The Blue Line (5 page)

Curled up in a ball in the darkness, her heart thudding and her palms sweating, she feels like throwing up. It isn't wanting to know the truth that is making her feel sick. It's finding herself once again shut up in the trunk of a car.

THE EZEIZA MASSACRE

Austral Winter

1973

J
ulia was fifteen. She'd been in love with him for a few months now. Her grandmother had warned her: women of the lineage were never happy in love. But Julia refused to listen. She would be the exception.

The callow youth who had approached her at her parents' home had become a man. He had enrolled in the School of Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. He wanted to become a computer scientist. He'd been good at math in school and had developed an interest in systems programming—a new field that had managed to survive the flight into exile of Argentina's finest minds following the Noche de los Bastones Largos.
*

Theo would have liked to work with Clementina, the pride of the faculty. It was the first computer programmed entirely in Argentina—a bulky piece of equipment occupying an entire room. Unfortunately Clementina had just been dismantled on the pretext that a new machine was going to be put into service. Theo was hoping to be part of the new team. His exam results were excellent, and his professors considered him a particularly brilliant student.

Theo was ambitious. He read almost everything he could get his hands on. He had an opinion on every subject under the sun, because even when his knowledge of something was superficial, he could support it with convincing remarks. Mama Fina said he had “presence.” He wasn't handsome by any means, but he had the appeal of young people who enjoy other people's company. His gift for repartee soon made him the center of any conversation; he could be self-deprecating and make people laugh. He often said he'd learned to play the clown to keep Julia's heart, and she knew it was true.

But above all—and this was what made him irresistible to Julia—Theo made it a point of honor to nurture his inner child. He was up for any game, curious about anything new, open to any craziness. Julia felt like she'd been caught up in a whirlwind. It was her turn to keep Anna up at night with her tales of Theo.

Theo was very close to his brother, Gabriel, who was five years his elder. His admiration for Gabriel knew no bounds. They had both graduated from the Colegio Nacional de
Buenos Aires. It was there that Gabriel had made friends with Carlos Gustavo Ramus, a classmate who would later meet a tragic fate. In 1964, at just seventeen, Ramus had become the leader of the Catholic students' organization in Buenos Aires. At twenty-three he had helped to launch a revolutionary movement opposed to the military dictatorship: the Montoneros, named after the guerrillas who had fought against Spanish rule in the nineteenth century. He was killed a few months later during a confrontation with police. It was through Ramus that Gabriel, aged barely eighteen, had become an activist within the Catholic Student Youth, the JEC. It was also through Ramus that Gabriel had made the acquaintance of the young priest Carlos Mugica, the movement's spiritual adviser.

Gabriel had gotten involved in politics in 1966 while studying for his entrance exams to the faculty of medicine. Theo assumed that his involvement in politics simply consisted of a few meetings with friends. Gabriel's circle was made up of young nationalists, most of them conservative and Catholic, who were also attracted, paradoxically enough, to the ideas of Che Guevara and Mao Zedong. They viewed Father Mugica as a mentor because he talked about social justice and worked on the ground in the
villas miserias
of Buenos Aires. He had taken his young followers there several times on vaccination campaigns and similar missions. The brush with poverty had put some of them off but encouraged the hardier ones to get more involved. Hence why young people from the Mataderos neighborhood, where the d'Uccello brothers lived, read Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, Yves Congar, and René Laurentin before they read Marx's
Capital
.

Young Theo's room reflected the influence of his older brother. Instead of the posters of Ursula Andress that held pride of place in his friends' bedrooms, his room was decked out with photographs of Che Guevara and Perón in full dress uniform. It didn't seem to bother him in the slightest that his heroes embodied contradictory ideals. At the foot of his bed lay piles of
Christianity and Revolution
salvaged after they'd been read from cover to cover by his brother's political circle. One of the shelves behind the door held a dusty copy of a book that had once been required reading in school:
La Razón de mi vida
, with a picture of Evita Perón on the cover. The book had recently been banned by the military junta.

Theo was an eager participant in the meetings Gabriel organized at their house, especially when Father Mugica was present. The young priest argued that the temptation of armed struggle was a trap and that only democratic action could break the military's stranglehold. Although he admired the success of the Cuban experience, he refused to justify revolutionary violence. He liked to remind them of the biblical reference to turning swords into plowshares, although that hadn't stopped him from clashing with Cardinal Caggiano, the archbishop of Buenos Aires and the head of the Argentine church, who openly supported the military dictatorship.

Gabriel had briefly nursed the idea of entering the seminary. He had been tempted to follow in Mugica's footsteps
and become involved in the antiestablishment Movement of Priests for the Third World, an organization of young Argentine clerics that had become extremely popular because of its outspoken criticism of the abuses of the military junta.

Perhaps that was why Gabriel hadn't joined his friend Ramus when the Montoneros formed their first armed unit in the early 1970s. Gabriel believed subversion would exacerbate the country's social malaise, not remedy it. Nor did he approve of Operation Pindapoy, the kidnapping of General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. The former head of the military junta had been hauled before a people's court. Charged with multiple crimes, particularly that of stealing Evita Perón's body, he had been killed by a bullet to the head. The Montoneros had published a statement declaring that they would give up his body only in exchange for Evita's remains.

This was when Theo, who had just turned seventeen, decided to become a Montonero, against the advice of his older brother and despite Father Mugica's warnings. His decision came just a few weeks before the news that Aramburu's body had been found by the army in a hacienda owned by Ramus's parents. Their property, La Celma, was situated in Buenos Aires district. Gabriel knew the place and had been there on a number of occasions.

Theo asked Gabriel to put him in contact with Ramus. He was convinced his brother knew where Ramus was hiding, and he wanted to join the organization right away. Gabriel refused outright. Whether it was because he condemned the
Montoneros' act or because he wanted to protect Theo, Gabriel became angry with his brother and retreated into an obstinate silence. Theo was furious at him.

The discord between the d'Uccello brothers lasted until the tragic events of the spring. On September 7, 1970, Carlos Gustavo Ramus died as he was pulling the pin out of a grenade during a confrontation with police in a pizzeria in the center of Buenos Aires. The leader of the Montoneros, Fernando Luis Abal Medina, was also gunned down in the shoot-out.

The news spread like wildfire. Theo's father and mother listened to every report on the radio, consumed with anxiety. Gabriel didn't show up at dinnertime. The atmosphere around the table was fraught; their plates remained untouched, and none of them dared comment on the affair. The previous evening Gabriel had quarreled with his father, who had upbraided him for his leftist views and accused him of being a bad influence on his younger brother. Theo felt terribly guilty, knowing how strongly Gabriel opposed the violence of the Montoneros and how unfair their father's accusation was. But he had lacked the courage to stand up for his brother, both the previous day and during the long, silent wait with his parents at the dinner table.

Overtaken by remorse, Theo waited up for his brother until dawn, sitting in the kitchen glued to the radio. When Gabriel finally appeared, Theo threw himself at his brother and hugged him, putting an end to the feud that had separated them for months.

Neither of them wanted to admit it, but they each felt the other had been right. A gradual change in their feelings, coupled with the recent events, had led them to see the political situation from the other person's point of view. Gabriel began to reconsider his categorical refusal of the armed struggle, while Theo pondered the possibility of joining the Peronist Youth instead of an underground organization like the Montoneros.

Father Mugica officiated at Ramus's funeral. A huge crowd had assembled near the church of San Francisco Solano, right in the middle of the bourgeois Mataderos neighborhood. Gabriel and Theo attended the ceremony, feeling part of their country's history for the first time. Ramus's death manifested a new reality to the d'Uccello brothers: it brought supporters of the Montoneros onto the streets, revealing the importance of the movement as a political force to be reckoned with and no longer merely an urban guerrilla group.

—

The day General Perón returned from exile for the first time, Gabriel and Theo went to welcome him with a group of about a hundred young people. They had gathered in the rain against the orders of the police, who had forbidden them to go anywhere near Ezeiza Airport. It was November 17, 1972, a few days before Anna's eighteenth birthday. Perón was detained at the airport for hours before being released into a deserted
Buenos Aires on a tight leash by the military, which had imposed a curfew.

Seven months later, on June 20, 1973, Gabriel, Theo, and Julia found themselves among a huge crowd come to celebrate Perón's definitive return. Following the democratic election of March 1973, the Peronist Héctor José Cámpora had been named president of the republic, since Perón himself was not allowed to run. Everyone knew it was merely a transition to pave the way for the general's return to power.

When Theo stopped by to pick up Julia on his way to join the welcome rally at Ezeiza Airport, Mama Fina's desperate attempts to dissuade them were no match for their enthusiasm. After all, Julia had changed a lot too. In the space of just a few months she had become a young woman, keen to prove her independence.

They arrived at Ezeiza under the thrust of the vast sea of humanity that had come to greet the general and was now fanning out around the platform that had been set up for him to deliver a speech. Hand in hand, Theo and Julia squeezed their way through to the pillar where activists representing the political arm of the Montoneros had gathered next to youths from the Justicialist Liberation Front and Peronist Armed Forces militants. They hoped they might find Gabriel there. Their mission proved completely impossible. There were more than two million people gathered there on that winter morning.

The weather was cold with a biting wind, but the young
people, dressed in thin clothes, seemed not to notice. True, it was a sunny day. But what was really keeping the crowd warm was their newfound freedom following the military junta's departure. As the excitement grew to a fever pitch, so the temperature rose too. The Montoneros, who had recently formed a political wing, were chanting their overtly revolutionary slogans loud and clear. Despite knowing very little about politics, Julia could see that the Montoneros were the most numerous among the Peronist forces present and were in a position of strength. She could feel herself getting carried away by the collective emotion; she was part of this human mass whose heart was beating in unison with hers. There was a primitive feeling of power and victory in the air that she had never experienced before and that she found intoxicating.

Giving up on the idea of trying to find Gabriel, Theo and Julia elbowed their way toward the platform, hoping to get a closer view of the man who stirred the hearts of all Argentines. A rumor began to spread that the general's plane had been diverted to Morón Airport, and a ripple of anxiety spread through the crowd.

That was when the shooting began. Bullets sprayed in all directions. The crowd panicked and began to crush and sway, swallowing Julia. Her hand slipped out of Theo's and she lost sight of him. Summoning all her strength, she tried to fight against the tide in the direction in which he had disappeared. She was jostled and fell to the ground, narrowly escaping being trampled underfoot in the stampede. Someone collapsed
at her feet, spattering her with blood. The crowd scattered, screaming, leaving Julia at the center of a wide circle next to a wounded young woman lying in a dark puddle. They immediately became a target for the snipers. Julia grabbed the young woman under her arms and began to drag her backward, trying to regain the shelter of the crowd.

She managed to pull the woman to a spot where the ground sloped down. She stayed in her improvised trench until late afternoon, when the shooting finally came to an end. The girl had sustained a bullet wound to the leg and was still losing blood. Julia laid her down as best as she could and, as a last resort, used the belt of her dress as a tourniquet, tying it above the woman's knee. She had to get her out of there right away.