By Celeste Orozco

Cierto gris en el cielo del otoño lo venía advirtiendo y ese día de mayo amaneció lluvioso, algo gélido. Claudio Morresi salió temprano siguiendo su rutina de trabajo habitual aunque era sábado. Manejó desde Balvanera hasta la ex ESMA y en lugar de tomar la autopista entró por los lagos de Palermo. Siempre le agrada más ese camino: en ese verde entrenaba con Norberto, su hermano mayor, que jugaba al fútbol en el Club GEBA. Saliendo de los parques pasó por el estadio de River, el club con el que salió campeón en 1986, cuando su hermano llevaba 10 años desaparecido.

A shade of gray in the autumn sky had been a warning, and that day in May began with a rainy, somewhat icy morning. Although it was a Saturday, Claudio Morresi started his everyday work routine early that day. He drove from Balvanera to the former ESMA and, instead of taking the highway, he turned towards the Palermo lakes. He always preferred that way: he used to train in that green area with his older brother Norberto, who played soccer at the GEBA Club. On his way out, he passed by the River Plate stadium, where he played and won a championship in 1986, ten years after his brother disappeared.

Before he arrived at the Museum and Site of Memory that sits on the building of the former Officers’ Club –where he was a special guest for a new event: the Five O’clock Tour– Morresi spent some time in the building of the Relatives of Disappeared and Detained for Political Reasons. He was coordinating the setting of a permanent exhibition about sports and human rights that had been his regular activity for several months: a running track that tells the story of the Argentine athletes who were victims of state terrorism. In the afternoon, soon before the kick-off of the Champions League final match between Barcelona and Juventus, he went up to the building that housed the most emblematic clandestine center of detention of the Argentine dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. As he waited for five o’clock, he watched the beginning of the match with Lucho, the guide who would join him in the tour, and several of his mates.

As it happened so many times since April 23rd, 1976 –the day Norberto was kidnapped– Claudio felt he was oscillating between different situations. He expresses so without being able to find the right word to explain the feeling that overwhelms him every time he must testify about his personal and family history –which is also a collective one. He comes up with notions like contradiction, ambiguity, but doesn’t feel they are right –those aren’t the words he is looking for. In any case, he feels anguish, sadness, an imprecise yet uncomfortable and stressful internal movement. That unease is overlapped by the conviction that there is no other place he could be when he is summoned to replicate and strengthen the phrase that, he says, “lies within all of us”. That was how he started his Five O’clock Tour.

– The most important thing is that you are here and that you share what you will see and experience here, so what took place here doesn’t happen Nunca Más.

In this building that was originally conceived as a resting and leisure area for Navy officers –a sort of hotel with a restaurant and a living room with pool tables– the Museum’s entrance hall welcomes a handful of visitors. It’s pouring outside.

In the days prior to this event, Claudio came to the Museum several times to organize the May 28th afternoon and choose the spots where he would speak to the visitors as a human rights activist, a former major league soccer player, and a brother of Norberto, who was killed by the dictatorship and remained disappeared for a long time until his body was identified by the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology in late 1989.

It was another of those low atmospheric pressure mornings when he talked to us about his youth. He told us about how after the kidnapping of Norberto, an activist in the Union of High School Students (UES) whom he had joined in a few events, his parents told him to drop out of school and get a job distributing poultry and eggs with his uncle. He also remembered the day when he played for the first time in the ninth league for Huracán, the local team of his neighborhood Parque Patricios, a team he would coach years later. He was 13 and very nervous, but not just because of the match: his brother hadn’t come home the night before. His parents weren’t in the stands, they were searching across the city for any sign of their son. Only his uncle went to the game to stand in for the family, and, as a merciful gesture to help him concentrate, he told him Norberto had already phoned in and that he was fine. But when the match ended, he found out that wasn’t true.

Many of those organization talks were about soccer. The date of the Tour marked the 38th anniversary of the opening game of the 1978 World Cup, which was held in Argentina. Claudio had been there, sensing the River Plate stadium vibrate, feeling angry and impotent before the speech of dictator Jorge Rafael Videla.

The acting president had been cheered by an enthralled crowd. Claudio was 15, he had tickets to the first three matches and the same uncertainty about Norberto.

– “For me, the World Cup happening was a wonderful thing. But it was such an incredible situation, it was hard to understand. Videla giving out a message of peace. I was listening to a murderer and also wishing the best for our national team, while the dictatorship was using that World Cup to hide their crimes. And I hoped the entire stadium would boo him, but we had learned to spot police officers and security agents and I saw them there, spread among the fans. But I don’t think that was the reason why people didn’t boo him. I think people didn’t boo because they were living in a different situation. We had relatives who didn’t even believe my brother had disappeared,” said Morresi that Saturday afternoon in Capuchita, one of the imprisonment areas within the ESMA clandestine center.

Capuchita is a small place, an attic where the water supply tank sits. It’s the spot that has more marks on the walls, and less intervention: there is only an audio system that amplifies the sounds from the outside. Many survivors said they realized they were in ESMA by adding up the different noises: the train, the soccer fields, the airplanes lifting off and landing on the Airport. In Capuchita, Claudio also meant to describe something his family experienced while searching for Norberto, a sequence that shows how the repressive machinery consisted not only in kidnapping and disappearing people but also an exterior criminal thread.

– A person tells my dad that my brother was being held in a place and that they would release him in exchange for a large amount of money. They would have him released and sent to an airport so he could hop on an airplane to Switzerland or Finland.

Claudio and Norberto’s father was Julio Morresi, one of the first men to join the Mothers’ rounds and a historic human rights activist who passed away on March 1st, 2016

Julio demanded proof of life.

– They said: every night your son asks for a green apple. And so, they thought they had found him.

It was a habit of him very few people knew about.

This happened in an apartment in the Caballito area, it’s the place where my father would later give them the money. Since they said they would be travelling to a very cold place, I have in my mind a clear picture –I always tell this part– of my mother knitting sweaters non-stop. But when my father got to the arranged location, Norberto didn’t show up. And when he returned to that Caballito apartment, it had been vacated. Of course, that money was the family’s life savings.

The Tour comes to an end with the same amount of visitors, in a slow walk and an increasingly fluid and afable conversation. Months later, I met Claudio at the Relatives’ building and we spoke about that day. He recalls there were a lot of questions, especially about the ‘78 World Cup.

– A lady was so surprised about that surreal and hypocritical event in which a detained-disappeared person attended Menotti’s press conference and was even featured in a photograph. (Lisandro Raúl Cubas was detained-disappeared at ESMA at the time a picture of him was published in the La Nacion newspaper on May 3rd, 1978. As part of his forced labor, he was sent to interview the coach of Argentina’s national team. The document is part of the permanent exhibition of the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory – Former CCDT&E)

I ask Claudio why, on that day, he came alone.

– Maybe it was because I was already on the site, working, but it is also true that sometimes I rather be alone in these kinds of things. Although I’m sure that if my father were alive today, he would have come, even if I wanted to be alone –he smiles. You just couldn’t tell him not to come, and then you’d be extremely happy that he was there.

Norberto Morresi, the son of Julio and Claudio’s brother, was shot six times and killed on the same day of his abduction, April 23rd 1976, along with his colleague Luis María Roberto, while they were carrying a few issues of the magazine Evita Montonera. They were buried together anonymously in a cemetery in General Villegas. In 1989, 13 years later, the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology exhumed the bodies and determined the shots were fired at close range and the victims had their hands tied behind their backs. Norberto was 17 years old.