Operation Massacre Read Online Free PDF

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:
    â€”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