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July 1998 |
The Look
He would go on and carry out his mission. Sometimes his job was hard, but he was a hard man and he knew God was on his side. The job was not pleasant but someone had to do it.
The group would get together some hours before to give each other courage; sometimes they'd spend the night together insulting vehemently their future victims so when the moment would come, they could treat them as dangerous criminals even when they were frail women or fragile, smooth-faced pubescents. After the attack, they stayed together still for some more hours, drinking and congratulating each other in the success of the operation. They felt no guilt, no worries.
Then he would go home and fall asleep. He almost never lost his sleep. Sometimes, some desperate mother was able to become a slight nightmare that he would then talk about with the guys, but it never amounted to a sin, it was never a matter for confession. Only once something made him go to the chaplain to procure solace. There was only one threat that was able to provoke him a shudder, not the weight of conscience: fear.
It was a night as many others; everything seemed to be as usual. As they went up the staircase of the building, they could hear a small child cry. Often there were children, but they seldom looked at them. There was no shooting, no need for it. They pulled out the man from his bed and the woman left the child on the cradle and offered no resistance, just a few drowned cries, the usual. They searched untidily for some evidence, without much enthusiasm, they all knew it wasn't necessary. Then a girl, about six-year-old, came out of a room. She seemed oblivious to what was happening around her. She took the baby, who had never stopped crying, from the cradle and sang very close to his ear, or perhaps she said something to him. When the baby calmed down, she looked up and walked slowly on her small, bare feet towards him. She looked at him. Tense and coldly, she looked at him. He vociferated some orders and hurried the procedure and pushed his victims to the elevator, a decrepit elevator of forged iron. The girl went out into the hall in silence, she did not cry, she did not scream, she did not look at her parents one last time. No. The girl embraced her brother in her naked arms and looked at him, at his eyes, with the same look than before, iron-like, metallic; not a look of fear, not the terrorized look that he knew so well. No. It was a different look, difficult to describe with words. A look that would be with the girl all her life, that would wait all her life to face him again.
My name is Raquel Robles, I am the daughter of two "disappeared" and I belong to HIJOS (Children for Identity and Justice, against Forgetting and Silence). I have never been a violent person, I am afraid of street fights. I don't know what I would do if I met Astiz or Bergez or another agent of death (to call a torturer an "angel of death" is too painful a poetic (...) for me), perhaps a blow could overcome all the obstacles of self-control and rationality. It would be the first time in my 24 years of life. And surely the Argentinian justice would choose to punish me with the whole weight of the law. In principle, and not by choice but because I've never been in a similar situation, the blow is still saved. Meanwhile I continue constructing my humble vengeance: I remain alive and dreaming a better world.
This article was sent as a letter to newspaper Página 12, after declarations by President Menem condemning a man who had stricken Alfredo Astiz. Astiz has been inplicated in many disappearances. Bergez was a doctor attending pregnant women at a secret concentration camp in Argentina.
