Mapuche (22 page)

At first, he thought botany would help him fight loneliness and idleness: better than a hobby, in flowers he had found another time. The time of growing . . . Wild irises from the marshes, gleaming gladiolis, haughty roses or azaleas, flowers would be his redemption.

Franco Díaz wanted to die in peace.

The liver cancer that was gnawing at him was spreading. The doctors he'd consulted in Montevideo gave him hardly six months to live. No one knew. Not even his former superiors. The illness developed in successive crises, more and more violent, and soon nothing would be able to hold it back. Franco was alone with Death, his metastases and his Secret, which was killing him perhaps even more than the cancer.

“Speak, and God will help you,” his friend and confessor at the time told him.

As the last months of his life fizzled out, Franco Díaz had become a mystic. Sometimes he heard It as a result of prayers and ecstatic appeals, when his reason gave way or when the pain in his guts became too much to bear. The Voice counseled him, omniscient and yet so near, more comforting than the morphine tablets: it was the Voice that had given him the idea of hiding his Secret, of letting time do its work. He had planted a
ceibo
, the Argentine national tree, like a stele, a mausoleum. The world was not yet ready: first, his generation had to pass away. An irony of fate: it was at the moment that Franco Díaz was getting ready to bow out that his past caught up with him.

It had all begun the preceding week, when the retiree had seen unusual things on his street: a gray car and figures prowling around his neighbor's house. The following day, a man had come to ask him questions, a big, husky man with a strong Argentine accent who claimed to be a friend of Ossario's passing through the area. Ossario hadn't opened his shutters for three days, and his car was not there: everything suggested that he had left. The big guy tried to seem friendly, but Franco guessed that he was lying. Ossario never received visits from friends, and his house seemed clearly to be under surveillance. The insurance agent who'd come from Buenos Aires had also lied about his identity. What did all these people have against Ossario? Franco Díaz had sensed danger. Something had filtered through, inevitably, something that concerned him. Blackmail, the extortion of money, putting “revelations” up for bids, the former paparazzo had been capable of anything. Diaz could have looked into it, found out through a traitor or a convert who he was. Familiar with interrogations, Díaz knew that the men who had visited him were professionals, cops or secret agents connected with some office. If the men prowling around his house were sent by his own people,
they would have told him
. Ossario's impromptu return and the attack on the house had accelerated everything.

Unlike the former military men who'd been driven out and put their houses in the Florida neighborhood up for quick sale, Díaz fled, leaving everything behind him: his property, his
posada
on the banks of the river, the precious plants that he'd spent so many years raising and that would fade without him in his secret garden. He crossed the border in his Audi that very evening and slept in Argentina, his beloved country, in a small hotel where he registered under an assumed name. Now he was driving along a tree-shaded road, ill at ease, on the run. “Speak, and God will help you,” his confidant repeated. Yes, but speak to whom? Viola, Camps, Galtieri, Bignone—most of the generals involved in the Process were dead. Who else knew? Who had betrayed them? In this treacherous game, whom could he trust?

Of the men from that time, the only one left was his confessor. And the Voice told him to look for him, so long as he had the strength to do so, and to find him before it was too late.

It was Thursday: the sun had returned, the sparrows on the Plaza de Mayo were taking a bath in the fountain at the base of the obelisk while waiting for the Grandmothers to arrive.

They were converging toward the assembly point, two by two or in small groups, shuffling along, the eldest holding the arms of their daughters. They greeted Elena Calderón, who was laying out the association's flyers, DVDs, and books under the impassive eyes of a police squad—the infamous elite police. Rubén's mother arranged her
pañuelo
, which the wind was blowing around, and returned the greeting of her companions in misfortune.

Elena Calderón would never have thought she would share the fate of these women.

Elena was a daughter of the old upper middle class of Buenos Aires, a descendent of the oligarchies that had gotten rich at the end of the nineteenth century, when Argentina, having liquidated its native peoples, had opened itself up to international trade. Her grandfather, an officer who had served under General Roca, had received immense lands as his reward and consolidated his fortune by allying himself with other great families that had divided up the country among themselves. His son Felipe had inherited thousands of acres on which the world's best beef cattle grazed, fed Europe as it was rebuilding itself, made substantial profits, and woven networks of influence in the various Argentine political groups, whose waltz of coups d'état was orchestrated by the army, which was still closely connected with the government.

The fall of Juan Perón, who after the death of his wife Evita went about in public with a thirteen-year-old girl, changed nothing. Coddled by her family, Elena had grown up in a middle-class household in La Recoleta where, once her beauty was recognized, she very soon found herself courted by the most eligible suitors in the capital. But unlike her brothers and sisters who sacrificed themselves to the rites of passage of their social class—for girls, parties to celebrate their fifteenth birthdays, balls to the sound of boleros and an exacerbated romanticism—the youngest daughter dreamed of emancipation. While reading in the Querandi, a smoke-filled cafe where the counterculture youth met, Elena had met a young poet and polemicist, Daniel Calderón, whose verbal skill competed with his fiery eyes: the lightning bolt made a direct hit on both of them and they were inseparable from then on.

Two years later, Rubén was born, and then Elsa.

A progressive, like every good Argentine petit-bourgeois or intellectual, Daniel had managed to slip through the nets of the ever-present military censorship. His poems began to be translated abroad and his wife encouraged him to write, sure that the best was still to come. Daniel Calderón had the
duende
, the gift of enchantment. Someday everyone would be like her, dazzled by his personality and his power of expression, this smile that by its luminous peace disarmed everyone—Elena was a woman in love.

And then came the
Golpe, on March 24, 1976.

Videla, Massera, Agosti. Because of her social origins, Elena thought she was protected from the generals who, each representing his respective corps, erected themselves as guardians of morality and Christian order: the famous National Reorganiza­tion Process. Despite the life she had chosen, Elena represented the old right wing of the country, which sometimes supported Peronism. She was very quickly disillusioned. Foreign creative works were outlawed, publications were put under surveillance, there was an auto-da-fe of books on history and culture in general that were deemed to be too influenced by “Marxism,” and the literary landscape dissolved in the widespread terror and self-censorship.

Books on sociology, philosophy, psychology, politics, and even mathematics soon became impossible to find. The review and then Daniel Calderón's books met with the same fate. According to the government, subversives would disguise themselves “as ordinary men-in-the-street,” which justified no-holds-barred repression.

Each case of disappearance constituted a universe of its own, an inexpressible totality of pain and an irreversible upheaval for those who remained.

Fear: every Argentine became a potential target, and was concerned first of all to ensure his own security and that of those close to him.

Ignorance: the media did not mention the kidnappings, ratified the official communiqués issued by the police and the military, according to which the ghastly daily discoveries were the result of conflicts with subversives, or even between subversives.

Confusion: hadn't this violence begun before the coup d'état, amid the disorder and corruption of the Peronist regime? Hadn't the guerrillas fought against the preceding military dictatorship, hadn't they refused to play according to the rules of democracy and carried violence to inadmissible extremes?

In Buenos Aires, the repression was terrible, the atmosphere sordid. People avoided greeting each other in the street, speaking to strangers on pain of being accused of conspiring or arrested for having given a light to a passerby. Elena and Daniel temporized. Something had to be done, but what? Who could resist the military? The Church? It was in bed with the military. The political parties? They'd been muzzled. The intellectuals, the journalists? They were in the line of fire.

But they did finally decide to act.

Since the junta controlled the kind of works that could be sent through the mail, Elena had had to move heaven and earth to get her father's friends to help her obtain a visa for Daniel, who had been invited to participate in a lecture series at the Sorbonne on nineteenth-century Argentine poetry. After months of negotiations, the exit visa was finally granted. Daniel Calderón had left for France in early 1978 with his manuscripts hidden in the lining of his suitcase—a publisher in Paris had agreed to bring out his most recent collections of poems under a pseudonym, whereas Daniel would establish contacts with the groups opposing the dictatorship, most of them composed of political refugees who were trying to alert defenders of human rights to the reality of the country as the Mundial approached. France, the country that took in the Argentine exiles: Daniel had convinced Simone Signoret to become their spokesperson in the media—the actress had shown great generosity and paid for the banners and flyers out of her own pocket—and Danielle Mitterand to use her influence in political circles, whose secrets she knew, as a former member of the French Resistance.

Daniel Calderón was giving his lectures in Paris when he learned of the abduction of his children on their way to school.

Had someone betrayed him? Where, in Argentina or in France? In any case, he had to find them before they disappeared forever, sucked into the machinery of the state. He immediately returned to Buenos Aires, despite his wife's fears, and was picked up by the agents of the SIDE before he even got out of the airport.

“Operation Return,” as the military called it, was a tactic consisting of setting a trap for exiles by infiltrating their associations abroad. Had the visa for France been granted with this end in mind? Elena Calderón had gone to great lengths to track down her family, had called upon people she thought were close to her, without result: “Your husband ran away,” they had dared to tell her. She had turned to Daniel's supporters in France. The affair had been brought before the highest authorities, but if the country of the Rights of Man condemned Videla's coup d'état, behind the scenes things were more complicated: the French intelligence service had been informed of the issuing of false papers for agents of the junta assigned to track down dissidents on French soil, but Poniatowski, the Minister of the Interior, had taken no steps to arrest them. Former members of the French Secret Army Organization were still found in the secret services, in France and in Argentina, where some secret agents returning from Algeria had become instructors in no-holds-barred interrogation. And it was not just the Secret Army Organization: from 1957 to 1983, regular army staff members and officers gave classes in Paris, via the “French mission,” training future torturers for war against insurrections and for the use of psychological terror in bringing the people into line. Were they playing a double game? Elena Calderón had met with the French ambassador in Buenos Aires, an affable and cultivated man who had proven more interested in improving his passing shot than in demanding information regarding the disappearance of a poet on his return from Paris.

Like other women and mothers of the
desaparecidos
, Elena had had to resign herself to the arbitrariness: the military men struck when and where they wanted, sarcastically throwing
habeas corpus
requests back in the faces of the humiliated plaintiffs.

Every day, there were dozens of these women in front of every police station in the neighborhood, asking for news of their loved ones; Elena Calderón joined these women eaten away by anxiety, most of them workers' wives whose children had been kidnapped by police forces operating without badges or identities. Through her contact with them, Elena discovered with alarm the condition of her compatriots, some of whom were going out alone for the first time in their lives. Reduced to housekeeping and childcare, these women knew nothing. Politics did not concern them—at least they had ended up believing that—and any notion of rights was foreign to them. Few read, or if they did, they picked up by chance
La Nación
, which spoke for the Process. Women who above all did not understand what was happening: “they” must have made a mistake . . .

For hours, these mothers remained prostrate, powerless, sleepless in a pit of despair. The authorities laughed in their faces: “You son must have run away with a chick!” “Another case of terrorists settling accounts among themselves.” The most fortunate of them received a coffin containing the body of their son or husband, with armed soldiers present to forbid them to open it—then they would have seen the marks of torture, or that there was no body in the coffin.

The women decided to join the resistance.

There were only fourteen of them when they first gathered around the obelisk on the Plaza de Mayo, on April 30, 1977. There was no square in Argentina that was kept under closer surveillance: the Plaza de Mayo was the center of military power, the symbolic site of the country's political memory, situated between the Cabildo, the seat of the former Spanish colonial government, and the Casa Rosada, through which had passed all the heads of state since the eviction of the last viceroy of Spain in 1810 and the proclamation of the Republic.