Typically, these kinds of acts aren’t carried out because of their direct targets but rather because of their effect in the news. Terrorism was weaponized propaganda, a broadcast medium like any other, he said with a tired air, bringing the interview to an end. We parted ways and I paid Parker two thousand dollars—“cash up front”—to continue the investigation.
4
At Penn Station I got onto the train that would take me back, a feeling of emptiness in my chest as if I was the protagonist in some sentimental fiction. I’d bought a flask of whiskey and put it in a brown paper bag, taking a swig from time to time. The train car was half empty; it was almost four in the afternoon, and it seemed like the only people traveling at that hour were the old and dying or teenagers escaping from school and going to Trenton to kill time. I remember that I tried to write down a few details from my conversation with Parker, but my state of mind and the motion of the car made the notes almost illegible, and it’s impossible now to decipher what I wrote that day between the jolting of the train and the slow accumulation of alcohol that distorted my handwriting and ideas. “Intelligence isn’t a secondary sexual trait, as gymnasts and frauds say; quite the opposite, sex is contingent on the purity of the mind.” Purity of the mind? Those are the idiotic things I write down when I’m desperate, and that sentence is the only one I could reconstruct from two-and-a-half pages of mishmash in an epileptic scrawl. Along one edge, however, there was a carefully columned list. “Buy oranges, mineral water, light bulbs, go to Gramercy Park. The wooden leg, the hair dyed the color of a rat, he wears suspenders!” I think I dozed off. When I awoke there were only two kids left in the car, with hoods covering their heads, listening to Walkmans and talking on cell phones, miserable and conceited. And why, after all, was she interested in D’Amato? Did she only have affairs with colleagues? She used them like a pen full of roosters. I burned with rage, thinking about her standing in the low light of the bedroom, looking down at D’Amato’s naked body lying on the bed with his stump and his scars. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I pictured her in bed, in one of her dirtiest positions, and D’Amato role-playing as an ex-soldier driven mad by war, a cripple (!) breaking into the hotel room. What bothered me most of all was that apostrophe in his last name, a useless mark that accentuated his overblown personality as if he believed himself to be D’Artagnan when, physically, he was Porthos. Grand, imperious, eager. He’d received the medal of honor in Korea. He’d worked on the campaign for Wallace, the American leftist candidate in the fifties, and when things turned south under McCarthyism had taken refuge in academia. He started out on the Marxist campus of Minnesota and while there wrote his extraordinary work on Melville. He was the son of Italian immigrants. “He’d received the medal of honor in Korea.” And what of it?
What would a terrorist cell be like in the United States? Maybe Ida let herself get carried away in her theoretical anti-capitalism and came into contact with an anarchist group. I knew of many similar cases in Argentina. A contact, meetings, trivial supporting tasks. The periphery of the organization, the ones who were active on the surface. Offering your house, signing leases, or providing your address to receive mail. Little acts like getting weapons out of a house surrounded by the police; Julia, my first girlfriend, had done that after the police assassinated Emilio Jáuregui during a demonstration in Buenos Aires. Entering the house as if she was a family friend and leaving with a grenade inside her little leather handbag. They’d asked her to take a package to the post office, perhaps. Or maybe there was someone with her in the car.
One night in La Plata, in 1963 or 1964 when I was studying at the university, I came back to the boarding house where I lived and there, inside my room, sitting in the dark, I unexpectedly encountered Nacho Uribe. A classmate from college. He was studying philosophy. We were both in the student union, had mobilized in the ARI (Agrupación Reformista Independiente), which was where everyone who wasn’t in the Communist Party went (that’s why we called ourselves independent), and were members of Reforma Universitaria. It caught me off guard, Nacho was waiting for me, he was passing through, he said, and wanted to see me. In the dark? It was strange, we didn’t share that kind of confidence, we’d been together at some assembly, had studied for Ancient Philosophy together, had traded notes, had first met in Agoglia’s class on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. We sometimes got coffee, and we greeted each other in line at the university dining hall. And nothing more than that, but now here he was.
It was winter, and he had his face buried in the lapels of his jacket. He’d come in because the police were looking for him; they’d been carrying out an action in Berisso, outside the refrigeration plant, and the police had surrounded them. He’d escaped and found himself near my house. Could he stay the night? He didn’t want to go back to his house or show himself, and he didn’t think it would occur to anyone to look for him here. He’d entered