For the third time this evening, the former police officer was recognized by one of his old colleagues.
—Hey Troxler! How’s it going? —the other guy shouts, passing by.
—Good, you know . . . —he replies.
He is about to keep walking when he sees a truck with Army soldiers approaching. As always, Julio Troxler does the most natural thing: he heads to a short line of early risers who are waiting for a Costera bus and joins it. He doesn’t plan on boarding the bus—besides, he doesn’t even have five cents on him—but he knows he will attract less attention there.
It seems fated. Because the truck stops just in front of the line. Without stepping out, an officer yells:
—Fellas, you haven’t heard any shots, have you?
The question seems addressed to everyone, but it’s Troxler that the officer is looking at, it’s him that he is addressing, for a very simple reason: he is the tallest in line.
Troxler shrugs his shoulders.
—As far as I know . . . —he says.
The truck takes off. Troxler leaves his place in line and starts to walk. He doesn’t have any money for the bus; a basic sense of prudence stops him from asking a stranger for money, or even for permission to call his friends . . .
He’s exhausted and frozen cold. He hasn’t eaten anything since the night before. He walks eleven hours straight through Greater Buenos Aires, which has morphed into a desert without water or shelter for him, a survivor of the massacre.
It is six o’clock in the evening when he reaches a safe haven.
Footnotes:
24 Troxler recounts that “. . . he found Carlos Lizaso along the way . . . in the place where the truck had been, in a supine position, with half of his body on the road and the rest of it in the ditch alongside it . . . he checked to make sure he wasn’t still alive . . . he crossed the road and, on the path that leads to the German Club, found Rodríguez in the middle of the street next to a large puddle of blood, then Carranza, and, on the right side . . . another corpse that he couldn’t identify . . .”
26. The Ministry of Fear
The “coup de grâce” that they delivered to Livraga went straight through one part of his face to another, crushing his nasal wall and his teeth, but missed his vital organs. His youth and his athleticism served him immeasurably: he never lost consciousness even though his face was swelling up and he was in a great deal of pain. The intense cold of the frost seemed to keep him awake.
He hears a new round of shots. It is probably the execution of Lizaso, the only one that seemed to have been formally carried out. Some evidence allows us to assume that the guards had him restrained up until the last minute, that they lined the squad up in front of him and fired according to regulation. The unlucky young man did not get the chance to even think of fleeing. Or, what’s more likely: at the crucial moment, he preferred to face his executioners courageously. What we know is that he was facing them when they fired at him, right in the middle of his chest.
Livraga hears the police cars driving away and waits. He is still not moving. Only when several minutes have passed does he try to get up. He rests his right arm on the ground; it has another bullet wound in it.
Now an endless torment begins: fear and physical suffering will follow one after the other and eventually become one. There will be a moment when Livraga will regret having survived.
He manages to get up. He walks. He makes his way to the garbage dump where he saw Giunta escape and looks for him. There is something foolish and pathetic about this search. It’s as though he cannot believe in anyone in this world anymore, as though the only person he can trust is the man who has been through the same experience. (Much later on he will find Giunta at last—in Olmos.)