grateful that they’re not being put on trial. The worst part is that nobody tells them what’s going on, everybody simply ignores them, as if they had never existed.
Giribaldi is trembling with rage. He sits down on a bench in the plaza and tries to calm down. From high atop a pillar, Columbus looks toward Spain, his back to the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. A palace that’s never occupied, he believes, by great men, patriots, those who devote their lives to serving their country. The blue-and- white flag waves from over one of the balconies. During other eras, its majestic flutter filled him with pride; now all he feels is shame. The communists managed to take over. What they couldn’t win as men, on the battlefield, they won by seducing the people, who always want to be flattered. He looks at the window of the office of the President of Argentina.
I bet that’s where he is, that fat faggot bastard, that traitor. He got rid of the entire general staff. Passed a bunch of useless laws. Made us think that the only ones who’d be put on trial for actions against the guerrillas would be the top commanders, the members of the Junta. But when it was their turn to sit in the dock, they opened their big traps and said they didn’t know what was going on. How could they possibly not have known!? The ones who have taken their places dress up in the costume of democracy, as if they didn’t have anything to do with it either. They just sat around on their big fat asses praying every night that they wouldn’t come for them, and they played their cards very carefully. And here we are, the ones who did all the work, the ones out on the front lines risking our lives, now it’s our lives on the line.
He tries to push these thoughts away because they make him feel like he’s going to explode with rage. He’s got to do something, get busy, or he’s afraid he’ll go crazy. He gets up, spits on the gravel path and turns toward the post office. It’s time for the stampede of office workers. Tomorrow he has an appointment with Gutierrez, who made a lot of dough as commander of a task force and used it to start a cleaning and security business. Seems he’s doing well, but when they spoke he told him, As long as you don’t get your hopes up, come on over and we’ll have a cup of coffee. He already knows he’s not going to give him a job, but at least they can talk. For too long his wife has been practically the only person he talks to. All Maisabe goes on about is the house, the boy’s school, the prices, the money that’s never enough.
He walks down the stairs into the subway along with a rushing, chaotic and undisciplined crowd. All these noisy, disorderly people make him sick. He represses an urge to bark out an order for them all to fall into line. If he had the slightest hope of being obeyed, Giribaldi would divide them into two groups: those going up and those going down. Those boarding the train would take one step back to leave room for those getting off. Once the cars were emptied out in an orderly fashion, the others could step forward and enter. Quick, efficient, organized, clean. This upsets him — people on the loose, struggling for space, pushing each other like animals in a corral. If it were in his power he would impose rational discipline that would save them from their own bestiality, this promiscuous rubbing of body against body, this total lack of respect for each other’s space. But he has no power at all. Once he did, and he could exercise that power anywhere and everywhere and at any time. Then his power was limited to the barracks. Now: nothing.
While he waits for the train, whose slow and tentative headlights are already shining through the tunnel, he feels like anybody, like nobody, like one more victim of the shoves and neglect of these civilians, civilians who are utterly oblivious to the debt of gratitude they owe men like him. People crowd around, get tenser and tenser, preparing for their attack on the seats. Giribaldi, a bit stupefied from staring at the lights that grow as they approach, thinks about the minuscule distance that separates him from death: one step and it’s over. Everything. Someone touches his back. His first thought is that they want to push him onto the tracks. He wheels around, his hand flying to the nine-millimetre gun in his shoulder holster, and he glues a furious eye onto a young yuppie. He looks him over — a two-day stubble, black suit, yellow tie and colourful backpack. The yuppie doesn’t even look back at Giribaldi, he’s in his own world, his ears covered by earphones echoing a rhythmic dum-dum that keeps time with the swaying of his head. The crowd starts to move and, with the force of a wave, sweeps Giribaldi into the train.
4
Marcelo moved out of his parents’ house less than four months ago. Now only his mother’s, because Mario passed on a week after Marcelo moved out. That death was anticipated, though not expected so soon. There were unexpected complications due to bronchitis, the doctors made the diagnosis and the old man came down with acute septicaemia. A few days earlier, when Marcelo asked him how he was, he delivered his last good line: Well, truth is, I’m much closer to the harp than the guitar. He died from one day to the next. Marcelo has dinner with his mother two or three times a week.
Due to the customary period of mourning, he had to delay his marriage to Vanina. A few days after his father died, he was appointed Public Prosecutor. He benefited from the resignation of many judicial officials who were not keen to have their actions during the dictatorship investigated. He attributed his promotion to his father, a little help from the above and beyond. Then he felt odd for having entertained such a thought. Life after death seemed to him about as probable as a pig with wings. But it was his private way of acknowledging everything his father had given him, everything he was grateful for.
Vanina was the most beautiful girl in high school, and now she is the most beautiful girl in the architecture department at the university. Though perhaps a little too aware of her beauty, she is polite and well educated. Marcelo thinks that her self-consciousness makes her movements less spontaneous, too studied, designed to emphasize her best features of face and figure and made to please whatever — people, animals, even objects — she has in front of her. They are both still caught up in how they are seen by their group of high-school friends, a group in which they are “the” couple. She has always been quite keen on the idea of getting married and having a family, but she accepts the excuse of Mario’s death to postpone the wedding with fewer protests than Marcelo would have hoped for, and more anger than he could have ever imagined. He doesn’t realize that Vanina’s anger smoulders away inside her like live embers, embers one notices only when they burn you. Since his appointment as a Public Prosecutor, he’s had a deluge of projects he’s wanted to work on. Investigations, open cases, a series of crimes committed by the military during the dictatorship that have never been brought to trial or punished, that have been bogged down in a series of laws and contradictory decrees, in many cases unconstitutional, which he would have to disentangle and pursue in opposition to the government’s lack of political will to prosecute criminals in uniform.
Mama is in the kitchen putting the last touches to the meal. The room that was his is exactly the same as it was the day he left it. That his mother has left it intact feels a bit creepy, even ghoulish, like when parents of a child who has died make cenotaphs of their rooms. Marcelo came to look for something he left there when he used to be a clerk in Judge Marraco’s court, documents pertaining to an investigation that was left unresolved — the Biterman case. When he takes the envelope off the bookshelf, he knocks to the floor a book by Kelsen his father gave him when he started studying law. He sits down on the bed, puts down the envelope and picks up the book. In spite of being an impenitent reader, his father didn’t like writing at all, not even a dedication, but he did highlight one paragraph in yellow: Justice, for me, is the shield under whose protection science — and along with science, truth and sincerity — can flourish. This is the justice of freedom, the justice of peace, the justice of democracy, the justice of tolerance.
He smiles. That morning he has been working on several cases of children of the disappeared, those who were stolen by the military during the dictatorship. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo had supplied him with evidence, some of which mentioned a military base in the provinces that was used as a base of operations and clandestine detention centre, named Coti Martinez. It was believed that Coti was short for Comando de Op- eraciones Tacticas I. Several witnesses implicated a major by the name of Giribaldi. He made note of that name, which was somehow familiar. He had seen it before, and he spent all morning trying to remember exactly where. In the afternoon, while he was having lunch with Monica, his friend and mentor, a judge in the criminal courts, suddenly, between bites of Don Luis’s steak with mushroom sauce, he remembered: his name had figured in the Biterman case.
Superintendent Lascano, otherwise known as Perro, gave Marraco all the evidence related to Biterman’s murder, in which Giribaldi was a suspect. The situation was as follows: as was common at that time, the task force, or death squad, commanded by the major had executed two young people, a man and a woman, in an empty field.
