The Dirty War(Sylvia Maclagan) Since I’m going slowly mad, it’s small wonder that I seem to glimpse old paintings and misty tatters inside the room, as well as some kind of error floating baldly about like a reminder of transience: ‘Your days are numbered’, et cetera, in quite an effective though tasteless sort of way. I sense my unimportance and the essential pettiness of my days – yet I feel in my bones that I’m somehow timeless, that I shall not be forgotten in the grand scheme of things.

I live in a basement. I can hear, at noon, the dark green silence, and even a few summery bluebottles that make it greener by droning round each sunny spot that offers in the gloom. Birds and bugs make themselves heard. This is not your usual basement, but only a vacuum half protuding from the ground – perhaps the servants’ quarters of the blackened ruin of the main building of an estancia, reduced to an ant-sized blot on the immensity of the Argentine pampas. Some of the walls still stand. The owners, La Pampa oligarchs, have long ago moved to the City or died. Voices from the past re-echo now and then.

It’s 1976 and kidnappings are political affairs in Buenos Aires. I assume that I'm being held to ransom, gold for the coffers of Revolution, or else one of them for one of me. Except that they’ve got the wrong person. I’m a very ordinary citizen, low profile type, neither involved with Isabel Perón’s farcical government, the Armed Forces nor Revolution. In fact, I’m a poet and writer, aspiring only to exist for a few more years. Nobody will pay a ransom for me, not many people have read my scribblings or know who I am. A gang of fanatics have mistakenly nabbed me. Kidnapping is routine, the done thing, and the perpetrators can be almost anyone, including mercenaries, but I know who mine are: disillusioned youngsters escaping from middle-class indifference and the duplicity of society.

I belong as from now to the host of the vanished. These guerrillas won’t answer when addressed, or allow for cleanliness. They even contest a person’s right to physical exercise. This is a sty, I’m the pig, and a semblance of freedom yawns luxuriously outside. Yet I can hear them discussing Marxist theory earnestly, and the Che’s name spoken with reverence. Their training consists of shooting at birds or trees. If they aim at revolution, then there must be target practice. Change the world, break it all to pieces, so as not to change yourself. One broods about all manner of things down here. Through someone’s inadvertence I’ve learnt a name: my jailer’s. Jaime oversees my education. J for Judas…

I’ve been instructed to take stock of my personal and political beliefs. I have studied Journalism and Philosophy. None of these seem unduly harmful. I’m among the people whom both the terrorists and the armed forces suspect of treason and disloyalty, either to the nation or to the “revolution”....
So, why am I in a people’s prison? Shouldn’t I be enlightened not chastised? Figuratively, of course, many are wasting away in a prison of their mind. This sounds as encouraging as the telephone book – except that I shall keep my name to myself.

My present status took some getting used to. I over-worried at the beginning, despite the absence of guilt and other considerations. Then I went through a transitional period: fever, sweating and uncontrollable shaking for a few days. Claustrophobia set in and will never leave me, I’m convinced of that. By now I under-worry successfully. These young men and women wear hoods, but I can distinguish their voices. Quite a few are older people. They hold me prisoner, keep subjecting me to psychological and physical stress. I did some vomiting at first.

Once a day Jaime walks me around the premises like a puppy. He sounds weary and almost human through his grimy hood, unwilling to go to great lengths to prove a point or act his part. He appears to be the only middle-aged bloke, schooled to patience, whereas the rest are a psychopathic lot. One is quick to grasp such subtleties.

I feel weak as I trudge forward on tethered shanks, a sub-machine gun levelled at my bourgeois loins. It’s usually sundown by the time I’m remembered down there, long enough to get escorted out for a brief saunter. Jaime led me to a stream yesterday, and I turned to him hopefully. He let me have a dip. ‘Get a move on’, he’d said curtly. I believe he needed a dip as badly as I did. Jaime lacks the stamina to act vicious. He doesn’t seem to have that numbing feeling of injustice to disrupt one’s sense of values.

There’s ample time to revise my recent past for deviations from Marxist fervor, and admit that I have erred. Revolutionaries have their own set of values, which I don’t grasp. I’m not one of them, but then I don’t think like the armed forces' dictators, either. I guess I got into the wrong sort of company. It’s difficult, in Buenos Aires right now, to carve a neutral path; apparently a logical impossibility.

Just prior to my kidnapping, something happened that was a major blunder. I met a school friend, a handsome young man in the street. It was evening and I was within walking distance of home. I grinned stupidly at him and asked him up to my place for a coffee, with no hope of success. He accepted on the spot. On close inspection I noted that he was a bit scruffy. He reminded me that his name is Diego and he took a shower straight off, during which time I searched his duffle bag: no identification, no money, no address-book. He came out of the bathroom swathed in my blue towel, and made a bee-line for the table. I’d saved some meat pastries in the fridge, and watched him dispose of them, washed down with good mendocino red wine. I followed them up with a round of mate en bombilla, to show goodwill.

Later he borrowed a pyjama jacket from me. There are moments when one imagines that some rare kind of enjoyment is possible in this poisoned atmosphere. But then the very notion verges on the absurd. I sneaked off to do the dishes while Diego busied himself with my hair dryer. When I returned, he’d sprawled out on the couch and dropped off to sleep. I spent a long, moody, incredulous night, in the course of which I made a strong resolve to keep myself to myself in future. But I was asleep when Diego escaped. I missed nothing of value afterwards, except my trust in human nature. He must have been a guerrilla and I’d been stupid enough to mistake him for a nice guy; I’d been duped.

I just believe in my body down here, now, in the dark. I believe in the insects that crawl over me, because they make me feel alive. A great silence surrounds me. What time is it, I wonder. Why is nobody coming to get me, make an end of it all?

Jaime strides in, toting his machine-gun, a torch in his right hand, meaning it has grown late for my stroll. He’s wearing his usual faded blue jeans and combat boots; the holes in the woolly hood stare at me like an embryo in formaldehyde. I often tease him about his jeans, a Yankee invention. Now I’m marched out, my shadow preceding me. It’s late evening. Jasmine and the reigning galaxy carry me by assault. In the ancient, weed-grown gardens, Jaime finds a seat for me: an old cement bench, a lovers’ hideaway under a rotting pergola. He sets me loose with a sharp knife. The preliminaries of execution? Really? My tether’s gone, and Jaime says: ‘Stand up!’
I do so feeling leaky, worn out in a terrible way.
‘You’ve been tried,’ he says. ‘In absentia, you know.’
I nod, faintly nauseated, and wide-eyed too. Jaime clears his throat as though in embarrassment. I keep nodding like an ass.
‘The People’s Tribunal has found you clean, limpio! Yes, well – lack of evidence. So you’re free to go. I’ll give you a lift into the City, I’m off duty tonight.’
Stunned, I falter. Urine runs down my thigh. The leg muscles won’t hold my weight and my mouth is very dry.
‘¡Carajo! Sit down!’, says Jaime, out of patience all of a sudden.
I sit down. He bids me wait, goes away and returns gripping a worn knapsack. His personal effects. A razor and shaving soap, I imagine. A pair of socks. A snapshot of the wife and kids, although that must be strictly forbidden, in case one gets caught.

The drive to town. Misgivings. I try to engage Jaime in conversation. He’s pulled his hood off to drive, but his features remain intriguing. He gives short answers to my questions. We’re both afraid of road-blocks and of military checks in particular. Although I can’t think of anyone rash enough to set in motion the fighting strength of the country because of me. If anyone has, and we manage by indirection to filter through, even this will mean a waste of time, since I only crave a hot bath. I’m perfectly willing to forget these implausible people. I feel hungry. Still expecting foul play, I lie back and try to doze.

After what must have been several hours on the two-lane, crowded highway into Buenos Aires, Jaime brakes sharply and lets me out at a bus-stop, rather far from home. A maudlin sense of comradeship. I almost shake hands with him. He looks ahead unblinkingly, with clenched teeth, like someone in a movie. We part.
On the street, nobody bothers to look at me. Buenos Aires comes alive at night, even under President Isabel Perón’s rowdy regime, with her Rasputin-like counsellor, López Rega, running the show; the ominous military maneuvers and the ever more frequent terrorist bombings. Several Yankee-owned supermarkets have been reduced to rubble in one night. But nothing’s really changed, on the surface. The far fetched human suffering escapes the crowds. They don’t even imagine that the CIA is supporting the armed forces, same as in Chile and other S.A. countries.

Evita’s memory is not enough to rekindle true hope for the masses. They’re indifferent, because they sense that nobody cares about them, that this new war that’s brewing is about something else, way above their heads. Evita cared, she was one of them; she was illegitimate and had clawed her way up from below. The ruling classes as well as the intellectuals had called her a prostitute, while they themselves led double lives or proclaimed free love, after French women like Simone de Beauvoir. Socialites and dilettantes marched together against women’s suffrage, because they were livid that Evita had gotten all the glory, and was photographed, on her deathbed, casting her ballot.

Evita was consumed by a hatred that spread its roots into her very guts, an unholy passion that courted death and lost; in doing so she lived on forever in the hearts of her grasitas, her shirtless ones, not in the annals of some foreign ideology, like the Argentine turncoat Guevara and others of his kin.

When I finally unlock my door, I find the place empty as a bomb-site. It’s been plundered down to basics: the floorboards are still there, and so are the walls, bearing the marks of filthy human habitation. The rusty geyser in the kitchen reminds me of defeat. A systematic job, this one, with plenty of time to carry it through. In absentia, I’ve been tried and raided in a professional way.
Half-hidden under the old-style bathtub, a bit of soap has been overlooked. My hatred towards generals, terrorists and politicians – in more or less that order - lies dormant as I soak in mollifying water. But stray thoughts veer towards the intruders’ loot: my Pachamama statuette (the Altiplano Earth Goddess), my dead mother’s Spanish colonial fans, the stereo and all of my books. All lost to unknown ideologues at one fell swoop. I miss them already, if only as insurance against the passage of time and the deconstruction of my personal domain.

I gradually become aware of sounds in the next room – the spare one – which I always keep closed up. I hadn’t thought of checking it out. Just a pile of junk in there, mostly. Dripping water all over the place, I tiptoe into the corridor and push open the spare room door, which is slightly ajar. It opens for me and closes with alacrity, like waters over a drowning man’s head. The lights come on at my touch. It’s an oblong room, full of odds and ends, and long ago smells. It doesn’t appear to have been sacked. I glance at the window and freeze: Jaime! How the hell?! His face looks distorted, as if death had already begun to pull it earthwards. He seems to expect me. He sits down on an old guitar, drags on a cigarette, and begins to sob his heart out. An ageing, infirm, defeated revolutionary underling.

We walk to the balcony and peer out. My flat is seven stories up; a new moon is making life meaner and sweatier in comparison. Jaime quietens down and wipes the mucus away with the back of his hand. He avoids my gaze as the high-flying bird avoids the sun. He appears to be talking to an audience of archangels, not to me.

‘It’s all mierda, this Revolution’, he starts with. ‘They gave me your key’, he adds, by way of explanation. ‘Just let myself in.’
He succeeds in remembering only the unhappy hours of a lifetime. The archangels are listening patiently to his tale. Meaning is a sealed book to him. He drags himself across existence on his own portable maze and affixes it carefully to wherever he happens to be, like a carpet. He sits on it, he eats, shits, sleeps, copulates on it, so as never to lose his bearings.
‘Being an unwanted child was hell’, he confides. Jaime had found the womb a draughty place.
‘Everything is dammed uncertain. Dammed uncertain! No percentage in it.’
Quite so. ‘I understand’, I say.
‘You don’t’, he argues, ‘they’ve deceived you too.’
‘Different codes!’ I insist. ‘It’s all a matter of codes.’
‘I’m jodido, in deep shit’, he says. Poor Jaime, tame, mild as milk, reasonable even after all is lost. ‘They’re just kids, mostly, these guerrillas, barely out of school. They carry pictures of the Che in their backpacks.’
‘Yes’, I offer.
‘Not the leaders, of course, they’re a lot older. They’ve been properly indoctrinated and trained abroad. They get a plentiful supply of arms across the Triple Frontier (Brazil, Paraguay and northern Argentina). The kidnappìngs are to raise money for The Cause.’
‘Of course’. I listen quietly, even though the archangels are somewhere up on the ceiling.
‘I want out!’ says Jaime, ‘but you can’t do that, they kill you before you can escape. They always know; and if they don’t, then the military nab you and torture you until you give them some names. Then you disappear, you’re a desaparecido, nobody ever hears from you again.’
‘I’ve been told that’, I say, ‘but nobody really believes it.’
‘You were lucky, for now, gracias a Dios, but they’ll be needing you for some job. Soon, very soon’.
I feel a shiver go down my spine.

‘But that’s nothing compared to what’s coming. Peron’s stupid widow Isabel’s given the generals too much power, they’ll organize a coup d’tat and combat these guerrillas till there’s nobody left to tell the tale. Those kids with their utopic ideals will just vanish, thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. I can see it coming. Whole families will disappear once the Armed Forces step in. There will be countless desaparecidos, already a lot have gone, they’re in mass graves, they’re NN’s, no names. I don’t want to be around then, I must go away, anywhere…’

Tension is building up on the balcony. By now I’m standing next to him, and he’s got one hand on the old iron railings, his head peering down at the beckoning space between life and thereafter. He’s edging one leg over the balustrade, but hesitates. Then he clambers up, wobbling in the moonlight, balancing dangerously with one hand grabbing my hair.
‘If you really want to do me a favour, just give me a shove, that’s all’, says Jaime. ‘Mierda, just push!’
I don’t push, I try to stop him, but I’m too late; he jumps. He’s found his vocation at last: Jaime’s moment of glory.

If only Jaime hadn’t let out that roar when he fell. I abstained from looking down, disjecta membra, seven floors below. I’m obsessed by that roar, the roar of belated self-discovery, the ‘I’ve always known this’ quality of it, and then, I imagine, the bone-smashing crash, the occult lore born of weightlessness.
Wherever he is, Jaime knows I understood him. Even short-lived recognition is preferable to none. He wasn’t like the others. He was like me. I’m waiting, now, for the military men to come and take me away. I’ll be one of the thirty thousand desaparecidos. Jaime is resting now, in some cool Buenos Aires morgue, with a slightly preoccupied smile on his lips, brought on by rigor mortis.

Investigations won’t take long, now that the Army has power over the Police, who in turn answer to the nefarious López Rega’s secret AAA. There’ll be a loud thumping on my door soon. Not from Jaime’s lot, of course, but from the others. The men in uniform, sent by the generals of our glorious National Army; the generals that were trained in Nazi Germany, before 1940, and their successors.

Somehow, though, I know that we’ll not be forgotten, that our legend will live on through the mouths of babes; yes, the babies that are being snatched from their wretched mother’s arms as they lie dying in the detention centers spread across Argentina. That’s where they err, these devils, in coveting the babes. They think society will forget.

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