Timote: A Novel

4

 Why not take advantage of this morning walk and pick him up in the street? It would be enough to cover the back window of the automobile with a curtain and hang a suit from each of the side windows. They toss that idea. The street is always risky. You’ve got to take advantage of the weakness the victim presents. That weakness is that there is no bodyguard. It seems strange, but that’s the way it is. The guy who shot Valle, who grabbed Evita’s body out from under the nose of the people, who killed the comrades of José León Suárez, has no bodyguard. No one guards him and he asks no one to. Does he think he’s invulnerable or innocent? The lack of a bodyguard decides the course of action. They will provide him with a bodyguard. They will be his bodyguard. They will guard him until he dies. But, right now, they have to guard him while they are taking him from his house. There are problems. The general lives on the eighth floor. They’ve got to make it there without arousing any suspicion. In the Argentina of 1970 no one aroused less suspicion than a military man. On the contrary, he aroused fear and reverence. They were running the government and they were tough. The youngster made a brilliant decision. They would go up to the eighth floor disguised as officers of the Argentine Army. They were unaware (since they josé pablo feinmann 42 | | were unaware of everything or almost everything) that they were going to end their career wearing army uniforms as well. But that doesn’t matter here. If we don’t tie ourselves to the event that is about to work itself out, if we don’t focus our story on the kidnapping of the general, we run the risk of never finishing it. Perhaps because what happened that day and what was going to happen on succeeding days is still going on, it is a living thing. Where there is so much hatred there cannot be ashes without fire, a fire that still burns, still wounds, or kills. Valle’s execution is alive in the hearts of those who will finish Aramburu off. And Aramburu ’s death feeds a limitless hatred on the part of Fernando Abal Medina and his associates, the authors of this crime. Not even the thousands of combatants, militants, and defenseless victims massacred by the dictatorship have managed to calm it. In turn, the crimes of the dictatorship have been so atrocious that they transcend the barriers of anything dreamed possible of men in the realm of horror. It’s difficult for those wounds to close. Difficult to live with them. It’s not impossible, but definitely an arduous and burdensome task. Often one that is overwhelming. But that’s up to us. It is irrelevant to our story. That’s not what Fernando Abal Medina and his companions were thinking about that May 29, 1970. Nor was Aramburu, that general laying his plans, seeking to create openings in History, paths that had been obstinately closed, that he himself had closed and now wanted to open in search of fresh air, a new period of risk taking and transformations . If he had changed, why couldn’t the others have done so, too? The wounds of the past, no matter how serious they have been, can and must be closed—or so he thinks, steeped as he is in his error. Even though he still doesn’t know it. t i m o t e| | 43 One of them, the one called Fatty Maza, knows how they walk, how they watch, how military men speak: he was at the military academy. Anyone who goes through a military school is marked by it. Something about being in the military sticks to him for the rest of his life. Some, for example, walk stiffly, with their butt in the air. Something else: they can never shake the habit of being early risers. Every civilian knows the saying used to characterize that unwavering military habit: early to rise, no matter what. Fatty Maza gives lessons to the companion who will go to get Aramburu on how to look, if not be, a soldier. The companion catches on quick. He’s like that, quick, and hates anything slow, ponderous...