Cuento sin moraleja

A parable ("Tale without a moral") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

There once was a man who sold words and screams.  Business was going quite well despite the numerous people he encountered who would dispute his prices in search of discounts.  The man almost always consented; and in this way he was able to sell plenty of street vendor screams, a few sighs bought off him by some pensioner women, and words for slogans, letterhead, and false witticisms.

Finally the man knew that the hour had come and he asked for an audience with the country's petty tyrant.  The tyrant, who looked just like all his colleagues, received him surrounded by generals, ministers and cups of coffee.

"I have come to sell you your last words," the man said.  "These are very important because they will never come to you at the right time; rather, you will find it convenient to utter them in some deep trance and thereby easily settle your historical fate in retrospect."

"Translate what he says," the tyrant commanded his interpreter.

"He's speaking Argentine, your Excellency."

"Argentine?  Then why don't I understand him?"

"You understood me perfectly well," said the man.  "I repeat: I have come to sell you your last words."

The petty tyrant rose to his feet as was customary in such circumstances and, suppressing a shudder, ordered that the man be arrested and placed in one of those special dungeons that these types of governments always seem to have at their disposal.

"What a shame," said the man as they took him away.  "I know you'll want to say them when the moment comes, and you will need to say them to settle your historical fate in retrospect.  What I was going to sell you is what you will want to say, and there is no getting around it.  But seeing that you won't accept this offer, you will never learn the words in advance.  And, of course, when the moment comes in which they'll want to gush forth for the first time, you won't be able to say them."

"And why won't I, if they're what I'll need to say?" asked the tyrant with the steam from another cup of coffee wafting before him.

"Because fear will not permit it," the man said sadly.  "You'll have a rope around your neck and nothing but a shirt on; fear and cold will be rattling your every bone.  Your teeth will be clattering and you won't be able to articulate a single word.  The hangman and his assistants – among whom you will find several of these gentlemen here – will wait a few minutes in all likelihood for the sake of decorum.  But when nothing more than a stifled moan emerges from your lips for hiccoughs and supplications (these, as it were, you will spout effortlessly), they will lose all patience and give you to the noose."

Wild with indignation, the ministers and especially the generals surrounded the petty tyrant to request that the man be shot immediately.  Yet the tyrant, "who was as pale as death itself," shoved his way past them and shut himself off in a room with the man to buy his last words from him.

In the meantime the generals and ministers, humiliated by such treatment, began to organize a coup and the next morning seized the tyrant as he was eating grapes in his favorite arbor.  So that he could not utter his last words, they put a bullet through his head and killed him on the spot.  Afterwards they went to look for the man who had disappeared from the governmental palace.  They found him soon enough: he was loafing about a marketplace selling public cries to acrobats.  Placing him in a stagecoach, they took him to the fortress and tortured him so that he would reveal what the tyrant's last words might have been.  Since they could not wrest a confession out of him, they kicked and beat him to death.

The vendors who had bought screams off him continued to scream on the street corners, and one of these screams soon became the watchword of the counterrevolution which did away with the generals and the ministers.  Before dying, some of them were confused by thoughts that all this had been nothing more than a clumsy chain of misunderstandings, and that the screams and the words were things which, strictly speaking, could be sold but which could not be bought, although this seemed absurd.

And they all rotted – the petty tyrant, the man, the generals, the ministers – but the screams resonated from time to time on the street corners.

First Stop in the New World

We have become both urban and urbane.  The relationship of those two words, as any old pedant will tell you, has as much to do with technology and society's development as with a persistent snobbery about those who live among strangers, who govern and shrive and housel and judge.  Nature should not be forgotten, and we can learn so many things from naturalists that our schools cannot or would not teach; but it is residing in a community with thousands or millions of others sharing similar goals and opportunities that defines modern existence.  Having spent my life almost entirely in capital cities I have a fondness for the countryside that is, in its essence, both Romantic and unrealistic, and what should be admired about the surroundings in this novella or this novel I may not want to experience for myself.  As the last two centuries have demonstrated, city life can be absolutely fabulous and absolutely miserable, paradise and penury lurking on opposite banks of a river that neither party really intends to cross.  And as our cities have grown, magnificent and proud structures, tributes to man's ingenuity, supremacy and sweat, art has reflected this shift: it has become more self-assured, less deferential, less keen on the mysteries of nature and more focused on the achievement of earth's most evolved species.  This is, for a variety of reasons, good and bad.  The bad consequence of our manmade landscapes is that we have come to believe that there is nothing beyond our grasp, that forests and hills and oceans are unkempt studies for true perfection.  While not all of us are so convinced, we can still revel in fine surveys of some of our more riveting urban sprawls.  One such location would be the former capital of the Aztec empire, now the Mecca of all sorts of empires, none of which seems to be unstinting towards its impoverished minions – which brings us to this recent book.

Mexico City is the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere, yet few have ventured a study into what makes it tick.  The habitual excuse will likely contain synonyms for "crazy," "unwieldy," "dangerous," and "colonialist," or maybe even those very words, leaving the curious reader who does not have the privilege of visiting quite cold.  As it were, the Distrito Federal (also known as D.F., in the spirit of Americans' D.C.) cannot be categorized as particularly safe, placid or easy to manage; if that's what you want in life, Geneva is still available.  No, D.F. screams tantalizing opportunities, huge disparities in those opportunities, and a certain ability to handle the vicissitudes of urban life that would make most spoiled Westerners quail.  In fact, given the plethora of negative information on Mexico City over the last few decades, there would be hardly an American of non-Mexican heritage that would ever want to consider a life there. 

Yet there are exceptions such as David Lida.  A New Yorker by birth and disposition, Lida has been a resident and proponent of D.F. since 1990 when he moved there after a succession of pleasant short-term stays.  All those years have given him access to changes and persons that would completely escape the casual observer, researcher or intrepid journalist armed with a handful of popular guides and a pocket dictionary.  Lida's knowledge is therefore profound, biased and laced with small chains of detail that could not have possibly occurred to someone unwilling to make a home out of his subject matter.  He bleeds and fights for a place that is not kind to its majority (and oftentimes pernicious to its minority), stubbornly persuaded that Mexico City will be the future.  Whose future is the only question:

People who complain that Mexico City has become agringada [Americanized] are in fact revealing that they never stray beyond the affluent neighborhoods.  However globalized, the city resists becoming the stereotype of a place that has lost its identity or become ruined due to contemporary capitalism.  There are probably many reasons, but the principal one is poverty.  Globalization functions for the middle class and the well-to-do, who increasingly find themselves living, working, and shopping in enclaves modeled after their counterparts in the United States.  The poor cannot afford such places, and globalization passes them by (106).

Unfortunately, there is nothing more commonplace and banal than poverty.  Lida's contribution aims to harpoon the traditional notions of mythic beasts such as postcolonialism, sexism, and the particularly Mexican malinchismo, which may be loosely rendered in English as a preference or prejudice for foreigners and foreign things, by adjusting the chiaroscuro.   Yes, Mexico City is poor (minimum wage is five dollars a day; only twelve percent of the working population earns more than twenty-three dollars a day).  Yes, Mexico City is as corrupt, unsafe and unpredictable as you might expect from a city that has only had non-appointed, elected mayors since 1997.  But what Lida finds is remarkable: he casts his eyes about and discovers the art and food of La Condesa; the vocabulary of death, fate and sexual interaction; the gentle winds that blow in from other nations and their impressions of Mexicans, by most accounts some of the friendliest people in the world.  One remarkable short chapter (there are thirty-three chapters, a tidy, unintentionally Christian number) relates the legend of the Island of the Dolls; another, longer entry surveys Mexico's diverse and brazen culinary combinations; and a lengthy chapter, fittingly the physical center of the book, is devoted to the sex industry at home, work and play.  Perhaps such prurience is unavoidable in our day and age consecrated so unabashedly to hedonism; whatever the explanation, it is not out of place given what the Spaniards accomplished and what we come to think about repressed lusts in countries that will overtly preach the contrary.

Lida may be a journalist accustomed to deadline, but he does not hurry his conclusions.  He admits that he did not immediately understand the complexity of the allusive phrase, "Soy chino libre"; and he has come to see the value of religion (which he clearly does not endorse) and Catholic motifs and rituals.  There is also an artistic touch to so many of his expressions, such as when he describes the inequities of daily existence: "people with money perceive the poor as abstractions, blurs who only come into focus when they wait on them" (29); or when he addresses the city's notorious penchant for gangdom: "Criminologists' explanation for the discrepancy has to do with the chilango's [Mexico City native's] perception of time. When surveyed, victims nearly always believe that the crimes have occurred more recently than they did" (209).  Would you want to read an urban diary whose author was not in love with that city, who wasn't prone to fits of exaggeration, who wouldn't place a charming twist on the most morose and sordid details?  This is neither obstruction nor propaganda, this is love.  When we love, we may espy the faults of our beloved, but we bask in the glory of her advantages, her ecstasies, her passions.  Lida took his time and found almost everything praiseworthy about an ancient city that most dismiss with a careless gesture.  Another chaotic valley of trouble, perched high above even less fortunate warrens of humanity?  That's only one way to look at it.

Recortes de prensa (part 2)

The conclusion to a story ("Press clippings") by this Argentine, perhaps inspired by the deeds of the last man to be executed in France.  You can read the original in this collection.

The sculptor returned the clipping to me; we didn't say much because we were practically keeling over with sleep.  I felt that he was happy that I had accepted to work with him on his book and only then did I realize that up until the end he had doubted my reputation of being very busy, perhaps of being selfish, of being, in any case, a writer deeply involved in her own matters.  I asked him whether there was a taxi stand nearby and walked out onto a deserted, cold and, for my tastes, far too narrow street in Paris.  A gust of wind obliged me to turn up my coat collar and I heard my steps stomping dryly in the silence, marking a rhythm in which fatigue and obsession inserted time and time again a melody, or a line from a poem, the only thing I was offered to see were her hands severed from her body and placed in a jar that bore the number 24, the only thing I was offered to see were her hands severed from her body.  I reacted brusquely, repelling the oncoming wave that came back again and again, forcing myself to breathe deeply, to think about the work of the following day.  I never knew why I had crossed over to the other sidewalk; there was no need for it since the street disembogued into the square at La Chapelle, where perhaps I would find a taxi.  It made no difference to me whether I walked on one pavement or the other, but I crossed because I no longer had the strength to ask myself why I was crossing.

The girl was sitting on a step in a doorway almost lost among the other doorways of the tall and narrow houses which could hardly be differentiated from one another on this particularly dark block.  What a girl could be doing at this hour of the night and in such loneliness on the edge of a step did not surprise me as much as her posture, a whitish stain with her legs open and hands covering her face, something that could have just as easily been a dog or a crate of trash abandoned at the entrance to a building.  I looked around vaguely: a truck was moving away with its stupid yellow lights; on the opposing sidewalk, a man was walking hunched over, his head deep in his raised collar and his hands in his pockets.  I stopped and looked around again: the girl had thin braids, a white skirt, and a pink knit sweater on.  And when her hands parted I saw her eyes and her cheeks and not even the partial darkness could erase her tears, their sheen dripping down towards her mouth.

"What's wrong?  What are you doing out here?"

I heard her breathe in sharply, swallowing her tears and snot, a hiccup or a pout; I saw her full, chubby face reach towards me, her tiny red nose, the curve of a trembling mouth.  I repeated my questions, saying God knows what as I bent down until I felt her very close.

"My mom," said the girl panting in-between her words.  "My dad’s doing things to my mom."

Perhaps she was about to say more but her arms relaxed and I felt her cling to me, crying desperately on my neck; she smelled dirty, like wet underwear.  I wanted to take her in my arms as I got up, but she moved away, looking in the darkness of the corridor.  Her finger was pointing out something to me; she began to walk and I followed her, barely making out a stone arch and, behind that, the darkness, the beginning of a garden.  She walked out silently into the open air, which surrounded not a garden but an orchard with low fences which gave sown fields boundaries.  There was enough light to see the rachitic mastic trees, the reeds which supported climbing plants, rags like scarecrows.  Towards the center a pavilion was divided in patches with sheets of zinc and cans, a small window from which a green light emanated.  There were no lights on in the windows of the buildings which encircled the orchard, and the black walls rose five floors high until they flowed into a low and cloudy sky.

The girl had walked in small, measured steps directly between the two stonemasons who guarded the gate to the pavilion.  She hardly turned around to make sure that I was following her and entered the building.  I know that I should have held up here, turned around, told myself that this girl had had a bad dream and returned to bed.  All the reasons of rational thinking at this very moment showed me the absurdity and perhaps even the risk of entering someone else’s house at this hour of the night; maybe I was still telling myself that when I passed through the half-open door and saw the girl waiting for me in a vague hallway full of tools and assorted junk.  A ray of light slipped out from under the last door at the back, and the girl motioned to me with her hand and, almost running, stepped across the rest of the hallway.  Then she began opening the door imperceptibly.  Close to her, getting the full yellow rays of the crevice which was expanding little by little, I smelled something burnt, heard something like a drowned scream again and again, stopping then repeating.  My hand gave the door a push and I entered the infected apartment with broken stools and a table full of glasses and bottles of beer and wine, and a mat stacked with old newspapers; past all this was a bed and on it a body tied up and gagged with a wet towel, her hands and feet bound in iron bars.

Sitting on a bench with his back to me, the girl's dad was doing things to her mom.  He was taking his time, slowly lifting his cigarette to his mouth, letting the smoke out little by little through his nose as he placed the lit stub of the cigarette on the mother's breast.  Through the towel wrapped around her mouth and face apart from the eyes, the mother's suffocated screams went on and on.  Before I had time to understand, to accept being part of this, the father found time to withdraw the cigarette from his mouth and then bring it back again; he found time to revive the ember and savor its excellent French tobacco; he found time to let me see the burned body, burned from the stomach to the neck, the red and bluish stains that went from the thighs and the vagina to her breasts where now he was lifting her arm with studied delicateness to find a spot on her skin without scars.  The screams and shaking of her body in the bed which creaked in spasms were mixed with things and acts which I did not choose and will never be able to explain to myself.  Between me and the man with his back to me came a decrepit stool; I saw it rise in the air and fall on its side on the dad's head; his body and the stool rolled on the ground in almost the same second.  I had to step back so as not to fall down myself, and the movement of raising the stool and discharging its weight had absorbed all of my strength, my strength which abandoned me at that very instant, which left me alone like a tottering old doll.  I know that I went to look for help and didn't find it; that I looked vaguely behind me and saw the door locked; the girl was no longer there and the man on the floor was a confused blot, a wrinkled heap of rags.  What came afterwards I could have seen in a film or read in a book: I was there without being there, but I was there with such agility and assiduity that, in a short while, if this were happening in time, I came to find a knife on the table, cut the ropes that bound the woman, rip the towel from her face and see her straighten herself out in silence, now perfectly in silence as if it were necessary and almost unavoidable, and watch the body on the floor which was starting to contract unconsciously, although that was not going to be for long, watch her go towards the body without a word, seize it by the arms while I took its legs and with doubled momentum, we tied it to the bed, we bound it with the same ropes hurriedly reconfigured and retied, we tied it up and muzzled it in the same silence in which an ultrasonic sound seemed to be vibrating and trembling. 

What happens next I don't know.  I still see the naked woman, her hands pulling off pieces of clothes, unbuttoning a pair of pants, and lowering them until they had reached the feet, I see her eyes in my eyes, one pair of eyes doubled and four hands pulling off and tearing off and taking off a cardigan, a shirt, a slip.  And now that I have to remember it and write it down, my woeful condition and rough memory bring me another matter, unspeakably vivid but unseen, a passage in a story by Jack London in which a trapper from the north struggles for a clean death while, at his side, a bloodstained matter keeps him conscious, his adventure buddy howls and convulses torturously for the women of the tribe who are to make him live out a horrific prolongation of life between spasms and screams, killing him without killing him, exquisitely refined in every new variant never described here, as we are never described and doing what we were supposed to do, what we had to do.  It was useless to ask myself now why I was involved in all this, what right did I have, and what was my part in what happened before my very eyes, what they no doubt saw, what they no doubt remember, just like London's imagination must have seen and remembered what his hand was not capable of writing.  I only know that the girl was not with us once I entered the room, and that now her mom was doing things to her dad, but who knows whether it was only her mom or perhaps indeed once again the howls of the night wind, fragments of images returning from a newspaper clipping, hands severed from her body and placed in a jar that bore the number 24, through unofficial sources we learned that he died suddenly at the beginning of the torture, the towel in the mouth, the lit cigarettes, and Victoria, two years and six months old, and Hugo Roberto, one year and six months old, abandoned at the door to the building.  How is one to know how long it lasted, how is one, including me, to understand, even me, although I think of myself as one of the good guys; how is one, including me, to accept, even me, because I am on the other side of the severed hands and mass graves, on the other side of girls tortured and shot that Christmas night; the rest is having your back to it, crossing the orchard beating me against the fence and gashing open my knee, going out onto a cold and deserted street and arriving at La Chapelle and almost immediately finding a taxi that brought me glass after glass of vodka and sleep from which I only awoke at midday, lying across my bed and dressed from head to foot, with my knee bloodied and that occasionally providential headache which pure vodka can give you when it goes straight from the bottleneck into your throat.

I worked the whole afternoon; it seemed inevitable and amazing that I was capable of concentrating to such an extent.  At nightfall I phoned the sculptor, who seemed surprised at my early reappearance.  I told him what had happened to me, and he respected me enough to let me spit it all out to him at one go, even though at times I heard him cough or try to start a question.  

"So that you see," I told him, "you see it didn't take me that much time to deliver what I promised you."

"I don't get it," said the sculptor. "If you mean the text on ..."

"Yes, that's what I mean.  What I just read to you is the text.  I'll send it to you once I've cleaned it up a bit; I don't want to have it here anymore."

Two or three days later, after a tempest of pills, drinks and thirty-threes – anything that could provide a barrier – I went out onto the street to buy some groceries; the fridge was empty and Mimosa was meowing at the foot of my bed.  In my mailbox was a letter with the stout handwriting of the sculptor on the envelope.  Inside I found a sheet of paper and a newspaper clipping; I began reading as I walked towards the market and only later realized that I had ripped the envelope when I opened it and lost a part of the clipping.  The sculptor thanked me for the text to his album – unusual but, it seemed, very much in my style, outside of all the usual customs in artistic photo albums – although he didn't care much about it just like I hadn't cared.  There was a postscript: "In you we lost a great dramatic actress, although luckily an excellent writer was saved.  The other evening I thought for a moment that you were telling me something that had actually occurred, after which I just happened to read France-Soir, from which I can tell you I found the source of your notable personal experience.  Surely a writer might argue that if his inspiration comes from reality, even from police reports and news, what he might be able to do with it has the potential of another dimension and gives it a different value.  In any case, dear Noemí, we are too good friends for it to have been necessary to condition me in advance to your text and deploy your talents on the phone.  But let's leave it at that; you already know how much I appreciate your cooperation and I am very happy about ..."

I looked at the clipping and saw that I had ripped it inadvertently, the envelope and the piece stuck within it had been tossed somewhere.  The article was worthy of France-Soir and its style: atrocious drama in a suburb of Marseilles; macabre discovery of a sadistic crime; former plumber bound and gagged in a rickety bed; a body, etc.; neighbors furtively on the up-and-up regarding repeated scenes of violence; a small girl missing for days; neighbors suspecting negligence and abandonment; police looking for his mistress; the horrible spectacle which was offered to the – and here was where the clipping ended.  At the end of it all, having wet the tongue of the envelope too much, the sculptor had done what Jack London and my memory had done; but the photo of the pavilion was complete and it was the pavilion in the orchard, the fences and the sheets of zinc, the high walls encircling everything with their blind eyes, neighbors furtively aware, neighbors suspecting abandonment, all of this was beating my face into the fragments of the story.

I took a taxi and got off at the rue de Riquet, knowing that this was idiocy and doing it because this was how stupid things were done.  In broad daylight this had nothing to do with my memory and, still, I walked looking at every house and crossed over to the other pavement as I remembered having done, and I didn't recognize a single doorway from that night.  The light fell over everything like some infinite mask, doorways but not like the doorway, no access to an interior orchard simply because this orchard was in the suburbs of Marseilles.  But the girl was indeed there, sitting on the step in an entrance playing with some kind of rag doll.  When I spoke to her, she hustled off running up to the first door, a concierge coming out before I could call her.  She wanted to know whether I was a social worker; surely I had come for the girl I had found lost in the street; that same morning a few people had been by to identify her and a social worker was coming to look for her.  Although I already knew what it was, I asked for her last name before leaving.  Then I betook myself to a café and on the back of the sculptor's letter wrote the conclusion to the text, then went to slip it under his door.  Just so he would know how it ended, that the text to accompany his sculptures was complete.         

Recortes de prensa (part 1)

The first half of a story ("Press clippings") by this Argentine, perhaps inspired by the deeds of the last man to be executed in France.  You can read the original in this collection.

Although I don't need to say so, the first clipping is real and the second imaginary.

It seems relevant to mention that the sculptor lives on Rue de Riquet, although in Paris you can't be too choosy when you're an Argentine sculptor, two very difficult ways of making a life for yourself in this city.  As it were, we haven't gotten to know each other all that well in those fragments of time approaching twenty years.  When he called me to talk about a book of reproductions of his most recent work and asked me to write an accompanying text, I told him what was always appropriate in such cases: that either he should show me his sculptures and then we'd see about that or, rather, we'd see about that later on.

That night I went to his apartment where we began with coffee and friendly jabs, both of us feeling what one cannot help feeling when one person shows another his work.  Then came that almost always fearful moment in which the bonfires of the home would be lit; otherwise one would have to acknowledge, covering it up with words, that the firewood, emitting more smoke than heat, was still wet.  Earlier on the phone, he had talked about his works, a series of small sculptures whose common theme was violence at all political and geographical parts which man could reach as wolf to man.  We knew something about all this, two more Argentines rising on a wave of memories, the daily accumulation of horror from cables, letters and sudden silence.  While we were talking, he went to clear off a table; then he sat me down in a convenient armchair and began bringing out his sculptures.  They were all placed under flattering light, obviously planned out beforehand, and I was allowed to examine them slowly, in time turning them and examining them from all sides.  Now we hardly exchanged a word; it was the sculptures who were speaking, and their speech continued to be ours, one after the other until we had a good dozen or so.  They were small and filiform, loamy and plastered, born from wires or bottles patiently wrapped by fingers and palette knifes and growing, from empty cans and objects which only the sculptor's confidence allowed me to recognize, into bodies and heads, arms and hands.  It was late at night; from the streets we could hear the faint noise of heavy trucks and ambulance sirens.

What I particularly liked about the sculptor's work was that there was no system.  Nothing was too explicit; each piece contained something enigmatic, making it often necessary to keep gazing at each object, gazing and gazing as the minutes slipped by, in order to understand the manner in which violence was expressed.  At the same time the sculptures seemed both ingenious and subtle.  In any case, there was no alarmism or sentimental extortion.  Even torture, the ultimate form of violence carried out in the horror of immobility and isolation, was not evident in the dubious minutia of so many posters, texts and films now returning to my equally dubious memory, equally too quick to retain certain images and reduce them to who knows what kind of obscure complacency. 

I thought that if I were to write the text the sculptor had asked me to write, If I write what you're asking me to write, I said to him, it will be a text like these pieces; I would never allow myself that ease of expression so filthily abundant in this type of work.

"That's your business, Noemí," he said to me.  "I know it's not easy.  Our memories are so awash in blood  that sometimes one feels guilty of putting up limits, of handling them so that they don't flood over us."

"You're preaching to the choir.  Look at this clipping: I know the woman whose name is signed at the bottom, and I found out some things from reports of friends.  Three years passed as if it were last night, just like it could happen at the same moment in Buenos Aires or Montevideo.  Just before leaving to come over to your place, I opened the letter of a friend and found the clipping.  Pour me another cup of coffee while I read this to you; in reality, I don't need to read it after what you've shown me here today.  But who knows, I think I'd feel better if you read it as well."

What he read was this:

I, the undersigned, Laura Beatriz Bonaparte Bruschtein, residing at Atoyac, number 26, district 10, Colonia Cuauhtémoc, Mexico 5, Mexico City, would like to share the following testimony with the general public:

1. Aída Leonora Bruschtein Bonaparte, born May 21, 1951 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a literacy tutor by profession.

Fact: At ten o'clock in the morning on December 24, 1975, Aída Leonora Bruschtein Bonaparte was kidnapped by members of the Argentine National Army (Batallion 601) at her workplace, in Villa Miseria Monte Chingolo, near the Federal Capital.

On the day previous, this site had witnessed a battle which had resulted in more than a hundred casualties, including civilians.  After being kidnapped, my daughter was taken to the military garrison of Battalion 601.

There she was brutally tortured, just like all the other women.  Those who survived were shot that Christmas night.  Among them was my daughter. 

The burial of those killed in battle and the kidnapped citizens, as in the case of my daughter, was delayed by about five days.  All the bodies, including hers, were carried by bulldozers from the battalion to the commissary of Lanús, from there to the cemetery of Avellaneda, where they were buried in a common grave.

I kept looking at the last sculpture left atop the table which prevented me from watching the sculptor as he read in silence.  Only now did I hear the tick-tock of the clock hands coming from the hall; it was the only thing audible at this moment; outside, the streets were becoming more and more deserted; this light sound came to me like a metronome of the night, an attempt to keep alive the time contained within that needle by which we were both being measured.  Time that had reached a room in Paris and a miserable neighborhood in Buenos Aires, that abolished calendars and left us face-to-face with this, confronted with what we could only call this, with all of our qualifications used up, the tired and filthy gestures of horror.  

"Those who survived were shot that Christmas night," the sculptor read aloud.  "Perhaps they also gave them bread and cider.  Remember that in Auschwitz children were given candy before being forced into the gas chambers."

He must have picked up on something in my expression, because he made a gesture of apology, lowered his eyes and looked for another cigarette.

Officially, I learned of the murder of my daughter on January 8, 1976, in the eighth court of the city of La Plata.  I was later referred to the commissary of Lanús where, after three hours of interrogation, I was told where the grave was located.  The only thing I was offered to see of my daughter were her hands severed from her body and placed in a jar that bore the number 24.  What remained of her body could not be handed over because it was a military secret.  The following day I went to the cemetery in Avellaneda looking for tombstone 28.  The commissary had informed me that there I would find, "what remained of her, because what we were given could not be properly termed bodies."  The grave was an area of earth recently displaced, five meters square, more or less at the back of the cemetery.  I know its location.  It was awful to realize how more than a hundred people were murdered and buried, among them my daughter.

2. In light of this dreadful situation and the indescribable cruelty of January 1976, I, residing at Lavalle street 730, fifth floor, new district, in the Federal Capital, charge the Argentine Army with murder.  I am pursuing my case in the same La Plata tribunal, in the eighth civil court.  

"You see, all of this does us no good," said the sculptor, barring the air with an outstretched arm.  "No good at all, Noemí.  I spend months putting together all this shit, you write books, this woman denounces atrocities, we go to conventions and round table discussions to protest, and we almost come to believe that things are changing.  And then it takes two minutes to read the truth yet again, so that ..."

"Shush, I'm also thinking about a few things right now," I said with the fervor of someone who had to say exactly that.  "If one just accepted these things, it would be the equivalent of sending them a telegram of support.  Moreover, you know full well that tomorrow you're going to get up and spend time assembling another sculpture.  And you'll also know that Ill be in front of my typewriter and you'll think that we're many although we're actually few, and that the disparity in forces is not and never will be a reason to keep quiet.  End of sermon.  Did you finish reading?  Well then, I have to go."

He gestured negatively, pointing to the coffee pot.

Consequent to this legal recourse, the following facts occurred:

3.  In March 1976, Adrián Saidón, a twenty-four-year-old Argentine, employee, and my daughter's fiancé, was murdered in the streets of the city of Buenos Aires by the police, who notified his father.

His body was not handed over to his father, Dr. Abraham Saidón, because it was a military secret.

4.  Santiago Bruschtein, an Argentine, born December 25, 1918, father of my murdered daughter previously mentioned in this document, a biochemical doctor by profession in the laboratories of the city of Morón.

Fact: On June 11, 1976, at twelve noon, a group of military officers dressed in mufti arrived at his apartment on Lavalle street, fifth floor, apartment nine.  My husband, attended by a nurse, was in his bed in an almost terminal state owing to a heart attack he had incurred, and with a prognosis of three months to live.  The soldiers asked him about me and our children, and added: How dare a son-of-a-bitch Jew charge the Argentine Army with murder.  Then they forced him to get up and, beating him, forced him into a car without letting him take his medication with him. 

Eyewitnesses have confirmed that for detainment purposes, the Army and the police employ about twenty cars.  We never heard from him again.  Through unofficial sources we learned that he died suddenly at the beginning of the torture.

"And I'm here, thousands of miles away, discussing with my editor what type of paper should be used for the pictures of the sculptures, the format and the cover."

"Bah, sweetheart, these days I've been writing a story talking about nothing less than the psy-cho-lo-gi-cal problems of a girl going through puberty.  Don't start torturing yourself; I think we have enough of the real thing."

"I know, Noemí, I know, dammit.  But it's always the same, we always have to recognize that all this happened in another space and time.  We were never there nor will we ever be there, perhaps ..."

(I recalled something I had read as a girl, perhaps by Augustin Thierry, a story in which someone, God knows what he was called now, had been trying to convert Clovis and his nation to Christianity.  When he was describing to Clovis the flagellation and crucifixion of Jesus, the king leapt out of his throne brandishing his spear and shouting: "Ah!  If only I had been there with my Franks!" – the marvel of impossible desire, the same impotent mania of the sculptor lost in his reading.)

5.  Patricia Villa, Argentine, born in Buenos Aires in 1952, journalist working for the agency Inter Press Service and the sister of my daughter-in-law.

Fact: She, like her fiancé Eduardo Suárez, a journalist as well, was arrested in September 1976.  They were transported as prisoners to the general coordination office of the Federal Police of Buenos Aires.  A week after her daughter's abduction, her mother, who had taken the pertinent legal actions, was informed that they had regrettably made a mistake.  Their bodies have not been returned to their families. 

6. Irene Mónica Bruschtein Bonaparte de Ginzberg, twenty-two years of age, a visual artist  by profession, married to Mario Ginzberg, master builder, twenty-four years old.

Fact: On the day of March 11, 1977, at six in the morning, forces comprising members of the Army and police force arrived at their apartment.  They abducted the parents and left their two children, Victoria, two years and six months old, and Hugo Roberto, one year and six months old, abandoning them at the door of the building.  We immediately took recourse to habeas corpus, I in the consulate in Mexico and Mario's father, my in-law, in the Federal Capital.

I have pleaded for my daughter Irene and for Mario, denouncing this horrific sequence of events to the United Nations, the OAS, Amnesty International, the European Parliament, the Red Cross, etc.

Nevertheless, I still have yet to receive any information on their place of incarceration.  I maintain the firm hope that they are still alive.

As a mother prevented from returning to Argentina owing to the persecution of my family as I have described, and by virtue of the fact that my legal recourses have been annulled, I call upon those institutions and persons who are engaged in defending human rights, so that the process may be initiated for the return of my daughter Irene and her husband Mario and so that their life and freedom may be safeguarded.  Signed, Laura Beatriz Bonaparte Bruschtein (From El País, October 1978, reprinted in "Denuncia," December 1978).

Vallejo, "Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca"

A work ("Black stone atop a white stone") by this Peruvian poet with whom I happen to share a birthday.  You can read the original here. 

In Paris I shall die and it shall rain,
Its memory I hold, a downpour's thrall.
In Paris I shall die and shall not strain,
Perhaps on one fine Thursday in the fall.

A Thursday, like today is Thursday, yet
My humeri betray me as I write;
I see myself alone, my path unmet
Through every angle of my spinning sight.

Vallejo died, they beat him dead, he's dead,
Although to them he, César, did no wrong.
They hit him hard, with sticks as hard as lead,

With rope they hurt him more, yet some looked on:
My Thursday days, these humeri my bones,
My solitude, my rain, my path alone.