Operation Massacre - Softcover

Walsh, Rodolfo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609805135 ISBN 13: 9781609805135

Verlag: Seven Stories Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

1956. Argentina has just lost its charismatic president Juán Perón in a military coup, and terror reigns across the land. June 1956: eighteen people are reported dead in a failed Peronist uprising. December 1956: sometime journalist, crime fiction writer, studiedly unpoliticized chess aficionado Rodolfo Walsh learns by chance that one of the executed civilians from a separate, secret execution in June, is alive. He hears that there may be more than one survivor and believes this unbelievable story on the spot. And right there, the monumental classic Operation Massacre is born.

Walsh made it his mission to find not only the survivors but widows, orphans, political refugees, fugitives, alleged informers, and anonymous heroes, in order to determine what happened that night, sending him on a journey that took over the rest of his life.

Originally published in 1957, Operation Massacre thoroughly and breathlessly recounts the night of the execution and its fallout.

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The grandson of Irish immigrants, Rudolfo Walsh was born in a small Patagonian town in 1927. He wrote crime fiction and worked as a translator before publishing Operación Masacre in 1957. Walsh then traveled to Cuba in the midst of the revolution and launched a newspaper in collaboration with Gabriel García Márquez, among others. Upon his return to Argentina in 1961 he was shunned by the journalistic community for his connections to the Cuban Revolution. In 1972, Walsh updated Operación Masacre for the fourth and final time before joining the radical leftist group, the Monteneros, the following year. A day after submitting his now famous 1977 “Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta,” Walsh was gunned down in the street by agents of the State.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Prologue
News of the June 1956 secret executions first came to me by chance,
toward the end of that year, in a La Plata café where people played
chess, talked more about Keres and Nimzowitsch than Aramburu
and Rojas, and the only military maneuver that enjoyed any kind
of renown was Schlechter’s bayonet attack in the Sicilian Defense.1
Six months earlier, in that same place, we’d been startled around
midnight by the shooting nearby that launched the assault on the
Second Division Command and the police department—Valle’s
failed rebellion.2 I remember how we left en masse, chess players,
card players, and everyday customers, to see what the celebration
was all about; how, the closer we got to San Martín Square, the
more serious we were and the smaller our group had become; and
how, when I finally got across the square, I was alone. When I
reached the bus station there were several more of us again, including
a poor dark-skinned boy in a guard’s uniform who hid behind
his goggles saying that, revolution or not, no one was going to take
away his gun—a handsome 1901 Mauser.
I remember finding myself alone once more, in the darkness of
Fifty-Fourth Street, just three blocks away from my house, which I
kept wanting to get to and finally reached two hours later amid the
smell of lime trees that always made me nervous, and did so on that
night even more than usual. I remember the irrepressible will of
my legs, the preference they showed at every street for the bus station,
returning to it on their own two or three times. But each time
they went a bit farther before turning back, until they didn’t need
to go back because we had gone past the line of fire and arrived at
my house. My house was worse than the café and worse than the
bus station because there were soldiers on the roof and also in the
kitchen and the bedrooms, but mainly in the bathroom. Since then
I’ve developed an aversion to houses that face police departments,
headquarters, or barracks.
I also haven’t forgotten how, standing by the window blinds,
I heard a recruit dying in the street who did not say “Long live
the nation!” but instead: “Don’t leave me here alone, you sons of
bitches.”
After that, I don’t want to remember anything else—not the
announcer’s voice at dawn reporting that eighteen civilians had
been executed in Lanús, nor the wave of blood that flooded the
country up until Valle’s death. It’s too much for a single night. I’m
not interested in Valle. I’m not interested in Perón, I’m not interested
in revolution. Can I go back to playing chess?
I can. Back to chess and the fantasy literature I read, back to the
detective stories I write, back to the “serious” novel I plan to draft
in the next few years, back to the other things that I do to earn a
living and that I call journalism, even though that’s not what it is.
Violence has spattered my walls, there are bullet holes in the windows,
I’ve seen a car full of holes with a man inside it whose brains
were spilling out—but it’s only chance that has put all this before my
eyes. It could have happened a hundred kilometers away, it could
have happened when I wasn’t there.
Six months later, on a suffocating summer night with a glass of
beer in front of him, a man says to me:
—One of the executed men is alive.
I don’t know what it is about this vague, remote, highly unlikely
story that manages to draw me in. I don’t know why I ask to talk to
that man, why I end up talking to Juan Carlos Livraga.
But afterward I do know why. I look at that face, the hole in his
cheek, the bigger hole in his throat, his broken mouth and dull eyes
where a shadow of death still lingers. I feel insulted, just as I felt
without realizing it when I heard that chilling cry while standing
behind the blinds.
Livraga tells me his unbelievable story; I believe it on the spot.
And right there the investigation, this book, is born. The long
night of June 9 comes back over me, pulls me out of “the soft quiet
seasons” for a second time. Now I won’t think about anything else
for almost a year; I’ll leave my house and my job behind; I’ll go by
the name Francisco Freyre; I’ll have a fake ID with that name on it;
a friend will lend me his house in Tigre; I’ll live on a frozen ranch
in Merlo for two months; I’ll carry a gun; and at every moment the
characters of the story will come back to me obsessively: Livraga
covered in blood walking through that never-ending alley he took
to escape death, the other man who survived with him by running
back into the field amid the gunfire, and those who survived without
his knowing about it, and those who didn’t survive.
Because what Livraga knows is that there was a bunch of them,
that they were taken out to be shot, that there were about ten of
them taken out, and that he and Giunta were still alive. That’s the
story I hear him repeat before the judge one morning when I say I’m
Livraga’s cousin so they let me into the court where everything is
infused with a sense of discretion and skepticism. The story sounds
a bit more absurd here, a little more lush, and I can see the judge
doubting it, right up until Livraga’s voice climbs over that grueling
hill, to where all that’s left is a sob, and he makes a gesture to take
off his clothes so that everyone can see the other gunshot wound.
Then we all feel ashamed, the judge seems to be moved, and I feel
myself moved again by the tragedy that has befallen my cousin.
That’s the story I write feverishly and in one sitting so that no
one beats me to it, but that later gets more wrinkled every day in
my pocket because I walk around all of Buenos Aires with it and
hardly anyone wants to know about it, let alone publish it. You
begin to believe in the crime novels you’ve read or written, and
think that a story like this, with a talking dead man, is going to be
fought over by the presses. You think you’re running a race against
time, that at any given moment a big newspaper is going to send out
a dozen reporters and photographers, just like in the movies. But
instead you find that no one wants anything to do with it.
It’s funny, really, to read through all the newspapers twelve years
later and see that this story doesn’t exist and never did.
So I wander into increasingly remote outskirts of journalism until
finally I walk into a basement on Leandro Alem Avenue where they
are putting out a union pamphlet, and I find a man who’s willing to
take the risk. He is trembling and sweating because he’s no movie
hero either, just a man who is willing to take the risk, and that’s
worth more than a movie hero. And the story is printed, a flurry of
little yellow leaflets in the kiosks: badly designed, with no signature,
and with all the headings changed, but it’s printed. I look at it affectionately
as it’s snatched up by ten thousand anonymous hands.
But I’ve had even more luck than that. There is a young journalist
named Enriqueta Muñiz who has been with me from the very beginning
and has put herself entirely on the line. It is difficult to do her
justice in just a few sentences. I simply want to say that if I have written
“I did,” “I went,” “I discovered”...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Seven Stories Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1609805135
• ISBN 13: 9781609805135
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 252
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@phaidon.com; gpsr@phaidon.com; ; Zähringerstraße 24; Berlin; 10707; Deutschland