In September of 1982, Ricardo Melogno murdered four taxi drivers in Buenos Aires. The crimes happened in close physical proximity and over a short period of time, but to this day, neither the perpetrator nor the many teams of experts who have treated Melogno have been able to discern a motive. Writer Carlos Busqued spent over two years interviewing Melogno and compiling the material that would eventually become Magnetized, published in English for the first time in June 2020 by Catapult.
The novel’s translator, Samuel Rutter, exchanged a series of emails with the author that touched on the writer’s process, the singularities of Ricardo’s case, and life in Buenos Aires under quarantine.
Samuel Rutter (SR): How did you first learn about Ricardo Melogno, and is his case still well-known in Argentina today?
Carlos Busqued (CB): No, quite the opposite actually—it was quite a sensation when it first happened, but the news cycle at the time didn’t cover it for long. Ricardo committed the murders right at the end of the last military dictatorship—two months after Argentina lost the Falklands War—so his crimes were quickly buried under an avalanche of news and exposés that were even more macabre.
I was a kid at the time of the murders and never heard about them back then—I lived in Chaco, a province in the far north of Argentina, so we didn’t read the press from Buenos Aires so much, and we only got some of their TV channels. So it was many years later that I stumbled across Ricardo’s case by chance. I got to know someone who worked on his treatment team, and I noticed that on the occasions I joined the team for after-work drinks or a birthday party, they tended to speak of Ricardo with empathy and curiosity. Every now and again they’d speculate about one or another detail of the crimes, which piqued my interest right away.
SR: What drew your attention to the case as a writer? Was there something in particular that inspired you to write about it?
CB: It was the strangeness of the whole thing, the fact that there really was no motive. Even today there is very little understanding of crimes with no known motive, and barely any research on the subject. A person who commits four identical murders is not acting randomly, but even so, neither Ricardo nor the numerous teams of specialists who examined him have been able to come up with a motive. Broadly speaking, when someone kills, they do it to survive. How that applies to Ricardo’s mindset when he committed the murders remains a complete mystery.
SR: Can you outline your process for this book, from your first general ideas, to arranging to meet with Ricardo and interviewing him, and finally writing the book itself?
CB: My first meeting with Ricardo was just so we could get to know each other and see what the situation was. I’ve always been interested in serial killers, and I’d read a great deal about them—I even hosted a radio program about them many years ago—so this was an opportunity to be face to face with someone who had actually been through this singular experience. At that stage I hadn’t even looked into the facts of the murders; it was only after our first few interviews that I began digging into newspaper archives. I was very interested in the opportunity to reconstruct the memory of such a unique individual, someone shrouded in an aura of mystery. The idea to turn that experience into a book came not long after.
Because there was a possible therapeutic angle to my project, gaining access and permission to meet with Ricardo was much less of a hassle than I thought it would be. We would meet at the hospital, in a kind of visiting room. They left me alone with Ricardo and we’d chat while drinking yerba mate and chain-smoking cigarettes. The meetings would last for four hours, and we got together every two weeks over the course of nearly two years. There was a lot of rambling in those sessions, so it took a lot of work to distill the interviews into the form they take in the book. The book is composed of Ricardo’s words, but they had to be heavily edited so that the reader can follow along. Each of the responses as they appear in the book are pulled from several different answers or references to the same topics, which I grouped together afterwards. And the questions I asked weren’t as brief as they appear in the book either; we had long, looping conversations, but I had to condense everything to create a story that readers could follow coherently without losing interest.
SR: What was it like to go into the prison and sit down opposite Ricardo for those interviews?
CB: The fact that we met in a hospital rather than the prison made it a lot easier. But it’s really hard to describe what you feel when you sit down with Ricardo. He’s friendly and it always seems like he’s ready to give a sincere answer. I never felt uncomfortable or afraid around him—even though we were always alone—and I guess it was inevitable that in the end I came to get along with him. He’s always kind of distant, and you can feel a sort of strangeness emanating from him. But I think that strangeness is hard-wired; it’s his way of being in the world.
SR: Along with this fascinating portrait of Ricardo Melogno, the book also provides a glimpse into the prison system and how it works in Argentina. Was this something you also set out to examine?
CB: Not specifically. I made an effort to avoid getting too deep into what in Argentina is called la cosa tumbera (prison culture) because that’s not the focus of the book. My vision for Magnetized was to recount Ricardo’s life. Most of his life unfolded behind bars, so that’s why prisons are so prevalent. It’s a description, rather than a denunciation; if that description presents a system that is cruel and deserves to be denounced, so be it, but that’s not the point of the book. In fact, I made the decision to leave out many interesting anecdotes from prison life, like the strange characters that Ricardo met in Unit 20 of the Borda Hospital. A lot of these were amusing little episodes, but they distracted from the book’s themes, so I left them out.
SR: From the stories told by Ricardo, and your interviews with him, it seems like the very notion of what it means to be “crazy” is put under the microscope. I’m thinking, for example, of the interview with Ricardo’s psychiatrist, who admits that every week, she goes to a shooting range and fires off several rounds of bullets into a target, all the while imagining the face of someone she knows.
CB: That’s part of the book’s core. A “monster” is made of the very same stuff as people who are, in theory, completely normal. We’re much closer to being monsters than we’d like to admit. By turning individuals into monsters, we save ourselves from being one.
SR: While I was translating the book, I remember you resisted the term “serial killer,” especially in the sense it is used in the United States. Could you speak a little about that? In your opinion, is Ricardo Melogno a serial killer?
CB: I don’t think of Ricardo as a serial killer. On the surface, there are certain details that might lead someone to think he is—four murders, each separated by a lapse in time, similar victims—but I’m more inclined to say that he committed the same murder, four times over. And the other major factor that separates him from serial killers is the lack of motive. A serial killer is actively doing something, while Ricardo’s behavior was always marked by a sort of absence of consciousness.
I think the term “serial killer” is counterproductive when applied to Ricardo because, strictly speaking, it’s almost a term that applies only to a certain dark corner of the American identity. There are serial killers all over the world, but when we think of the figure of the serial killer we think straightaway of Ted Bundy, of Ed Kemper, the famous American cases which tend to have grotesque and almost cinematic characteristics. What makes Ricardo’s case interesting is the rarity, the strangeness, the “statistically infrequent” nature of his crimes, as his psychiatrist called it. If you were to put together a graph of unusual murderers, Ricardo would still be off the chart, statistically speaking.
SR: Are you still in touch with Ricardo? Have there been any developments in his situation?
CB: Yes, we’re still in touch. One of the anomalies of Ricardo’s case is that he has served his full sentence, but still hasn’t been released. Almost a whole year went by after he completed his sentence and he remained in prison while the authorities tried to figure out what to do with him. Eventually he was transferred to a “civilian” psychiatric facility and I was able to visit him there. We were even allowed to eat a restaurant nearby, as long as we had a medical professional with us. Because of the quarantine, I haven’t been able to see him recently, but we still speak on the phone. He’s doing better. He’s still locked up, but in much better conditions.
SR: Has he read your book?
CB: Of course Ricardo has read the book! He thought it was pretty good, and he even made a couple of corrections—typos, things like that.
SR: How are you dealing with life in quarantine in Buenos Aires?
CB: I’m lucky that for now, I still have a job—I teach at a university, and classes have moved online. But I’m not sure how sustainable the situation will be, going forward. Having said that, I’m also delighted to not have to go outside. It’s quite relaxing to get up in the morning and know that I won’t have to talk to anyone all day long. When this is all over, going back to having conversations with people and having to pretend I’m interested in what they’re saying is going to be very difficult. I can’t rule out the possibility that it might send me into a deep depression.
SR: And what about your writing? I hear you are working on a new novel—can you tell me a little bit about that?
CB: Yes, I am working on a new novel, but at this stage I don’t how much I can say about it without causing confusion. It’s about esoteric Nazism, existential angst, and militants from the end of the world. I’m hoping to finish it soon, then I can kick back and relax.
Carlos Busqued was born in Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, Chaco (Argentina) in 1970 and lives in Buenos Aires. His first novel, Under This Terrible Sun, was a finalist for the 2008 Herralde Prize and later adapted for film (El Otro Hermano, Adrian Caetano, 2017). Magnetized is his second book.
Samuel Rutter is a writer and translator from Melbourne, Australia.
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