Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.
Punctuated by thrusts of the cattle prod, it wasn’t difficult to determine the direction that such a clerical-fascist interrogation was taking. And Senorita Grumberg, too, was a Jew. We later discovered what happened to the majority of those who had been held and tortured in the secret prisons of the regime. According to a Navy captain named Adolfo Scilingo, who published a book of confessions, these broken victims were often destroyed as “evidence” by being flown out way over the wastes of the South Atlantic and flung from airplanes into the freezing water below. Imagine the fun element when there’s the surprise bonus of a Jewish female prisoner in a wheelchair to be disposed of… we slide open the door and get ready to roll her and then it’s one, two, three… go!
Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disappeared into the precincts of that hellish place. What do you find to say to a doctor and a humanitarian who has been gutted by the image of a starving rat being introduced to his daughter’s genitalia? Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled. The Catholic chaplain of ESMA, Father Christian von Wernich, was three decades later convicted of direct complicity in murder, torture, and abduction. The Papal Nuncio, later to become Cardinal Pio Laghi, was the sleek tennis partner of Admiral Emilio Massera, the supervising member of the Argentine Navy’s whole sadistic enterprise. Here’s Timerman again, on the details and elaborations of his own electric-shock torture:
Now they’re really amused, and burst into laughter. Someone tries a variation while still clapping hands: “Clipped prick… clipped prick.” Whereupon they begin alternating while clapping their hands: “Jew… Clipped prick… Jew… Clipped prick.” It seems they’re no longer angry, merely having a good time. I keep bouncing in the chair and moaning as the electric shocks penetrate…
And here he is again, on a truly ingenious element of the inferno, when suspects are brought in and tortured en famille and where:
The entire affective world, constructed over the years with utmost difficulty, collapses with a kick in the father’s genitals, a smack on the mother’s face, an obscene insult to the sister, or the sexual violation of a daughter. Suddenly an entire culture based on familial love, devotion, the capacity for mutual sacrifice collapses. Nothing is possible in such a universe, and that is precisely what the torturers know… From my cell, I’d hear the whispered voices of children trying to learn what was happening to their parents, and I’d witness the efforts of daughters to win over a guard, to arouse a feeling of tenderness in him, to incite the hope of some lovely future relationship between them in order to learn what was happening to her mother, to get an orange sent to her, to get permission for her to go to the bathroom.
I borrow Jacobo’s words here because they are crystalline authentic and because my own would be no good: Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.
For all its outwardly easy Latin charm, Buenos Aires was making me feel sick and upset, so I did take that trip to the great plains where the gaucho epics had been written, and I did manage to eat a couple of the famous asados: the Argentine barbecue fiesta (once summarized by Martin Amis’s John Self as “a sort of triple mixed grill swaddled in steaks”) with its slavish propitiation of the sizzling gods of cholesterol. Yet even this was spoiled for me: my hosts did their own slaughtering and the smell of drying blood from the abattoir became too much for some reason (I actually went “off” steak for a good few years after this trip). Then from the intrepid Robert Cox of the Buenos Aires Herald I learned another jaunty fascist colloquialism: before the South Atlantic dumping method was adopted, the secret cremation of maimed and tortured bodies at the Navy School had been called an asado. In my youth I was quite often accused, and perhaps not unfairly, of being too politicized and of trying to import politics into all discussions. I would reply that it wasn’t my fault if politics kept on invading the private sphere and, in the case of Argentina at any rate, I think I was right. The miasma of the dictatorship pervaded absolutely everything, not excluding the aperitifs and the main course.
It even made its sickening way into the bookish, secluded atmosphere of Apartment 6B on Calle Maipu 994, just off the Plaza San Martin, where lived Jorge Luis Borges. I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. “This was my country and it might be yet,” he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: “But something came between it and the sun.” This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla junta that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Perón, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn’t disagree with this at all—and Perón had victimized Borges’s mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library—but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of “gentlemen” as opposed to “pimps.” This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: canfinflero. “A canfinfla, you see,” said Borges with perfect composure, “is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a canfinflero is a trafficker in cunt: in Anglo-Saxon we might say a ‘cunter.’” Had not the very tango itself been evolved in a brothel in 1880? Borges could talk indefinitely about this sort of thing, perhaps in revenge for having had an oversolicitous mother who tyrannized him all his life.)
He wanted me to read aloud to him and this I gladly did. I most remember his request for Kipling’s “Harp Song of the Dane Women,” a poem that employs mainly Anglo-Saxon and Norse words (Borges’s own talk was spiced with terms like “folk” and “kin”) and which opens so beautifully and hauntingly with the Viking wives as they are keening:
What is a woman that you forsake her
And the hearth fire and the home acre
To go with that old grey widow-maker?
For every author and topic Borges had a crisp summation. G.K. Chesterton: “Such a pity that he became a Catholic.” Kipling: “Unappreciated because too many of his peers were socialists.” “It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.” The hours I spent in this anachronistic, bibliophile, Anglophile retreat were in surreal contrast to the shrieking horror show that was being enacted in the rest of the city. I never felt this more acutely than when, having maneuvered the old boy down the spiral staircase for a rare out-of-doors lunch the next day—terrified of letting him slip and tumble—I got him back upstairs again. He invited me back for even more readings the following morning but I had to decline. I pleaded truthfully that I was booked on a plane for Chile. “I am so sorry,” said this courteous old genius. “But may I then offer you a gift in return for your company?” I naturally protested with all the energy of an E
nglish middle-class upbringing: couldn’t hear of such a thing; pleasure and privilege all mine; no question of accepting any present. He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. “You will remember,” he said, “the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.” And he then recited the following:
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti)—“Inclusiveness”—may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. I was mumbling my thanks when he said, again with utter composure: “While you are in Chile do you plan a call on General Pinochet?” I replied with what I hoped was equivalent aplomb that I had no such intention. “A pity,” came the response. “He is a true gentleman. He was recently kind enough to award me a literary prize.” It wasn’t the ideal note on which to bid Borges farewell, but it was an excellent illustration of something else I was becoming used to noticing—that in contrast or corollary to what Colin MacCabe had said to me in Lisbon, sometimes it was also the right people who took the wrong line.*
Two small sequels complete this episode in my life, which turned out to be a sort of hinge. After returning to London via Chile, I wrote a longish report for the New Statesman about the American-backed dictatorships of the Southern Cone. This drew two invitations. The first came from Kai Bird, writing on behalf of Victor Navasky, the new editor of The Nation magazine in New York. My article was much admired at their office: Might I consider writing for them in the future? (“Dear Ms. Bird,” I ignorantly wrote back to the future Pulitzer-winning historian and biographer, readily accepting his offer.) The second invitation was from my old comrade Denis Matyjascek, by now renamed MacShane because the BBC wouldn’t let him use an unpronounceable Polish name on the air, and also by then the leader of the National Union of Journalists. Would I speak with him at a public meeting, to enlighten all the reporters who would be covering the upcoming soccer World Cup in Argentina, and to encourage them to make inquiries about the human rights situation? Naturally I would, I replied to Tony Blair’s future deputy foreign minister. If there was one thing of which my Argentine experience had convinced me, it was that for all its hackery and cynicism, the profession of journalism did still have its aspect of nobility. Jacobo Timerman, some time after his release, was to praise Robert Cox of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald as a natural English gentleman. Timerman himself struck me as a vivid example of the great tradition of secular Jewish dissent. Both had testified to the health of the written word and its salutary effect upon diseased and disordered societies. I was renewed in believing in what I wanted to do.
The MacShane-sponsored solidarity evening came: I made my pitch and told my tales, the turnout was good, the questions were of a fairly high standard and then up got a man in a three-piece suit who in a very plummy accent identified himself with a double-barreled name. Here it comes, I thought, there’s always some bleeding Tory trying to put a veneer on military rule. The gentleman proceeded to give high praise to my speech. He underlined the fascistic nature of the junta and went on to call attention to its aggressive design on the Falkland Islands, where lived an ancient community of British farmers and fishermen. In 1978 this didn’t seem to be a geopolitical detail of any consuming interest, but I do remember agreeing with him that when challenged about its own depredations, the Argentine Right invariably tried to change the subject to the injustice of British possession of the Falklands (or Las Malvinas as they were known locally).
As a consequence, I was invited to an evening event thrown by the Falkland Islands Committee in the garden of Lincoln’s Inn. I asked if I might bring my father, who had himself briefly been stationed on this desolate archipelago. The reception was a distinct success, if somehow quaint in its almost antique Englishness. I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Milošević and Karadžić were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in the Ustashe tended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina. Falklands nationalism was too mild to stand comparison with any of these toxic movements, but the loyalist atmosphere on the lawn that night, with a Navy band playing and ancient settler families inquiring after one another’s descendants, was of an unquestioning and profound and rooted kind that one almost never encountered in the rest of a declining and anxious Britain. It was a bit much even for Commander Hitchens, who privately thought the islands slightly absurd and probably undefendable. When the time came when his old Royal Navy was sinking and shattering the Argentine fleet, the cadet school of which was a training camp for torture and rape, I was one of the very few socialists to support Mrs. Thatcher and he was one of the very few Tories to doubt the wisdom of the enterprise. So it goes.
I may seem to be getting ahead of my story there—it can happen to the best and the worst raconteur—but in fact the remaining short time of my life in England was becoming more and more overshadowed by that same Iron Lady. I didn’t really like anything about her, except, that is, for the most important thing about her, which was that she was “a conviction politician.” In the Labour Party, this sort of principled character had effectively ceased to exist. The closing years of “Old Labour” in Britain were years laced with corruption, cynicism, emollience, and drift. I tried my best to maintain my old commitment, but the effort was too much. In the area where I did my actual work, the printing trade unions were not much better than a protection racket for a privileged guild. In the rest of the country, Labour had become a status quo party, hostile to the union with Europe, suspicious of technological innovation, inward-looking, and envious. Striking workers were too easily emboldened because they were inconveniencing, not the capitalist and the owner and the scab, but the vulnerable remainder of the working public.
My last-ditch moment, though, was the official defense of torture in Northern Ireland. Labour’s “responsible” minister in the province, a bullying dwarf named Roy Mason, had both denied and excused (perhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification) the use of atrocious methods. Everybody knows the creepy excuses that are always involved here: “terrorism” must be stopped, lives are at stake, the “ticking bomb” must be intercepted. That after so many years of unhappy engagement with Ireland we should imagine that torture should be given another try… and that I should know people in the government who would defend it. I had a friend-losing and tearful dinner with a brilliant young junior minister who would not repudiate methods that were bursting the eardrums and fracturing the limbs of Irish prisoners. In the election campaign of 1979 I wrote as much as I could about this for the New Statesman. The election itself had been precipitated by a vote of confidence in the House of Commons, when the Irish Left and Republican members had furiously refused to vote to keep Labour in office. To this day, I find, many habitual Labour supporters have succeeded in forgetting that shame. I was in the press gallery that night, and I remember thinking that it would be a long time before there was another Labour government, and that if it came to that I didn’t really care.
Decades earlier, in some essays (boldly titled “Origins of the Present Crisis”) that had been one of the founding documents of the New Left, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn had anatomized the British disease as that of an intransigent ancien régime whose pathologies were as much institutional as economic. A stringently Marxist conclusion from this would have been that if Labour and “the Left” could not or would not confront
the ossification of the past, then the historic task would fall to a newly dynamic “Right.” Christopher Hill was later to say to me, half-admiringly, that Mrs. Thatcher had not just chosen to face down the outmoded syndicalism of the trade unions but had also “taken on” corporate-state ideas among business people, and picked fights with the House of Lords, the ancient universities, the traditional Conservative Party, the Church of England, and even the House of Windsor. Moreover, in the two most hidebound areas of old-style British authority, Northern Ireland and Southern Rhodesia, she was also able to enforce some of the constitutional revolutions that Old Labour had been too cowardly and too deferential to impose. She went barmy in the end and even attempted to keep the Berlin Wall as a part of the status quo but at the time she made me suffer from the same odi et amo complex that I’d begun to develop on the night of the spanking…