One night in the first week of the conflict the school closed early because only a handful of students turned up. It was warm and I walked home and had a shower and went back down to the street. I thought that I might go to a bar and then to a restaurant, but slowly I began to walk through the city. Everything had changed, there was no tension now in the way people walked and looked at each other. I did not deliberately follow a group and I do not think that there was a stream of people going in one direction. But after a while I could hear shouts and I realized that there was a demonstration in front of the Casa Rosada. As I came nearer, the shouts sounded like huge echoing explosions, and then I saw the crowds and the faces, something I had never seen before and never could have imagined, the look of shocked involvement on each face, and the shouting “Las Malvinas Son Argentinas,” all the voices together, all the voices rising toward the balcony. I stood and watched them and felt the pure wonder of us being here together, people who had been unable to speak to their neighbors, who were afraid on the street, and the venal generals who had been our enemies, all of us now were together for these days, proud of our country, glad to be close to each other and shouting with one voice. Afterward everyone forgot those feelings and there was shame, but during those days in the city we lived in a sort of freedom that we had not known before. We forgot everything in that great first wave of national emotion.

I pushed through the crowd until I could see Galtieri on the balcony. I knew that there had been an American delegation to see him. I knew that Alexander Haig was behind him in the room somewhere and I shouted with the rest of them that the Malvinas were ours. I let my voice rise in the darkness with those of my countrymen and -women. We had come after all these years to possess this square once more, these streets. No matter what happened afterward, I do not believe that anyone who went to those demonstrations has ever regretted it. That night if you found yourself walking along beside a group, you could talk to them. It was something new and strange and I have never forgotten it.