—They’ve asked for the booklet over in La Plata. It’s for a procedural matter.
***
On the afternoon of June 10, a young man was walking, deeply worried, toward Franklin Street in Florida. A woman he didn’t know stopped him along the way.
—Are you related to Brión? —she asked.
—I’m his brother —he replied.
—Don’t worry —she then said.— Horacio and Mario are okay.
And before he could ask anything more, the stranger left in a hurry.
It was the first piece of news he had received since Mario’s disappearance the night before. All the events that followed would work to refute it, but this mysterious encounter would fuel—even in the face of hard evidence—the cruelest and most irrational hopes.
A brother-in-law of Mario’s found out straightaway that he had been arrested and went to the District Police Department to ask after him. There—according to a third party—something strange happened.
—What did your brother-in-law look like? —asked the officer on duty.
—He was . . . —Just as Mario’s relative had begun to explain, he caught the man’s gaze and exclaimed in shock:— Actually, he looked just like you . . . !
Upon hearing these unexpected words, the officer apparently broke down and started to cry.
Mario’s body was at the San Martín polyclinic, which is where his father went to retrieve him. They let him see his son for not more than a few seconds. One moment they were folding back the sheet that covered him, and the next they were wrapping him up again.
Months later, Mr. Manuel Brión received a mysterious phone call.
—Are you the father of Mario? —a voice asked.
—Yes . . .
—I want to talk to you about your son.
—Who are you?
—I’m a sailor. I’ve just returned from the south. I’ll wait for you tonight next to the big wall of the Mechanics School . . .
He named a time and an exact location.
An unspeakable fear prevented the old man from making it to the meeting. But from that day forward he began to doubt what he had seen in the morgue at the polyclinic. Only the words of the night watchman at the depot, which we have already mentioned here, grounded him in the cruel reality of the situation.29
Footnotes:
27 “. . . from the site of the crime, he headed northwest and, after about five hundred meters, he went up to a bus driver who made a stop in that region and, asking the man for money, boarded the vehicle . . .” Troxler and Benavídez’s statement, dated the ninth of May, 1957, in La Paz, Bolivia, addressed to the author of this book.
28 DG: General Domingo Quaranta was head of the State Intelligence Service at the time.
29 The murder of Mario Brión was reported for the first time by me in Revolución Nacional on February 19, 1957. To write this indictment, I made contact with his family members, who still didn’t want to accept that it was all over. Unfortunately, the inquiries that were made confirmed his death.