La vendetta come farmaco

La vendetta come farmaco names the story’s bleak account of revenge as both pain relief and prolonged damage. The old woman argues that the desire to avenge wartime losses enabled people to fight, but that those who relied on it never escaped its effects: revenge filled their lives with ghosts and helped leave them unable to remember what living meant.

Revenge beneath the political ideal

Salinas presents the war as a struggle for a better world, one in which its fighters believed they could restore dignity and the possibility of happiness to millions. In that logic, suffering and the infliction of suffering became necessary costs: once the struggle was understood as breaking ground for a future, distinctions between old and young, friend and enemy, could be overridden. The old woman challenges the grandeur of this account by proposing a more intimate motive. The fighters’ memories of murdered loved ones, she argues, were not incidental to their politics; revenge was the true reason they fought.

Her explanation does not make the violence less real or less terrible. It shows how an ideal can provide a protective story around grief, allowing its adherents to understand cruelty as service to a future good. The old woman insists that the vision of a better world concealed a more personal force: the effort to answer unbearable loss by making others suffer.

A drug that enables violence

The old woman calls revenge the only medicine available for pain, and also a drug that makes people capable of fighting. The image holds two claims together: revenge can numb or redirect grief sufficiently to sustain action, yet it is not a cure. What permits the fighters to endure violence also perpetuates it, turning remembered injuries into a reason for further killing.

She presses the accusation against Salinas through a particular wartime choice: he had entered the war after the army had already been defeated, and killed a man he had never met without giving him a trial. In her account, he did so because he had begun killing and could no longer stop. Revenge is thus not presented merely as a motive from the past; it has become a momentum that outlives the immediate conflict and erodes the boundary between justice and private retaliation.

The cost that survives the war

The old woman rejects Salinas’s evasive claim that he has never asked himself what the war accomplished. She says he has asked repeatedly whether victory produced a better world, why he joined the war, and what he was doing at Mato Rujo when the fighting was supposedly over. His repeated questioning points to the persistence of the past beneath the official end of hostilities. The dead continue to fill his memory, while the political ideal serves as a way not to face the grief that drove him.

Her judgment extends beyond him to the surviving fighters: revenge has burned through their lives, filled them with ghosts, and left them unable to remember what life is. The image of medicine therefore darkens into one of addiction and injury. A remedy taken to survive pain has itself become destructive, preserving the wound in the very act of suppressing it.

A private reckoning after public forgetting

The argument takes place against a postwar society that has moved on at extraordinary speed, while a separate world of former combatants remains caught in what the war did to them. Salinas’s death is not accepted as a closed matter: the old woman recounts how former associates came to believe that she knew something and decided she had to be eliminated. Their continuing violence shows the afterlife of revenge not as a purely inward burden but as a force shaping new threats and acts of concealment.

The old woman’s confrontation with the surviving man brings that history back into the present. She recalls that he opened the hidden trapdoor on the night of the attack and then shut it again, and says he has carried that secret like an illness for the rest of his life. In the later encounter, she also recounts what she learned about her father’s death and challenges the man’s attempt to separate ordinary conduct from wartime inaction. The language of revenge thus meets the language of responsibility: grief may explain why violence became bearable, but it does not erase the choices that followed or the memories those choices left behind.