He is a thin man of average height and ordinary features: grey-green eyes, brown hair, and a mustache. He is a few days shy of turning twenty-four.
His ideas are entirely commonplace and shared by other people in town: they are generally correct regarding concrete and tangible things, and more nebulous and random in other arenas. He has a reflective, even calculating temperament. He will think a great deal about things and not say more than is necessary.
This doesn’t take away from a certain instinctive curiosity he has, a deep impatience that manifests itself not so much in his smaller acts, but rather in the way he goes about adjusting to the world. He dropped out of high school after finishing his freshman year. Then, for several years, he was a clerk at the Aviation Authority. Now he works as a bus driver. Later on, once he is already “brought back from the dead,” he will join his father in construction work.
He is a fine observer, but he might trust himself too much. Over the course of the extraordinary adventure that he is about to experience, he’ll catch some things with such exceptional precision that he’ll be able to draw up very exact diagrams and maps. Other things he will get wrong, and he will be stubborn about sticking to his mistakes.
He will prove to be lucid and calm in the face of danger. And once the danger has passed, he will show a moral courage that should be noted as his main virtue. He will be the only one among the survivors or the victims’ family members who dares to come forward and demand justice.
Does he know anything, on that afternoon of June 9, about the rebellion that will take place later on? He has come home before his shift is over, which could seem suspicious. But it turns out that the bus he drives—number five of all the buses that run along the 10 line in Vicente López—has broken down on him, and the company will confirm this detail.
Does he know anything? He will flatly deny that he does. And he will also add that he doesn’t have a record of any kind—criminal, legal, professional, or political. This claim will also be proven and confirmed.
But despite all that, does he know anything? Many people in Greater Buenos Aires know about it, even if they aren’t thinking of taking part. Still, of the numerous testimonies we collected, there is not one that suggests Livraga was involved or informed.
It is after ten o’clock at night when Juan Carlos leaves his house. He turns right and goes down San Martín Avenue, heading towards Franklin, where there is a bar he often goes to. It’s cold and the streets are not very busy.
A certain indecision overtakes him. He doesn’t know whether to stay and play a game of pool or go to a dance that he promised he would attend.
Chance decides for him. Chance that appears in the form of his friend, Vicente Rodríguez.
12. “I’m Going to Work . . .”
He is a tower of a man, this Vicente Damián Rodríguez, a thirty-five-year-old man who loads cargo at the port and, heavy as he is, plays soccer, a man who retains something childlike in his loudness and his crankiness, who aspires to more than he is able to do, who has bad luck, who will end up chewing on the grass of a barren field, asking desperately for them to kill him, for them to finish killing him since the death that he is gulping down won’t get done flooding him through the ridiculous holes that the Mauser bullets are leaving in him.
He would have liked to be something in life, Vicente Rodríguez. He is teeming with great ideas, great gestures, great words. But life is fierce with people like him. Just having a life will be a constant uphill struggle. And losing it, a never-ending process.
He is married, has three kids and loves them, but of course they need to be fed and sent to school. And that poor house that he rents, surrounded by that thick, dirty wall with that stretch of uncultivated land where the chickens do their pecking, is not what he imagined it would be. Nothing is as he imagined it would be.
He never manages to properly transfer the sense of power that his vigorous muscles give him to the objective world around him. At one time, it’s true, he is active in his union and even serves as a representative, but later all of that falls apart. There’s no union , no representatives in his life anymore. That’s when he understands that he is nobody, that the world belongs to doctors. The sign of his defeat is very clear: in his neighborhood, there is a club, and in that club, a library; he will come here in search of that miraculous source—books—that power seems to flow from.