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

Franklin, where there is a bar he often goes to. It’s cold and the streets are not very busy.
    A certain indecision overtakes him. He doesn’t know whether to stay and play a game of pool or go to a dance that he promised he would attend.
    Chance decides for him. Chance that appears in the form of his friend, Vicente Rodríguez.

 
    12. “I’m Going to Work . . .”
    He is a tower of a man, this Vicente Damián Rodríguez, a thirty-five-year-old man who loads cargo at the port and, heavy as he is, plays soccer, a man who retains something childlike in his loudness and his crankiness, who aspires to more than he is able to do, who has bad luck, who will end up chewing on the grass of a barren field, asking desperately for them to kill him, for them to finish killing him since the death that he is gulping down won’t get done flooding him through the ridiculous holes that the Mauser bullets are leaving in him.
    He would have liked to be something in life, Vicente Rodríguez. He is teeming with great ideas, great gestures, great words. But life is fierce with people like him. Just having a life will be a constant uphill struggle. And losing it, a never-ending process.
    He is married, has three kids and loves them, but of course they need to be fed and sent to school. And that poor house that he rents, surrounded by that thick, dirty wall with that stretch of uncultivated land where the chickens do their pecking, is not what he imagined it would be. Nothing is as he imagined it would be.
    He never manages to properly transfer the sense of power that his vigorous muscles give him to the objective world around him. At one time, it’s true, he is active in his union and even serves as a representative, but later all of that falls apart. There’s no union, no representatives in his life anymore. That’s when he understands that he is nobody, that the world belongs to doctors. The sign of his defeat is very clear: in his neighborhood, there is a club, and in that club, a library; he will come here in search of that miraculous source—books—that power seems to flow from.
    We don’t know if he even gets a chance to read the books, but what will remain of Rodríguez’s passing through this cannibalistic time that we are living in—aside from the misery in which he leaves his wife and children—is an opaque photograph with a blurred stamp on it that simply says “Library.”
    Rodríguez has left his house— 4545 Yrigoyen Street—around nine o’clock. And he has set out on the wrong foot. To his wife, he says:
    â€”I’m going to work.
    Is it an innocent lie to cover up one more outing? Is he hiding something more serious, namely his plan to take part in the movement? Or is he really going to work? It’s true that more than an hour has passed since he left the house, but the street that he’s walking along leads to the station. From there he can get on the train that takes him to the port in twenty-five minutes where he might ask for an extra shift at work.
    It’s hard to tell. In this case, just as in others. On the one hand, Rodríguez is in the opposition, a Peronist. On the other, he is an open, talkative man who finds it very difficult to keep quiet about something important. And he hasn’t said anything to his wife, whom he has been married to for thirteen years. Not even insinuated it. He has simply told her: “I’m going to work,” and has said goodbye in the usual way, without any trace of impatience or anxiety.
    Then again, it’s worth considering his behavior later on. He is completely passive when they take him to be killed in the assault car. A survivor who knew him well will later observe:
    â€”If the Big Guy had wanted to, he could’ve messed those thugs up in a heartbeat . . .
    It could be that he never thought they were going to kill him, not even at the last minute,