Ricky laughed and said that I obviously had no idea of how those things worked. The military hadn’t depended on a group of reactionary kids chanting things like “Homeland, Family, Church.” They needed intelligent, resourceful people. Such as Rivadavia. Ricky said his group had solid proof that for several years Professor Rivadavia had passed on to the military government detailed information about us—his students. Not simply the names, but careful notes on our likes and dislikes, on our family backgrounds and school activities. He knew us all so well.
Ricky told me this a few years ago, and I have never stopped thinking about it. I know Ricky wasn’t mistaken. In my mind, I have three options:
I can decide that the person who was of the uttermost importance in my life, who in a way allowed me to be who I am now, who was the very essence of the illuminating and inspiring teacher, was in fact a monster and that everything he taught me, everything he had encouraged me to love, was corrupt.
I can try to justify his unjustifiable actions and ignore the fact that they led to the torture and death of my friends.
I can accept that Rivadavia was both the good teacher and the collaborator of torturers, and allow that description to stand, like water and fire.
I don’t know which of these readings is the right one.
Before saying good-bye, I asked Ricky if he knew what had become of Rivadavia. Ricky nodded and said that Rivadavia had left the school and entered a small publishing company in Buenos Aires, and that he wrote book reviews for one of the major Argentinean newspapers.
As far as I know, he’s still there.
God’s Spies
“They’re putting down their names,” the Gryphon whispered
in reply, “for fear they should forget them before the end of
the trial.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 11
AS OUR READING TEACHES us, our history is the story of a long night of injustice: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, the South Africa of apartheid, Ceausescu’s Romania, the China of Tiananmen Square, Senator McCarthy’s America, Castro’s Cuba, Pinochet’s Chile, Stroessner’s Paraguay, endless others form the map of our time. We seem to live either within or just on this side of despotic societies. We are never secure, even in our small democracies. When we think of how little it took for upright French citizens to jeer at convoys of Jewish children being herded into trucks, or for educated Canadians to throw stones at women and old men in the reservation of Oka when the natives protested the building of a golf course, then we have no right to feel safe.
The trappings with which we rig our society so that it will remain a society must be solid, but they must also be flexible. That which we exclude and outlaw or condemn must also remain visible, must always be in front of our eyes so that we can live by making the daily choice of not breaking these social bonds. The horrors of dictatorship are not inhuman horrors: they are profoundly human — and therein lies their power. “There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny,” wrote optimistically Samuel Johnson, “that will keep us safe under every form of government.” And yet any system of government based on arbitrary laws, extortion, torture, slavery lies at a mere hand’s grasp from every so-called democratic system.
Chile has a curious motto, “By Reason or by Force.” It can be read in at least two ways: as a bully’s threat, with an accent on the second part of the equation, or as an honest recognition of the precariousness of any social system, adrift (as the Mexican poet Amado Nervo said) “between the clashing seas of force and reason.” We, in most Western societies, believe we have chosen reason over force, and for the time being we can depend on that conviction. But we are never entirely free from the temptation of power. At best, our society will survive by upholding a few common notions of humanity and justice, dangerously sailing, as our Canadian motto has it, “A mari usque ad mare,” between those two symbolic seas.
Auden declared that “Poetry makes nothing happen.” I don’t believe that to be true (nor, probably, did he). Not every book is an epiphany, but many times we have sailed guided by a luminous page or a beacon of verse. What role poets and storytellers have on our precarious journeys may not be immediately clear, but perhaps some form of an answer emerged in the aftermath of one particular dictatorship, one that I followed closely over the bloody decade of its rule.
I can’t remember her name (so unfaithful are the promises of memory), but she was one grade below mine at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. I met her in my second year of high school, on one of the excursions our zealous monitors liked to organize for us during which we discovered the art of rigging up tents, a taste for reading around the campfire, and the mystery of politics. What exactly these politics were we never quite found out, except that at the time they echoed, somewhat bombastically, our vague notions of freedom and equality. In time, we read (or tried to read) arid books on economy and sociology and history, but for most of us politics remained a serviceable word that named our need for comradeship and our contempt for authority. The latter included the school’s conservative headmaster; the remote landowners of vast areas of Patagonia (where, at the foot of the Andes, we went camping and where, as I’ve mentioned, we saw peasant families living out their distant and for us inconceivable lives); and the military, whose tanks, on 28 June 1966, we saw lumber through the streets of Buenos Aires, one of many such processions towards the presidential palace on Plaza de Mayo. She was sixteen that year; in 1969 I left Buenos Aires and never saw her again. She was small, I remember, with black and curly hair which she had cut very short. Her voice was unemphatic, soft and clear, and I could always recognize her on the phone after just one syllable. She painted, but without much conviction. She was good at math. In 1982, shortly before the Malvinas War and towards the end of the military dictatorship, I returned to Buenos Aires for a brief visit. Asking for news of old friends, so many dead and disappeared in those terrible years, I was told that she was among the missing. She had been kidnapped leaving the university where she had sat on the student council. Officially, there was no record of her detention, but someone had apparently seen her at El Campito, one of the military concentration camps, in a brief moment when her hood had been removed for a medical inspection. The military usually kept their prisoners hooded so that later on they would not be able to recognize their torturers.
On 24 April 1995, Victor Armando Ibáñez, an Argentinean sergeant who had served as a guard at El Campito, gave an interview to the Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa. According to Ibáñez, between 2,000 and 2,300 of those imprisoned there, men and women, old people and adolescents, were “executed” by the army at El Campito during the two years of his service, from 1976 to 1978. When the prisoners’ time came, Ibáñez told the newspaper, “they were injected with a strong drug called pananoval, which made a real mess of them in a few seconds. It produced something like a heart attack. [The injections would leave the prisoners alive but unconscious.] Then they were thrown into the sea. We flew at a very low altitude. They were phantom flights, without registration. Sometimes I could see very large fish, like sharks, following the plane. The pilots said that they were fattened by human flesh. I leave the rest to your imagination,” Ibáñez said. “Imagine the worst.”
Ibáñez’s was the second “official” confession. A month earlier, a retired navy lieutenant commander, Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, had confessed (also in La Prensa) to the same method of “disposing of the prisoners.” In response to his confession, Argentinean president Carlos Menem called Scilingo a “criminal,” reminded the press that the commander had been involved in a shady automobile deal, and asked how the word of a thief could be counted as true. He also ordered the navy to strip Scilingo of his rank.