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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
A LATIN AMERICAN TRUE CRIME CLASSIC IN ENGLISH FOR THE FIRST TIME On the evening of 9th June 1956 in an apartment in Buenos Aires, a dozen men were arrested on suspicion of plotting against the Argentine government. A few hours later, the local police chief received the order to execute them. Almost all were innocent. Operation Massacre recreates the events of that night and its aftermath in dramatic detail, from the horrifying, botched execution to the author's successful efforts to track down the survivors and bring the perpetrators to justice. Pre-dating Capote's In Cold Blood by over a decade, Operation Massacre is the original work of modern true crime. Walsh combines a passion for the truth with a novelist's flair for storytelling. This - his most celebrated work - is a masterpiece of reportage, admired by writers as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
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A LATIN AMERICAN TRUE CRIME CLASSIC IN ENGLISH FOR THE FIRST TIME
On the evening of 9th June 1956 in an apartment in Buenos Aires, a dozen men were arrested on suspicion of plotting against the Argentine government. A few hours later, the local police chief received the order to execute them. Almost all were innocent.
Operation Massacre recreates the events of that night and its aftermath in dramatic detail, from the horrifying, botched execution to the author’s successful efforts to track down the survivors and bring the perpetrators to justice.
Pre-dating Capote’s In Cold Blood by over a decade, Operation Massacre is the original work of modern true crime. Walsh combines a passion for the truth with a novelist’s flair for storytelling. This – his most celebrated work – is a masterpiece of reportage, admired by writers as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
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‘Utterly compelling … a classic of true-life crime reporting … unbearable poignancy’ MICHAEL JACOBS, Daily Telegraph
‘A mesmerising, prophetic tour de force of investigative journalism exposing the pervasive thuggishness of the Argentine military elite … Walsh’s meticulously detailed style is remarkable … A chilling, lucid work, beautifully translated by Gitlin, which serves as a great example of journalistic integrity’ KIRKUS (STARRED REVIEW)
‘One of the jewels of universal literature’ GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ on Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta
To Enriqueta Muñiz
The declarant adds that the task with which he had been charged was horribly unpleasant, and went far beyond the stipulated duties of the police.
—Police Commissioner Rodolfo Rodríguez Moreno
Greater Buenos Aires
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
News of the June 1956 secret executions first came to me by chance, toward the end of that year, in a La Plata café where people played chess, talked more about Keres and Nimzowitsch than Aramburu and Rojas, and the only military maneuver that enjoyed any kind of renown was Schlechter’s bayonet attack in the Sicilian Defense.1
Six months earlier, in that same place, we’d been startled around midnight by the shooting nearby that launched the assault on the Second Division Command and the police department—Valle’s failed rebellion.2 I remember how we left en masse, chess players, card players, and everyday customers, to see what the celebration was all about; how, the closer we got to San Martín Square, the more serious we became as our group became smaller; and how, when I finally got across the square, I was alone. When I reached the bus station there were several more of us again, including a poor dark-skinned boy in a guard’s uniform who hid behind his goggles saying that, revolution or not, no one was going to take away his gun—a handsome 1901 Mauser.
I remember finding myself alone once more, in the darkness of Fifty-Fourth Street, just three blocks away from my house, which I kept wanting to get to and finally reached two hours later amid the smell of lime trees that always made me nervous, and did so on that night even more than usual. I remember the irrepressible will of my legs, the preference they showed at every street for the bus station, returning to it on their own two or three times. But each time they went a bit farther before turning back, until they didn’t need to go back because we had gone past the line of fire and arrived at my house. My house was worse than the café and worse than the bus station because there were soldiers on the roof and also in the kitchen and the bedrooms, but mainly in the bathroom. Since then I’ve developed an aversion to houses that face police departments, headquarters, or barracks.
I also haven’t forgotten how, standing by the window blinds, I heard a recruit dying in the street who did not say “Long live the nation!” but instead: “Don’t leave me here alone, you sons of bitches.”
After that, I don’t want to remember anything else—not the announcer’s voice at dawn reporting that eighteen civilians had been executed in Lanús, nor the wave of blood that flooded the country up until Valle’s death. It’s too much for a single night. I’m not interested in Valle. I’m not interested in Perón, I’m not interested in revolution. Can I go back to playing chess?
I can. Back to chess and the fantasy literature I read, back to the detective stories I write, back to the “serious” novel I plan to draft in the next few years, back to the other things that I do to earn a living and that I call journalism, even though that’s not what it is. Violence has spattered my walls, there are bullet holes in the windows, I’ve seen a car full of holes with a man inside it whose brains were spilling out—but it’s only chance that has put all this before my eyes. It could have happened a hundred kilometers away, it could have happened when I wasn’t there.
Six months later, on a suffocating summer night with a glass of beer in front of him, a man says to me:
—One of the executed men is alive.
I don’t know what it is about this vague, remote, highly unlikely story that manages to draw me in. I don’t know why I ask to talk to that man, why I end up talking to Juan Carlos Livraga.
But afterward I do know why. I look at that face, the hole in his cheek, the bigger hole in his throat, his broken mouth and dull eyes, where a shadow of death still lingers. I feel insulted, just as I felt without realizing it when I heard that chilling cry while standing behind the blinds.
Livraga tells me his unbelievable story; I believe it on the spot.
And right there the investigation, this book, is born. The long night of June 9 comes back over me, pulls me out of “the soft quiet seasons” for a second time. Now I won’t think about anything else for almost a year; I’ll leave my house and my job behind; I’ll go by the name Francisco Freyre; I’ll have a fake ID with that name on it; a friend will lend me his house in Tigre; I’ll live on a frozen ranch in Merlo for two months; I’ll carry a gun; and at every moment the characters of the story will come back to me obsessively: Livraga covered in blood walking through that never-ending alley he took to escape death, the other man who survived with him by running back into the field amid the gunfire, and those who survived without his knowing about it, and those who didn’t survive.
Because what Livraga knows is that there was a bunch of them, that they were taken out to be shot, that there were about ten of them taken out, and that he and Giunta were still alive. That’s the story I hear him repeat before the judge one morning when I say I’m Livraga’s cousin so they let me into the court where everything is infused with a sense of discretion and skepticism. The story sounds a bit more absurd here, a little more lush, and I can see the judge doubting it, right up until Livraga’s voice climbs over that grueling hill, to where all that’s left is a sob, and he makes a gesture to take off his clothes so that everyone can see the other gunshot wound. Then we all feel ashamed, the judge seems to be moved, and I feel myself moved again by the tragedy that has befallen my cousin.
That’s the story I write feverishly and in one sitting so that no one beats me to it, but that later gets more wrinkled every day in my pocket because I walk around all of Buenos Aires with it and hardly anyone wants to know about it, let alone publish it. You begin to believe in the crime novels you’ve read or written, and think that a story like this, with a talking dead man, is going to be fought over by the presses. You think you’re running a race against time, that at any given moment a big newspaper is going to send out a dozen reporters and photographers, just like in the movies. But instead you find that no one wants anything to do with it.
It’s funny, really, to read through all the newspapers twelve years later and see that this story doesn’t exist and never did.
So I wander into increasingly remote outskirts of journalism until finally I walk into a basement on Leandro Alem Avenue where they are putting out a union pamphlet, and I find a man who’s willing to take the risk. He is trembling and sweating because he’s no movie hero either, just a man who is willing to take the risk, and that’s worth more than a movie hero. And the story is printed, a flurry of little yellow leaflets in the kiosks: badly designed, with no signature, and with all the headings changed, but it’s printed. I look at it affectionately as it’s snatched up by ten thousand anonymous hands.
But I’ve had even more luck than that. There is a young journalist named Enriqueta Muñiz who has been with me from the very beginning and has put herself entirely on the line. It is difficult to do her justice in just a few sentences. I simply want to say that if I have written “I did,” “I went,” “I discovered” anywhere in this book, it should all be read as “We did,” “We went,” “We discovered.” There were several important things that she got alone, like testimonies from Troxler, Benavídez, and Gavino, who were all in exile. At the time, I didn’t see the world as an ordered sequence of guarantees and certainties, but rather as the exact opposite. In Enriqueta Muñiz I found the security, bravery, and intelligence that seemed so hard to come by.
So one afternoon we take the train to José León Suárez and bring a camera with us, along with a little map that Livraga has drawn up for us in pencil, a detailed bus driver’s map. He has marked the roads and rail crossings for us, as well as a grove and an X where it all happened. At dusk, we walk about eight blocks along a paved road, catch sight of the tall, dark row of eucalyptus trees that the executioner Rodríguez Moreno had deemed “an appropriate place for the task” (namely, the task of shooting them), and find ourselves in front of a sea of tin cans and delusions. One of the greatest delusions was the notion that a place like this cannot remain so calm, so quiet and forgotten beneath the setting sun, without someone keeping watch over the history imprisoned in the garbage that glistens with a false tide of thoughtfully gleaming dead metals. But Enriqueta says “It happened here,” and casually sits down on the ground so that I can take a picnic photo of her because, just at that moment, a tall sullen man with a big sullen dog walks by. I don’t know why one notices these things. But this was where it happened, and Livraga’s story feels more real now: here was the path, over there was the ditch, the garbage dump and the night all around us.
The following day we go see the other survivor, Miguel Ángel Giunta, who greets us by slamming the door in our faces. He doesn’t believe us when we tell him we’re journalists and asks for credentials that we don’t have. I don’t know what it is that we say to him through the screen door, what vow of silence, what hidden key, that gets him to gradually open the door and start to come out, which takes about half an hour, and to talk, which takes much longer.
It kills you to listen to Giunta because you get the feeling you’re watching a movie that has been rolling and rolling in his head since the night it was filmed and can’t be stopped. All the tiny details are there: the faces, the lights, the field, the small noises, the cold and the heat, the escape from among the tin cans, the smell of gunpowder, and panic. You get the feeling that once he finishes he’s going to start again from the beginning, just as the endless loop must start over again in his head: “This is how they executed me.” But the more upsetting thing is the affront to his person that this man carries within him, how he has been hurt by the mistake they made with him, because after all he’s a decent man who wasn’t even a Peronist, “and you can ask anybody, they’d tell you who I am.” But actually we’re not sure about this anymore because there appear to be two Giuntas, the one who is talking fervently as he acts out this movie for us, and the other one who is sometimes distracted and manages to smile and crack a joke or two, like old times.
It seems like the story could end here because there is no more to tell. Two survivors, and the rest are dead. I could publish the interview with Giunta and go back to that abandoned chess game in the café from a month ago. But it’s not over. At the last minute Giunta mentions a belief he has, not something he knows for sure, but something he has imagined or heard murmured: there is a third man who survived.
Meanwhile, the great picana god and its submachine guns begin to roar from La Plata.3 My story floats on leaflets through corridors at Police Headquarters, and Lieutenant Colonel Fernández Suárez wants to know what the fuss is all about. The article wasn’t signed, but my initials appeared at the bottom of the original copies. There was a journalist working at the newspaper office who had the same initials, only his were ordered differently: J. W. R. He awakes one morning to an interesting assortment of rifles and other syllogistic tools, and his spirit experiences that surge of emotion before the revelation of a truth. They make him come out in his underwear and put him on a flight to La Plata where he’s brought to Police Headquarters. They sit him down in an armchair opposite the Lieutenant Colonel, who says to him, “And now I’d like you to write an article about me, please.” The journalist explains that he is not the man who deserves such an honor while quietly, to himself, he curses my mother.
The wheels keep turning, and we have to trudge through some rough country in search of the third man, Horacio di Chiano, who is now living like a worm underground. It seems as though people know us already in a lot of these places, the kids at least are following us, and one day a young girl stops us in the street.
—The man you’re looking for —she tells us— is in his house. They’re going to tell you he isn’t, but he is.
—And you know why we’ve come?
—Yes, I know everything.
Okay, Cassandra.
They tell us he’s not there, but he is, and we have to start pushing past the protective barriers, the wakeful gods that keep watch over a living dead man: a wall, a face that denies and distrusts. We cross over from the sunlight of the street to the shade of the porch. We ask for a glass of water and sit there in the dark offering wheedling words until the rustiest lock turns and Mr. Horacio di Chiano climbs the staircase holding onto his wife, who leads him by the hand like a child.
So there are three.
The next day the newspaper receives an anonymous letter that says “Livraga, Giunta, and the ex-NCO Gavino managed to escape.”
So there are four. And Gavino, the letter says, “was able to get himself to the Bolivian Embassy and was granted asylum in that country.”
I don’t find Gavino at the Bolivian Embassy, but I do find his friend Torres, who smiles and, counting it out on his fingers, says, “You’re missing two.” Then he tells me about Troxler and Benavídez.
So there are six.
And while we’re at it, why not seven? Could be, Torres tells me, because there was a sergeant with a very common last name, something like García or Rodríguez, and no one knows what’s become of him.
Two or three days later I come back to see Torres and hit him pointblank with a name:
—Rogelio Díaz.
His face lights up.
—How’d you do it?
I don’t even remember how I did it. But there are seven.
So now I can take a moment because I have already talked to survivors, widows, orphans, conspirators, political refugees, fugitives, alleged informers, anonymous heroes. By May, I have written half of this book. Once more, roaming around in search of someone who will publish it. At about that time, the Jacovella brothers had started putting out a magazine. I talk to Bruno, then Tulio. Tulio Jacovella reads the manuscript and laughs, not at the manuscript, but at the mess he is about to get himself into, and he goes for it.
The rest is the story that follows. It was published in Mayoría from May through July of 1957. Later there were appendices, corollaries, denials, and retorts that dragged this press campaign out until April 1958. I have cut them all out, together with some of the evidence I used back then, which I am replacing here with more categorical proof. In light of this new evidence, I think any possible controversy can be set aside.
Acknowledgements: to Jorge Doglia, Esq., former head of the legal department of the Province’s police, dismissed from his position based on the reports he gave for this case; to Máximo von Kotsch, Esq., the lawyer for Juan C. Livraga and Miguel Giunta; to Leónidas Barletta, head of the newspaper Intenciones, where Livraga’s initial accusation was published; to Dr. Cerruti Costa, head of the late newspaper Revolución Nacional, which ran the first articles about this case; to Bruno and Tulio Jacovella; to Dr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, who published the first edition of this story in book form; to Edmundo A. Suárez, dismissed from his position at State Radio for giving me a photocopy of the Registry Book of Announcers for the broadcast that proved the exact time when martial law was declared; to the ex-terrorist named “Marcelo,” who took risks to get me information, and who was horribly tortured shortly thereafter; to the anonymous informant who signed his name “Atilas”; to the anonymous Cassandra who knew everything; to Horacio Maniglia, who gave me shelter; to the families of the victims.
Part One
THE PEOPLE
Mayoría cover from May 27, 1957. Bottom left reads: “Lived and complete history of the innocent victims of the José León Suárez killings and of those who miraculously survived.”
1. CARRANZA
Nicolás Carranza was not a happy man on the night of June 9, 1956. Protected by the shadows, he had just come into his house, and something might have been gnawing at him on the inside. We’ll never really know. A man carries so many heavy thoughts with him to the grave, and the earth at the bottom of Nicolás Carranza’s grave has already dried up.
For a moment, though, he could forget his worries. After an initial, surprising silence, a chorus of shrill voices rose to receive him. Nicolás Carranza had six children. The smaller ones might have hung on to his knees. The oldest, Elena, probably put her head just at her father’s arm’s reach. Tiny Julia Renée—barely forty days old—was asleep in her crib.
His wife, Berta Figueroa, lifted her gaze from the sewing machine. She smiled at him with a mix of sadness and joy. It was always the same. Her man always came in like this: on the run, in the night, like a flash. Sometimes he stayed the night and then disappeared for weeks. Every so often he would have messages sent her way: at so-and-so’s house. And then she would be the one going to her meeting, leaving the children with a neighbor to be with him for a few hours racked with fear, anxiety, and the bitterness that came with having to leave him and wait for time to pass slowly without any word.
Nicolás Carranza was a Peronist. And a fugitive.
That’s why, whenever he would be coming home secretly like he was that night and some kid from the neighborhood yelled “Hello, Mr. Carranza!”, he would quicken his step and not answer.
—Hey, Mr. Carranza! —curiosity was always following him.
But Mr. Carranza—a short and stocky silhouette in the night—would walk away quickly on the dirt road, raising the lapels of his overcoat to meet his eyes.
Now he was sitting in the armchair in the dining room bouncing his two-year-old, Berta Josefa, his three-year-old, Carlos Alberto, and maybe even his four-year-old, Juan Nicolás—he had a whole staircase worth of children, Mr. Carranza—on his knees. He rocked them back and forth, imitating the roar and whistle of trains run by the men who lived in that railroad suburban town, men like him.
Next he talked to his favorite, eleven-year-old Elena—she was tall and slim for her age with big grey-brown eyes—and shared only some of his adventures, with a bit of happy fairytale mixed in. He asked her questions out of a sense of concern, fear, and tenderness, because the truth was that he felt a knot form in his heart whenever he looked at her, ever since the time she was put in jail.
It’s hard to believe, but on January 26, 1956, she was locked up for a few hours in Frías (in Santiago del Estero). Her father had dropped her off there on the twenty-fifth with his wife’s family and continued on along his regular Belgrano line trip to the North, where he worked as a waiter. In Simoca, in the province of Tucumán, he was arrested for distributing pamphlets, a charge that was never proven.
At eight o’clock the following morning, Elena was taken from her relatives’ home, brought to the police station, and interrogated for four hours. Was her father handing out pamphlets? Was her father a Peronist? Was her father a criminal?
Mr. Carranza lost his mind when he heard the news.
—Let them do what they want to me, but to a child …
He howled and wept.
And fled the police in Tucumán.
It was probably from that moment on that a dangerous glaze washed over the eyes of this man whose features were clear and firm, who used to be a happy nature, the fun-loving best friend to his own kids and to everyone’s kids in the neighborhood.
They all ate together on the night of June 9 in that working-class neighborhood of Boulogne. Afterward, they put the kids to bed and it was just the two of them, he and Berta.
She shared her sorrows and her worries. Was the railway going to take away their home now that he was out of work and on the run? It was a good brick house with flowers in the garden, and they managed to fit everyone there, including a pair of women factory workers they had taken in as lodgers. What would she and the children live off of if they took her house away?
She shared her fears. There was always the fear that they would drag him from his home on any given night and beat him senseless at some police station, leaving her with a vegetable for a husband. And she begged him as she always did:
—Turn yourself in. If you turn yourself in, maybe they won’t beat you. At least you can get out of jail, Nicolás …
He didn’t want to. He took refuge in harsh, dry, definitive statements:
—I’ve stolen nothing. I’ve killed no one. I am not a criminal.
The little radio on the shelf in the sideboard was playing folk songs. After a lengthy silence, Nicolás Carranza got up, took his overcoat from the coat stand, and slowly put it on.
She looked at him again, her face resigned.
—Where are you going?
—I have some things to take care of. I might be back tomorrow.
—You’re not sleeping here.
—No. Tonight, I’m not sleeping here.
He went into the bedroom and kissed his children one by one: Elena, María Eva, Juan Nicolás, Carlos Alberto, Berta Josefa, Julia Renée. Then he said goodbye to his wife.
—Till tomorrow.
He kissed her, went out to the sidewalk, and turned left. He crossed B Street and walked just a few paces before stopping at house number thirty-two.
He rang the doorbell.
2. GARIBOTTI
The young men are wild and there may be some aggression in the air at the home of the Garibottis in the working-class neighborhood of Boulogne. The father, Francisco, is the archetype of a man: tall, muscular, with a square and firm face, mildly hostile eyes, and a thin mustache that flows well over the corners of his mouth.
The mother is a beautiful woman, even with her tough, common features. Tall, strong, with something contemptuous about her mouth and eyes that do not smile.
There are six children here as well, just like at Carranza’s, but that’s where the similarities end. The five oldest ones are boys who range from Juan Carlos, who is about to turn eighteen, to eleven-year-old Norberto.
Delia Beatriz, at nine years old, somewhat softens this otherwise intensely male environment. Dark-haired, with bangs and smiling eyes, her father melts when he sees her. There is a photo in a glass cabinet of her in a school uniform of white overalls standing next to a chalkboard.
The whole family appears on the walls. Yellowing, far-off snapshots of Francisco and Florinda—they are young and laughing in the park—ID photos of the father and the kids, even some fleeting faces of relatives and friends, have all been glued to a big piece of board and stuck inside a frame. Just as at the Carranzas’, the inescapable “portrait artists” have been here as well and, beneath a double “bombé” frame, have left a wealth of blues and golds that attempt to portray two of the young boys, though we can’t figure out which ones.
This passion for decor or mementos reaches its peak in the predictable print of Gardel all in black, his hat nearly covering his face, his foot resting on a chair as he strums a guitar.
But it is a clean, solid, modestly furnished house, a house where a working man can live decently. And the “company” charges them less than one hundred pesos in rent.
This may be why Francisco Garibotti doesn’t want to get into any trouble. He knows the union is not doing well—the military has gotten involved, friends have been arrested—but all of that will pass some day. One needs to be patient and wait it out.
Garibotti is thirty-eight years old, with sixteen years of service to the Belgrano Railway under his belt. Now he works the local line.
That afternoon he left work around five and came straight home.
Of his two sons, he might favor the second eldest. He has his father’s name: Francisco, only with the extra middle name, Osmar. This sixteen-year-old young man with a serious look in his eye is all set to start working for the railroad as well.
There is a true camaraderie between the two of them. The father likes playing the guitar while his son sings. This is what they’re doing that afternoon.
It gets dark early on these midwinter June days. It’s already night-time before they even bother to notice. Mother sets the table for dinner. A frying pan crackles in the kitchen.
Francisco Garibotti has nearly finished his dinner already—he ate steak and eggs that night—when the doorbell rings.
It’s Mr. Carranza.
What’s Nicolás Carranza come for?
—He came to take him away. And they brought him back to me a corpse —Florinda Allende would later recall with resentment in her voice.
The two men talk for a while. Florinda has stepped back into the kitchen. She senses that her husband is feeling an itch to go out on this particular Saturday night, and she plans to fight for her rights, but on her own turf, without the neighbor in the room.
Francisco comes in after a moment.
—I have to head out —he says, not looking at her.
—We were going to go to the movies —she reminds him.
—You’re right, we were. Maybe we can go later.
—You said you’d go out with me.
—I’ll be right back. I just have to run an errand and then I’ll be back.
—I can’t imagine what errand you need to run.
—I’ll explain later. The truth —he tries to make himself clear, anticipating her reproach— is that I’m also a little tired of this guy … and all his ideas …
—Doesn’t seem like it.
—Look, this is the last time I’ll give him the time of day. Wait for me a little while.
And as though to prove that he is only going out for a minute, that he has every intention of coming back as soon as he can, he gets to the door and, just as he finishes putting on his overcoat, yells out:
—If Vivas comes by, tell him to wait. Tell him I’m going to run an errand and I’ll be back.
The two friends set out. They walk a few blocks along Guayaquil, a long street, and turn right, heading toward the station. They take the first local bound for the barrio of Florida. It’s only a few minutes away by train.
No one can testify as to what they talked about. We can only speculate. Maybe Garibotti repeated Berta Figueroa’s advice to his friend: that he turn himself in. Maybe Carranza wanted to put him in charge of something in case he didn’t make it back home. Maybe he knew about the uprising in the making and mentioned it to him. Or maybe he simply said:
—Let’s go to a friend’s place to listen to the radio. There’s going to be some news …
There could also be more innocent explanations. A card game or the Lausse match that would be on the radio later.4 Something like that may have happened. What we do know is that Garibotti has left without really feeling like it, and intended to come back soon. If he ends up not going back later, it’s because they have managed to conquer his curiosity, his interest, or his inertia. He was unarmed when he left, and would at no point have a weapon in his hands.
Carranza is also unarmed. He will let himself be arrested without any sign of resistance. He will let himself be killed like a child, without one rebellious movement. Begging uselessly for mercy until the final gunshot.
They get off in Florida. They turn right and cross the railroad tracks. They walk six blocks along Hipólito Yrigoyen Street. They cross Franklin. They stop—Carranza stops—in front of a country house with two small light blue wooden gates that lead directly into a garden.
They go in through the right gate. They walk through a long corridor. They ring the bell.
From this point on we won’t have any verifiable accounts of Garibotti. As for some account of Carranza before the final, definitive silence—we still have to wait for many hours to pass.
And many incomprehensible things, too.
3. MR. HORACIO
Florida is twenty-four minutes from Retiro on the F. C. Belgrano line. It’s not the best part of the Vicente López district, but it’s also not the worst. The municipality skimps on waterworks and sanitation, there are potholes in the pavement and no signs on the street corners, but people live there despite all that.
Six blocks west of the train station lies the neighborhood where so many unexpected things are going to happen. It exhibits the violent contrasts common to areas in development, where the residential and the filthy meet, a recently constructed villa next to a wasteland of weeds and tin cans.
The average resident is a man between the ages of thirty and forty who has his own home with a garden that he tends to in his idle moments, and who has not finished paying the bank for the loan that allowed him to buy the house in the first place. He lives with a relatively small family and works either as a business employee or a skilled laborer in Buenos Aires. He gets along with his neighbors and proposes or agrees to initiatives in support of the common good. He plays sports—typically soccer—covers the usual political issues in conversation and, no matter what government is in charge, protests the rising costs of living and the impossible transportation system without ever getting too excited about it.
This model does not allow for a very wide range of variation. Life is calm, no ups and downs. Nothing ever really happens here.
During the winter, the streets are half-deserted by the early evening. The corners are poorly lit and you need to cross them carefully to avoid getting stuck in the mud puddles that have formed due to the lack of drainage. Wherever you find a small bridge or a line of stones laid down for crossing, it’s the neighbors who have put it there. Sometimes the dark water spans from one curb all the way to another. You can’t really see it, but you can guess it’s there using the reflection of some star or the light of the waning lanterns that languish on the porches into the wee hours. San Martín Avenue is the only place where things are moving a bit: a passing bus, a neon sign, the cold blue glare of a bar’s front window.
The house that Carranza and Garibotti have walked into—where the first act of the drama will unfold, and to which a ghost witness will return in the end—has two apartments: one in front and one in back. To get to the back one, you need to go down a long corridor that is closed in on the right by a dividing wall and on the left by a tall privet hedge. The corridor, which leads to a green metal door, is so narrow that you can only walk through it in single file. It’s worth remembering this detail; it carries a certain importance.
The apartment in back is rented out to a man who we’ll come back to at the last moment. The apartment in front is where the owner of the whole building, Mr. Horacio di Chiano, lives with his family.
Mr. Horacio is a dark-skinned man of small stature with a mustache and glasses. He is about fifty years old and for the last seventeen years he has worked as an electrician in the Ítalo. His ambitions are simple: to retire and then work awhile on his own before truly calling it quits.
