“A few minutes more, and every one of them would have gone home and nothing would’ve happened.”
A few minutes more. In this case, everything will revolve around a few minutes more.
10. Mario
Mario Brión lives at 1812 Franklin Street. It is a house with a garden, almost at the corner, less than a hundred meters from the fateful house.
On the afternoon of June 9, Brión is thirty-three years old. He is a man of medium height, blond, mustached, and starting to bald. A certain melancholy, perhaps, exudes from his oval face.
A serious young man and a hard worker, the neighbors say. We gather that his has been a normal life, with no bright highlights or dazzling adventures. At the age of fifteen he becomes an office clerk while staying in school, takes courses in English (which he will come to speak with a certain fluency), and graduates from high school with a commercial degree. He seems to have set a life plan for himself with clear stages that he goes about completing one by one. He uses his savings to buy a plot of land, build a house. Only then does he decide to get married, to his first girlfriend. Later on they have a son: Daniel Mario.
From his father, a Spaniard who learned to make a living in tough trades, he has inherited a wide-ranging love of reading. It’s surprising to find Horace, Seneca, Shakespeare, Unamuno, and Baroja in his library next to the cold collections on accounting. There are also those books of inevitable American provenance, all of varied titles that could be summed up in one: How to Succeed in Life. These books suggest, more than the dubious results that they promise, what Mario’s aspirations were: to work, to advance in life, to protect his family, to have friends, to be appreciated.
He would not have had to do much to achieve all of this. His company had offered him a position as head of his section. He made good money: his home did not lack any comforts. Whatever useful initiatives there were in the neighborhood came from him alone. A small paved road that joins the corner of his house with San Martín Avenue is a reminder of this. He is the one who collected the money, he is the one who gathered the neighbors to work on Sundays and holidays.
Mario Brión—people say—is a happy guy who is kind to everyone and a bit shy. He neither smokes nor drinks. The only things he does for fun are go to the movies with his wife or play soccer with his friends from the neighborhood.
That night, he has eaten his dinner late, as usual. Afterward he leaves to buy the paper. This, too, he always does. He likes to read the paper, in an armchair, while listening to a record or some program on the radio. On the way, he runs into a friend or an acquaintance. We won’t know who it was.
—They want me to come hear the fight —he announces to his wife, Adela, when he returns.— I don’t know if I should go . . .
He’s indecisive. In the end he makes a decision. After all, he had also been thinking of tuning into the fight.
He gives a kiss to his son Danny—who is already four years old—and says goodbye to his wife.
—I’ll come back as soon as it’s over.
Despite the cold, he doesn’t put on an overcoat. He wears only a thick white cardigan.
He walks to Yrigoyen Street and enters the long corridor. A last-minute witness will see him standing next to the radio receiver, smiling and with his hands in his pockets, a bit isolated, a bit removed from the other groups that are talking and playing cards.
11. “The Executed Man Who Lives”
At number 1624 on Florencio Varela Street, in the Florida district, stands a beautiful California-style house. It could be the home of a lawyer or a doctor. It was built by Mr. Pedro Livraga, a quiet man getting on in years, with his own two hands. In his youth he was a building laborer and later on, through the gradual mastery of the job, ended up as a contractor.
Mr. Pedro has three children. The oldest daughter is married. The two sons, on the other hand, live with him. One of them is Juan Carlos.