Suddenly he feels a burning tickle, an irresistible stinging in his eyelids. Wild violet figurines dance in an orange light that penetrates his eye sockets. An unstoppable reflex makes him blink beneath the blazing stream of light.
The command strikes like lightning:
—Get that one, he’s still breathing!
He hears three explosions go off at point-blank range. With the first one, a spurt of dust shoots by his head. Next he feels a searing pain on his face and his mouth fills with blood.
The guards don’t bend down to check if he’s dead. It is enough for them to see that ripped up and bloodied face. So they walk away believing that they have delivered the coup de grâce. They don’t know that this bullet (and the one that got his arm) are the first ones to actually hit him.
The dismal assault car and Rodríguez Moreno’s van retreat to where they came from.
“Operation Massacre” has ended.
Footnotes:
23 A traditional, fast-paced dance that originated in aristocratic, eighteenth-century Europe and migrated to the Southern Hemisphere in the nineteenth century, where it became a more popular art form.
25. The End of a Long Night
The fugitives dispersed into the field of the night.
Gavino has not stopped running. He jumps over puddles and ditches, gets to a dirt road, sees houses at a distance, takes unfamiliar streets, stumbles onto a railroad track, follows it, gets to the vicinity of the Chilavert station on the Mitre line, miraculously finds a bus, gets on it . . .
He is the first to seek asylum in a Latin American embassy while martial law is in full force. The terrible affair had ended for him.
Not so for Giunta, who had a never-ending nightmare waiting for him. The moment he reached a more populated area, he sought refuge in the front yard of a house. Inside there was light and movement. Nearly the entire neighborhood of José León Suárez had been awakened by the shooting.
The petrified fugitive had no sooner stepped into the garden when a window opened and a woman appeared, shouting:
—Don’t even dare, don’t even dare! —and added, turning halfway around, seeming to address the man of the house:— Take him out! He got away!
Giunta doesn’t wait to hear anything more. He must think the world has gone mad tonight. Everyone wants to kill him . . .
He clears the fence with one jump and resumes his desperate sprint. Now he is avoiding the more trafficked areas, walking deliberately along dirt roads.
But there is one encounter he can’t escape. Standing on the corner are three young men who watch with curiosity as he goes by. His voice faltering, he tells them some part of what happened and asks for money, even just a few coins to take some means of transportation to get away from this hell. He finds a softer heart among these nightwalkers: one gives him a peso, another gives him a ten-peso bill.
Like Gavino, Giunta makes it to Chilavert station. It’s likely that neither of them know that Chilavert was the name of another executed man, one who fell in the Battle of Caseros . . .
He goes to the window and asks for a ticket.
—Where to? —asks the clerk.
Giunta looks at him, amazed. He hasn’t the slightest idea. He doesn’t even know where he is. He must be quite a sight, this man whose eyes are popping out of their sockets, whose hair is standing on end, whose face is covered in sweat on this freezing night, who is asking for a ticket and doesn’t know his destination.