The writer and psychologist Pablo Melicchio approaches three stories with a sensitive look and attentive listening to create a literary and free version based on various encounters with war veterans Reynaldo Arce, Darío Correa and Alberto Filippini. Three men who returned from the abyss to tell what they experienced. How do you come back from the war? How is the life of someone who was on the brink of death? The author narrates the lives of these three men before, during and after the war and analyzes the guilt of the survivors and the pact of silence that fueled the drama. Three testimonies that break with the cloak of oblivion that society imposed on them and that forced them to remain for many years within the island that each one had built inside.
We share a part of the first chapter.
TIERRA
(Based on the testimony of Reynaldo Arce)
But to fight, to fight, in reality, no one knew.
Fogwill
I
Return from the abyss, but return to tell what has been lived. How do you come back from the war? How is the life of someone who was on the brink of death? Reynaldo is a survivor of the Malvinas war. Since then he has not stopped looking for answers and has gone through all possible emotional states, the known ones, described in psychiatry manuals, and the indescribable ones, those that only the man who returned from a war knows he suffers from. And of all the questions he asked himself, one was fundamental: “Why did I have to go to war?” At first he maintained that it was the product of “damn chance.” Later, that “it was written” in that destiny that they say is unalterable. And over time, when he was able to embrace faith, he believed that “God ordained it that way.” Is the God who sends men to war the same one who saves them or who allows some to die? Where was God when Reynaldo went to war? a Discepolean agnostic might ask. Who weaves the threads of fate? Why are there human beings who go to war, experience horror, torture, death, and others lead simple lives, without major shocks? There are answers that are very complex and others that are close at hand, concrete, without metaphysics or poetry. Someone pragmatic would affirm that Reynaldo had to go to war simply because he was born a man, in Argentina and in the year 1963. The truth is that he could have deserted, invented an illness or committed suicide. But Reynaldo decided to obey the divine plan, the letter of chance, or destiny in which it was written that he would participate in the war for the Malvinas Islands, and on the Argentine side, which is another story. The mind of the human being is very strange, it is a Borges labyrinth, although dynamited. In these times I heard many times about the power of the mind and that what one decrees happens. I’m not sure it’s like that, like so many other things, but Reynaldo dreamed of going to war since he was little. It was not a childish fantasy while he played with tin soldiers or invented a war between friends. He wanted to go to a real war. He had that deep-rooted desire. He remembered it the day he was actually leaving for the islands. In his case, what he wanted came true.
He was in the Malvinas. he fought. And she returned to tell what she experienced.
II
Reynaldo had a happy childhood. And what is a happy childhood? How to represent the happiness of others when you can hardly describe your own? Happiness, seen from a distance, carries the infidelities committed by time. But we make the effort. We look out the window that looks at yesterday. We want to contemplate the past life, but we see it through frosted glass. We squint our eyes, try to focus, to see each other and see how we felt then. However, what has been lived moves at will, is disrupted, is confused with other experiences, is lost in the blurred landscape of memory. Despite how imprecise yesterday is, Reynaldo knows that he had a roof, a home and a family in which love and a certain economic stability were not lacking; perhaps that is the best scenario where happiness can act. Obviously, Reynaldo’s family went through the shocks of the governments on duty and their very Argentine measures. But they were saved by the strength that family union gives. One could suppose that Reynaldo’s was similar to so many Argentine families from that not so distant past, who met every Sunday, as if it were a mass; perhaps it was a mass because they believed in something invisible, like those who believe in God. Sunday ritual that started early with some mates that quieted down around noon when the snack arrived with the vermouth. The women in the kitchen, the men around the grill. Girls and boys playing hopscotch, running after a ball, happy, but without considering what happiness is, perhaps the purest of all future happiness. Everything happened slowly, because in the past there was never a rush, there was always plenty of time. At the cry of “at the table”, lunch was officially started. The glasses and silences were filled. The achuras arrived with the inevitable choripán. Then the roast, the vacuum and the chicken. And “a round of applause for the grill”. At the after-dinner the trick was put together while the mates were being renewed, now with the afternoon bills. In the background, the radio with the match of the date. Typical Argentine Sunday. Without realizing it, as the day glided by, these families celebrated life, without asking, perhaps the purest of all future celebrations. The more we move away from childhood, the more we realize that a determining moment was encrypted there, that of time without time, that of the absence of the tragic feeling of existence. Just a brief but magical time. A party that, at some point and without prior notice, ends. Reynaldo dropped out of high school when he was in his fifth year. He was going to Haedo 2 school. Right away he wanted to become independent, work, have his money to go out; and, besides, he dreamed of buying a motorcycle. He brought it up with his father. At first he was opposed, then, seeing his son so determined and enthusiastic, he began to doubt, until he finally gave up and gave her a job in his company. And so he was able to buy the desired motorcycle, a Honda 650.
Reynaldo’s life was like that of so many young people of the 80s, of partial freedom, conditioned by the military. There was no shortage of raids, repression and compulsory military service, that hidden cuckoo waiting for the draw to attack. Reynaldo does not remember exactly how he prepared himself. He does remember when the next day he confirmed, between the pages of the newspaper, that he had received the number 892. Many of his friends had drawn a low number and then they celebrated wildly and charged those who would have to do the colimba. Reynaldo first got angry, then took it with resignation, assuming that it had all been the work of bad luck. It was about the lost year. What could be done, it was part of the Argentine being of those times, they had not yet murdered the soldier Carrasco. Because of the number he had received, he was going to be assigned to the southern territory of the country, and because of his height, enrolled in the PM, the military police. How to get out of the colimba? It was very difficult. It was not about getting a municipal contact to renew the driver’s license. However, from the galley of the magician of destiny an unexpected dove came out, a distant uncle who belonged to the Gendarmerie. So his father contacted him and asked him if he could do something, if it was not possible to avoid military service, at least for his son to stay close to him, in Buenos Aires. Reynaldo would have preferred to avoid that lost year, continue with his daily life, work, friends, the motorcycle. But if he had to do the conscription, he didn’t care where. The parents did all the possible maneuvers behind Reynaldo, they wanted to prevent his son from doing the colimba, or the last one that did not go to the south, due to the cold, without a doubt because of the distance. Parents often try in vain to protect their children from incorruptible chance, or from divine designs that are difficult to shatter, like diamonds. Finally, an unexpected letter came out of the sleeve of the sorcerer of fate: a neighbor and family friend, who had an acquaintance in the military, proposed to his parents that he could ask Reynaldo to stay in Ciudadela. Sometimes we believe that we are doing good when in reality we are complicating things. Without knowing it, getting him to stay in Buenos Aires, they signed the sentence of his son. And they celebrated unaware that magic is like mirages, an illusion that sooner or later fades. Meanwhile, Reynaldo was on vacation with some friends in Mar del Plata. It was the summer of ’82, he was seventeen years old and had his whole life to live. It could be said today, with the clarity that distance sometimes offers, that it was his last “normal” summer; then, everything lived will be dyed by the ink of war. He was in “La Feliz”: friends, bowling alleys, music, glasses and kisses, nights that turned into dawn on the beach. Live, live to the full, drink life in one gulp, saving nothing for that uncertain tomorrow, cradled by the charm of what is emerging at every moment. Flowing in the luminous sea of the here and now, swimming without fear, feeling immortal, caressing the skin of the possible, drinking every last drop of the elixir of the present. Reynaldo was spending, without knowing it, the last cartridges of his eternal youth. And he arrived that afternoon, as violent as a tsunami on a calm and familiar beach. It was when he phoned the neighbor’s house to give signs of life. In five minutes his mother was on the other side of the line and without delay she read him the sentence: the telegram. He had to return urgently and report to the Ciudadela battalion. Reynaldo felt that the world was softening under his feet and that a centripetal force was sucking him in to bury him in the center of the earth. When he was able to get out of the well, anticipating the trench to come, he made two or three inconsistencies to his mother and hung up the phone. He immediately became angry with the very God that years later he would embrace. He was in full enjoyment and had to leave everything to leave for the lost year. “To fuck or not to fuck”, that was the fundamental question associated with his being. His time was not measured in hours or days but in jousts. “To fuck or not to fuck with you is the measure of my time”, was his phrase in his Borgean style. Not only were his vacations cut off, but all the outings for all the following weekends. In Mar del Plata, a postcard of an unforgettable summer, his normal life was stopped forever. Goodbye youth. Bye to the absolute present and to the eternity of the moment. At that time he went to dance in Ramos Mejía, in Pinar de Rocha, in Juan de Los Palotes, in Crash, and he had, like Roberto Carlos, a million friends in all corners of the western suburbs. He walked along the beach, alone, angry, his gaze hanging on the horizon torn by the waves. Without suspecting it, he was very close, a few days away from contemplating, or rather watching, another landscape, the same Argentine sea, but far to the south. On its beaches, instead of tourists, English invaders.
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