The fugitives dispersed into the field of the night.
Gavino has not stopped running. He jumps over puddles and ditches, gets to a dirt road, sees houses at a distance, takes unfamiliar streets, stumbles onto a railroad track, follows it, gets to the vicinity of the Chilavert station on the Mitre line, miraculously finds a bus, gets on it . . .
He is the first to seek asylum in a Latin American embassy while martial law is in full force. The terrible affair had ended for him.
Not so for Giunta, who had a never-ending nightmare waiting for him. The moment he reached a more populated area, he sought refuge in the front yard of a house. Inside there was light and movement. Nearly the entire neighborhood of José León Suárez had been awakened by the shooting.
The petrified fugitive had no sooner stepped into the garden when a window opened and a woman appeared, shouting:
—Don’t even dare, don’t even dare! —and added, turning halfway around, seeming to address the man of the house:— Take him out! He got away!
Giunta doesn’t wait to hear anything more. He must think the world has gone mad tonight. Everyone wants to kill him . . .
He clears the fence with one jump and resumes his desperate sprint. Now he is avoiding the more trafficked areas, walking deliberately along dirt roads.
But there is one encounter he can’t escape. Standing on the corner are three young men who watch with curiosity as he goes by. His voice faltering, he tells them some part of what happened and asks for money, even just a few coins to take some means of transportation to get away from this hell. He finds a softer heart among these nightwalkers: one gives him a peso, another gives him a ten-peso bill.
Like Gavino, Giunta makes it to Chilavert station. It’s likely that neither of them know that Chilavert was the name of another executed man, one who fell in the Battle of Caseros . . .
He goes to the window and asks for a ticket.
—Where to? —asks the clerk.
Giunta looks at him, amazed. He hasn’t the slightest idea. He doesn’t even know where he is. He must be quite a sight, this man whose eyes are popping out of their sockets, whose hair is standing on end, whose face is covered in sweat on this freezing night, who is asking for a ticket and doesn’t know his destination.
—Where to? —the clerk repeats, looking at him curiously.
—Wherever . . . Where does this line go?
—Retiro.
—That’s it. Retiro. Give me a ticket to Retiro.
He gets the ticket. He leans against a wall. He closes his eyes and breathes deep. When he opens them again, there are three strangers looking at him on the platform, just looking at him . . .
All three of them seem to have their eyes fixed on the same spot. Giunta lowers his head and discovers his muddy shoes, his pants torn up from the getaway.
But now the train is arriving. He jumps on. The strangers get on behind him. Giunta starts to walk through the train cars. Two of the men have sat down. But the third is following him, nearly stepping on his heels.
Giunta acts with remarkable clarity of mind: he slows down his step so that the man is practically touching him, and then sits down all of a sudden—or rather, he drops like a rock—in the first seat that he finds on the right.
The stranger sits down as well. In the same row of the empty car, in the seat on the left.
Giunta doesn’t look at his pursuer. He fixes his gaze on the dark window in an effort to make out the movements of the image reflected in it. He almost jumps up from his seat. Because the Stranger—could it be a coincidence?—is doing the same thing, watching him in his own window.
Will this night never end? Giunta is in despair. The train leaves Villa Ballester behind. The stranger keeps cunningly observing him. They reach Malaver. A few minutes later they are in San Andrés.
Once more, Giunta’s instincts work in his favor. He decides in a flash. He waits for the train to start moving again, to pick up some speed. Then he jolts up, runs to the door, pulls it open in one go, walks down the platform steps, and throws himself off . . .
It’s a miracle he doesn’t kill himself. As soon as he puts pressure on his foot, the ground forces him to take giant leaps that he has never had to in his life. In his discombobulated puppet dash—ten meters, twenty meters—he brushes against a privet hedge that leaves long scratches on one arm. But the train is far away by now, lost like a glowworm in the dark.
And Giunta is—or believes he is—safe.
***
Julio Troxler has hidden himself in a nearby ditch. He is waiting for the shooting to end. He sees the police cars drive away. Then he does something incredible. He goes back!
He goes back, dragging himself stealthily and calling out quietly to Benavídez, who escaped from the assault car with him. He doesn’t know if he survived.
He gets close to the bodies and starts turning them over one by one—Carranza, Garibotti, Rodríguez—looking at their faces in search of his friend. Pain grips him when he recognizes Lizaso. He has four holes in his chest and one in his cheek. But he doesn’t find Benavídez.24
The bodies were still warm. He probably doesn’t see Horacio di Chiano, who continues to play dead not too far from there. He understands that there is nothing left to do there, and starts walking in the direction of José León Suárez.
He is almost at the station when he sees Livraga coming towards him, teetering and covered in blood. At the same moment, an officer from the nearby police station was making his way towards the wounded man, shouting: “What’s going on? What’s going on?”
—They executed us . . . they fired some shots at us —Livraga mumbled, among other insults and unintelligible mutterings.
The officer held him under his armpits and helped him walk towards the station. Along the way, they passed by Troxler.
For the third time this evening, the former police officer was recognized by one of his old colleagues.
—Hey Troxler! How’s it going? —the other guy shouts, passing by.
—Good, you know . . . —he replies.
He is about to keep walking when he sees a truck with Army soldiers approaching. As always, Julio Troxler does the most natural thing: he heads to a short line of early risers who are waiting for a Costera bus and joins it. He doesn’t plan on boarding the bus—besides, he doesn’t even have five cents on him—but he knows he will attract less attention there.
It seems fated. Because the truck stops just in front of the line. Without stepping out, an officer yells:
—Fellas, you haven’t heard any shots, have you?
The question seems addressed to everyone, but it’s Troxler that the officer is looking at, it’s him that he is addressing, for a very simple reason: he is the tallest in line.
Troxler shrugs his shoulders.
—As far as I know . . . —he says.
The truck takes off. Troxler leaves his place in line and starts to walk. He doesn’t have any money for the bus; a basic sense of prudence stops him from asking a stranger for money, or even for permission to call his friends . . .
He’s exhausted and frozen cold. He hasn’t eaten anything since the night before. He walks eleven hours straight through Greater Buenos Aires, which has morphed into a desert without water or shelter for him, a survivor of the massacre.
It is six o’clock in the evening when he reaches a safe haven.
Footnotes:
24 Troxler recounts that “. . . he found Carlos Lizaso along the way . . . in the place where the truck had been, in a supine position, with half of his body on the road and the rest of it in the ditch alongside it . . . he checked to make sure he wasn’t still alive . . . he crossed the road and, on the path that leads to the German Club, found Rodríguez in the middle of the street next to a large puddle of blood, then Carranza, and, on the right side . . . another corpse that he couldn’t identify . . .”