Rómulo Ezzayeche is a young Basque Argentine carried south by the Operativo Cóndor hijacking of 1966, who survived the descent beneath the Malvinas, turned occultist under Malnati, and later wrote the story down in Santo Domingo.
| Era | 1966 |
| Affiliation | Sons of Labor Lodge |
| Spanish entry | Rómulo Ezzayeche |
Name
Recorded as Ezzayeche, Hayeche and Etcheche; Ezzayeche is the form the chronicle fixes, pronounced Hayeche in Basque. The surname shares the Basque root of other figures of the gesta, such as the broken sailor and the girls of the coast.
History
He began torn between half-born vocations: football that never happened, journalism that did not take, and the shadow of a deserter soldier on his name. Operativo Cóndor, the hijacking of a plane to the Malvinas on 28 September 1966, carried him into the cold, crystalline land where something far older sleeps under the dispute over flags.
Laura Echegoyen, the blonde from Tres Arroyos, chose him for his Basque side; their romance grew slowly and openly, tolerated by her family.
During the descent he bonded with Malnati, head of the Sons of Labor Lodge in Barracas, which received, funded and housed the group on its return. In its doctrine of white and black lodges and their hidden war he found the first vocation that did not break. The price: he grew irascible, hoarded weapons, and became obsessively protective of Laura, unaware that her grandmother’s line hangs on the fish-men of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, worshipers of Cthulhu.
In the mine under Top Malo’s house, when the Deep Ones rose from the black water, he was slammed against the cave wall, leaving with three battered ribs and no clear memory of how the slaughter ended. In the Stanley infirmary he was questioned handcuffed to a stretcher; the cover story was a pub beating.
On the night of Claromecó Lighthouse, in the dream of the two suns, he saw a dark 1975 office with Federal Police plaques: that of the sorcerer López Rega. A commissioner whose shadow did not match his body asked him to annotate a list of his companions’ names; what he wrote is unknown. He came away with a spell read backward, “Ashes and diamonds”, and the Triple A as a pending debt (Dream Pacts).
He survived the Basilica of Barracas and crossed with the other three, through a box, to the Dominican Republic. He narrates the story, written later in Santo Domingo, knowing what the country did not know in 1966.