392
PARTISAN REVIEW
down outside my house and to wait for a knock at my door in the early
hours telling me that "they" had come.
Burned cars littered the sides of the wide highways leading out of
Buenos Aires. Thieves had left them there, after using or stripping
them. The carcass that was left made the job of the investigators quite
difficult.
Good ideas are always copied.
On many a morning at the end of 1973 the smoldering ruins of
cars- fast, new models, not those stripped for parts by thieves-were to
be found on rubbish dumps or by the sides of roads. Shantytowns
where people feared to walk at night were usually chosen as dumpsites,
as if the poor did not have enough troubles without this new one.
In
the trunk of the car, or in what had once been a back seat, there
were always the charred remnants of one, maybe two, human bodies.
The stumps of limbs were tied with wire or chain that had been
partially melted and twisted by the heat of the blaze or had been
embedded in the charcoal crust that had once been human flesh. The
bodies were to be found at dawn beside the branch roads of the Pan
American Highway; on the
quema,
the municipal rubbish dump
outside Villa Martelli; or in the woods near the Buenos Aires interna–
tional airport at Ezeiza.
It
was only at first light that each case was
discovered; the fire in the dark had been passed by, ignored by motorists
who preferred not to venture off the road. Police did not answer a
caller's alarm at night.
After the first few discoveries of bodies disposed of in this manner
there were official statements about attempts at identification using
what was left of the victims' dentures. Soon the explanations were
quietly abandoned and no more were demanded. Extremists of all
persuasions-from guerrillas to government-sheltered paramilitary
groups to private armies employed by trade union bosses or
businessmen-agreed on the method to rid themselves of their captives,
of their traitors and informers, and of the bodies of those who had died
under their torture or of those summarily executed in the name of some
savage cause.
One very hot morning in January 1974, after hearing the early
news on the radio, I drove a borrowed car to a place in the woods near
the airport. A free-lance cremation had taken place there the night
before. Two policemen with machine guns were standing near what
had been a car, now a rust-colored scrap on the hubs of its wheels. The
two men were frightened, not of the charred bits but of the fantasies
that the mind made of them, here, in this beautiful lonely spot, where
