Il complotto per eliminare Nina

The conspiracy to eliminate Nina is an attempt by former wartime allies to turn an unresolved secret into a murder. Years after one of them concealed that Manuel Roca’s daughter had been beneath the farm during the attack, rumors of her survival and Salinas’s strange death make the child seem dangerous to men who have never left the war behind. Their answer is not to discover what she knows, but to arrange her elimination.

Background: A secret kept for years

The conspiracy is disclosed as a confession. Its narrator explains that for years he wondered what he ought to do, but never managed to tell anyone that Nina had been there beneath the farm that night. At first he stayed silent out of fear. As time passed, silence acquired a different rationale: the war had receded from public attention, people wanted to look forward, and what happened seemed buried for good. He began to believe that forgetting and letting the matter go would be better.

That fragile settlement breaks when a story circulates that Roca’s daughter is alive and being hidden in a village in the south of the country. The narrator finds the report difficult to believe, yet cannot rule it out: children, he reflects, can survive what seems impossible. When someone claims to have seen Nina and swears it was her, the secret ceases to feel safely buried. The narrator says that he understands he and the others will not be free of the story again. His attention shifts from his own concealment to what the child might have seen and heard—and whether she might remember his face.

From suspicion to a decision

The narrator describes the uncertainty surrounding Nina’s memory as part of the danger perceived by the former fighters. Adults, he says, have memory, a sense of justice, and sometimes a taste for revenge; it is harder for them to know what a child can understand after witnessing such violence. For a while, he persuades himself that nothing will come of the rumors. Then Salinas dies in a way the narrator calls strange, and the possibility of Nina’s survival takes on a darker significance.

Ricardo Uribe’s connection to Salinas’s death emerges next. The narrator admits that the connection might be coincidence, but insists that it seemed strange. Gradually, the group becomes convinced that Nina knows something. The account does not establish exactly what she knows, or prove that she remembers a particular crime; it shows how uncertainty hardens into collective suspicion. The death of Salinas is intolerable to the group, and the men discuss the matter at length before deciding that Nina must somehow be eliminated.

A world still at war

The narrator places the decision within the divide between a country moving forward and a group unable to join it. In his telling, the country advances at astonishing speed beyond the war, forgetting what happened; another world remains inside the conflict, unable to fit into the supposedly happy postwar country. He counts himself among that world and speaks of the former fighters collectively: for them, nothing is over. Nina becomes a danger within this closed circle not because the confession confirms what she can reveal, but because the men cannot dismiss the possibility that she knows something about the past.

The narrator calls the decision both terrible and logical. That pairing captures the conspiracy’s moral distortion: the men reason from fear, suspicion, and resentment over Salinas’s death until killing a child appears to them as a practical solution. Their logic does not resolve the uncertainties that gave rise to it. Instead, it recasts a survivor as a threat and makes the group’s unresolved war the justification for further violence.

The count’s coercion of Uribe

The group assigns the task to the Count of Torrelavid, whom the narrator describes as having played a double game throughout the war: he worked for the opposing side while remaining one of their own. The count goes to Uribe with a choice framed as a threat. Uribe can spend his life in prison for Salinas’s murder, or disappear and leave Nina to the count. The narrator calls Uribe a coward and argues that he could have remained calm because no court would have been able to convict him. But Uribe is frightened, leaves Nina with the count, and goes away.

The account closes Uribe’s immediate story with his death about ten years later in a remote village beyond the border. He left a written statement claiming that he had done nothing and that God would pursue his enemies to hell. His denial and curse contrast with the narrator’s disclosure: a man who had kept Nina’s presence beneath the farm secret now recounts the conspiracy, while Uribe’s final written version refuses responsibility. The fate of the child after the count takes her is not supplied in this account; what it establishes is that the conspiracy moves from shared suspicion to an assigned act, and that Uribe abandons her under pressure.