About Survivals

Translation by Kathy Odgers

Buenos Aires, 1957. A background of brilliant colors: green-the grass for our choo-choo train; red-the patio rocking while I swing; brown-the floor stretching through the bedrooms. Papa and Mama have gone out, leaving our beds side by side, just like in their room. We can also watch TV until late, only if we are good. Gerardo changes the channels as he pleases; he always gets his way, because he is older. On the screen, a fight: masses of muscles jump out at me each time I look. He knows I'm scared and he makes fun of me. He sticks out his tongue and attacks me. I cry out, I push him, I scream until finally I manage to slip past him and run out the front door. I go out to look for my parents.

I fooled you! I fooled you! I left you all alone and you, Gerardo, are the one who is going to be scared to death. You're going to have an asthma attack.

Good night / Sleep well / Thanks / You're welcome. Good night. . .

Nobody will say the next line tonight because I'm going to sleep with them.
Bring the knife, ring the bell, when you die you'll go to Hell.

Buenos Aires, 1977. Black, the railings of the balcony, our ruined garden; gray, the half-closed blinds, shadows of imaginary trees; white, the doorframe, our last setting.
"Look out the window to see if they follow me," you say.

"Why should I? Why don't you just leave? This is a dictatorship and you're playing hide and seek with the bogeyman." You get angry and leave. I look out to see if they are following you. I don't see anybody. Nor do I see you again.

THEY came looking for you several times, closing in on you until one dawn they took you away forever. The first warning was at your workplace. Ten years later, your workmates described the havoc of papers and instruments they made in your lab as the watchman allowed them to ransack the place in broad daylight, a heavily guarded building, an atomic research center. Several friends of yours had already been kidnapped, yet you stayed.

By the doorframe in a hallway of that center, there are fifteen names on fifteen plaques, the names of the disappeared. I also saw you once in giant letters, in a demonstration, held aloft by strangers, a symbol. I approached you cautiously, keeping my distance, unsure of our new relationship. I spoke your name, I held you, joining in the chanting, “Murderers / son of bitches / what have you done to the disappeared…”

I've seen you on the sidewalks, I've seen you on the walls, in the silhouettes that remember you between paint and bricks. I've found you multiplied a thousand times, filling the streets, in voices, in thousands of voices.
Gerardo competes in the relay race in first grade. People are clapping. “On your mark, get set. . . Go!”

Gerardito is one of the fastest. Suddenly he stops short and turns his head 90 degrees. He smiles, he waves: Mama is there. He takes off again, as fast as he can. He's the last to cross the finish line. He starts to cry.

Gerardo enters high school and still doesn't wear long pants. Gerardito is intelligent but he doesn't study. Gerardo changes schools because he's expelled; Gerardo has a knee operation to avoid the draft. Gerardo shows up at meetings. Gerardito has a girlfriend and he brings her home for the night. Gerardo is fun. Gerardo talks too much about politics. Gerardito writes:

We have in this country an orchestra composed of a great orchestrator: Mr. Bourgeois, Conductor, Juan Carlos, Repressor. Players: workers and farm laborers, with special guest artists, several bourgeois. The music, composed in Buenos Aires, is divided into three movements: economic (imperialism vivace), social (jailhouse andante), and political (a fugue in fraud major).l

Gerardo is under surveillance. Gerardo supports violence from below and challenges violence from above. Gerardo is being followed.

Gerardo writes:

It's as if they had stolen a chunk of you
as if, craftily, patronizingly, they had told you
"Watch it, kid," suggesting that in the end, whether you know it
or not
they will continue to steal bits of you, little by little,
until there's nothing but ashes left.

Gerardo never killed anyone and he certainly never kidnapped anyone: Gerardo is kidnapped and certainly killed.

Buenos Aires, 1977. The trip from my house to the concentration camp takes less than 15 minutes. The so-called Athletic Club is right in town. They drag me down some stairs and leave me in a room where I am to undress before a group of men who will proceed according to their usual routine: they are going to torture me.
"What were you yelling in Jewish in the street?"
"My name."
"Lie down here and we'll see how much you feel like joking around. You'll 'chat with Susana.' And later on we'll make soap out of you, little Jewish shit."

The neighbor across the street once told my mother, "You may be Jewish, but you are nice." They were Germans and, according to my father, former S.S. who had found refuge in our country after the war. My grandparents were Russians and Poles who had left their homelands by the end of the 1880s. Argentinean government officials had promised them land and prosperity. They came. They docked at Buenos Aires and then traveled up to Entre Rios province. Only there did they conceive the true dimensions of their task: to become godlike. They had to harvest almost without tools, to live almost without a roof. My grandfather, like so many others, ended up moving to Buenos Aires to try his luck.

Is it true, Grandpa, that you went in a cart selling clothing? Did you really go into the southern forests to barter with the Indians? Did you ever go to the temple?

No, dear, your grandparents left their traditions in the boats. Here they drank mate and even ate ham. The secret of belonging was not to look back. To look back was to condemn yourself, like Lot's wife, to divine retribution. We, the grandchildren, hardly understood what it meant to be Jewish. Was it a religion, a way of life? A race? An identity? It was none of that. To be Jewish was simply to be seen as such. But we didn't know that yet.

I lie face up on a metal table, naked, spread-eagled, bound hand and foot, blindfolded. The screams and music merge with the voices asking me questions, my code name, my brother's, his friends', his friends' friends. I have electrodes all over my body. A charge penetrates my brain, my teeth, my gums, my ears, my nails, my breasts, my ovaries, my nails, my head, my ears, my teeth, my ovaries, my skull. The pores of my skin smell burnt. Now they turn me over, laughing. They go up and down over my back until the voltage drives me crazy. I yell out, but I control myself. I won't give these gentlemen the pleasure of my tears.

Above all, they want names. They already know Gerardo's. I invent names of people in exile in Mexico, Bolivia, Spain. What else can I say? I must find something, words delay discharges.

After this first 'talk with Susana' they throw me into a cell. I take off my blindfold, but can't see a thing. I'm in a dark cubicle so small.

I can't even stand up. They have left me here to think it over, until I decide to cooperate. Think it over. I don't know any words to think with. There are vacant lots between me and my memories. I've already forgotten myself. I have nothing to say, nothing to add, nothing to understand.

They come back. I cover my eyes and the door swings open. Once again they drag me and I fall. We reach another room and I feel a white light through the blindfold. "You're going to remember this just like you remember your Mama." Voices. I don't even think about death.

They have removed a book from my luggage, Oh Jerusalem, which
I had planned to read during the flight to Israel. They read paragraphs of that book, out loud and between discharges: a new method for text analysis. They want to know about the Irgun, how it operates. They think I'm going over to join it.

"That organization was active in 1947!" I yell at them, unable to bare their grotesque ignorance in the midst of this test. "This is 1977!"
They close that book but open others.
"What was Marx doing in your library?" "What else did you read? Come on, speak up!"

I love opening and closing the enormous books, illustrated books with hard, red covers. I open one: a wolf wearing an old granny's nightgown peers at me between the sheets. I close one: the midnight bells ring out. I open another: a cat with boots jumps out. I close another: the traveling ant disappears, leaving a trail in the dust with her wooden shoes. Books are my playhouses. I am director, audience, or actress when I feel like it.

At the university I am obsessed with reading, particularly the books our professors don't recommend. Hegel, Marx, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus and so many others parade before my insatiable eyes. I remember a few phrases, a few ideas perhaps. The rest is forgotten. The books alone remain, infinite worlds in infinite signs. I keep playing hide and seek with myself in their lines. I collect thoughts, images, nocturnal butterflies.

"Don't don't please no more you're going to kill me you're killing me!" The blue smell. It's Gerardo. It's Gerardo's voice. "I don't know anything stop stop oh please stop!" It is him. He must be in the next room, or is it just a recording to make me talk? The voltage seems higher than ever, I bite my tongue so that I won't scream.

Buenos Aires, 1984. Words, only words remain. Your name is bodiless, fleshless, your name is weightless, timeless, your name. You who so often spoke to me of the lines and the points in the spacetime continuum, I can't give you a vector, a plane, not even a tomb. Vacuum, a concept you could never make me understand. I fill the vacuum with letters that vibrate to the touch, voices that at least distract me from so much blood. I can only write vowels and consonants that barely invoke you, transcribe paragraphs that others wrote but never sent you, like this letter from Mother:

Why did I choose today to sit down and pour out my feelings in this unfinished notebook, half-filled with the algebraic calculations that I've never understood and will never understand? Simply because they were written by my son whom I don't know if I will ever see again, who today is entering the twenty-ninth year of his life, if he's still alive. That's why I'm writing in this little notebook, which because it's his, brings me closer to him. If the day should come I'd like to tell him all this in person, I want him to know that we've missed him a lot.

I know that on this day he wouldn't want me shut away, crying. I hope he'll forgive me for not doing what he'd want me to. Today is sunny and warm; I've closed the shutters and turned on the lamp. Daylight bothers me.

Where are you? Do you know that today is the day of your birth 28 years ago? Are you anywhere that lets you know this? What thoughts, memories, images, must be passing through your mind today? Have you been able to find a balance since you ceased to belong to the world of people who move from here to there without thinking that it can all suddenly end, that something can casually happen and then we are no more.

It's the not knowing that's terrible, that's the worst possible thing, worse than death. His things are here, his books, his writings, his clothes, but he is not. Only those who've lived through this can know it. At times, the emptiness is so great I don't know how I reach the end of the day having accomplished things, walked along the streets, talked to people, carrying on what would be called a normal life. I go through the motions but inside there is emptiness.

How can I be cured? Only with your return. Will that be? There is no answer. It is terrible to realize that we are anonymous numbers; that we don't count. We disappear, our place is filled out, and life goes on. I hope this won't last very much longer. It would kill too many parents. It's too cruel. I'll write more another day, if I have something more to tell you.

The rest of the notebook is blank.
End of the second session with the cattle prod. They give me someone else's clothes-the pants, shirt, shoes, and underwear of someone who won't need them any longer. Cold, clammy hands drag me to an office where I have to repeat my testimony in front of a typewriter.

My official version of the facts, so official that I sign it without being able to read it, without knowing who will be made guilty by my name signed blindly at the bottom of the page. They give me a letter and a number. "You don't have a name anymore. From now on you're K48. If you forget that, you can forget about ever getting out of here." If I forget, I condemn myself, if I don't forget they condemn me. I will be liquidated, either way. No more fresh air, no more friends, no more books, no kisses, no letters, no trains, no more.

It's cold, very cold. The cold comes through the walls, passes through the bed-frame, the mattress, climbs up my back and pierces the back of my neck. It plays along my spine, vertebra by vertebra, up and down, down and up, without respite.

Through an invisible crack in the wall a pale ray of light slices the dirty frozen air. It probes my skin, the unlikely drops of sweat. I want to touch it but I don't know how. My hands shake and fall lifeless to my sides, my head rises and drops limp, I'm trapped in a web of bruises. My shackled feet no longer fight. Pain screams a single obsessive sentence from my legs to my brain: you are imprisoned in a dark hole, in a concentration camp, desaparecida. I curl up in the mattress, trying to get warm. I cover my ears. I try to sleep to forget that I still exist. I am an inert object throbbing. I must memorize my code number. K48, Kay forty-eight, Kay forty plus eight.

My body aches, my joints crack, the cell is not big enough for more than three paces, but I keep moving until I'm warmed up. Concentrating on my exercises, I don't hear the footsteps approaching down the corridor to my cell. The massive metal door opens without giving me time to cover my eyes.

"Put on your blindfold, bitch! Next time there won't be a next time. Keep still!" Some hands drag me once again to the platform. I can't stand another session. The cattle prod again? The voltage, a hundred times stronger than before. Talk. One of them says a few words in Hebrew.

"Who was your madrij?" They want to know the names of my shooting instructor and my javerim, my comrades. Why Hebrew? First they're going to get rid of the lefties and then they'll proceed to free the country of Jews. For the time being they are collecting information on the international Jewish conspiracy. Their appetite is indiscriminate.

Christians, Jews, atheists, dark and fair, male and female, young and old, pregnant women are all swallowed together. Secondary students asking for a discount on bus fares, a lady taking her dog for a walk in the wrong place at the wrong time, revolutionaries or their relatives, their neighbors, it's all the same to them. They've gotten tired of asking questions. Now they answer. They describe in minute detail the office that arranged my trip to Tel Aviv and what my madrij looks like. I'm sure they have secret service people working there. I'm exhausted. My resistance has reached the breaking point. I would love to submerge myself in tears. What for? I wonder. Tears don't open padlocks, my grandmother used to say.

They stop and I'm still alive. They take me along stinking corridors to a wider place they call the infirmary. I try to orient myself by using my ears, the only sense available to me. The voice of the male nurse, or doctor, echoes in a space that I estimate to be as big as a hospital room for twelve beds. They are well equipped and they treat my infected wounds. The cattle prod opens them and they, with great care, close them so that it can open them again. Soft, delicate hands bandage me. It's the first time I've been touched without being beaten, spoken to without being sworn at. Perhaps it's because of this that words bubble up and I say that I don't know anything, that they have to release me, that I've got nothing to do with it, that I don't know anything, that I don't know. . .

I don't know. I know I don't know. What do I know? At the university it slowly starts to dawn on me. For very vague reasons I enter the most politicized of the faculties, the Red Forum, the Faculty of Arts. Since I am a good listener and I have a manic-depressive aunt, I register in Psychology, which shares a building with Philosophy, Sociology, and Literature, a solid structure with a secret inner life.

During the day students act studious: they saunter down corridors, they enter classrooms, they ask questions, they take notes, they go to the library. Professors act professorial: they arrive late, they've forgotten their notes, they improvise, they answer questions, they assign homework, they go home early. It's the backstage whispers that give it away: invitations, admonitions, beckoning, prompting, teasing. At night the whispers overwhelm the day. They organize meetings, they initiate discussion, they formulate demands, they call for votes, they pass resolutions, they mobilize support. Suddenly the curtain comes down in the middle of the act. The whispers have bodies, the bodies scream and try to escape, they leap from windows, they scale rooftops. Some disappear down passages leading to buses or taxis, others that escape in two's rush into the nearest hotel, burning with desire for each other.

Some sit in cafes, watching the performance. Blue uniforms guard the exits, a police truck is parked outside. The uniforms throw tear gas canisters, the students start burning blackboards and benches in response. The backdoor of the truck opens and swallows whole those who are flushed out by the smoke. Other bodies run through the smoke to safety.

Backstage another play is in progress. We hear muffled screams, doors slamming, sometimes nothing. What's going on? This is experimental theatre. It's not for everybody. I rarely go to auditions but they still try to cast me, to court me, to lure me, with promises of immortality. I plot my escape: before the final curtain I'll tiptoe offstage to a waiting taxi and the final exit, the airport. No one will notice. I'm not important enough.

I was wrong. Someone noticed.

A certain perverse magic turns the key and three pairs of feet start their dislocated tap dance on an arm, a hip, an ankle, a foot, a hand. My body. I'm today's trophy, a hide with a hollow head and glass eyes. They step on me, step on a crack break your mother's back, the toy hunters have voices. "You Jewish shit, we'll make soap out of you."

Of course this mechanical and banal ritual exorcises my extremism in the temple: a Ford Falcon without license plates. Of course it accelerates down the senseless street and through the red lights without the bystanders batting an eye. Business as usual. But it's not every day (or is it every day?) that the laws of gravity are over. It's not every day that you open the door to let in a tornado that ransacks four rooms and draws and quarters the past and rips off the hands of the clock and shatters the mirror for your faces and tears apart the voile dresses and derails the trains. It's not every day that you try to escape and the lock has moved the door is unhinged the window is stuck and you're cornered by minutes that don't tick, the seconds that could save you are missing. It's not every day that you slip and fall with your hands behind your back pinned by the voices emerging from the maelstrom while time is out of order tossing into the air shreds of daily life.

You forget yourself among the spines of broken friends, chairs overturned, drawers emptied, suitcases burst open, colors obliterated, maps ripped up, and you realize that the voices repeat "So you wanted to escape, bitch" and a huge mouth opens and digests you into a sick body with guttural noises and sour smells.

Maybe in the background voices sound, "They don't know anything," but you're here in this body, tiles etched in your skin, a boot on your spine, a gun at the nape of your neck. "Stand up!" and you do, submissive, confused, stupefied, defeated, and you want to scream "They've got me, they've got me" while steel fingers claw your flesh you don't want to believe it can be so blatant two o'clock in the afternoon and they're stuffing you into the elevator and fondling you and dragging you along the sidewalk and finally you know that you're kicking against a nameless fate in a mass grave.

I scream my name at the top of my lungs, the street is a high diving board into the void, I don't want to jump but they make me. I land on the floor of a car, in my mind I run but it's a beehive I'm lost trapped the whip of the animal tamer keeps time to my defeat. "Take that for screaming in Jewish, slut. Take that for kicking us." Take that and that and that. I am a horse they have to break with their feet on my arms on my hips on my head on my ankles. My body. Step on a crack.

After a fleeting parody of freedom in which I am looked after like any other patient and even listened to, I go back to my corner dragging the chains that hurt my ankles. A prisoner in another cell calls the guard. He wants to go to the bathroom. No, he can't go, it's not the right time. He will soil himself, they will beat him and he will continue shitting his pants until they beat him to death. Now I know the rules of the game: bait the victim to show him his impotence, transform him into a weakling, beat a new language into him, a nice simple one with no past or future tense, no first person singular. You soon forget who you are, what you think, what day it is. You can't even remember your birthday, even though you know you're getting old.

They're cleaning the corridors and the cells. There is a festive air, the guard is whistling a tango and even asks me if I need anything. A way of saying what? The atmosphere is more relaxed and I take advantage of it to lower my blindfold as soon as I hear the steps receding in the distance. The doors of the cells are open and I can see the prisoner across from me. He's also looking at me. He is very young, thin, and disheveled.

"Where are we?" I ask with a thread of a voice.
"In a concentration camp. Top security section."
"Until when?"
"No one knows. Some are transferred, which means killed, some are released. If they take you down to the main floor and keep you there overnight, you are released."

"Have you been here long?"
"Six months. I don't think there's any hope for me. SHH, they're coming."

Thin and graceless. He made me think of you, with that delicate look, that casual indifference of the body. Andres. One of the lucky ones, saved by an inch or by an hour. You left Argentina without any documents when a friend smuggled you a note from her jail cell: get lost.

And you are lost. Forbidding and taciturn, you spend hours slumped in a chair watching the feet of the world. Your room is a perfect replica of a prison cell. You live in a student residence in Jerusalem, but Israel and your surroundings are on the other side of the universe.

I go to visit you one noon hour. When the hills encrusted with buildings appear I walk a little faster, I'm almost there. I only have to go down the stairs, find your corridor, look for your number and knock. I open the door and when I close it I know I am going to stay.

Your walls speak with familiar voices: Julio Cortazar, Rodolfo Walsh, Marta Traba speak to us from your clippings, as if in a hurry to tell us something. With their voices we drown out the radio, the television, the street, the barrage of language and culture bombing us. Innocuous resistance, a toy gun against the artillery of reality. We barely lower the volume. Soldiers on buses, on corners, everywhere, illegible signs, puzzling gestures. We are superfluous, literate illiterates, unarmed soldiers on a foreign battleground, exiles.

Since you left Argentina without any papers, they give you an Israeli passport sentencing you to serve in the army. But instead you buy a ticket to Spain and our life together ends, a life in danger of becoming everyday life. As you pack and leave I feel more foreign than ever. My need to leave erupts. I land in Barcelona a few months later, you greet me with a smile, a host greeting a guest. We go to take the train to Sitges.

I settle in. I hang up my clothes, I shelve my books, I invade your medicine cabinet with my first aid kit insuring me against microbes and melancholy. But my talismans don't work, neither does the beauty of the place. A sudden malaise lays me low. My legs are dead weights, my whole body is lead, it hurts to move, I can't walk.

The doctors say there's nothing wrong with me. What's wrong with me can't be located between the stomach and the liver because it is pulsing through the blood vessels of my memory. Now that I can stop for a rest, a South American tide courses through me, voices crying out in unison, transfixing me, claiming something I am powerless to give. Life.

"Attention!"
I don't know what it's all about, but I stand in front of the door to my cell, which is open. I don't know what I'm supposed to do about the chain I hear dragging along the corridor. I think I've been left alone in my section, that the other cells are empty and that they're going to punish me for not following the invisible group of prisoners I belong to. I remain at attention, defying the darkness, the fear of possible reprisals. The voice of a woman comes to rescue me.

"That order was to go to the bathroom. When they open the door, you have to wait for the signal to turn right, put your hand on the shoulder of the person in front of you and start moving. I'll take you this time so they won't know you stayed behind." I come back coupled to the locomotive of bodies I had lost. A half-turn, my hand on a shoulder, one, two, one, two. . . a centipede going to its hole, an insect with twenty, thirty, forty pairs of legs, crawling blindly along. The choo-choo train. . .

They also take us to the showers in single file, up to a huge room with pipes spewing out water, plenty for everyone.

We undress in front of a group of men who are in charge of the merchandise.

"Hey, baby, get ready! I'm saving it for you!"
You have to shower looking at the floor, pick up the soap without shifting your gaze, pretend you can't hear their jeers and their laughter, not react to the icy water that condenses the cold of the walls and the body, forget there are no towels. And back to the cell we go.

The massive door of the cell has its own rhythm. It opens three times a day. Once to go to the bathroom, twice to provide the concoction they call soup. I grope for a place for the bowl on top of the mattress and I try to place the spoon in the liquid. It's scalding. I blow on each spoonful so I won't burn my mouth. But I'm not used to it. I take too long for their liking. After the fifth spoonful, they take it away.

Soup is my clock. It marks my nights and dawns until I lose track and enter an unrelieved twilight. Time has gotten sick, lost in a labyrinth where tomorrow, yesterday, and today search for each other without ever meeting, time flickers and goes out.

Buenos Aires, 1987. Seated in your impassive green armchair, Papa, you try to trap the moth eluding your grasp. The past fixes your gaze on a lost point on the dining-room wall. The two of us alone with two ghosts who never water the plants or dust the books, which haven't been read for years. You, a voracious reader, don't even have the will to open them. The world slammed shut the day they took him away and ended the day Mama died. If only you could find the strength to go out to the streets, to leave your armchair for the plaza. Eight years passed between the petition of Habeas Corpus and other official documents. Years of knocking on the doors of the judges. It had become your routine-filing writs to discover where the order to arrest your son had originated and what charges were alleged against him. The judge would receive your depositions and send letters to the various jurisdictions overseeing the administration of justice: the district courts, the militia and the regular police force, the Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence services. The replies were always negative. At the end of so many forays into the labyrinth of hooded justice, you chose silence.

One morning you get up with more spirit than usual. You tidy yourself up from head to toe and tell me you are going out to look for an old people's home. You need a change, you wanted to be with people your age. You want to know when I will be home.

“Not till late.”
You go down the stairs. From some distance I hear you say goodbye. I get home late. You aren't there. Under the door I see a slip of paper and bend down to pick it up.

Miss Nora: Please call your Aunt Rosa as soon as you get home. It's a an urgent matter concerning your father.

"Is Papa there?"
"No, darling. . . your papa entered the building this afternoon, but
he didn't come to see us. Dear, your father is dead, he jumped from the balcony. It's terrible, you poor darling. . . You'll have to go to the police station and you will be able to see him. . ."

You jumped into nothingness and your pocket-watch broke in two.

Is the life of greenhouse plants like this? No, because there they are carefully tended so they will think it's their natural environment. This is a prison cell, there's no doubt about it. A creaking sound interrupts my thoughts. We climb some stairs. It's the first time they've taken me upstairs.

"Wait here until we call you."
I feel fresh air, like the air that flows through doorways from
patios. An evening breeze.

"Yes, sir. Come here, Corporal. Right away, sir." A military base? I also hear typewriters, movement. I'm not alone, I realize from the sporadic sound of chains that I'm not the only one sitting on the floor with shackled feet. It's very cold, the tiles are freezing, I can't sit like this, I have to move.

Maybe it was the others, or the breeze, or the sudden illusion of being on the brink of freedom. I don't know what it was, something in the air that spoke through me:

"Excuse me, sir, could I please move around a little? I'm cold.” A deathly silence slices the room in half: on one side them, all of them, astounded. On the other side me, ashamed of my unerring instinct to say the wrong thing. They'll make fun of me, they'll tease me like crazy, they'll kill themselves laughing.

"All right."
I still don't believe them, but I stand up and start moving my body.
My ankles are still tied together, but I flex my arms toward the ceiling and go up on tiptoes.

"Bravo, and again! Look, guys, the Swan Lake! Now up on your points!"
They come over to watch and I go on, obsessively and patiently I go on. "Let's have the Nutcracker!" I forget the chorus and down and up from deep down inside where they can't touch an unknown warmth flows over me and reaches my neck and yes comes out and I laugh and I laugh inside and I dance the Blind Woman's Bluff and I laugh inside not outside.

"What an idea! Asking them to do exercises. . . When I heard your voice it sounded familiar but I wasn't sure. When they gave you permission I too started to move, although not enough for them to notice. It seemed that they were about to let us go, and I was trying to find out whether your brother was in the group. They rounded us up together. He wasn't. He didn't have much of a chance, he was on their hit list. Since then I've been keeping to myself what I'll tell you now.

"Gerardo and I had gotten together with some other friends to study. We had an exam coming up, but it was dangerous to go around as a group. They were everywhere. Your brother was scared because they'd already come for several of his coworkers. He asked me for advice and I told him that the best thing was to spend the nights on the trains, buying a round-trip ticket to La Plata, for example, and getting off wherever he had to. I have friends who lived that way for months, but of course he didn't want to. He felt safer with me, so I offered him a place to stay. My wife and sons were on holiday, so the only one in danger was me. He came.

"They came at about five in the morning. They jumped over the garden wall and stared through the window. Their knocking woke me up-they weren't the slightest bit concerned about waking the neighbors. They were gesturing to me to open up, but I couldn't find the keys anywhere. Of course they don't need anyone to open the door for them, but they waited. I realized that I had left them in the lock. I hesitated before opening the door because Gerardo was not going to have time to escape, but I realized it was already too late. I let them in. They threw me to the floor, they made me close my eyes, they held my hands against the wall while they swore at me and beat me up. Your brother, who was in the other bedroom, suffered the same fate. They took us away but some of them stayed behind to trash the house. The neighbors say there were three cars in the operation and that they had cleared the area. As usual, the police didn't intervene. They'd been given orders not to intervene.

"They spun us around to make us dizzy, then they accelerated toward the center of town. It took about twenty minutes to cover the distance from my place to the concentration camp. There we were separated.

"First I was interrogated, fully clothed, and beaten. I assured them that I didn't know anything about politics or about my friends' politics: a complete moron. I was just a regular guy who works during the day and studies at night, too busy supporting my family to get mixed up in politics. They used the cattle prod on me twice. When they finished they took a declaration from me in a place that looked like a police station, full of typewriters.

"They bound my feet and put me in the lions' cage, a big room divided by partitions into smaller cells. They brought your brother in and left us alone together for a while. We only exchanged a few words, that he hadn't said anything about me, that I hadn't said anything about him. Some guards realized that we knew each other and took him out. I never saw him again.

"After a few days they took me to that floor where I heard your voice, they put me in a van and let me go. I suppose the same thing happened to you. In my van there were five people: two of them and three of us. They left me in La Boca. Before releasing me, they reminded me that they had picked me up drunk off the street a week before and now that I had sobered up they were letting me go. I shouldn't drink so much and I shouldn't come whining to them, they weren't nurses. When I took off my blindfold I saw some cars cruising around that looked like police cars, except they didn't have license plates. I hurried to a bus stop to take the bus home."

They call me up, this time by my name. A guard grabs me roughly by the arm and takes me to an office. A formal voice asks me to come in.

"Come closer! It appears that there's been some mistake about you, but if you don't want any complications you'd better remember this: you were never here. Do you understand? We're going to let you go and if you don't want to come back you'll forget everything, do you hear me? We don't want to be forced to act even more firmly. You understand that we know all about you and your family, your cousin and his mistress, the movements of your uncle the journalist, your Commie cousins. They could find themselves in serious trouble as a result of any false move on your part. But if you're good you won't have to worry, at least not for now."

I had stopped seeing my cousins Abel and Hugo, not because I wanted to, but for family reasons. Our parents had fallen out and we cousins had stopped seeing each other at birthday parties and New Year's. Time passed and I got used to not thinking about them, although at times I heard family gossip. "Did you hear Hugo had graduated from architecture? Not only that, but he's also an actor and they say he's a Montonero." "Abelito has almost finished secondary school. He's very tall and good-looking."

"They came to see me at the clinic one afternoon," my uncle told me. "They didn't come often because they were militants and knew it was dangerous. However, that day both of them arrived without realizing they were being followed. It was an ambush. Suddenly shots were fired, there were armed men swarming all over the building. Hugo tried to escape across the roof but when they brought his body in later it wasn't a bullet that had killed him. He had taken a cyanide pill. And Abel, who had tried to cover his brother's escape, was taken prisoner. He is still missing.

I went crazy. The policemen were everywhere. I covered the holes in the walls of the institute with adhesive tape so they couldn't spy on me. They locked me up and gave me electroshock therapy. They said I was cured. The truth is that I lost my memory and my will to live."

My uncle Pedro died the following year. Hugo, the one who took his own life before it could be taken from him, appeared years later on the lists of missing persons. Abel was seen in the Navy School of Mechanics, the ESMA. My cousins were already dead when I was kidnapped, long before I heard that voice politely informing me "We know all about the antics of your Commie cousins. . . They could find themselves in serious trouble as a result of any false move on your part."

They sit me on the floor once again. They order us to stand up and put our hands against the wall. "Over here, you jerk!" they yell at those who are not able to locate the wall in their blindness. "Don't act smart, you son of a bitch, stand where I tell you!" They frisk us. As if we could be concealing something.

L for liberation, T for transfer. We are the chosen. If they bother to give us so many instructions beforehand, it must be because they're planning to give us an L. But they might also put us to sleep and throw us from their planes into the River Plate. Or shoot us. You never know.

In the end they put us into the van. Let's just get it over with, once and for all. I try to peek out of my blindfold to see where they leave the first prisoner. It's an empty lot far out of town: I can't see any buildings or streets.

"Start walking," they tell him.
He doesn't understand the order. Maybe he thinks he's in front of a
firing squad. He takes a few steps backwards.

"All right, buddy, count to 100 and then take off your blindfold, and if you do it any sooner you won't have a tale to tell, understand?"
He gets back into the van whistling a tune and slams the door.

I keep my eyes well covered. They floor the van and it takes off with a jerk.
They stop again and the scene is repeated. One, two, three, I'm the fourth. I'm alone with them, as I was at the beginning. It's my turn. The door opens and the street rescues me. The noise of the engine gets fainter and fainter and I begin to count out loud, taking in gulps of cold pure air. I follow the instructions literally, as if they had a magic power to protect me from evil. Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred.

The mercury street lamps blind me. I have to open my eyes slowly to allow them to get used to the glare. I'm in an old neighborhood, not my own, but it looks familiar. High sidewalks as a precaution against floods, cobblestone streets, the Caminito-the little side street celebrated in tangos-the river. It's La Boca.

There are bars in La Boca that stay open all night. I go into the first one I see. The tenants of the night are celebrating something, with an abundance of food and laughter: unconcerned, happy. I ask for a phone. I don't want to waste any more time. I dial the number nervously. It rings. A sleepy voice answers, suddenly wide awake.

"Norita! "
"I'm fine. Don't worry, Mother. I'm on my way home."
I don't give you time to reply. I'm afraid that I'm being followed, that they're listening to the conversation. I go out into the street with the echo of your joy.

I called you to let you know I was alive. They called me to let me know you were dying. The phone rang in my room in Vancouver. My cousin said I should go back to Buenos Aires immediately: you were going into surgery in a few days, and you might not survive the operation.

My first visit after eight years. A frenzy of packing, of arrangements completed and suspended in mid-air. The flight is interminable. In Lima we are delayed because they are looking for someone, no doubt for political reasons. I even imagine it might be me. An uncontrollable anxiety makes the clouds into buttonholes of suffocation. By the time we land in Buenos Aires my teeth are chattering like castanets. I pretend to be chewing gum. Nothing's going to happen to me. Elections have been held, the military are about to leave office, and anyway they have no interest in small fry like me. I talk to myself in English, to convince myself and them of my new nationality.

"It's OK, Nora, you're gonna make it."

I get through Customs and Immigration and take a taxi to the hospital. Strange sights scroll by the window, but I can't concentrate on them right now, nor on how I feel, I can only see a hospital and your face looking up at me. I arrive and watch you sleeping. You survived. I don't know about the official diagnosis, but I do know the real name of your illness. You're never going to see him again, despite the arrival of democracy. Grief erodes your resistance, but you struggle against it and try to confront your condition.

Your eyes light up when they find me at your bedside waiting for them to open. I manage to rescue you from that bed and take you home, but THEY come back, as usual. The same little people, the authorities: nurses, guards, those who have a voice and a vote, those who decide.

Three white coats uncurl you defeated submissive from your chair drag you to the ambulance whose siren boasts your surrender / we arrive in only fifteen minutes / your bed is made lie down in it those eyes / those helpless eyes / don't look at me with those eyes / good-bye, good-bye / an unused arsenal of tears / your pupils sliding over me without stopping / come back stay don't go yet / your fragmented curving gestures / your arm shakes / you clutch the air / fright claws at me / it won't be me who covers your face trapped in a net of reflexes. I leave.

I ask the waiter for some change for the bus. I tell him that I only need a few coins. I get them. I run outside to the nearest bus stop. The bus comes, one that goes near my home. I pay the fare. The driver tells me that he's not leaving for a few minutes. I ask him what time it is. Two in the morning. I sit in the first seat. I'm the only passenger. I look out the window and see a patrol car sitting in front of us. It doesn't surprise me.

"Your papers!"
"I'm sorry, sir, I don't have them on me."
"Don't you know it's against the law to go out without an I.D.?" "Yes, sir."
"Come with us, please."

To the police station. Snared. I told you, I told you not to trust them. The same old story. I don't feel anything much, no fear, no disappointment, maybe a certain pride in having foreseen this. A feeble, defeated pride. Maybe they're testing me. They want to see if I'll talk.

Bruised, in short sleeves and the temperature 4 degrees, no 1.0., picked up in an outlying district at 2 A.M. I act as if everything is normal.
Another interrogation, this time facing a desk, without blows, without a blindfold. The wholesome face of the officer listens to my answers, his hand writes them down, my address, my telephone number. They're going to phone home, my mother won't understand what's going on and she'll say too much.

"Good evening, Madam. We have here at the police station a young lady who claims to live at that address. We're calling to find out whether you know her and whether you can tell us where she's been tonight.

"Is that all you can tell us? Nothing else? All right, Madam, thank-you." They finally look and me and state: "We'll take you home in a patrol car."
Delivered under escort. At the door four open arms pick me up, twirl me around, and they are my wings, my butterfly wings.

My parents, two old people younger than I am, two children to whom the adults have just returned a beloved toy. They spoil me, they run the bath to warm me up, they feed me, I fall asleep in their arms. They don't ask much. They want me to leave as soon as possible. I take the next plane the next day.

Buenos Aires, I984. I will come back home seven years later to search for a reason, or maybe a grave. In order to tie up the loose ends of our story in a knot that would untie the uncertainty. To find a version of the facts that could be pieced together and understood and believed. To recover your name and their names. To free myself of the compulsion to invent possible endings, endless possibilities. To turn you into a book whose ending I alone decree, whose ending is open and subject to change. I will go out with your picture in my purse. I will take you around the city to show you to whoever holds the key, the clue to putting you into a conventional narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

You tried to trap the night in cafes and chess games but in the end it trapped you. They won't tell me how long you survived, only that someone said you'd been shot, only that someone had seen you in the ESMA, only that you'd been killed. I already knew, but it's not the same as hearing it. I almost cry, I almost scream, almost.

ESMA they shot Gerardo, they killed your smiling photograph killed
my brother her son his grandson
her girlfriend his mother his aunt
her grandfather his friend
her relatives his neighbor
ours yours us