30. The Telegram Guerrilla
Meanwhile, a silent battle was being fought for the life of Juan Carlos Livraga.
With Police Inspector Torres driving the jeep, Livraga is taken from the polyclinic to Moreno’s First Precinct, where they throw him into a cell naked, without food or medical assistance. They don’t list him in the registry book. Why would they? They are probably waiting to catch the other fugitives so they can execute him again, this time more carefully. Or they want him to die off on his own.
But his relatives will not rest. One of them manages to reach Colonel Arribau. There is strong evidence suggesting that this officer’s intervention is what prevented Livraga from suffering another execution.
Mr. Pedro Livraga decides to appeal directly to the Pink House.30 At 7:00 p.m. on June 11, the following registered telegram is sent from Florida, addressed to his Excellency the President of the Nation, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, the Government House, Buenos Aires, and received at 7:15 p.m.:
In my capacity as Father Juan Carlos Livraga executed the 10th at dawn on route 8 but who survived being tended to thereafter san martin polyclinic from where he was moved sunday around 8 o’clock not knowning new whereabouts I anxiously request your human intervening to prevent being executed again assuring you there has been confusion as he is unconnected to any movement. Registered. Pedro Livraga.
The reply arrives quickly. Telegram No. 1185—sent from the Government House on June 12, 1956, at 1:23 p.m., received at 8:37 p.m., and addressed to Mr. Pedro Livraga, Florida—reads:
In reference to telegram dated the 11th I report your son Juan Carlos was wounded during shooting escaped thereafter was arrested and is staying at Moreno precinct. House Military Chief.
Juan Carlos’ family hurries to the Moreno precinct. And there again they pull the old police trick: Juan Carlos—say the same clerks who just saw him thrown into a cell—has never been there before. It’s pointless for Mr. Pedro Livraga to show them the telegram from the president’s office: Juan Carlos isn’t there. They don’t know him. They instill what they say with a professional air of innocence. Later, in front of the judge, the commissioner will say that no visitors came to see him . . .
His family moves heaven and earth. To no avail. The young man does not turn up and at this point no one has any news from him. With the slow passing of each day, Mr. Pedro begins to get used to the harsh idea. Everyone in Florida assumes his son is dead.
But Juan Carlos is not dead. Remarkably, he survives his infected wounds, his excruciating pain, the hunger, the cold, the damp Moreno dungeon. At night he is delirious. Night and day do not even really exist for him anymore. Everything is a shimmering bright light where the ghosts of his fever move about, often taking on the indelible forms of the firing squad. When they happen to leave him some leftover food out of pity by the door and he drags himself toward it like a small animal, he realizes that he can’t eat, that his shattered teeth still harbor searing promises of pain inside the shapeless and numb mass that is his face.
And so the days go by. The bandage they gave him at the hospital is rotting, falling off by itself in infected little bits. Juan Carlos Livraga is the Leper of the Liberating Revolution.
We should not have anything to say in defense of the then-commissioner of Moreno, Gregorio de Paula. It’s useless for a man to try to hide behind “orders from on high” when those orders include the slow murder of another unarmed and innocent man. But he must have been holding onto some shred of mercy when he arrived at the cell that night carrying a blanket at the tips of his fingers—until then, it had been used to cover the precinct dog—and let it fall over Livraga, saying:
—This isn’t allowed, kid . . . There are orders from the top. But I’m bringing it to you as contraband.
Beneath this blanket, Juan Carlos Livraga felt strangely twinned with the animal it had previously sheltered. He was now, more than ever, the leprous dog of the Liberating Revolution.