I grew up in La Plata; I never walked by the ESMA when I was little. Had Isabel?
“It doesn’t matter really,” she continued. “Just plant the seed. Knowing what you’ve said of the Colonel, he’ll want it to grow.”
* * *
I didn’t wait very long. Better to get it over with, I thought. Especially as—I kept landing on these additional, half-baked justifications—it might provide a buffer for any suspicions the Colonel had formed since the party. Clearly I couldn’t be spying or involved with those idealist kids if I wanted to work at the ESMA, could I?
On April 3, I made two calls: the first to the Colonel, asking to meet for a coffee later that day at Parada Norte. It would have to wait till tomorrow, he told me—“Who knew there’d be so many logistical complications to taking over a government? I barely thought Argentina had one to begin with”—but he was very glad I’d seen the charms of that particular locale.
The second was to my mother; she’d been trying to reach me since the coup, and I’d put off the task of calling back to ease her worries. But I decided to use my meeting to help in this regard as well: “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m seeing the Colonel tomorrow and I’m going to get his advice, make sure I’m staying safe.”
“Make sure he’s keeping an eye on you too,” she said, only moderately relieved.
“I don’t think we need to worry about that, Mami. The Colonel’s always keeping an eye on me.”
“But you know what I mean. Make sure he puts in a word with the right people about you. Tell him to do it for me, to ease a mother’s fears. The number of arrests the last few days—there were six high schoolers here in La Plata who were taken. High schoolers, Tomás!”
“I’m not in high school, Mami.”
“And the other night, Alba Quiroga was woken by a moving crew next door at two in the morning. At least she thought it was a moving crew at first—loud thumps, the scraping of furniture, you know. But then she saw the time and how fat the rugs were when they carried them out.”
“Sounds like one of Alba Quiroga’s stories to me. After all, a rug would never be fat enough for her.”
“Tomás, don’t you—” She cut herself off, forgoing her reproach. “I love you,” she said instead, and I muttered the words back before hanging up.
* * *
The dingy interior of Parada Norte seemed much the same when the Colonel and I met the following afternoon. The newspapers had been replaced, but it was impossible to tell about the men, what with their identical comb-overs and buttoned-up shirts, the outlines of crosses or military tags visible under their collars.
I started by passing on my mother’s request. It’d smooth the ground for the main one, I figured, make it seem like just another in a handful.
“It’s embarrassing to ask, especially since I don’t quite know what I’m asking,” I said, “but could you help put her mind at ease?”
“Embarrassing! Not at all, Tomasito. Didn’t I tell you right here you could always come to me?” He gave a proud, cartoonishly wide smile, and I nodded. “Tell your mother you’re very much under my protection. You can also remind her what I said when she asked me about your moving to our lovely capital in the first place: I told her I personally believe things are safer for students in Buenos Aires than in La Plata. Such an intellectual city, La Plata—it’s not a great time for intellectuals. For Thomas Shore types. Better to be one of this country’s big dumb animals.”
“You’re not exactly that,” I said.
“No,” he laughed. “Some of us, if we’re clever enough, we can slip past their defenses. But tell me, Tomás—is there anything else I can do for you?”
Haltingly, allowing for pauses as I sipped on my cortado and nibbled on the tostados the Colonel had ordered again, I made my second request as Isabel had instructed.
“Tomás, my dear,” the Colonel said when I finished, “if you’re short on money, you can just ask.”
“I don’t just want money, I want work.”
“If you want work, you can do anything. You can be a waiter here at the café,” he said, gesturing to one at random.
“There’s not much . . . esteem for waiters at cafés, Colonel,” I said cautiously.
“I’m not sure there is esteem to be found at the ESMA either, Tomás,” he said. I felt him measuring my reaction, like a parent delivering disappointing news to a child. At length, he sighed. “But that’s because I’m an army man, not a navy man. If it’s the ESMA in particular you want, I can’t help you. Other places, perhaps. I know other places you might be interested in working, though I can’t speak to the status they might grant you among your friends, or whether your friends would even have heard of them. In fact, to be candid, I don’t believe they ever should hear of them. Is that the kind of place you want to work, Tomás?”
It was horrible to relive. To experience at once the convoluted logic of the instant itself and, at the same time, all the intricate knowledge of the months and years to come. So many repercussions, so many if-thens rippling endlessly—if I could have just reached into that idiot version of me from the past and altered his response, who knew how the rest would have changed? Might Isabel have lived? Might others have died? Though I’d been over it again and again, explored every hypothetical, serpentine tunnel in that speculative labyrinth trying to solve the brutal calculus of one life’s value against another’s, I still didn’t know what the answer was, or should have been. I only knew what answer I gave.
“If you don’t think it’s a good idea—”
The Colonel brushed me off with a casual wave. “When I was your age, I certainly didn’t have only good ideas,” he said, and smiled, closing off one whole future of mine if not more.
He paid despite my protests and told me to go ahead, he had to stop by the bathroom. But I didn’t go ahead. I stared out the window until he got back, wearing his phantasmal form again.
“That won’t be the same outside anymore, will it?” I asked him.
“The same outside?”
“Avenida Jujuy. That’ll be Venancio Flores now, won’t it?”
He gave me one of his supremely nonchalant looks. “Why? Something scary about Venancio Flores?”
I suspected he was toying with me. So I went to the door without bothering to answer that it wasn’t the street I feared but what was on it, five minutes from the train station. The so-called Garden—Automotores Orletti, the way it was ten years ago.
ELEVEN
There were other conversations with Claire about my nightmares. They provided a kind of shorthand, a neat excuse for my being so closed off, emotionally unavailable. A crutch, in other words, though it was a genuinely comforting one at the beginning of our relationship, when at the mere mention of my nightmares Claire would put her arms around me like none of it—none of what I’d become—was my fault.
Then my troubled dreams became the sort of thing Claire tried to fix, or help me fix—by getting me to look head-on at the past and confront it, to “deal with my issues.” After I proved no better at adopting even passive strategies like “moving on” and “letting go,” my mutedness around my nightmares took on a different cast, became the type of characteristic that contributed to Claire’s calling me a slab of stone.
“They’re never about the torture itself?” she asked me once while encouraging me to talk about my dreams. The details I’d given previously—the train, the garage—must have seemed odd to her, tangential to what she imagined was the real horror of my experience.
“Sometimes I’m asked to keep someone alive,” I told her. I guess it scared her off, since she didn’t ask me to elaborate.
The main feature of those nightmares was the sound of the radio. I would have preferred to hear screaming. Since screaming meant the person behind the door was alive. It was when the screaming ceased that I grew terrified. Both because the person might
have lost their life and, worse, because I might get called in to determine if they’d get it back. That is, to decide if they’d have the chance. If this life was worth coming back for.
* * *
It had been made explicit when I was hired that this would be one of my duties. Aníbal Gordon told me outright, in what was by far the strangest job interview of my life. It was later that April, and the Colonel had driven me down. Among other warning signs, on the way over he’d told me, laughing, that prior to working for the intelligence agency SIDE, Aníbal had been accused of murdering Silvio Frondizi, brother to the former president Arturo Frondizi. But, the Colonel added, I shouldn’t let that intimidate me.
Aníbal belonged to that mythologized class of Argentine power-mongers best represented by Admiral Emilio Massera of the junta, who was rumored to help enact kidnappings himself, and José López Rega, the infamous “Warlock” of the Triple A (the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance). Whatever the Colonel contended, their chief purpose was large-scale intimidation via political eradication. Aníbal had worked with the Triple A death squads as well as his own gangs and, according to the Gringo, who would later relay this list admiringly, had been suspected of armed robbery, racketeering, and the stealing and selling of fuel from commercial planes. Though his alias was Black, no one made use of it, perhaps because his real name was more frightening or because no one dared report him, in any case.
Aníbal had thick, muscular features, including a bulbous nose and large, fleshy ears, and often visibly perspired through the suits he wore to work. When I met him in his office—the heart of the place was kept hidden from me at first—he said my proficiency in English and ability to communicate with his American friends made me an appealing prospect. But the real reason he was open to the Colonel’s idea was that none of his men knew a thing about medicine—which was very much in keeping with the disorganized, “unprofessional” nature of Automotores, he said. He added that recently one of the guards, trying to determine whether a prisoner’s heart was still beating, had stuck it with a fucking syringe and watched for movement in it. Suffice it to say, there was none.
The point was, a medical student was good enough for him. If I could do CPR, operate a defibrillator, and use the syringe only for fucking vaccinations, that was all I needed.
* * *
But as the cultural refrain about that time went: I knew, but I didn’t know. I didn’t truly know what my job would entail until the moment I heard the sizzle of static pouring from the radio beyond the torture room door.
At lunchtime on my first day, I met several of the other men, sitting in the kitchen around a nicely set table with sandwiches and empanadas. Neither Aníbal nor the Priest was there—the Priest offered his services elsewhere occasionally, when they thought they could extract information through an actual confession, and Aníbal checked in from time to time at Coordinación Federal. (It turned out it was a detention center as well as a federal police headquarters, and an appropriately named one at that: what good was getting all this information if they didn’t coordinate how to use it?) Rubio’s lunch break was brief; he’d been at it with a “squealer” since the night before and wanted to get back to it. When I finished—I barely touched my meal, and spoke almost exclusively with the Gringo, since Triste showed no interest in speaking to anyone—I went to the prisoners’ side of the floor to patrol the hall and be near the torture room in case I was needed.
I could tell by the raspy pitch that it was an older man inside, and by the volume that he was new. After a week or more, people tried to stay quiet if they could, I’d been informed during my tour with the Gringo, and they rarely allowed themselves to plead. This man did; he shouted at the top of his lungs for help, screamed he was innocent, said he didn’t know, he was just a psychiatrist, it wasn’t his fault his patients—and then he said nothing.
Czzzzshhkk. Krrrrzzzzccshhkkk.
Radio static. I was nauseous and scared to be seen throwing up and had the awful thought: The sooner Rubio calls me in, the better.
Finally the bolt loosened and Rubio revealed himself, adjusting his glistening blond hair and wiping his brow. “Verde,” he summoned, and I went.
Czzzzshhkk. Krrrrzzzzccshhkkk.
The man on the table—the parrilla, or grill, as the Gringo called it, to the Priest’s distaste—looked to be what my father’s age would have been. He was naked, and the indignity of that moved me, more than it should have. He’d been tortured, possibly to death; what did it matter if he was naked on top of that?
Rubio stood aside, and I got the defibrillator from where it was kept in the corner. I’m sure I moved quickly, but it felt slow, routine. Without urgency. Rubio took a toothpick from his pocket and went to work on his teeth while he waited, like he had all the time in the world.
The man was already shirtless, so all I had to do was feel his pulse, make sure the use was appropriate, then place the pads and push the button. I didn’t hesitate on the first try. But at the convulsion in the man’s body—it was my first time using the defibrillator on someone in need of it—I paused and reckoned with what I was about to do. It had only been one morning, but that was enough to comprehend what the rest of a prisoner’s days were likely to be at Automotores.
I applied the defibrillator again. Again the convulsion, and nothing more. Again I pondered the momentousness of what I was doing, as if the stakes got higher the further from life the man seemed. I looked at the squiggly white chest hairs surrounding the defibrillator pads and wondered: How much longer could he have anyway?
I used it again. Again that dramatic tremor of the body and—that was all. Maybe the problem was adding more electricity to a heart stopped by electricity?
I glanced at Rubio. He waited, toothpick in his pristine white teeth.
Again. Again. Ag— I’m not sure how I knew. But there it was, in his throat, running feebly through his veins—breath. Life.
Rubio thanked me, and I went back out.
After all that, the man died a few weeks later; his heart stopped again, only this time on one of my days off. I took fewer after that.
* * *
When I got home that first night, I called Isabel. Pichuca said she was out. I tried again an hour later—she still wasn’t there. Neither was Nerea—she was probably off with Tito, Pichuca said, complaining that her daughters never told her anything. I considered asking more pointed questions but realized it could open me up to questions in turn, and I worried about my ability to handle them in my state.
Anger doesn’t do it justice. Not even betrayal. I felt used and abandoned, thrown away. When I went to work the next day, the impact of every sensation was amplified: the muffled screams; the grimy stray car parts strewn around the garage to give the appearance that the place was still operating in that capacity; the broken lightbulbs hanging in the air—they all seemed analogues to the pain induced by Isabel.
Maybe if she loved me, if I could tell myself it was for love of her—if I could inject the experience with that kind of sacrificial spirit and heroism—it might feel worth it, endurable. But as it was? With Isabel absconded away with Gustavo, fucking in the throes of revolutionary passion? I had no idea how I’d find the strength for this. I had no idea—the thoughts spiraled from rage to terror to sudden, chest-thumping panic as I listened to the violent Liszt concerto playing inside the torture room—how I’d survive this. One wrong word or revealing hesitation—that’d be enough to put me on the table.
All that made me show up again was the danger of not doing so. I couldn’t go to the Colonel after a mere two days and say I wasn’t up for it. I couldn’t ask him to protect me either, after what I’d witnessed. How would he even be able to protect himself, if the likes of Aníbal Gordon believed he’d put a Montonero spy in their midst?
Two days. This could last two years—more, even. That was what might have tormented me most: Isabel must have known that if she got me
in there, I’d have no way of getting out.
* * *
It was one of the longest weeks of my life, that first one at Automotores. The sounds and sights that broke the murky dankness of the place hadn’t blurred together yet, grown numbing. Each was still its own startling horror, even the minute ones like the unintelligible sound of Portuguese between two Brazilian guards, the roar of the rusty garage door when it opened or closed. The stink of engine oil, of infection. The flickering of the lights when the picana was being used at high voltages, and the terrible care with which prisoners drank soup, to avoid the blows they got when they spilled. The request one made that I tighten his blindfold, because he might be punished if a guard thought he could see.
The conversations, the laughter among those guards. Rubio and the Gringo making fun of Triste’s grumpiness, chatting about soccer or a girl one of them was seeing. Aníbal and the Priest going over “evidence” taken during a kidnapping, choosing among stolen watches or cigarette lighters while making remarks about moneygrubbing Jews, their commenting on humiliating entries in a journal or calendar. (“What the fuck you think this lady’s chest appointment is, eh, boludo?”) Aníbal giving the Priest a hard time for driving to work when it was all of fifteen minutes away from home, and in his own personal car to boot. (The Priest responded, smirking, that it was God’s duty to protect him, since He was the one who made him lazy.) One of the visiting SIDE officers complaining about lawyers’ pesky writs of habeas corpus—if only they could be more like the notaries who happily signed over detainees’ assets, no questions asked; another telling stories about other centers’ methods and congratulating us on not using “the submarine,” a vat of water filled with shit and piss they’d dunk prisoners’ heads in—it wasn’t good, someone had drunk the dirty water trying to kill herself, he explained with amusement.
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