december 1976
A man shoved Lorena to the floor, where the raw wood drove splinters through her palms and bare thighs. Her hands were cuffed behind her. She moved her fingertips along the ground to orient herself. She was sitting on a plywood panel, based on the way it tilted and warped under her weight. They’d torn off her clothes and dressed her in something short and stiff, jute or burlap, the same material as the head covering she still wore. Her underpants, thankfully, remained on.
José moaned from somewhere nearby, and Lorena could sense other people moving around her. It was dark and humid. The sharp, rancid smell of vomit and bleach hung in the still air. An abrupt tug at her head covering restored her full vision. Suddenly José’s naked body was upright before her, tied to a table as though on display. Rope bound his wrists and ankles tightly, cutting into his skin.
She lunged forward toward her husband, but when she thrust her body, she discovered that her cuffs were attached to the floor behind her. She pulled anyway, so hard that the metal dug into her wrists, scraping through her flesh.
Where the hell was she? The car ride hadn’t been long enough to take them outside the city. She’d counted three flights of stairs when they brought her up here to this dank, open floor, lit only by moonlight that bled through a single barred window. It had to be three or four in the morning by now. Her eyes darted around the room, which was scattered with thin mattresses, metal beds, and, most distressingly, dozens of other people. They were all blindfolded—some crouched, others lying down—and filthy, but alive. The junta wanted her to see this.
Awareness arrived then: This place had been here since the coup began, maybe longer. The possibility had been polluting the air around her for months, leaving a residue on her skin. This was the source of her inexplicable rage, the horror she’d conceived that only Claudio had recognized or acted against, the terror that subdued Esme and José into complacency. This was what everyone in Buenos Aires pretended didn’t—couldn’t—exist.
Yet here she was.
José’s head lolled to one side. What had they done to him? She noticed a small box at the foot of the table: an electric transformer of some kind with wires springing out like curly hair. A small red bulb was lit up next to a switch and numbers on a voltage dial. To the right of the table, the man who had shoved her to the floor now held a long wand with a wire tail that led to the box. A second man, an officer, stepped past Lorena and approached him.
Lorena started to scream, but thick fingers pushed a wadded rag into her mouth, salty and dry, triggering her gag reflex. A face eclipsed her vision.
“Claudio Valdez,” the officer said.
It was the man with lentil-colored eyes, the one who’d let her leave Matías with Esme.
“I’m taking that thing out of your mouth and we’re going to have a little chat, claro?” he said. “And you’re going to do all the talking. Don’t stop until you’ve told me everything you know about Claudio Valdez.”
He moved to adjust the dial, cranking the voltage.
Lorena shook her head in despair, but her tormentor took it as a refusal. He nodded to the other officer, who touched the bronze tip of the wand to José’s bottom lip. José’s face tightened, the veins and tendons in his neck jutting out like cords, and his body stiffened, petrified for the span of several seconds. Lorena’s eyes blurred with tears. She grunted deeply through the rag, biting down, her saliva soaking through.
Lentil Eyes turned the dial down and abandoned the box to get close to her face again. Before he could fully approach, an officer whipped a blindfold around her head, jerking it back. He tied it so tightly that it creased, exposing a sliver of view beneath her left eye.
“I said, ‘Claudio Valdez,’” Lentil Eyes repeated, calmly. “When was the last time you saw him?”
Lorena’s mind flew back through time to her secretive encounters with Claudio, then immediately pushed every image of him from her thoughts, desperate to erase the evidence from her own memory.
“Who else worked on the paper?” asked Lentil Eyes. “Who went to the rabbit house, Lorena Ledesma? Who did you see there?”
Lorena resisted the futile impulse to sob. The “rabbit house” was an underground printing press run by the Montoneros out of a residential home in La Plata. The owners bred rabbits as a front, and the animals were everywhere, or so she’d heard from Claudio—she’d never been inside. If this officer knew it existed, the junta must have already shut it down. But it sounded like they didn’t have Claudio. She tilted her head back and, through the slice of opening in her blindfold, saw the torturer with the prod move closer to José, touching its tip to José’s earlobe. His body tensed; he screamed loudly.
She heard Lentil Eyes light a cigarette, then smelled its smoke. “You can tell me now or we can keep going like this all night.” He pulled the rag from Lorena’s mouth. “Who else was there?”
Her words came in quick gasps, before the electric prod could jolt back to life.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Please. Just leave him alone.” She would lie. She was capable of that. She just needed to make them stop torturing José.
“Don’t hurt her,” José groaned, barely lucid. Lorena flushed with shame. What had she done to her sweet husband? Come after me instead, you bastard, she thought. Put me on that table. I’m the guilty one. But she kept her lips tight.
Lentil Eyes waited in mock anticipation. This was her punishment. God was punishing her for what she’d done. In response to her silence, the torturer moved the picana to José’s ribcage without hesitation. José jolted, tensed, then screamed again. His voice was raw. When the officer dropped the prod to José’s inner thigh, Lorena shrieked until her own vocal cords strained.
“Stop! Stop!”
Lentil Eyes shoved the rag back in her mouth. The crackling of electricity ceased. José went silent. The whole room was silent. How could so many people not make a single sound?
A hand yanked her blindfold down. José’s body hung limp in full before her on the table. She prayed he was merely unconscious. The terrible face engulfed her view again.
“Start talking,” said Lentil Eyes. “Claudio Valdez. Everything you know. Last chance, or I’ll stop asking nicely.”
* * *
Lorena met Claudio at a student rally in June of 1969. She was nineteen, and the whole world seemed on the cusp of an awakening. Protests were taking place throughout the country—the Cordobazo and Rosariazo had been the biggest uprisings Lorena had ever seen—and artists, intellectuals, academics, and even middle-class professionals were coming together to form the “new left.” The students’ movement merged with general strikes of autoworkers. Grown men like her father mobilized alongside Lorena and her classmates. They took to the streets in their coveralls to march against a government that had abandoned them, a ruling class that exploited them for a profit. Lorena was exhilarated. She wanted nothing more than to be a part of it.
“Take the sturdy one,” Gustavo had said from the doorway of the garage as Lorena rummaged through his plywood barricades and rolled-up fabric banners punctured with wind vents. Her father pointed at the thicker of two folding wooden A-frames, and when Lorena picked it up, she knew she was taking up her father’s fight, carrying a weight he could no longer bear.
Gustavo was barely fifty then, but his years of struggle were deep lines drawn into his face. Argentina’s “revolution” a few years prior was supposed to be a new beginning for the workers who had revered Juan Perón—Perónism without Perón, they promised—but Gustavo had been wary, and his hesitation proved right. General Juan Carlos Onganía pandered to the labor unions, lip service to keep their resistance in check. Then he’d raised the retirement age, denied the right to strike, supported corporations, and implemented laws repressing anyone who didn’t participate in his initiatives.
The people weren’t standing for it any longer.
When Lorena kissed her father goodbye that day, his skin was flushed, his brow damp.
His heart is stressed, Esme fretted, but her mother always worried too much.
Lorena headed toward the park with the heavy A-frame under her arm, her bulky winter coat and woolen mittens protecting her from its splintering slats. In the cold air of the street, distant chants from the rally swelled, their power culminating. Her steps gained momentum as she burrowed her chin into the chunky scarf Esme had knitted for her.
At the edge of the park, José waited for Lorena in a collared shirt and wool sweater. They’d only been dating a few months after meeting in a sociology class. José was gentle, refined, and clearly smitten. He took the makeshift barricade from her arms and carried it through the crowd to the center of the park, where a group of classmates gathered. There, Ernesto Ramos, whom she’d known for years, stood talking to another student, scribbling in his flimsy notebook, presumably conducting an interview for the university publication he ran. Lorena watched as the interviewee took a pull from his cigarette and responded thoughtfully to Ernesto’s questions. She hadn’t seen him before. He was handsome with thick curls, and when he glanced over at her and began to approach, Lorena’s heart lifted.
“Che,” José said, reaching out a hand. “Claudio.”
Claudio clapped José’s shoulder in a friendly way. There was a fluidity to his body, a constant movement, like dancing. His attention moved swiftly past Lorena and to the A-frame under José’s arm.
“That’s brilliant. Put it right over there at the curb. The cops are already getting annoyed with us.” His laughter hitched when Lorena caught his eye.
“This is Lore, my girlfriend,” said José, using the term for the first time aloud. “She’s the one who brought it.”
Claudio opened his mouth, then closed it again. His dance stopped for a moment.
“Thanks for the help,” Claudio said to her.
Lorena felt a surge of heat. She wanted to say more, to do more, but Ernesto joined them then and wolf-whistled at her playfully, instantly demoting her from fellow revolutionary to just another pretty girlfriend.
“Boludo.” She narrowed her eyes at Ernesto.
Claudio’s laugh was infectious music.
“Come on,” said José, pulling Lorena toward a nearby tipa tree and away from Claudio.
The rally was a memorial for a fifteen-year-old student killed by military police during the recent protests. Claudio took center stage, speaking boldly and leading the rallying cries.
¡Viva la patria! Claudio yelled, and the crowd responded in kind. This is our moment of national liberation! We must take action!
José leaned back against the tree trunk and opened his stance. Lorena nestled into the safety of his body, fitting nicely against his lean frame. From the space between his legs, she chanted back heartily. ¡Viva la patria! When her emotion flared high, José put his arms around her waist carefully, as if she was made of glass. She settled into his touch.
Claudio preached, offering quotes from Che Guevara and other revolutionaries between waves of roaring cheers from the students. Officers lined the perimeter of the park. Claudio held up a photo of the boy who’d been killed.
Luis Norberto Blanco gave his life for our struggle, Claudio cried, but it’s better to die standing than to live life on our knees! The students’ voices exploded in response to his words. When Claudio raised his arms and shouted, the hem of his jacket lifted, revealing a slice of bare skin above his waistband that triggered an unexpected hunger in Lorena, despite José’s hands on her own stomach. Claudio was a force. Chasing him would be like grasping a comet’s blazing tail—equal parts futile and destructive—but Lorena wanted to nonetheless. He was the type of person who would change the world.
At the fringes of the crowd, a few men too old to be students whispered to one another. They were eyeing Claudio, the proficient young orator, evaluating his magnetism.
How often Lorena looked back on that moment, that fork in the road.
Within one short year of that day, the recruiters had claimed Claudio as a registered Montonero and the group was credited with kidnapping former president Aramburu, who’d led the coup against Perón. Soon after, Gustavo’s heart expended its last beat. Lorena no longer searched the landscape of her future for possibility, but for the safe and comforting path provided by José—one which led her, with Esme’s encouragement, to a sweet and uncomplicated life of relative safety and contentment. She suppressed thoughts about the chances she didn’t take, adventures she’d bartered in exchange for the life she had. The past was behind her.
But then, in a single afternoon, she’d risked everything and everyone she loved. For one breath of ecstasy, Lorena had paid the highest price.
* * *
It smelled of rain and wet cement. The roof leaked; the thin mattress absorbed the falling drops. Her ill-fitting clothes chafed her bare skin. It was sweltering hot during the day and damp at night. She remained blindfolded, barefoot, and, most of the time, cuffed to a bed frame.
She sensed the presence of the other prisoners, but they weren’t permitted to talk. Occasionally they exchanged whispered grievances and small shows of solidarity. Sometimes, usually at night, the junta burst upstairs, rounded up a group of prisoners, and transferred them to other places. Another squad would bring in a new group, their boots firing like cannons. These transfer officers were from somewhere else, it seemed—unlike Lentil Eyes, a constant at the prison. He supervised trips to the basement, where Lorena and the others were made to sit on a cement bench just outside of the parrilla, the electric shock torture room. Lorena and José went in together and were asked repetitive questions to which neither had answers—Who worked at the rabbit house? Where are the weapons? How many people were there? Names! Now! Everything you know!—then dragged back upstairs, ulcerated, burning, inconceivably thirsty.
They were harder on José. When she wrenched her neck to peek under the slit in her blindfold, she saw him sitting on his bed in a pair of shorts she’d never seen before. He still wore one of his bedroom slippers from home. His head was sloppily shaved, pocked with fleabites. He rested it against the concrete wall. There was a small open cut on the inside of his ear.
* * *
Nights kept coming, followed by mornings. An indeterminable number of days passed. Lorena was hungry. Occasionally Lentil Eyes brought day-old bread on a tray and a small tin cup of water. Once, a chunk of stale pan dulce appeared. Christmas had come and gone, Lorena realized, holding the bread in her hands like a sacred gift. Where was Matías now? Was he afraid? Again and again, she replayed the moment she’d handed him to Esme and felt the same mix of relief and incapacitating regret. Her boy. Her baby. She hated herself.
During the next transfer, a group of new prisoners arrived. Lentil Eyes cuffed a woman next to Lorena on the same bed. Lorena could feel her small frame, the height of her shoulder, the long, soft curls that brushed against Lorena’s bare arms. She thought of the girls she went to school with and missed those friendships terribly. She was suddenly so desperate for connection, so drawn to the warmth this woman’s body emanated, that when night fell in earnest, Lorena dared to speak.
“What’s your name?” Lorena asked.
Even if the junta had allowed them to talk, the prisoners had no reason to trust each other. There was no way to know that what they shared with another person wouldn’t be used against them in the parrilla.
“Flavia,” the woman whispered after a long silence.
Lorena told Flavia who she was and, during the black hours of night, under shallow breath, they shared their stories. In whispers, Flavia recounted her horrific circumstance. She had been pregnant with her second child when the junta arrested her and had just recently given birth. Her baby girl, Marcela, was delivered in the prison where she’d been kept after her arrest. There was a doctor there, Flavia said, who worked for the dictatorship. A few weeks after the baby was born, the junta drove Flavia and Marcela to Flavia’s mother’s house, where she’d been permitted to briefly see her four-year-old daughter. She’d left baby Marcela with her mother before the junta transferred her here.
“My husband is with the Montoneros. He’ll leave the country with the girls if he must, but as long as they’re safe, that’s all that matters,” repeated Flavia. “They’ll be safe with my mother and my husband until this is over.”
“Over?”
“The Montoneros are reassembling in Rome,” Flavia whispered. “They’re planning a counteroffensive.”
Lorena drew in a slow breath. Was Claudio in Italy, plotting against this junta? If the Montoneros brought down the dictatorship, Lorena and José could be released. She would hold Matías in her arms again. Please, God.
“Just keep your head down,” Flavia warned. “And pray none of the guards take an interest in you. There was this one woman in the last prison . . . ” She was quiet for a long time. “God help her.”
Lorena pressed her knees together.
In the morning, Lentil Eyes dropped a tray of bread and fruit next to Flavia’s bed. They’d been feeding Flavia well, Lorena noticed—even letting her rest when the others were taken to the basement. Flavia chewed the food as Lentil Eyes lit a cigarette.
“You might be interested in knowing that your friend Ernesto Ramos is dead,” he said to Lorena. He kicked the empty metal tray on the ground.
Lorena hadn’t heard Ernesto’s name since university. She wrapped her arms around her torso.
“There’s no one left at the rabbit house to protect,” he said. “You might as well save yourself by giving up their names.”
I’ve never been to the rabbit house, Lorena thought, a refrain she’d uttered countless times aloud.
She braced for him to hit her, but he just flicked his cigarette and walked away. Flavia was a despondent presence on the next bed.
The temperature of the outside air through the barred window had dropped. The season was changing.
Later that evening when the boots returned, Flavia was taken away in a transfer. Lorena never saw her again.