They walked on. Game days, M continued, are saturated by an incongruous mood and sense of time. One hears the noises and is able to identify each one: the cries of joy and indignation, the encouraging cheers, even the gasps — sudden and unanimous — of disappointment or relief at a missed goal; you can hear the din but it is obvious that something fundamental is missing, something overlooked that could explain the cause of the noise and restore its meaning, like gazing out over a landscape in which a light shines so brightly from one point on the horizon that we are not able to see or understand the scene as a whole. Sometimes, the other heard him say, I’ll be sitting at my front door and the fact that I am able to hear the fans seems unjustified; not unreal, but inappropriate, excessive for mere noise: the effect arbitrarily conjoins a single yet disparate, diverse, and even unconnected geography; a strategy of events meant to indicate that, as I sit on my front step, I am connected to something that is happening two hundred meters away. “Space abolished by noise,” he concluded, struggling to wrap his left arm around a mass of folders and books held together by elastic bands. A few blocks later, at the corner of calle Sarmiento, each went off his own way.
Years later that same place, a mixture of neighborhood and suburb, a few blocks crossed by tracks, fatigued by trucks, saturated with stores, family shops, and modest homes joined together in clusters; that same place would contain M’s sudden absence as it had once contained his body, as contradictory as this might sound. What had been present until that moment was now gone. M wasn’t taken from his home; they took him from a friend’s house. It could have been mine or anyone else’s, but that day it was his. This element of chance would color his disappearance with a sense of gratuitousness, which in a way undermined the dramatic quality of the circumstances. Many would say that the abduction of a political militant was unjustified but that causality, however cruel and murderous, was still at work. What happened to M, on the other hand, had been pure chance: an unlucky presence that had allowed happenstance to restore death to its final and inalienable place. The combination of political innocence and the coercive force of fate endowed M’s disappearance with a sense of error or the failure of destiny, making his innocence seem to reflect back on his abductors, who one could, hypothetically, imagine blaming chance for putting M in their path.
The abduction was followed by a drama that was at once silent, private, and confidential. M’s parents, unable to take even the slightest initiative to search for their son or to find out what happened to him, were left in a stupor. Eaten away by passivity, in the end they obeyed their fear, the conviction that it might be possible to save the rest of the family if they did nothing. To this day I am astonished not to have found M’s name written anywhere; not in the lists made by organizations or in the press. I say to this day because right after the abduction I, like many others, threw myself into reading legal appeals, denouncements, documents, the testimony of the victims, et cetera. This lasted for years; after that, I simply waited for him to appear in some list or press announcement. I now find myself feeling a combination of fear and adoration: the effect turned back into the cause, M’s name was set apart by silence and in this way was able to return to the state of pure incantation in which all names float until we claim them through use, assigning them to an individual. As is well known, it is a fine line that separates this from sorcery.
I am unable to break this pact between absence and reality, made with no one and among all, into which ambiguous words like memory, oblivion, name, and individual insert themselves, as though only half of M had lived on in me. The names of many of the victims are unknown; still, for those of us who knew him, his absence from the lists suggests an emptiness that calls into question his very existence. It is not as though seeing him in some index were necessary to confirm his time on earth, but it would have increased the density of his memory; no one has written his name or read it since. And there you have the anomaly, since this tends to happen with people who have been dead a long time, not with recent deaths. Around the time of that first conversation about Club Atlanta’s stadium, about noise and distance, I remember the realm of ambiguity a student would enter if he were not included in the class list. Seeing your name there was not only a confirmation of registration, but a magnification of existence: it meant being something more or, occasionally, something different. The anxiety that would set in on those who did not appear on the list was the most convincing evidence of the hypothetical nature of their person. They had to make inquiries, change rooms, come back with signed papers. They passed into a limbo from which they could only be rescued, once they got their papers in order, by their appearance on the list.
It is also true that while many of us may have felt powerless or indignant at his omission from the lists of the abducted (first his body disappeared, then his name), his parents may have seen this absence as natural or even necessary. After all, it was clear how little could be done about it. The accusations, investigations, and protests contributed to the collective reaction through which the victims were reborn and claimed their right to have gone on living. They also allowed the people to touch the horrific medium into which they had sunk. In the meantime, most Argentines, thrilled with questionable accomplishments like the 1978 World Cup and the 1982 war in the Falkland Islands, noticed too late that the flood of kidnappings, torture, and murder had unequivocally renewed its campaign against frivolity and barbarity; in the face of this, they chose to forget.
It is natural that, when confronted with this panorama, the complexity and meaning of which were beyond the average family, so many would choose resignation. M’s parents did the same; on one hand because death was natural to them and, on the other, because their meager resources and particular lack of aptitude and personal connections left them not only without tools, but also without the reflexes to deal with the hardship that had been imposed upon them. What is more, at the time, political violence and death hovered in the air; they were recognized as an everyday occurrence toward which many or few could feel aversion or horror — this did little to reduce its power; in fact, it had the opposite effect, preserving it as part of the normal order of things. This acceptance could have been a result of detachment, consent, or debasement, but either way it meant that death had proliferated through its use; a use that was sanctioned by endowing politics with a functional dimension, turning its morals back into action.