My students asked me if I supported Argentina and I said of course I did. I said that the entire history of the decline of the British Empire was about forcing the British to leave. The Irish had done it, so had the Indians, indeed so had the North Americans. The British would never listen to negotiations unless there was force, I said. I tried to get them back to the lesson, but the tension was too great for that. No one could speak of anything else. I found it hard to be alone.

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.