I arrived at the prison at ten in the morning; I presented my documents and the letter from Parker at the counter in the entrance and, in the control area, asked to speak with Dr. Beck, a doctor in residence at the jail, a friend—or employee—of Sam Carrington, who used him as a liaison between his boys (as he called the inmates) and his used car business. A while later he appeared, a jubilant fat man with the look of a quack doctor from a country fair, dressed in a white lab coat with his name embroidered on it. I imagined the walls of his consulting room with framed titles and vague academic diplomas. He didn’t seem to have much to do that morning and was smoking a mother-of-pearl pipe, which accentuated his comedy-actor look. The truth is that, thanks to him (and another hundred dollars), I was able to enter without any issues and made it through all of the checkpoints.
“A high-security prison in the United States is a complex institution, perhaps the most complex form of social life imaginable,” the doctor said as we descended in a glass-walled elevator. “Really, it’s an experimental laboratory to test the behavior of men under extreme conditions, an excellent place for a medical psychiatrist like me to work,” he said. We went out into a covered courtyard and, after passing down a tunnel, stopped before a commanding set of white bars. Dr. Beck presented me to the guard and withdrew. We’d meet again on the other side, once I passed through the control area. I listened as they shut the bolts behind me and then descended into the basement, accompanied by a prison guard.
At the far end was the identification area, a dark room with a metallic wire mesh screen at the front that didn’t allow you to see through from the other side. On the back wall were lines indicating where to stand and a series of numbers to measure the height of the person who was going to be processed. Opposite me, on the ceiling, there were several spotlights that immediately blinded me. The guard accompanying me had gone away, and I stood alone in the room. Over a loudspeaker they ordered me to place myself in the middle of the white lines under a latticed skylight. Behind the screen everything was dark, and from there issued the voice that asked me the questions. Who did I want to see (they already knew), and for what purpose; I told them I needed to show the prisoner some documents that might prove useful in the trial. They asked whether I had a criminal record, whether I had any markings or scars, what religion I belonged to, what race, whether I was addicted to drugs. They receive all of that information when you complete the form requesting access, but they repeated it again in case you made a mistake or gave different information, or they might have done it purely out of routine. The point was to wear the visitors down and treat them like they were going to be arrested. They took photos of me from the front and in profile and kept me there for several long minutes under the blinding light, to intimidate me, I suppose. The voice issuing from the loudspeakers continued a while later with instructions. Stand up straight, raise your chin, throw your shoulders back, take off your glasses, look forward, turn to the left, now to the right, stay in profile. Take off your clothes, leave them on the floor. Stand facing away, bend over, spread your buttocks (“show your ass”). Stand up straight, face forward now, raise your arms, show your armpits, lift your testicles. Okay, now turn your face toward the light, open your mouth and stick out your tongue, show your teeth. Hands apart, fingers spread, palms facing up, palms facing down. Get dressed. The light went out. They imagined that you might be hiding drugs in some orifice, or maybe a shiv wrapped up in plastic tape hidden in the inner linings of the soul. A knife, it could be, a bit of coke for the boys in jail, a bulletin from the Workers Party printed on invisible rice paper. For years I’d gone to prison to visit Beto Carranza, a friend who’d had the fortune to fall prisoner before the military coup of 1976 and, though he did undergo torture and several simulated executions, was given over to the custody of the Executive Power and saved from being murdered in secret. In the Devoto prison, when I visited him, the guards back then would warn you that they were keeping a file on you and would ask if you were from La Orga, if you were a lefty or gay, if you were Jewish and communist (or just Jewish), and finally they’d ask you for cash to buy cigarettes. Friends of the inmates did indeed pass on letters written in microscopic writing on cigarette rolling papers, or they conveyed messages from memory. I remember that Carranza was always content and optimistic when he showed up in the visiting room, and he gave hope to us, the ones who came in from the street.
With the inspection now finished, I left the room and went into an office, where I deposited the money I had with me, my credit cards, my keys. The Conrad book was one of the objects that could be taken into a high-security area.
When I left the identification room, Dr. Beck was waiting for me. According to him, the prison was one of the most peaceful places in the world, you could walk at night along the corridors between cells without any trouble. Life was suspended here, it had no purpose or meaning. In a cell, you might see a brownish blanket on the cement floor and a man who couldn’t fall asleep, or who wasn’t even trying to sleep, sitting on the edge of the bed with his bare feet on the blanket, motionless, waiting for morning to come. “There’s a large number of Black and Latino prisoners (they make up 67% of the population), and of the remaining prisoners, 25% are white,” said the doctor, “and the other 8% are Asian, yet 67% of the guards are white, generally poor whites from Louisiana or Virginia who used to work in the loading and unloading zones at plantations or on the docks but had lost their jobs and were hired as prison guards. They preferred living locked up in here to having no work.” Dr. Beck had also come here to work because he saw no other prospects, and he was comfortable in this role because, except for the ones who got injured in fights—stabbings, headbutts that broke their noses—and the ones who were sexually assaulted, the majority had only minor ailments and spent time in the infirmary to ease the tension of communal living.
As for Munk, everyone treated him with great respect and called him the Professor; they transferred him to solitary, but, as he hadn’t killed any guards, he was considered a normal prisoner. “He’s fine now,” said Doctor Beck, “we’re convinced that he isn’t a psychopath, quite the opposite, he’s a friendly, studious man who says very little. Ah, I don’t think it would be easy to find another person like him. A great man, a brilliant mind. He lives in his own world, thinking all the time. He’s expanded my intelligence, not only because I get the chance to talk to him every now and then, but also because of his history. He lived alone in the woods with no electric light or TV, so he feels like he’s on cloud nine here, he never says so but I can tell.”
We’d gone down floor after floor in a cement stairwell until we reached the gray area, also called the Short Cut. Down there were the murderers, the psychopaths, the most hardened criminals waiting out their sentences. It was what you could technically call the psychiatric wing of the prison, although Beck laughed at that designation. “The lunatics are on the outside, my friend, I know what I’m talking about, down here there are only criminals beyond hope,” he said, and left me alone, facing a cement hallway so clean that it looked glazed.
The visiting room was a white enclosure with high barred windows and bright light. A guard admitted me and placed me before a rectangular table, and then he stationed himself at the end of the empty room like a bored docent in a museum who looks at the masterworks on display without seeing them. One of the walls gave the impression of being a Gesell camera, that is, a one-way mirror that would allow us to be monitored from the other side. It reminded me of D’Amato’s private aquarium with the white shark swimming relentlessly in the pale waters, lying in wait for its prey. A circular clock with large black hands would mark the duration of the visit, and it had already started running.
In the background you could hear distant voices as well as the metallic sound of footsteps approaching down the entry hall. “I don’t like it when people talk about me like I’m not there,” someone could be heard saying. “Calm down, Mister Munk,” answered the guard, a black man with white hair, as they entered the room.
Thomas Munk was taller than I’d imagined, and he had an air of calm and startling pale blue eyes. He was dressed in a prisoner’s brown uniform, kind of like pajamas, which hung too big on him; his legs were shackled with a metal bar at his ankles, yet he still retained a distinguished quality, as though his distinction was independent of any external circumstances. When he moved, his footsteps clinked with a gloomy sound; he was detained, and for the first time the word took on its full meaning for me. An iron, mechanical pressure, a ludicrous, impersonal efficiency that has the power to immobilize a man.
He situated himself directly opposite me, on the other side of the table; he was so close that I slid back a little in the seat as he opened and closed his left hand, dotted by scars and burns.
He didn’t have much time left, he said, there were things he wanted to say, and he wanted some of his ideas to be heard firsthand. He was thankful for the people who came to see him, and he had many requests for interviews but had accepted mine because he was intrigued by the fact that I was from Buenos Aires.
“Is it true that the Argentine revolutionaries carried cyanide pills?” he asked me.
“To avoid torture… Not because they wanted to die.”
“I understand,” he said.
“When the repression came down, the average lifespan of an activist in hiding was three months…”
“In this country, secrecy is impossible,” he said. “A man can hide for a while but will always be filmed and observed, no matter what he does, and they’ll read his mail, monitor his bank account, and secretly break into his house and his friends’ houses. The only way to keep yourself safe is to live on your own in some remote place. On a desert island you brood, you murmur, you mutter, you think. No one can know of the things we plan, thoughts can’t be seen. That’s what secrecy consists of now, you have to withdraw and start anew. We live in an era of decline and defeat; you have to be capable of being alone before you can start over again. Nature took the precaution that ideas would be invisible. It’s rebellion’s last refuge. It used to be possible to create clandestine groups, little iron-willed organizations, a network of closed cells, disciplined and effective. That phase came to an end, there was a terrible series of defeats. Now we have to start over again, we’re in the era of lone men, private conspiracies, solitary action. We can only resist by hiding our invisible thoughts, blending them in with the crowd. We are scattered individuals, off in the woods, lost in big cities, subjects in flight and adrift on the prairies. We are isolated, but we are many. We’ve gone from the mass to the herd. That is the new political situation: scattering, retreat, the vanguard lost behind enemy lines. Kropotkin, Prince Kropotkin, the Russian revolutionary and brilliant anarchist theorist, used the term consistency for the energy that keeps men bound together in situations of assault and danger. United in dispersion, unknown to each other, these groups in fusion are constantly changing: in direction, in dimensions, in territory, in velocity.
“Anarchism denies the false distinction between the one and the many: The individual, to begin with, and contrary to the etymology of the word, is multiple. The Prince called it an aggregate of power, where every individual is a collective of forces and each collective can be conceived of as an individual. As the Bible says: ‘Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?’ (Romans 9:21). That means”—he said—“a life for honor; a life for dishonor. A life of anger. A life of compassion. Each way of life has its values, its language, and its law, and they’re in constant flux and redefinition. Anarchist subjectivity is variable. Its discontinuity is a fact that Kropotkin explains as the ‘resultant’ of a series of autonomous units and sequences that simultaneously compose it.
“Our most intimate memories, our most intimate feelings, our ways of living are multiple. Each decision we make closes off a series of possible alternatives. What happens if we try to make several contradictory decisions at once and keep them separate, in open series? A political life, an academic life, an emotional life, family life, sexual, religious, all of which may have diffuse (not to say clandestine) relationships between them.”
He was articulating his thoughts without emphasis, rather wearily, like someone meeting a stranger on a train and initiating a casual and meandering conversation. He’d begun to study his peers in solitary, and their behavior never ceased to surprise him. They’d be watching the images on TV in the break room, and it was there that the bloodiest rebellions were set off. It infuriated them to see people on the outside, living normally. It wasn’t the oppression that made them rebel but the trivial repetition of everyday gestures reflected on the screen. To know that life was proceeding on the outside infuriated them and stirred them up to revolt.
“Sometimes,” he said then, “I am caught off guard by nostalgia for eras that I don’t remember living through.” There was a patio with red flowerpots and geraniums and the sound of a piano. It was his mother. He missed her but didn’t want to see her; she was associated with the weakest aspect of his spirit. “She played piano in such an honest way, my mother,” he added, “that I always get emotional to remember her sitting in front of the keys with her glasses on to read the music. She was a Polish pianist, that is, she wasn’t Russian, and she felt inferior but really was excellent. Music expresses thoughts better than anything else.”
(The exercise of imagining possible worlds or alternative societies is a constant in utopian thought, but it hasn’t occurred to anyone—except by accident or by chance—to imagine several simultaneous personal lives, radically different from one other, and then be capable of living them.)
“I’ve sought to express my thoughts by means of direct action. Are you taking notes?” He looked at me as though waking up and smiled. “But then what is it you’re looking for here?”
“I’m a friend of Ida Brown’s.” He remained impassive; he wasn’t someone who could be caught off guard by such tricks. “I have a photo,” I said, and placed it on the table. He studied it carefully. A smiling girl and a shy young man. Did he remember her? “She was a graduate student at Berkeley. She died in an accident. Did you know her?”
He had known her, yes, a long time ago, he said. And had he continued to see her? He had seen her, yes, a couple of times, later on. She was a friend, he could trust her. We agreed on that, like two strangers who’re surprised to find out that they’ve loved the same woman. But he said nothing of the kind, I must be imagining it, for there was no confidence between us, and the only point of contact was that, when I said the name Ida Brown, we started speaking in Spanish and immediately the guard who was with us turned on a red light.
“Don’t pay attention to him. It will take them longer to decipher what they record, but Menéndez will understand us, and he’s the only one who could have any interest in this conversation, and if you’re here it’s because he permitted it,” he said. “That Mexican is trying to understand… the mystery of the criminal personality,” he said, sarcastically. “He’s a dog who can’t catch a horsefly and only feels its sting. And he jumps. He snaps in the air, barks in the night. Can a dog understand a horsefly?”
According to Munk, the FBI was gathering evidence, consulting with experts, using their scientific laboratories, their labyrinthine archives interconnected with all the police files in the world, casting the net to trap the fish, but, in the end, they would resolve—whatever they resolved—through torture, blackmail, betrayal.
“My brother, for example, is worse than my parrot Daisy; at least she doesn’t know what she’s saying. They gave him a million dollars in recompense and swore to him that they would not string me up from a tree.”
He seemed to be speaking for his own benefit, indifferent to the sympathy or antipathy of whoever was listening to him, thanks to the habit he’d acquired of thinking out loud in the solitude of the woods, like a hermit in the desert who speaks of his visions. I don’t believe I’m reproducing his words faithfully, as I wrote them down when I returned to the hotel, some hours later, but a few of his phrases are in my notes and I’ve tried to convey the sense of what he expressed that day.
“For my theorem on choice,” he said, “I won the Fields Medal. As soon as I received the prize money, I abandoned everything, and that was my point of departure.” They’d given him the medal for his advances in the logic of choice. According to him, it was about experimenting with possible lives and fictional lives. In both cases, we’re immersed in a world that is like the real world, immersed as if we are in the real world. The key is that fictional universes—in contrast to possible worlds—are incomplete (that’s why we can never know what Marlow did after he finished telling the story of Lord Jim). Munk had set out to politically complete certain unresolved plots and to act accordingly. He preferred to begin from an existing plot. That was all he said about his reading of Conrad’s novels.
In the beginning, he’d planned to write each alternative series of his life in a different notebook: but then he recognized that the interest lay in their intersections. So as not to compromise anyone, several pages of his Diary were encoded, written with a system of rolling codes, of his own invention, which changed according to the hour of the day! At three in the afternoon the words meant one thing, but by midnight they already had another meaning.
He knew that the FBI technicians had been forced to turn to the NSA, and the NSA cryptographers had tried to turn to the Russians, but the Russians were devoted to deciphering the codes for the secret accounts of former Communist Party leaders in Switzerland and didn’t want to collaborate on anything as superfluous as deciphering the diaries of an ex-mathematician.
“The Russians have lost everything, but they’ve preserved their disdain for the North Americans, and in that sense I am Russian as well.”
“But don’t think I never think about the ones who die,” he said then. “They’re the same as me, I could have been one of them. Great scientists, perfect scoundrels, sensitive men. John Kline loved birds. James Korda, a theologian, had a lover who couldn’t express his pain because he didn’t want to expose him. Leon Singer was a socialist all his life, which led to problems in his academic career. Aaron Lowden couldn’t endure exile. They were naïve, and, because of their private ambition, which they called a love of science, they advanced, destroying everything in their way, like bulldozers knocking down forests and sacred mountains.
“They forgot—or didn’t want to see—the consequences of their actions. That is evil: not taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions. The consequences, not the results. The consequences,” he said. “The perpetual problem is how to connect thoughts to actions.” There are actions that clearly express ways of thinking: in that sense they were like him.
The light in the place was a perpetual light, fluorescent tubes creating a constant atmosphere of day. The guard sitting in a corner seemed to be dozing off with his eyes open. The conversation, or rather, the monologue, was interrupted here and there by yells or moans or beating against the bars, and the distant, intermittent, sharp sound of the unreal voices on TV, and the sounds that entered through the air-conditioning grates. There was no silence in prison either. “Never,” he said, and smiled as though he’d discovered me once again. Then he asked me what I’d been saying.
“What were you saying?” he said.
“You would have received a letter from Ida Brown.”
He took a while moving his pieces.
“A letter?”
“Let me lay it out like this,” I said. “Ida would have discovered in Conrad’s novel, by chance, certain connections to your mode of action. A coincidence, perhaps, and, so as not to give you away, she would have written you a letter of warning.” He looked at me impassively and I continued. “In choosing that Conrad novel, you would have had to infer, just as a plagiarist would, the possibility that someone, by chance, as they were reading the book, might discover the connection. The FBI glimpsed some relationship between the novel and your actions but couldn’t determine the link. A book in itself, isolated, means nothing. It needs a reader who is capable of establishing the nexus and restoring the context. The markings are clear, the dates coincide. She taught the novel during the first week of March. Therefore, she must have sent a letter before the thirteenth because she left the book with me that day, she forgot it, shall we say, or she used me as a safeguard… in case something happened to her.” He had revived and was looking at me thoughtfully. “I don’t know what she would have said in the letter, but from the little of her that I do know, I can assure you that she wouldn’t have given you away without warning you first, without saying that she’d discovered you, even without suggesting that you should escape, that you should stop what you were doing.”
He took a while to answer.
“I haven’t been receiving letters for months, and the ones I do receive I tear up without reading.”
All the same, there were a few blind spots. I was convinced that Ida’s death had not been an accident. Everyone must—at least—be master of their own death. Integrity depends on that.
“Do you know what integrity is?”
“I would have used integrity to not kill innocent people.”
“In my case integrity is a virtue that succeeds the events,” he said. “You never have to explain what you do, you never have to justify yourself!”
If he’d kept silent about his reasons, he said later, he would have been victorious. A series of incomprehensible deaths, a wicked and perfect work of art, all of society turning circles around one blind spot. He rejected the moralists who killed and destroyed in the name of sound reasons. His arguments, by contrast, were not compatible with the murders he committed. He’d never said why he did what he did. In that way, he achieved absolute sovereignty, a pre-political and ultra-moral sovereignty, he said. There was no proposition in the future that could justify his present actions. He denied utopian hope, always deferred, stubbornly postponed, which nevertheless presented itself as the final horizon of the action. He never said it openly, but he believed that political violence explained itself. It was a concept, it didn’t require explanation. It was an example, a case, something given for consideration. It worked like imaginary situations in the history of philosophy: Plato’s cave; the race between Achilles and the turtle.
But there was something that escaped that logic, I countered, because Ida’s death did arise from a cause, and I was proposing an interpretation. “She wouldn’t have wanted to give you away”—I repeated—“and she sent a letter to warn you…”
“That’s not how it went,” he said.
“Then Ida was working with you?”
An impassive, terrifying expression.
“I do not confirm nor deny it,” he said.
He couldn’t lie, or was it that he wanted me to believe he couldn’t lie?
“In my country it has happened many times. The bomb sometimes goes off on the person carrying it. She was working with you,” I said, as though this was evidence. “Possibly she was transporting one of the parcels that day.”
“I do not confirm nor deny it.”
“In the end she was afraid… terrified, perhaps. And she died alone.”
“Not alone,” he said. “There are many of us in this country.”
I already knew that language; an invisible army, a secret war. Anonymous heroes. I’d been thinking the whole time about a young Trotskyist, a dear friend, El Vasco Bengoechea, brilliant and dynamic, who died while moving a bomb—“un caño,” as they say in Argentina—which detonated unexpectedly and killed him in his apartment on Calle Gascón, in Buenos Aires.
“That’s why I came to see you, so that her death would at least have a meaning.”
“A meaning?” he asked.
“She was a prominent intellectual, and it’s possible that she would have undertaken a secret war in defense of her principles and her ideals. It doesn’t matter whether she was wrong or right, but she died for something she believed in, and that gave her death meaning…”
“Ida was a brave woman. We keep her in our thoughts.”
“We?”
“You and I. That’s enough to keep her memory.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Vea,” he said in his perfect Spanish, “I don’t want to compromise anyone. You read about cases like mine in books, but when the things are actually happening to you, they’re always messier and not at all noble or dramatic. Just sordid and horrifying,” said Munk. “You have to do what you have to do, and sometimes it seems impossible or pointless and other times it’s simply terrible. We have to start over again from zero, like in the old times; we’re alone but it’s possible to resist and be victorious.” He made a gesture with his hands. “Many times in my life…” he said, but the little bell of the clock interrupted him. Time was up. “That’s it, then,” he said, and sat up straight, laboriously, with his legs shackled.
He moved away, followed by the black guard who conducted him down the hallway the way someone would move a large, wounded animal.
“Take care, Mr. Munk, take care.”
When I returned to the hotel, Munk’s words were still ringing in my ears. It was Ida’s accidental death that had made him break his silence and send the manifesto that led him to ruin. Was that it? He didn’t give me any explanation. “We are many,” he had said. It was an ambiguous phrase that could only be understood if you were familiar with his ideas. “I am Chambiges, I am Badinguet, I am Prado, I am all the names in history.” Never being oneself, changing identities, inventing a past.
She was like that too, I’m sure; I had one piece of evidence, the little glimmer of her passion for secrecy, for the occult in life. I could imagine perfectly well Ida’s nocturnal trips to distant cities, the studied movements, the danger that made her pause in the street with a gun in her purse and her heart in her mouth. If she’d died on one of her clandestine journeys and been discovered, everyone would be talking about her, condemning her and reviling her, yet they would be keeping her alive as long as they cursed her name. You have to be very desperate and, at the same time, feel a cold and lucid hatred in order to go out and kill. Maybe that’s how it was. I do not confirm nor deny it. No justification, no explanation, but it might be possible, even right. It depends on the circumstances. Or maybe it was just that Munk wanted to imagine a multitude of young people that existed in the United States who were determined to take action, even without knowing each other. He had demonstrated that a lone man could act and elude the FBI for twenty years. It could be. I do not confirm nor deny it.
Through the hotel window could be seen the rain and the night; it was one of those brief and violent summer storms. On the other side of the hotel parking lot, on the outskirts, lay the countryside, the darkened plain, and in the background, far away, a few indistinct glimmers. They were the lights of the prison, the high wall like a starry sky. I thought that Munk would be looking out at the rain too, his hands on the bars, and perhaps he could see, in the distance, amid the darkness, the reflection of one light in a hotel room window.