Meanwhile, a silent battle was being fought for the life of Juan Carlos Livraga.
With Police Inspector Torres driving the jeep, Livraga is taken from the polyclinic to Moreno’s First Precinct, where they throw him into a cell naked, without food or medical assistance. They don’t list him in the registry book. Why would they? They are probably waiting to catch the other fugitives so they can execute him again, this time more carefully. Or they want him to die off on his own.
But his relatives will not rest. One of them manages to reach Colonel Arribau. There is strong evidence suggesting that this officer’s intervention is what prevented Livraga from suffering another execution.
Mr. Pedro Livraga decides to appeal directly to the Pink House.30 At 7:00 p.m. on June 11, the following registered telegram is sent from Florida, addressed to his Excellency the President of the Nation, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, the Government House, Buenos Aires, and received at 7:15 p.m.:
In my capacity as Father Juan Carlos Livraga executed the 10th at dawn on route 8 but who survived being tended to thereafter san martin polyclinic from where he was moved sunday around 8 o’clock not knowning new whereabouts I anxiously request your human intervening to prevent being executed again assuring you there has been confusion as he is unconnected to any movement. Registered. Pedro Livraga.
The reply arrives quickly. Telegram No. 1185—sent from the Government House on June 12, 1956, at 1:23 p.m., received at 8:37 p.m., and addressed to Mr. Pedro Livraga, Florida—reads:
In reference to telegram dated the 11th I report your son Juan Carlos was wounded during shooting escaped thereafter was arrested and is staying at Moreno precinct. House Military Chief.
Juan Carlos’ family hurries to the Moreno precinct. And there again they pull the old police trick: Juan Carlos—say the same clerks who just saw him thrown into a cell—has never been there before. It’s pointless for Mr. Pedro Livraga to show them the telegram from the president’s office: Juan Carlos isn’t there. They don’t know him. They instill what they say with a professional air of innocence. Later, in front of the judge, the commissioner will say that no visitors came to see him . . .
His family moves heaven and earth. To no avail. The young man does not turn up and at this point no one has any news from him. With the slow passing of each day, Mr. Pedro begins to get used to the harsh idea. Everyone in Florida assumes his son is dead.
But Juan Carlos is not dead. Remarkably, he survives his infected wounds, his excruciating pain, the hunger, the cold, the damp Moreno dungeon. At night he is delirious. Night and day do not even really exist for him anymore. Everything is a shimmering bright light where the ghosts of his fever move about, often taking on the indelible forms of the firing squad. When they happen to leave him some leftover food out of pity by the door and he drags himself toward it like a small animal, he realizes that he can’t eat, that his shattered teeth still harbor searing promises of pain inside the shapeless and numb mass that is his face.
And so the days go by. The bandage they gave him at the hospital is rotting, falling off by itself in infected little bits. Juan Carlos Livraga is the Leper of the Liberating Revolution.
We should not have anything to say in defense of the then-commissioner of Moreno, Gregorio de Paula. It’s useless for a man to try to hide behind “orders from on high” when those orders include the slow murder of another unarmed and innocent man. But he must have been holding onto some shred of mercy when he arrived at the cell that night carrying a blanket at the tips of his fingers—until then, it had been used to cover the precinct dog—and let it fall over Livraga, saying:
—This isn’t allowed, kid . . . There are orders from the top. But I’m bringing it to you as contraband.
Beneath this blanket, Juan Carlos Livraga felt strangely twinned with the animal it had previously sheltered. He was now, more than ever, the leprous dog of the Liberating Revolution.
***
In his cell at San Martín’s First Precinct, Giunta hears continuous laughter that seems to be coming from far away, rolling around the hallways, and suddenly exploding right next to him. It is he who is laughing. He, Miguel Ángel Giunta. He checks this by bringing his hand to his mouth and stifling the hysterical flow of laughter as it gushes all of a sudden from inside him.
He has had to repress it more than once this way, through reason, saying out loud:
—Hush. It’s me. I need to keep it together . . .
But then the whirlwind pulls him in again. He talks to himself, laughs, cries, rambles and explains, and falls again into the well of terror where Rodríguez Moreno’s silhouette is tall against the eucalyptus in the night, a gun shining coolly in his hand, and men are taking one, two, three paces back to aim their rifles. Then there’s the unforgettable and perverse buzzing of the bullets, the band of fugitives, the plop! of a bullet penetrating the flesh and the shrill ahhh! of a man running full-speed who drops to the ground, just two steps behind him. Giunta jostles his head between his hands and mumbles:
—It’s me, I’m okay, it’s me . . .
But every murmur he hears in the hallways renews his agony. “They’re coming to take me away,” he thinks. “Now they’re going to execute me again.”
Sleep, at last, redeems him. It is bitterly cold, but somehow he manages to sleep on the wooden trundle bed without covers. At midnight he is woken by the cries of people being tortured, people being “given the machine.”
No one, however, is focused on him. They don’t even talk to him. Over the course of the eight days that he stays in the cell, they don’t bring him even one plate of food or a glass of water. It’s the ordinary prisoners, the ones going out for their regular walks, who save him from death by starvation. They throw pieces of stale bread and food scraps through the cell’s peephole that the prisoner then scoops up eagerly from the floor. To ease his thirst, they think up an emergency procedure. They insert the spout of a kettle into the hole and the survivor feels for the falling stream of water with his mouth.
His family, meanwhile, has no news of him. The police play the fun game of blind man’s bluff: from the District Police Department, they send them to the prison in Caseros, from Caseros to the penitentiary in Olmos, from Olmos to La Plata Police Headquarters, from La Plata to the precinct in Villa Ballester, from Villa Ballester to the San Martín District Police Department . . . a week of anxiety passes before they finally find out the truth: Miguel Ángel is at San Martín’s First Precinct.
They go to see him, but are only allowed in the next day. They get there just in time—his wife, his elderly father, his cousin, his brother-in-law—to witness a pitiful scene. They have hardly had time to embrace him before he is taken away: they bring him out into the street, shackled and with an armed escort, and steer him toward the railway station. The pleas of his family—proper middle-class people for whom the mere idea of walking the streets handcuffed is worse than death—are of no use. There they go, this strange bunch, along the main roads of the city of San Martín at midday: the “frightening” prisoner, the armed thugs, and the crying family members who trail behind them. People gaze at this spectacle, astonished.
Thin, bearded, with a faraway look in his eyes, a ghost of himself, Miguel Ángel Giunta was taken to the penitentiary in Olmos on June 25. There, life would begin to change for him.
Footnotes:
30 The Pink House (Casa Rosada) is the Presidential Office. The mansion is relatively centrally located in the city of Buenos Aires, and is so called because of its pink façade. In the book, Walsh also refers to the building using its alternate name, the “Government House” (Casa de Gobierno).