Acknowledgments

Other books and authors make cameos in this book. Pabst paraphrases René Girard’s interpretation of Paolo and Francesca from his To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology, as well as Malcom Gladwell’s rendering of two behavioral experiments in The Tipping Point. Blood Rites, by Barbara Ehrenreich, is paraphrased on two occasions at the beginning of the book, as is the Encyclopedia Britannica entry for “Beast” in the third part of the book. Also in the third part, a paragraph of Caesar Augustus’s diary (The Deeds of the Divine Augustus, in the English translation by Thomas Bushnell) is rendered with slight modifications of meaning. In Vivi’s diaries, the Levi’s jeans poem about the disappeared is reproduced almost verbatim from an ad run in Siete Días magazine in 1974; the horoscope and the woman’s magazine advice are taken from 1970s original magazines that I found in the Hemeroteca (journals section) basement of the National Library of Argentina in Buenos Aires. The instructions and suggested readings for urban guerrillas come from a June, 1970 photocopy of Carlos Maringhella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. In the game Dirty War 1975, the description of a guerrilla girl in a flowing white dress belongs to Rodolfo Walsh’s letter upon the killing of his daughter Vicki. I am indebted to many books and press articles about the 1970s in Argentina: Rodolfo Walsh’s war writings, the Lucha Armada en la Argentina magazines, La Voluntad (Caparrós and Anguita), Montoneros, final de cuentas by Juan Gasparini, to name a few; the ultimate bibliography on the topic exists somewhere, but the juicy parts are probably still hidden among Henry Kissinger’s love letters.

Many friends have helped and inspired me while working in this book. I would like to bid special thanks to the editors at editorial Entropía in Argentina, Gonzalo Castro and Juan Manuel Nadalini, who believed in the book from the start, and to Ana S. Pareja, editor of Alpha Decay in Spain. I’d like to thank Isabelle Gugnon, the French translator at Seuil, and to the immensely gifted, radically generous and laborious Roy Kesey, the translator of the present edition. Many artists and people working and thinking in Buenos Aires have inspired lines in the book: Maxine Swann, Jorge Eugenio Dotti, Dick el Demasiado, Pablo Messutti, Elsa Druccaroff, and Miguel Tomasín; my gratitude is with you all. Miguel is the Down syndrome drummer of one of my favorite cult bands in Buenos Aires, Burt Reynols Ensamble, and he is the inspiration for my Miguel—a true rock star. I went to say hello backstage once in the ’90s; I don’t think I was ever snubbed in a bigger way. The hack to Google Earth is based on an advisory for DNS cache poisoning written by Emiliano Kargieman and Ivan Arce in 1996; to this day, this continues to be an infrastructure problem for the Internet. My lovely aunt Martha, who was kidnapped and disappeared in 1975 by the Perón government, and later went into exile in Peru, was also a presence I’m indebted to, as well as my mother, who was a member of the Partido Comunista Revolucionário at the time and cemented, against her will, my fascination with the Dirty War years. Thank you Martin Caparrós and Juan Antin, who lent me their precious houses to write. Thank you nice librarians on the 5th and 6th floor of the National Library in Buenos Aires. For the present edition, I’d like to thank Hari Kunzru and Katie Kitamura, and very specially my editor Mark Doten and the team at Soho Press. Ultimately, I am grateful to my love and lionheart EK.