Departing at Dawn

16 The Window

89 16 The Window She stayed in that room for three days and three nights, going through all kinds of torment that she supposed would prepare her for when she herself would have to face the all-tooreal torture that her friends, neighbors, and colleagues were surelyalreadysuffering.ShethoughtaboutpeopleinTucumán, just regular people like her, being dragged by their hair, locked up in car trunks, hands tied behind their backs. She could hear their screams as well as the ones of others now silenced. She cried at the kicks, the thousands and millions of kicks that others must be receiving, she saw their bruises, their sores and stripped fingernails, and their swollen mouths so deformed that they would never again be able to express anything. And the teeth falling out like petals on the air, their eyes bulging out of their sockets, and a shoe, stray, without its mate, lying near the entrance of a house, where the light would stay on forever because a family would be endlessly searching for somebody. She suffered through those three nights lying on the floor on the old Catamarca quilt with embroidered flowers. Somehow the earth beneath the floor gave her the support she needed to face the nightmares whose actors never had hands, 90 much less fists, to close up tight and use as a defense. They were all blaming her, while she waited for her cursed hour to arrive, in that darkness that was the sum of all her panic. All the horror fit into the insignificant rectangle of a pillow soaked by the silent tears of a young woman. She smothered her terror in the pillow, and this was about as far as her freedom reached. That was all the freedom she and her people had. People who, though she did not yet know it, would stand together in solidarity because of the lamps being lit suddenly in the night, or the quick unexpected movements inside a house, or the low voices over the phone asking for or giving information about the most horrible things. It always happened at that hour of the day when dawn is just barely breaking, making the helpless even more powerless and even more alone, the people who have nowhere to turn in their search for information about their loved ones snatched from them. But the sun still rose each day to spread its light, clearing out the noises—and the silence as well—of the night that kept reminding her of the final outcome: the car that would stop in front of the house; the hooded men who would come in to take her away; the weapons, the commands, and the terror of her aunt and uncle who would defend themselves and try in vain to protect her. She was already prepared to remain silent and withstand the pain to her body and the tearing of her soul; to put up with it until everything would go to hell, or insanity would set in so she could just say all right, enough already. Or who knows? Maybe she would tell them what they wanted to hear, even if she didn’t know anything, inventing any old plot and finally singing in her own holocaust like Santa Cecilia, the 91 patron saint of music, so she could pass quickly through the corridor of death and turn off the light. Because that must be what death is, just a light switched off and that’s it, with nothing left for those who remain except the silence of the person who will never say another word. It had happened to Atilio and his brother Mauro, and who knows how many others before, throughout all the conflicts of this human race, to which she soon would no longer belong. In her nightmare she kept asking herself angrily where that angel could be, her own, the one each person was supposed to have according to her mother. Where in the world was God on all those nights of kidnapping and martyrdom, bullets, and blood; of separating children from their parents, spouses from spouses, brothers, sisters, and friends from each other? Where could God possibly be, a God who let loose this angel that would appear at the worst moments of sleeplessness, so happy that people were nothing but idiots whose heads were empty except for graphic novels. And then the angel appeared to her, right in front of...