walk away believing that they have delivered the coup de grâce. They don't know that this bullet (and the one that got his arm) are the first ones to actually hit him.

The dismal assault car and Rodríguez Moreno's van retreat to where they came from.

“Operation Massacre” has ended.

Footnotes:

 

25.
The End of a Long Night

The fugitives dispersed into the field of the night.

Gavino has not stopped running. He jumps over puddles and ditches, gets to a dirt road, sees houses at a distance, takes unfamiliar streets, stumbles onto a railroad track, follows it, gets to the vicinity of the Chilavert station on the Mitre line, miraculously finds a bus, gets on it . . .

He is the first to seek asylum in a Latin American embassy while martial law is in full force. The terrible affair had ended for him.

Not so for Giunta, who had a never-ending nightmare waiting for him. The moment he reached a more populated area, he sought refuge in the front yard of a house. Inside there was light and movement. Nearly the entire neighborhood of José León Suárez had been awakened by the shooting.

The petrified fugitive had no sooner stepped into the garden when a window opened and a woman appeared, shouting:

—Don't even dare, don't even dare! —and added, turning halfway around, seeming to address the man of the house:— Take him out! He got away!

Giunta doesn't wait to hear anything more. He must think the world has gone mad tonight. Everyone wants to kill him . . .

He clears the fence with one jump and resumes his desperate sprint. Now he is avoiding the more trafficked areas, walking deliberately along dirt roads.

But there is one encounter he can't escape. Standing on the corner are three young men who watch with curiosity as he goes by. His voice faltering, he tells them some part of what happened and asks for money, even just a few coins to take some means of transportation to get away from this hell. He finds a softer heart among these nightwalkers: one gives him a peso, another gives him a ten-peso bill.

Like Gavino, Giunta makes it to Chilavert station. It's likely that neither of them know that Chilavert was the name of another executed man, one who fell in the Battle of Caseros . . .

He goes to the window and asks for a ticket.

—Where to? —asks the clerk.

Giunta looks at him, amazed. He hasn't the slightest idea. He doesn't even know where he is. He must be quite a sight, this man whose eyes are popping out of their sockets, whose hair is standing on end, whose face is covered in sweat on this freezing night, who is asking for a ticket and doesn't know his destination.

—Where to? —the clerk repeats, looking at him curiously.

—Wherever . . . Where does this line go?

—Retiro.

—That's it. Retiro. Give me a ticket to Retiro.

He gets the ticket. He leans against a wall. He closes his eyes and breathes deep. When he opens them again, there are three strangers looking at him on the platform, just looking at him . . .

All three of them seem to have their eyes fixed on the same spot. Giunta lowers his head and discovers his muddy shoes, his pants torn up from the getaway.

But now the train is arriving. He jumps on. The strangers get on behind him. Giunta starts to walk through the train cars. Two of the men have sat down. But the third is following him, nearly stepping on his heels.

Giunta acts with remarkable clarity of mind: he slows down his step so that the man is practically touching him, and then sits down all of a sudden—or rather, he drops like a rock—in the first seat that he finds on the right.

The stranger sits down as well. In the same row of the empty car, in the seat on the left.

Giunta doesn't look at his pursuer. He fixes his gaze on the dark window in an effort to make out the movements of the image reflected in it. He almost jumps up from his seat. Because the Stranger—could it be a coincidence?—is doing the same thing, watching him in his own window.

Will this night never end? Giunta is in despair. The train leaves Villa Ballester behind. The stranger keeps cunningly observing him. They reach Malaver. A few minutes later they are in San Andrés.

Once more, Giunta's instincts work in his favor. He decides in a flash. He waits for the train to start moving again, to pick up some speed. Then he jolts up, runs to the door, pulls it open in one go, walks down the platform steps, and throws himself off . . .

It's a miracle he doesn't kill himself. As soon as he puts pressure on his foot, the ground forces him to take giant leaps that he has never had to in his life. In his discombobulated puppet dash—ten meters, twenty meters—he brushes against a privet hedge that leaves long scratches on one arm. But the train is far away by now, lost like a glowworm in the dark.

And Giunta is—or believes he is—safe.

***

Julio Troxler has hidden himself in a nearby ditch. He is waiting for the shooting to end. He sees the police cars drive away. Then he does something incredible.
He goes back!

He goes back, dragging himself stealthily and calling out quietly to Benavídez, who escaped from the assault car with him. He doesn't know if he survived.

He gets close to the bodies and starts turning them over one by one—Carranza, Garibotti, Rodríguez—looking at their faces in search of his friend. Pain grips him when he recognizes Lizaso. He has four holes in his chest and one in his cheek. But he doesn't find Benavídez.
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The bodies were still warm. He probably doesn't see Horacio di Chiano, who continues to play dead not too far from there. He understands that there is nothing left to do there, and starts walking in the direction of José León Suárez.

He is almost at the station when he sees Livraga coming towards him, teetering and covered in blood. At the same moment, an officer from the nearby police station was making his way towards the wounded man, shouting: “What's going on? What's going on?”

—They executed us . . . they fired some shots at us —Livraga mumbled, among other insults and unintelligible mutterings.

The officer held him under his armpits and helped him walk towards the station. Along the way, they passed by Troxler.

For the third time this evening, the former police officer was recognized by one of his old colleagues.

—Hey Troxler! How's it going? —the other guy shouts, passing by.

—Good, you know . . . —he replies.

He is about to keep walking when he sees a truck with Army soldiers approaching. As always, Julio Troxler does the most natural thing: he heads to a short line of early risers who are waiting for a Costera bus and joins it. He doesn't plan on boarding the bus—besides, he doesn't even have five cents on him—but he knows he will attract less attention there.

It seems fated. Because the truck stops just in front of the line. Without stepping out, an officer yells:

—Fellas, you haven't heard any shots, have you?

The question seems addressed to everyone, but it's Troxler that the officer is looking at, it's him that he is addressing, for a very simple reason: he is the tallest in line.

Troxler shrugs his shoulders.

—As far as I know . . . —he says.

The truck takes off. Troxler leaves his place in line and starts to walk. He doesn't have any money for the bus; a basic sense of prudence stops him from asking a stranger for money, or even for permission to call his friends . . .

He's exhausted and frozen cold. He hasn't eaten anything since the night before. He walks eleven hours straight through Greater Buenos Aires, which has morphed into a desert without water or shelter for him, a survivor of the massacre.

It is six o'clock in the evening when he reaches a safe haven.

Footnotes: