There could also be more innocent explanations. A card game or the Lausse match that would be on the radio later.8 Something like that may have happened. What we do know is that Garibotti has left without really feeling like it, and intended to come back soon. If he ends up not going back later, it’s because they have managed to conquer his curiosity, his interest, or his inertia. He was unarmed when he left, and would at no point have a weapon in his hands.
Carranza is also unarmed. He will let himself be arrested without any sign of resistance. He will let himself be killed like a child, without one rebellious movement. Begging uselessly for mercy until the final gunshot.
They get off in Florida. They turn right and cross the railroad tracks. They walk six blocks along Hipólito Yrigoyen Street. They cross Franklin. They stop—Carranza stops—in front of a country house with two small light blue wooden gates that lead directly into a garden.
They go in through the right gate. They walk through a long corridor. They ring the bell.
From this point on we won’t have any verifiable accounts of Garibotti. As for some account of Carranza before the final, definitive silence—we still have to wait for many hours to pass.
And many incomprehensible things, too.
Footnotes:
8 DG: Argentine middleweight boxer Eduardo Lausse fought and beat Chilean middleweight boxer Humberto Loayza in round three of twelve on the night of June 9, 1956, at the Luna Park Stadium in the City of Buenos Aires.
3. Mr. Horacio
Florida is twenty-four minutes from Retiro on the F. C. Belgrano line. It’s not the best part of the Vicente López district, but it’s also not the worst. The municipality skimps on waterworks and sanitation, there are potholes in the pavement and no signs on the street corners, but people live there despite all that.
Six blocks west of the train station lies the neighborhood where so many unexpected things are going to happen. It exhibits the violent contrasts common to areas in development, where the residential and the filthy meet, a recently constructed villa next to a wasteland of weeds and tin cans.
The average resident is a man between the ages of thirty and forty who has his own home with a garden that he tends to in his idle moments, and who has not finished paying the bank for the loan that allowed him to buy the house in the first place. He lives with a relatively small family and works either as a business employee or a skilled laborer in Buenos Aires. He gets along with his neighbors and proposes or agrees to initiatives in support of the common good. He plays sports—typically soccer—covers the usual political issues in conversation and, no matter what government is in charge, protests the rising costs of living and the impossible transportation system without ever getting too excited about it.
This model does not allow for a very wide range of variation. Life is calm, no ups and downs. Nothing ever really happens here.
During the winter, the streets are half-deserted by the early evening. The corners are poorly lit and you need to cross them carefully to avoid getting stuck in the mud puddles that have formed due to the lack of drainage. Wherever you find a small bridge or a line of stones laid down for crossing, it’s the neighbors who have put it there. Sometimes the dark water spans from one curb all the way to another. You can’t really see it, but you can guess it’s there using the reflection of some star or the light of the waning lanterns that languish on the porches into the wee hours. San Martín Avenue is the only place where things are moving a bit: a passing bus, a neon sign, the cold blue glare of a bar’s front window.
The house that Carranza and Garibotti have walked into—where the first act of the drama will unfold, and to which a ghost witness will return in the end—has two apartments: one in front and one in back. To get to the back one, you need to go down a long corridor that is closed in on the right by a dividing wall and on the left by a tall privet hedge. The corridor, which leads to a green metal door, is so narrow that you can only walk through it in single file. It’s worth remembering this detail; it carries a certain importance.