ANDREW GRAHAM-YOOLL
395
The policeman shouted that I should go away. He threatened to arrest
me, and then said
I
deserved to be shot. The other officer called out,
"Yes, yes, let him have it ... Step aside, I'll shoot him."
I
yelled,
"Don't shoot!" My free hand was in the air in automatic surrender.
The other was being squeezed by the policeman, who was shorter than
I
but thickset. After that
I
do not know what he shouted, insults
I
think.
I
seem to remember many oaths and threats. And I could only squeal in
a shrieky voice, "Don't shoot." Finally he pushed me away and I
stumbled into the burnt grass and fell, coughing and spluttering as I
raised a cloud of ash, calling in tears, "Don't shoot."
I
crawled to the
rim of the ashes and stood shaking in the grass.
I
heard a safety catch
smack and I swung around screaming and pleading. "Go away!" the
man who had held me yelled.
I
stumbled, my knees missing, my buttocks tight to counter the
loosening of my bowels, even though my stomach was empty and felt
snarled like a wrung floor mop. For some reason
I
tried to clean my
shoe in the grass by the car.
I
got into the car and started the engine
without looking back, or even ahead for that matter. Later I could not
remember turning the car around onto the road. When I looked up,
eventually, into the mirror,
I
saw my face streaked with dried tears and
the ash which had been on my hands. I drove the first three miles on the
way home at no more than five miles an hour, hoping that the traffic
police would not stop me because I would have had to explain the mess
my clothes were in. There was no telling, but I could guess quite
accurately what the policemen back in the field might do to me if we
met again.
It was the abduction of an old lawyer, Silvio Frondizi, aged sixty–
seven, a Trotskyist of no great spark, and the elder brother of a former
president, that shattered all vestige of calm inside me.
It
was September
1974,
spring in Buenos Aires, and the weather was turning warm and
wonderful. There had been about ninety murders in the three months
since President Juan Peron's death in early July. The dead ranged from
four-months-old children to men of nearly seventy. They were caught
in the violent political dispute over the succession to the former
strongman's leadersh ip.
It
was a Friday afternoon and I was planning to take an early cut
from the paper
to
get to a garden cocktail party near my home. The
formula was one of comfort: spring, Friday, and a garden cocktail
party. It made the very idea of ninety political murders unreal and
something that could not, rather, would not, have happened around
me.
The
Noticias Argentinas
wire flashed the report of Frondizi's
