K by Bernardo Kucinski

Author:Bernardo Kucinski [Kucinski, Bernardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Practical Action Publishing with Latin American Bureau
Published: 2015-02-04T17:00:00+00:00

* * *

1 Rio de Janeiro branch of Ação Libertadora Nacional, the main urban guerrilla movement that fought the military regime.

2 A Rio de Janeiro army barracks where political prisoners were tortured and killed.

3 Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária, another guerrilla movement, founded in 1968.

A nightmare

That night K slept deeply for the first time since the disappearance of his daughter. The trip to the Baixada Fluminense1 had left him exhausted. He woke up refreshed but disturbed by a dream he’d had, almost a nightmare. He’d felt as if he was being punished for his stupidity on the previous day. Dreams are always confused but this one more than usual, with strange scenes he was now trying to decipher. One came back forcefully to his mind. He was digging the ground with a shovel, it was an ordinary shovel, with a flat blade, yet each time he brought it up, it held a vast amount of earth, as if it were a mechanical digger, so the hole soon became very deep. There was an obvious interpretation for the dream: he should have dug a hole on the previous day and he hadn’t, despite all the effort he’d made to find that forsaken spot in the Baixada Fluminense. He remembered that mulatto girl, with a baby on her lap, who’d pointed out the scrap-metal yard, the only one near the station. He’d reached the cave by taking four hundred paces towards the hills from the gate. And there he’d found the path and at the end of it the round granite rock, just as the journalist had said, the same journalist who’d told him that disappeared political prisoners had been buried there. But K had looked at the hard, stony ground with its few dirty tufts of grass and weeds. No sign that the earth had been dug up. Perhaps it was then that the feeling of despair had begun to hit him. He’d also realised he’d made a mistake in not getting someone to come with him. While seeking help from so many important people, at home and abroad, he’d got cut off from the joint actions the families took, although it was clear – obviously – that all the families also carried out their own searches, mobilising people they knew, relatives by marriage, even distant ones, or work colleagues; they all did this and they had to. But some things shouldn’t be done alone.

When he reached the spot, K also realised just how ridiculous the journalist’s suggestion had been to hire a tractor in the town and get the driver to dig up the area. As if it was a simple business, digging up a skeleton or perhaps more than one, clumsily, so everything would be damaged, without an official body witnessing what was going on and drawing up a report, without any experts there, without involving the Brazilian Bar Association. That wasn’t the right way to do it. It was as if he’d never really thought he’d actually dig up the spot.

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