***
In his cell at San Martín’s First Precinct, Giunta hears continuous laughter that seems to be coming from far away, rolling around the hallways, and suddenly exploding right next to him. It is he who is laughing. He, Miguel Ángel Giunta. He checks this by bringing his hand to his mouth and stifling the hysterical flow of laughter as it gushes all of a sudden from inside him.
He has had to repress it more than once this way, through reason, saying out loud:
—Hush. It’s me. I need to keep it together . . .
But then the whirlwind pulls him in again. He talks to himself, laughs, cries, rambles and explains, and falls again into the well of terror where Rodríguez Moreno’s silhouette is tall against the eucalyptus in the night, a gun shining coolly in his hand, and men are taking one, two, three paces back to aim their rifles. Then there’s the unforgettable and perverse buzzing of the bullets, the band of fugitives, the plop! of a bullet penetrating the flesh and the shrill ahhh! of a man running full-speed who drops to the ground, just two steps behind him. Giunta jostles his head between his hands and mumbles:
—It’s me, I’m okay, it’s me . . .
But every murmur he hears in the hallways renews his agony. “They’re coming to take me away,” he thinks. “Now they’re going to execute me again.”
Sleep, at last, redeems him. It is bitterly cold, but somehow he manages to sleep on the wooden trundle bed without covers. At midnight he is woken by the cries of people being tortured, people being “given the machine.”
No one, however, is focused on him. They don’t even talk to him. Over the course of the eight days that he stays in the cell, they don’t bring him even one plate of food or a glass of water. It’s the ordinary prisoners, the ones going out for their regular walks, who save him from death by starvation. They throw pieces of stale bread and food scraps through the cell’s peephole that the prisoner then scoops up eagerly from the floor. To ease his thirst, they think up an emergency procedure. They insert the spout of a kettle into the hole and the survivor feels for the falling stream of water with his mouth.
His family, meanwhile, has no news of him. The police play the fun game of blind man’s bluff: from the District Police Department, they send them to the prison in Caseros, from Caseros to the penitentiary in Olmos, from Olmos to La Plata Police Headquarters, from La Plata to the precinct in Villa Ballester, from Villa Ballester to the San Martín District Police Department . . . a week of anxiety passes before they finally find out the truth: Miguel Ángel is at San Martín’s First Precinct.
They go to see him, but are only allowed in the next day. They get there just in time—his wife, his elderly father, his cousin, his brother-in-law—to witness a pitiful scene. They have hardly had time to embrace him before he is taken away: they bring him out into the street, shackled and with an armed escort, and steer him toward the railway station. The pleas of his family—proper middle-class people for whom the mere idea of walking the streets handcuffed is worse than death—are of no use. There they go, this strange bunch, along the main roads of the city of San Martín at midday: the “frightening” prisoner, the armed thugs, and the crying family members who trail behind them. People gaze at this spectacle, astonished.
Thin, bearded, with a faraway look in his eyes, a ghost of himself, Miguel Ángel Giunta was taken to the penitentiary in Olmos on June 25. There, life would begin to change for him.
Footnotes:
30 The Pink House (Casa Rosada) is the Presidential Office. The mansion is relatively centrally located in the city of Buenos Aires, and is so called because of its pink façade. In the book, Walsh also refers to the building using its alternate name, the “Government House” (Casa de Gobierno).