Three Musketeers by Marcelo Birmajer

Tucuman and Aguero was my favourite bit of town—in the Once district the sun rises and sets on this corner, the first star of the Sabbath appears on this corner, and on this corner you can choose the direction of your day. But on the short walk up to Aguero and Corrientes it came over me again that we were exposing ourselves to danger, both of us walking along quite openly beneath the gaze of our torturers.

When we reached the bar I couldn’t stop staring obsessively out of the window.

“They won’t kill us in the open air, man,” said Traum.

“That’s what Benjamin thought,” I reminded him.

“They’re not going to kill us at all,” stated Traum. “I told you, it’s fine. They can kill us for any reason. But they won’t kill us for this, that’s for sure. Calm down. I know they were following me.”

“You knew they were following you? Did Pesce tell you?”

“No, I worked it out for myself. I know something about these things.”

“Where did you learn?”

“I was the friend of a number of lads persecuted in difficult times.”

“I imagine that for you the term ‘persecuted’ doesn’t imply greater moral or political value, is that right?”

“No, it doesn’t,” acknowledged Traum. “Besides, I have more reason than you to hate the Montoneros organisation; I think that without it my friends would still be alive. Or an even more naive thought: that without this organisation my friends wouldn’t have thrown themselves over the edge. Both ideas are false. But what about you? Why does it repel you so much? Why do you despise them the way you do?”

“In the first place, that’s the way it is,” I said. “I don’t like them. I don’t like Firmenich, or his speeches, or his little ditties. But if you want me to spell it out… there is a photo where Firmenich and Galimberti are embracing Arafat, some time towards the end of the seventies, it must be. It was the time when the PLO was attacking children’s nurseries.”

“Maalot,” said Traum.

“I don’t speak Hebrew,” I told him.

“No need to,” said Traum. “Maalot was the city with the nursery that the PLO attacked. They killed sixteen children.”

“With a bomb?”

“No, bullets.”

“Isn’t that enough to make you despise the Montoneros? But there’s something even more important for me. After that embrace, how could a Jew belong to the Montoneros organisation?”

Traum shrugged and looked out of the window. But without fear, just to look somewhere.

“Are you going to do this interview?”

“It depends on you,” I said. “If you want to. I suppose there’s no way you would leave Argentina right now?”

“No,” he answered. “But I’ll agree to the interview. Afterwards we’ll see if it is publishable. That all right with you?”

“No problem,” I said. “Besides, that gives me the chance to ask you things that are unpublishable.”

“Let’s do it,” said Traum.

“You are tossing me a number of enigmas,” I began, “that you will have to clarify at some point. What I mean is, you’re telling me half-truths because, I don’t know why, you want to keep me guessing. Why did you tell me you didn’t work, but you don’t want to tell me how you got by? Why didn’t you tell me straight away you were an architect? And what do you mean, when you say it’s got something to do with women?”

“All right, all right,” said Traum. “I’ll answer both questions at the same time. When I left the country, I left my whole past in darkness. My own past and the past of others. I was particularly careful that nobody should have information about what my life had been in Argentina, and I was just as careful to leave the lives of Guidi and Benjamin concealed. I wrote nothing, I said nothing, I didn’t make the slightest effort to keep their memories alive. But now—this is the last time I’ll set foot in Argentina.”