A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010
God’s spies
Crime and punishment
“They’re putting down their names,” the Gryphon whispered
in reply, “for fear they should forget them before the end of
the trial.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 11
AS OUR READING TEACHES us, our history is the story of a long night of injustice: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, the South Africa of apartheid, Ceausescu’s Romania, the China of Tiananmen Square, Senator McCarthy’s America, Castro’s Cuba, Pinochet’s Chile, Stroessner’s Paraguay, endless others form the map of our time. We seem to live either within or just on this side of despotic societies. We are never secure, even in our small democracies. When we think of how little it took for upright French citizens to jeer at convoys of Jewish children being herded into trucks, or for educated Canadians to throw stones at women and old men in the reservation of Oka when the natives protested the building of a golf course, then we have no right to feel safe.
The trappings with which we rig our society so that it will remain a society must be solid, but they must also be flexible. That which we exclude and outlaw or condemn must also remain visible, must always be in front of our eyes so that we can live by making the daily choice of not breaking these social bonds. The horrors of dictatorship are not inhuman horrors: they are profoundly human — and therein lies their power. “There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny,” wrote optimistically Samuel Johnson, “that will keep us safe under every form of government.” And yet any system of government based on arbitrary laws, extortion, torture, slavery lies at a mere hand’s grasp from every so-called democratic system.
Chile has a curious motto, “By Reason or by Force.” It can be read in at least two ways: as a bully’s threat, with an accent on the second part of the equation, or as an honest recognition of the precariousness of any social system, adrift (as the Mexican poet Amado Nervo said) “between the clashing seas of force and reason.” We, in most Western societies, believe we have chosen reason over force, and for the time being we can depend on that conviction. But we are never entirely free from the temptation of power. At best, our society will survive by upholding a few common notions of humanity and justice, dangerously sailing, as our Canadian motto has it, “A mari usque ad mare,” between those two symbolic seas.
Auden declared that “Poetry makes nothing happen.” I don’t believe that to be true (nor, probably, did he). Not every book is an epiphany, but many times we have sailed guided by a luminous page or a beacon of verse. What role poets and storytellers have on our precarious journeys may not be immediately clear, but perhaps some form of an answer emerged in the aftermath of one particular dictatorship, one that I followed closely over the bloody decade of its rule.
I can’t remember her name (so unfaithful are the promises of memory), but she was one grade below mine at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. I met her in my second year of high school, on one of the excursions our zealous monitors liked to organize for us during which we discovered the art of rigging up tents, a taste for reading around the campfire, and the mystery of politics. What exactly these politics were we never quite found out, except that at the time they echoed, somewhat bombastically, our vague notions of freedom and equality. In time, we read (or tried to read) arid books on economy and sociology and history, but for most of us politics remained a serviceable word that named our need for comradeship and our contempt for authority. The latter included the school’s conservative headmaster; the remote landowners of vast areas of Patagonia (where, at the foot of the Andes, we went camping and where, as I’ve mentioned, we saw peasant families living out their distant and for us inconceivable lives); and the military, whose tanks, on 28 June 1966, we saw lumber through the streets of Buenos Aires, one of many such processions towards the presidential palace on Plaza de Mayo. She was sixteen that year; in 1969 I left Buenos Aires and never saw her again. She was small, I remember, with black and curly hair which she had cut very short. Her voice was unemphatic, soft and clear, and I could always recognize her on the phone after just one syllable. She painted, but without much conviction. She was good at math. In 1982, shortly before the Malvinas War and towards the end of the military dictatorship, I returned to Buenos Aires for a brief visit. Asking for news of old friends, so many dead and disappeared in those terrible years, I was told that she was among the missing. She had been kidnapped leaving the university where she had sat on the student council. Officially, there was no record of her detention, but someone had apparently seen her at El Campito, one of the military concentration camps, in a brief moment when her hood had been removed for a medical inspection. The military usually kept their prisoners hooded so that later on they would not be able to recognize their torturers.
On 24 April 1995, Victor Armando Ibáñez, an Argentinean sergeant who had served as a guard at El Campito, gave an interview to the Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa. According to Ibáñez, between 2,000 and 2,300 of those imprisoned there, men and women, old people and adolescents, were “executed” by the army at El Campito during the two years of his service, from 1976 to 1978. When the prisoners’ time came, Ibáñez told the newspaper, “they were injected with a strong drug called pananoval, which made a real mess of them in a few seconds. It produced something like a heart attack. [The injections would leave the prisoners alive but unconscious.] Then they were thrown into the sea. We flew at a very low altitude. They were phantom flights, without registration. Sometimes I could see very large fish, like sharks, following the plane. The pilots said that they were fattened by human flesh. I leave the rest to your imagination,” Ibáñez said. “Imagine the worst.”
Ibáñez’s was the second “official” confession. A month earlier, a retired navy lieutenant commander, Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, had confessed (also in La Prensa) to the same method of “disposing of the prisoners.” In response to his confession, Argentinean president Carlos Menem called Scilingo a “criminal,” reminded the press that the commander had been involved in a shady automobile deal, and asked how the word of a thief could be counted as true. He also ordered the navy to strip Scilingo of his rank.
Since his election in 1989, Menem had been trying to shelve the whole question of military culpability during the so-called “dirty war” that ravaged Argentina from 1973 to 1982, and during which more than thirty thousand people were killed. Not content with the deadline for filing charges against the military (which his predecessor, Raul Alfonsin had set as 22 February 1988), on 6 October 1989 Menem had offered most of the military involved in human rights abuses a general pardon. A year later, three days after Christmas, Menem issued a general amnesty to all involved in the events that had bled the country for nine long years. Accordingly, he released from prison Lieutenant General Jorge Videla (who was later re-arrested) and General Roberto Viola, both of whom had been appointed to the presidency by the military junta, from 1976 to 1981 and for ten months in 1981, respectively. In legal terms, a pardon implies not an exoneration or acquittal but only a relief from punishment. An amnesty, on the other hand (such as the military had granted itself in extremis in 1982, and which was repealed by Alfonsin), is, in effect and intention, a recognition of innocence that wipes away any imputation of crime. After the declarations of Scilingo and Ibáñez, President Menem briefly threatened the military with a retraction of the 1990 amnesty.
Until the confessions of 1995, the Argentinean military authorities had recognized no wrongdoing in their so-called anti-terrorist activities. The extraordinary nature of guerrilla war demanded, the authorities said, extraordinary measures. In this declaration they were well advised. In 1977, following a joint report from Amnesty International and the U. S. State Department’s Human Rights Bureau accusing the Argentinean security forces of being responsible for hundreds of disappearances, the military hired an American public relations company, Burson-Marsteller, to plan its response. The thirty-five-page memorandum presented by Burson-Marsteller recommended that the military “use the best professional communications skills to transmit those aspects of Argentine events showing that the terrorist problem is being handled in a firm and just manner, with equal justice for all.” A tall order, but not impossible in the Age of Advertising. As if moved by the hackneyed motto “The pen is mightier than the sword,” Burson-Marsteller suggested that the military appeal for “the generation of positive editorial comment” from writers “of conservative or moderate persuasions.” As a result of their campaign, Ronald Reagan declared in the Miami News of 20 October 1978 that the State Department’s human rights office was “making a mess of our relations with the planet’s seventh largest country, Argentina, a nation with which we should be close friends.”
Over the years, others answered the advertisers’ appeal. In 1995, shortly after Ibáñez’s and Scilingo’s confessions, an article appeared in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, signed by Mario Vargas Llosa. Under the title “Playing with Fire,” Vargas Llosa argued that, horrible though the revelations might be, they were not news to anyone, merely confirmations of a truth “atrocious and nauseating for any half-moral conscience.” “It would certainly be wonderful,” he wrote, “if all those responsible for these unbelievable cruelties were taken to court and punished. This, however, is impossible, because the responsibility far exceeds the military sphere and implicates a vast spectrum of Argentinean society, including a fair number of those who today cry out, condemning retrospectively the violence to which they too, in one way or another, contributed.”
“It would certainly be wonderful”: this is the rhetorical topos of false regret, denoting a change from shared indignation at the “atrocious and nauseating” facts, to the more sober realization of what they “really” mean — the impossibility of attaining the “wonderful” goal of impartial justice. Vargas Llosa’s is an ancient argument, harking back to notions of original sin: no one soul can truly be held responsible because every soul is responsible “in one way or another” for the crimes of a nation, whether committed by the people themselves or by their leaders. More than a hundred years ago, Nikolai Gogol expressed the same absurdity in more elegant terms: “Seek out the judge, seek out the criminal, and then condemn both.”
Using the case of his own country as a history lesson, Vargas Llosa concluded his cri de coeur: “The example of what has happened in Peru, with a democracy which the Peruvian people have distorted — because of the violence of extremist groups and also because of the blindness and demagogy of certain political forces—and which they let fall like a ripe fruit in the arms of military and personal power, should open the eyes of those imprudent justice-seekers who, in Argentina, take advantage of a debate on the repression in the seventies to seek revenge, to avenge old grievances or continue by other means the insane war they started and then lost.”
Burson-Marsteller could not have come up with a more efficient publicist for its cause. What would a common reader, confident in Vargas Llosa’s intellectual authority, make of this impassioned conclusion? After hesitating, perhaps, at the comparison between Argentina and Peru (where the novelist-turned-politician thunderingly lost the presidential election), which seems to protest too much, too obviously, the reader is led into a far subtler argument: these “justice-seekers,” the seekers of that justice which, according to Vargas Llosa, is desirable but utopian—are they not in fact hypocrites who not only must share the guilt for the atrocities but are also to blame for starting a war which they then lost? Suddenly the scales of responsibility are tipped ominously to the victims’ side. Not a need for justice, not an urge to acknowledge wrongs officially, but an itch for revenge or, even worse, sheer spite apparently drives these so-called justice-seekers. The thirty thousand disappeared are not to be lamented; they were troublemakers who started it all. And those who survived — the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the thousands forced into exile, the hundreds of tortured men and women who crowd the pages of the 1984 Report on the Disappeared by the National Commission on Disappeared People, with their sober accounts of utterly indescribable sufferings — should not seek redress lest they themselves be called to judgment. And furthermore, the seventies are now so long ago … Would it not be better to forget?
Fortunately, there were readers who were not so confident. Mario Vargas Llosa’s article was reprinted in Le Monde on 18 May 1995. A week later (25 May), the Argentinean writer Juan José Saer published an answer in the same newspaper. After correcting a number of important factual errors in Vargas Llosa’s piece — calling Isabel Perón’s presidency a “democratic government,” ignoring the fact that between 1955 and 1983 Argentina enjoyed barely six years of freely elected leaders — Saer notes that Vargas Llosa’s arguments coincide, point by point, with those of the military leaders themselves, who argued that the official tactics of murder and torture had not been their choice but the choice of those who provoked them and forced them to make use of “extreme measures.” Saer also points out that Vargas Llosa’s notion of “collective responsibility” might place Vargas Llosa himself in a delicate position since, at a time when Argentinean intellectuals were being tortured or forced into exile, the Peruvian novelist continued to publish willingly in Argentina’s official press.
Saer responded to Vargas Llosa’s role, accusing him of being a spokesman for the military: he dismissed or ignored his arguments, which are based on a number of false assumptions. And yet, since these arguments must stand, thanks to Vargas Llosa’s craft, as the most eloquent of those penned by the defenders of a military amnesty, they deserve, perhaps, a closer examination.
•The notion of guilt shared between the military government, which came to power by force and used torture and murder to fight its opposers, and the victims, including guerrilla fighters, political objectors, and ordinary civilians with no political associations, is fallacious. While it could be argued that in a sense the army of insurrectionists and the official Argentinean army were equal forces (though, even here, the numbers appear to be on the order of 1 to 1,000), no argument can find a balance of power between the organized military forces and the intellectuals, artists, union leaders, students, and members of the clergy who expressed disagreement with them. The civilian who voices an objection to the actions of the government is not guilty of any crime; on the contrary, vigilance is an essential civic duty in any democratic society, and every citizen must become, as it were, God’s spy. “And take upon’s the mystery of things,” says King Lear, “As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out / In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones / That ebb and flow by th’ moon.”
But the repression overflowed even the realm of civilian opposition. The National Commission on Disappeared People, led by the novelist Ernesto Sabato, concluded its report in September 1984: “We can state categorically—contrary to what the executors of this sinister plan maintain—that they did not pursue only the members of political organizations who carried out acts of terrorism. Among the victims are thousands who never had any links with such activity but were nevertheless subjected to horrific torture because they opposed the military dictatorship, took part in union or student activities, were well-known intellectuals who questioned state terrorism, or simply because they were relatives, friends, or names included in the address book of someone considered subversive.”
•Any government that uses torture and murder to enforce the law invalidates both its right to govern and the law it enforces, since one of the few basic tenets of any society in which citizens are granted equal rights is the sacredness of human life. “Clearly,’’ wrote G. K. Chesterton, “there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.” Any government that does not recognize this truth, and does not hold accountable those who torture and murder, can make no claims for its own justice. No government can rightly mirror the methods of its criminals, responding in kind to what it might deem an act against the nation’s laws. It cannot be guided by an individual sense of justice, or revenge, or greed, or even morality. It must encompass them all, these individual deeds of its citizens, within the parameters established by the country’s constitution. It must enforce the law with the law, and within the letter of the law. Beyond the law, a government is no longer a government but a usurped power, and as such it must be judged.
•Trust in the ultimate power of the law sustained many of the military dictatorship’s victims during those terrible years. In spite of the pain and the bewilderment caused by the officialized abuses, the be lief remained that in a not-too-distant future these acts would be brought to light and judged according to the law. The wish to torture the torturer and to kill the murderer must have been overwhelming, but even stronger was the sense that such acts of revenge would become indistinguishable from the acts that caused them and would be transformed, in some abominable way, into a victory for the abusers. Instead, the victims and their families continued to believe in some form of ultimate earthly judgment, in which the society that had been wronged would bring the guilty ones to trial according to the laws of that society. Only on the basis of such justice being done did they believe that their country might have another chance. Menem’s amnesty denied them that long-awaited possibility.
•This “absence of justice” was reflected with ghoulish symmetry in the “disappearing” tactics employed by the military, by which their victims—kidnapped, tortured, thrown from airplanes, dropped into unmarked graves — became not officially dead but merely “absent,” leaving the anguished families with no bodies to mourn. Julio Cortázar, speaking in 1981, described in these words the dictatorship’s method: “On the one hand, a virtual or real antagonist is suppressed; on the other, conditions are created so that the family and friends of the victims are often forced to remain silent as the only possibility of preserving the life of those whom their hearts won’t allow them to presume dead.” And he added, “If every human death entails an irrevocable absence, what can we say of this other absence that continues as a sort of abstract presence, like the obstinate denial of the absence we know to be final?” In that sense, Menem’s amnesty didn’t heal the sickness of the past—it merely prolonged that sickness into the present.
•Menem’s revisionist attempt is not original. One of the earliest instances of perfecting the present by erasing the tensions of the past took place in the year 213 B.c., when the Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi ordered that every book in his realm be thrown into the fire so as to destroy all traces (as one legend has it) of his mother’s adultery. But no deed, however monstrous or trivial, can ever be abolished once committed — not even by a Chinese emperor, even less by an Argentinean president. This is the adamantine law of our life. The immutability of the past does not depend on the volubilities of government, nor on cravings for revenge or for diplomacy. No deed can be undone. It can be pardoned, but the pardon must come from the offended person and from no one else if it is to have any emotional validity. Nothing changes in the deed itself after a pardon: not the circumstances, not the gravity, not the guilt, not the wound. Nothing except the relationship between the torturer and the victims, when the victims reaffirm their sovereignty, “not weighing our merits,” as the Book of Common Prayer has it, “but by pardoning our offences.” Pardon is the victim’s prerogative, not the torturer’s right—and this Menem’s government and his supporters, such as Vargas Llosa, have apparently forgotten.
•The pardon granted by a victim — the dripping quality of mercy— has no bearing on the mechanics of justice. Pardon does not change or even qualify the act, which will cast its shadow forward, throughout eternity, into every new present. Pardon does not grant oblivion. But a trial, according to the laws of society, can at least lend the criminal act a context; the law can contain it, so to speak, in the past so that it no longer contaminates the future, standing at a distance as a reminder and a warning. In a mysterious way, the application of a society’s laws is akin to a literary act: it fixes the criminal deed on a page, defines it in words, gives it a context which is not that of the sheer horror of the moment but of its recollection. The power of memory is no longer in the hands of the criminal; now it is society itself that holds that power, writing the chronicle of its own wicked past, able at last to rebuild itself not over the emptiness of oblivion but over the solid, recorded facts of the atrocities committed. This is a long, dreary, fearful, agonizing process, and the only possible one. This sort of healing always leaves scars.
•Menem’s amnesty, bowing to the demands of acknowledged murderers and torturers, has postponed the healing for what appears to be a very long time. As it stands today, since all the torturers and murders in the military regime have not been brought to justice, Argentina is a country bereft of rights: its right to social justice ignored, its right to moral education invalidated, its right to moral authority forfeit. The need to “carry on,” the need to “reconcile differences,” the need to “allow the economy to flourish once again” have all been invoked by Menem and his successors as good reasons for forgiving and forgetting. Supported by literate voices such as that of Vargas Llosa, Menem apparently believed that history could be paid off; that the memory of thousands of individuals like my friend from school could be left to yellow on forgotten shelves in dim bureaucratic offices; that the past could be recovered without expenditure of effort, without making official amends, without redemption.
While waiting for the act of justice now denied, the victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship can still hope for another, older form of justice — less evident, but in the end longer-lasting. The maze of a politician’s mind has seldom held the promise of redemption, but that of a gifted writer is almost exclusively built on such a promise, and in spite of Auden’s dictum, it allows no forgetting.
Thanks to certain books (a catalogue too long and personal to be of use here), both the torturers and their victims may know that they were not alone, unseen, unassailable. Justice, beyond the requirements of literary conventions that demand a happy ending is in some essential way our common human bond, something against which we can all measure ourselves. As the old English law has it, justice must not only be done but be seen to be done.
Auden’s lack of confidence in the writer’s ability to change the world is apparently a modern perception. Robert Graves noted that the Irish and Welsh distinguished carefully between poets and satirists: the poet’s task was creative or curative, that of the satirist was destructive or noxious, and both changed the course of worldly events. Even nature was supposed to bow to Orpheus’s words, and Shakespeare recalled the power of the Irish bards, “rhyming rats to death;” in the seventh century, the great Senchan Torpeist, having discovered that rats had eaten his dinner, slaughtered ten on the spot by uttering a verse that began:
Rats have sharp snouts
Yet are poor fighters.
Whether against rats or dictators, writers can bring about a wild form of justice in their role as God’s spies. “Many brave men lived before Agamemnon’s time,” wrote Horace in the first century B.c., “but they are all, unmourned and unknown, covered by the long night, because they lacked a poet.” As Horace implied, we are luckier. Poems and stories that will redeem us (or in which we will find redemption of a kind) are being written, or will be written, or have been written and are awaiting their readers and, throughout time, again and again, assume this: that the human mind is always wiser than its most atrocious deeds, since it can give them a name; that in the very description of our most loathsome acts something in good writing shows them as loathsome and therefore not unconquerable; that in spite of the feebleness and randomness of language, an inspired writer can tell the unspeakable and lend a shape to the unthinkable, so that evil loses some of its numinous quality and stands reduced to a few memorable words.