(to the second edition, 1964)
I want now to state what I have accomplished with this book, but also, mainly, what I have not accomplished. I want to note the ways in which it was a triumph, and the ways in which it was a defeat; what I have won and what I have lost.
It was a triumph to be able to clarify some facts that were at first confusing, disturbing, even implausible, with little help aside from that of a young woman and a few harrassed men, namely the victims. It was a triumph to overcome the fear that came at me with a kind of intensity, primarily in the beginning, and to get them to overcome theirs too, even though they had experienced fear in a way that I will never be able to match. It was a triumph to get a man like “Marcelo,” who didn’t even know us, to bring us his information, risking the ambush and the picana that tore him up later; to get even little Cassandra from Florida to know that she could entrust us with a man’s life. It has been a triumph to find myself face to face years later with Troxler’s childish grin, and to know that he saved everyone who survived, but not to say a word about that night.
As for the rest, I lost. I wanted the government—Aramburu’s, Frondizi’s, Guido’s, any government really—to acknowledge, be it in the words of the most absent-minded and innocent of its public servants, that an atrocity had been committed on the night of June 10, 1956, in the name of the Argentine Republic.
I wanted one of the multiple governments of this country to acknowledge that its justice system was wrong to kill those men, that they were killed for no good reason, out of stupidity and blindness. I know it doesn’t matter to the dead. But there was a question of decency at hand, I don’t know how else to say it.
I wanted those who escaped—Livraga disfigured from bullet wounds; Giunta nearly insane; Di Chiano hiding in a basement; others in exile—to have some kind of authority, some institution, any respectable part of this civilized country, admit to them in words at least—here, where words are so easy, where they cost nothing—that there was a mistake, that there was a fatal lapse in consideration, let alone a murder.
I wanted Carranza’s six children, Garibotti’s six children, Rodríguez’s three children, and Brión’s only child, together with all of these men’s wives, to be given some rights on account of the bloody corpses that the justice system of this country, and not any other, sent to their graves; on account of all the bodies that were once people loved by their families. To be given something, a testimony, a word, a monthly stipend, not as large as what they would give a general or a judge of the Court, because who could ask for so much. But something.
I failed at this. Aramburu promoted Fernández Suárez; he did not clear the names of the victims. Frondizi had a copy of this book in his hands with a dedication in it: he promoted Aramburu. After that is when I think I lost interest. In 1957 I boasted: “This case is in process, and will continue to be for as long as is necessary, months or even years.” I would like to retract that flawed statement. This case is no longer in process, it is barely a piece of history; this case is dead.
I failed at other things as well. I wanted Fernández Suárez to be tried, removed from office, and punished. When it became clear that none of this was going to happen, I wanted to punish him myself, in my own way, with my own weapons: I chased him perhaps as savagely as he chased, tortured, and killed; I whipped him week after week. To the extent that I resembled him in this effort, I again request a retraction. What do I care about Fernández Suárez at this point.
There is yet another failure. When I wrote this story, I was thirty years old. I had been a journalist for ten years. Suddenly I felt I understood that everything I had done before had nothing to do with a certain notion of journalism that had been taking shape in my mind, and this—investigating at all costs, gathering testimony of what is most hidden and most painful—this did have something do with it and fit into that notion. I was fortified by this thought, so I investigated and wrote about another secret story right away, the Satanowsky case.45 It made more noise, but the outcome was the same: the dead, still dead; the murderers, proven guilty, but set free.
So I asked myself if it was worth it, if what I was chasing was not a fantasy, if the society we live in really needs to hear about these things. I still don’t have an answer. In any event, you can understand how I may have lost some faith—faith in justice, in compensation, in democracy, in all those words, and finally, in what was once, but is no longer, my trade.
I am rereading the story that you all have read. There are entire sentences that bother me, I get annoyed thinking about how much better it would be if I wrote it now.
Would I write it now?
Footnotes:
45 DG: See Note 47.