“They forgot—or didn’t want to see—the consequences of their actions. That is evil: not taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions. The consequences, not the results. The consequences,” he said. “The perpetual problem is how to connect thoughts to actions.” There are actions that clearly express ways of thinking: in that sense they were like him.
The light in the place was a perpetual light, fluorescent tubes creating a constant atmosphere of day. The guard sitting in a corner seemed to be dozing off with his eyes open. The conversation, or rather, the monologue, was interrupted here and there by yells or moans or beating against the bars, and the distant, intermittent, sharp sound of the unreal voices on TV, and the sounds that entered through the air-conditioning grates. There was no silence in prison either. “Never,” he said, and smiled as though he’d discovered me once again. Then he asked me what I’d been saying.
“What were you saying?” he said.
“You would have received a letter from Ida Brown.”
He took a while moving his pieces.
“A letter?”
“Let me lay it out like this,” I said. “Ida would have discovered in Conrad’s novel, by chance, certain connections to your mode of action. A coincidence, perhaps, and, so as not to give you away, she would have written you a letter of warning.” He looked at me impassively and I continued. “In choosing that Conrad novel, you would have had to infer, just as a plagiarist would, the possibility that someone, by chance, as they were reading the book, might discover the connection. The FBI glimpsed some relationship between the novel and your actions but couldn’t determine the link. A book in itself, isolated, means nothing. It needs a reader who is capable of establishing the nexus and restoring the context. The markings are clear, the dates coincide. She taught the novel during the first week of March. Therefore, she must have sent a letter before the thirteenth because she left the book with me that day, she forgot it, shall we say, or she used me as a safeguard… in case something happened to her.” He had revived and was looking at me thoughtfully. “I don’t know what she would have said in the letter, but from the little of her that I do know, I can assure you that she wouldn’t have given you away without warning you first, without saying that she’d discovered you, even without suggesting that you should escape, that you should stop what you were doing.”
He took a while to answer.
“I haven’t been receiving letters for months, and the ones I do receive I tear up without reading.”
All the same, there were a few blind spots. I was convinced that Ida’s death had not been an accident. Everyone must—at least—be master of their own death. Integrity depends on that.
“Do you know what integrity is?”
“I would have used integrity to not kill innocent people.”
“In my case integrity is a virtue that succeeds the events,” he said. “You never have to explain what you do, you never have to justify yourself!”
If he’d kept silent about his reasons, he said later, he would have been victorious. A series of incomprehensible deaths, a wicked and perfect work of art, all of society turning circles around one blind spot. He rejected the moralists who killed and destroyed in the name of sound reasons. His arguments, by contrast, were not compatible with the murders he committed. He’d never said why he did what he did. In that way, he achieved absolute sovereignty, a pre-political and ultra-moral sovereignty, he said. There was no proposition in the future that could justify his present actions. He denied utopian hope, always deferred, stubbornly postponed, which nevertheless presented itself as the final horizon of the action. He never said it openly, but he believed that political violence explained itself. It was a concept, it didn’t require explanation. It was an example, a case, something given for consideration. It worked like imaginary situations in the history of philosophy: Plato’s cave; the race between Achilles and the turtle.
But there was something that escaped that logic, I countered, because Ida’s death did arise from a cause, and I was proposing an interpretation. “She wouldn’t have wanted to give you away”—I repeated—“and she sent a letter to warn you…”
“That’s not how it went,” he said.
“Then Ida was working with you?”
An impassive, terrifying expression.
“I do not confirm nor deny it,” he said.
He couldn’t lie, or was it that he wanted me to believe he couldn’t lie?
“In my country it has happened many times. The bomb sometimes goes off on the person carrying it. She was working with you,” I said, as though this was evidence. “Possibly she was transporting one of the parcels that day.”
“I do not confirm nor deny it.”
“In the end she was afraid… terrified, perhaps. And she died alone.”
“Not alone,” he said. “There are many of us in this country.”
I already knew that language; an invisible army, a secret war. Anonymous heroes. I’d been thinking the whole time about a young Trotskyist, a dear friend, El Vasco Bengoechea, brilliant and dynamic, who died while moving a bomb—“un caño,” as they say in Argentina—which detonated unexpectedly and killed him in his apartment on Calle Gascón, in Buenos Aires.
“That’s why I came to see you, so that her death would at least have a meaning.”
“A meaning?” he asked.
“She was a prominent intellectual, and it’s possible that she would have undertaken a secret war in defense of her principles and her ideals. It doesn’t matter whether she was wrong or right, but she died for something she believed in, and that gave her death meaning…”
“Ida was a brave woman. We keep her in our thoughts.”
“We?”
“You and I. That’s enough to keep her memory.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Vea,” he said in his perfect Spanish, “I don’t want to compromise anyone. You read about cases like mine in books, but when the things are actually happening to
