Free Operation Massacre by Rodolfo Walsh, translation by Daniella Gitlin, foreword by Michael Greenberg, afterwood by Ricardo Piglia

he runs into a friend or an acquaintance. We won’t know who it was.
    â€”They want me to come hear the fight —he announces to his wife, Adela, when he returns.— I don’t know if I should go . . .
    He’s indecisive. In the end he makes a decision. After all, he had also been thinking of tuning into the fight.
    He gives a kiss to his son Danny—who is already four years old—and says goodbye to his wife.
    â€”I’ll come back as soon as it’s over.
    Despite the cold, he doesn’t put on an overcoat. He wears only a thick white cardigan.
    He walks to Yrigoyen Street and enters the long corridor. A last-minute witness will see him standing next to the radio receiver, smiling and with his hands in his pockets, a bit isolated, a bit removed from the other groups that are talking and playing cards.

 
    11. “The Executed Man Who Lives”
    At number 162 4 on Florencio Varela Street, in the Florida district, stands a beautiful California-style house. It could be the home of a lawyer or a doctor. It was built by Mr. Pedro Livraga, a quiet man getting on in years, with his own two hands. In his youth he was a building laborer and later on, through the gradual mastery of the job, ended up as a contractor.
    Mr. Pedro has three children. The oldest daughter is married. The two sons, on the other hand, live with him. One of them is Juan Carlos.
    He is a thin man of average height and ordinary features: grey-green eyes, brown hair, and a mustache. He is a few days shy of turning twenty-four.
    His ideas are entirely commonplace and shared by other people in town: they are generally correct regarding concrete and tangible things, and more nebulous and random in other arenas. He has a reflective, even calculating temperament. He will think a great deal about things and not say more than is necessary.
    This doesn’t take away from a certain instinctive curiosity he has, a deep impatience that manifests itself not so much in his smaller acts, but rather in the way he goes about adjusting to the world. He dropped out of high school after finishing his freshman year. Then, for several years, he was a clerk at the Aviation Authority. Now he works as a bus driver. Later on, once he is already “brought back from the dead,” he will join his father in construction work.
    He is a fine observer, but he might trust himself too much. Over the course of the extraordinary adventure that he is about to experience, he’ll catch some things with such exceptional precision that he’ll be able to draw up very exact diagrams and maps. Other things he will get wrong, and he will be stubborn about sticking to his mistakes.
    He will prove to be lucid and calm in the face of danger. And once the danger has passed, he will show a moral courage that should be noted as his main virtue. He will be the only one among the survivors or the victims’ family members who dares to come forward and demand justice.
    Does he know anything, on that afternoon of June 9 , about the rebellion that will take place later on? He has come home before his shift is over, which could seem suspicious. But it turns out that the bus he drives—number five of all the buses that run along the 10 line in Vicente López—has broken down on him, and the company will confirm this detail.
    Does he know anything? He will flatly deny that he does. And he will also add that he doesn’t have a record of any kind—criminal, legal, professional, or political. This claim will also be proven and confirmed.
    But despite all that, does he know anything? Many people in Greater Buenos Aires know about it, even if they aren’t thinking of taking part. Still, of the numerous testimonies we collected, there is not one that suggests Livraga was involved or informed.
    It is after ten o’clock at night when Juan Carlos leaves his house. He turns right and goes down San Martín Avenue, heading towards