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.23 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:
23 A traditional, fast-paced dance that originated in aristocratic, eighteenth-century Europe and migrated to the Southern Hemisphere in the nineteenth century, where it became a more popular art form.