Il dopoguerra

Il dopoguerra names a period that is over in the calendar but not in the lives of those who endured the war. While the country looks forward and forgets, survivors carry its violence into the present: buried memories return, crimes evade formal justice, and the past becomes both a private burden and a danger to the living.

A public end, a private continuation

The divide is already audible during the attack on Mato Rujo. Hidden beneath the house, Nina hears her father speaking, the baskets dragged across the floor, a shot and a window breaking; then a burst of gunfire sweeps back and forth above her. She watches light and dust through the floorboards and recognizes her father by the passing shadow. The concealed child experiences the raid not as a complete account of events but as fragments of voices, sounds and glimpses, a pattern that anticipates the incomplete and contested memories of the postwar years.

The conflict between official time and lived time is stated plainly when Salinas tells a doctor that the war is over, only to answer that it is not over for him—or for Salinas. Years later, in the café, the same distinction resurfaces when a woman challenges a man’s claim that they were soldiers fighting a war: that war had already ended, he admits; not for them. The repeated correction turns the postwar period into an unresolved condition rather than a clean break.

Memory, silence, and testimony

The woman’s account of her own survival is shaped by the gap between what she remembers and what she has learned. She says she knows the events of that night but remembers almost nothing: under the floor she could not see, and what she heard seemed dreamlike before the fire erased it. She has been told how Manuel Roca was killed, including the short burst of gunfire that ended his life, but cannot know whether those accounts were true. Her testimony therefore does not settle the past; it makes visible how childhood memory, other people’s stories, and uncertainty coexist.

The man listening to her has kept his own knowledge to himself for years. He says he never told anyone that Nina was beneath the floor that night. At first fear stopped him; later, as people turned away from the war and seemed to bury it for good, he came to think that forgetting was preferable. When word spread that Roca’s daughter had survived and was hidden in a southern village, his silence became harder to maintain. He wondered what she had seen or heard, and whether she could remember his face. Salinas’s later death renewed the unease: a buried scene had become a question with present-day consequences.

For the woman, recollection is similarly double. She says she misses every single thing that has happened to her, yet speaks without outward melancholy. At the café she remembers that, as a child in the hiding place, she had not feared the open hatch; fear came when the cover closed again, the baskets scraped overhead, and the boy’s footsteps receded. She describes that terror as never having left her, and recalls wishing that the boy would take her with him. The memory gives emotional force to details the hidden child could not then explain.

Impunity and private reckoning

After Manuel Roca’s capture, he warns his captors that they will be imprisoned if they touch him. Salinas laughs, produces a pistol, and tells him that no one will ever know: Roca’s friends have abandoned him, while Salinas’s own associates are occupied. The promise that the killing will disappear from public view captures the postwar order of impunity. The state and the courts are invoked as threats by Roca, but his captors expect neither prosecution nor public accountability.

The later account of Salinas’s death offers no reliable resolution. Two years after the affair with Roca, he is found dead in bed, apparently from a heart problem. Rumor then attributes his death to slow poisoning by his doctor, Astarte; an investigation yields no proof. The suspected poison connects the death to the wartime medicine Botran, developed by Astarte with pharmacist Ricardo Uribe, whose name had also surfaced in inquiries about the Hyena Hospital. Uribe is questioned, released, and leaves for a remote town in the south, where he buys a pharmacy and lives with a young daughter, Dulce. The uncertain account—medical explanation, rumor, investigation without findings—leaves the cause of Salinas’s death unresolved while making it the catalyst for renewed suspicion.

The man’s later confession explains how suspicion becomes a conspiracy. Once Salinas is dead and people believe the child may know something, former associates discuss eliminating her. In a country eager to move beyond the war, they understand themselves as people who have never left it; to them Nina has become a danger. The Count of Torrelavid, who had played both sides during the war while secretly belonging to their side, is assigned to act. He gives Uribe a choice between facing prison for Salinas’s murder and disappearing while leaving the child behind. Uribe is frightened, abandons Nina, and leaves the country; about ten years later he dies in a village beyond the border, maintaining in a written statement that he had done nothing and that God would pursue his enemies. The account shows private coercion taking the place of a trial, without resolving whether the allegations against Uribe were true.

Stories that survive the war

The café brings private recollection into public space. The woman recounts a poker game in which Uribe slowly turns over the Count’s cards; she says she does not think he considered what he was losing, only what he was failing to win. She then challenges the man listening to her: why should her version of the story be less false than his? The exchange makes the competing accounts themselves part of the postwar landscape. Neither memory nor narration supplies an uncontested tribunal for what happened.

The setting sharpens the contrast between continuity and ordinary life. Three musicians play old songs at the back of the café while people dance; elsewhere in the room two young men watch the older man, and one laughs as he begins to cry. The woman’s conversation has returned to Mato Rujo, but the room has not become a memorial: music and dancing continue around the recollection. The man cannot find words for the peace he once felt watching Nina hidden beneath the floor, and his thoughts carry him away until he weeps openly. The woman answers the young man’s laughter with a blunt rebuke. In that small present-day gesture, the postwar past is neither repaired nor dismissed: it is still capable of eliciting witness, pain, and resistance.