“I would like to live in my homeland. You have to have a homeland, you know? You have to have a country. For me, it is important to have one. What separates me from my country impoverishes me and saddens me. I am desperate to return to Cuba.” Chronologically, these are the last words we hear the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla utter in Pavel Giroud’s film El caso Padilla (The Padilla Affair, 2022). The recording of the poet’s declaration, made when he was already settled in the United States, reflects on the dreadful journey that took him, against his will, into exile from Cuba. Moreover, as suggested by the film’s structure, at the time his voice was recorded, he was close to the end of his life, although the film offers no information as to when and where the recording took place. As we listen to the voice-over, a still photograph of Padilla lingers on-screen, as he stares at us with a slight smile. After the voice-over, a cut introduces a newspaper obituary sharing the news of Padilla’s passing. Then, over a black screen, an intertitle reveals when and where the poet died—in Alabama in 2000.

Interestingly, the intertitle stresses that Padilla had to leave Miami as a sort of second exile for political reasons. Whether Padilla’s second exile is properly framed or not, the film presents exile as an existential and identity-defining state from which there is no escape. As the film nears its end, the combination of Padilla’s words and the intertitle call attention to the impossibility of a return and the existential angst embodied by Cuba both as an unreachable physical place and an itinerant mental and emotional burden that is carried by exiles who live in a constant process of always leaving something behind. Padilla’s enduring desperation to return and urgency to belong to a “country” and a “homeland”—even after having emigrated from the island as the only way to, as he put it, “choose again to live”Footnote ² —parallels the anguish of other Cuban writers and intellectuals who suffered similar persecution to different degrees, and eventually, the same fate as exiles throughout the second half of the twentieth century and the two decades of the present one.

To mention a familiar example, Guillermo Cabrera Infante described his relationship with Cuba in similar terms: as a paradoxical paradise, a dreadful place from which people need to flee but to which they will always yearn to return. Both writers emphasized the impossibility of forgetting (Cabrera Infante’s “persistent memory”) and of surrendering the dream of reattaining a lost state of belonging and connection with the space (Padilla’s desperation to return). Such reflections about Cuba and its meaning from the exile point of view have yet another crucial common feature: They are produced retrospectively from a present time framed by loss. The mourning process from the exile is part of what the historian Michael J. Bustamante calls the “retrospective politics” distinctive to the “Cuban memory wars” since 1959. Although the Cuban official discourse employs retrospective politics to filter and manipulate the past to validate itself in the present, Bustamante notes how the exile also “articulated powerful retrospective frameworks for understanding where the Revolution had gone wrong.”Footnote ³ The retrospective politics produces a critique of the past from the position of a shared traumatic experience. In so doing, this kind of politics organizes a historical narrative that produces an idea of the nation—the paradise lost, the necessity of belonging—and, thus, speaks in the collectivity’s name. These “memory wars” are, according to Bustamante, one of the “defining fronts of the Cuban conflict,” as the Cuban political clashes took the shape of a “battle over the past—to preserve, extend, or contend with its legacies, or to buck its course.”Footnote ⁴ In the Cuban case, history and memory are zones of conflict in which dissident voices have sought to challenge official appropriations and interpretations of the nation’s past.

Pavel Giroud’s El caso Padilla draws on such retrospective politics to enter this battle over the past by using archival footage recorded by Cuban State Security to defy the power of the state’s official archive and its narrativization of history. The documentary uses recently recovered archival footage from Padilla’s forced “confession” of committing fabricated counterrevolutionary activities in 1971 not solely as historical evidence of the political violence proper of the past but also as a tool of historical inquiry and interpretation from and for the present. The relevance of the gesture is not so much that the archival footage Giroud reveals in his film sheds new light on the darkest moments of repression in Cuba as the new kind of interpretation of such repression that it produces. El caso Padilla uses archival footage to shift the attention toward the experience of reception of these images today in the current political climate of repression on the island, creating what Jaimie Baron has called an “archive effect.” The archive effect, Baron argues, stresses how audiences perceive a given set of images and sounds as archival and how their use in a completely different context can generate multiple critical readings that can counter the original intended purpose of the images. El caso Padilla brought back to the center of Cuban intellectual life not only the Padilla affair as a critical moment for recent debates around memory, politics, repression, exile, and the ever-growing push to reassess the history of the past six decades on the island. It also stirred a more comprehensive reflection on archival audiovisual materials, their qualities as historical documents, and the ethics of using or possessing objects that are perceived to be part of collective ownership.

Such a reflection stems from Giroud’s use of the footage against its own initial intended aim. The achievement of this reversal is possible because the original footage is turned into what I propose to call appropriated footage, as a media practice that appropriate images produced by hegemonic political institutions and totalitarian apparatuses to emphasize the political possibilities of the very act of appropriation and rearrangement as a critical reflection about the images’ origins.Footnote ⁵ Recent documentaries have increasingly made available images that the official institutions filmed in places as diverse as the Soviet Union (Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, 2019) and Argentina (Ulises de la Orden’s El juicio/The Trial, 2023) but that were never exhibited as a result of political fluctuations and interests. It is precisely the reluctance of the state to release these images that signals, in the first place, their political potential, as there is an inherent impulse to concealment placed at the core of the footage. In this sense, appropriated footage seems to be defined by the opening of the images to a markedly different field of signification as a result of the appropriation process that counters the concealment logic favored by the initial images’ possessors. The use of appropriated footage, then, tends to negate or at least detach the new material from the original footage’s political ethos by countering the narrowing intent to contain the footage’s content by keeping it under control. The shift in the footage’s ethos underscores that appropriated footage tends to have a high political potential because, at its core, it almost always entails a retrospective quality of revisiting the past to reassess history and crucial political junctures by revealing information previously intended to be never accessed. In the case of El caso Padilla, Giroud appropriated the footage initially recorded by the Cuban state apparatus to produce an alternative narrative about the past, an organized, coherent account of authoritarianism and political violence in recent Cuban history. In so doing, the film reflects on what turned the island into that persistent memory of what is lost and from where the only option is to escape.

Once a prominent figure within revolutionary Cuban politics and literature and internationally renowned for his poetry, Padilla shifted away from the enthusiast for and blind supporter of the Revolution as the 1960s passed, and he traveled through Europe, visiting several socialist countries. In 1968, the publication of his poetry book Fuera del juego (Sent Off the Field) sparked a heated debate as the volume was awarded the Julián del Casal Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC, National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba). The UNEAC leaders and censors protested the prize and unilaterally attached to the book a declaration condemning the jury’s decision to award the prize to Fuera del juego due to political faults. Padilla subsequently lost his job and was ostracized from Cuban intellectual life.

By the 1970s, the government went further in its hard-line cultural policies and repressive strategies and took radical actions against intellectual figures deviating from official ideological lines. One of the most notorious cases was the series of events that would later be known as the Padilla affair, when, on March 20, 1971, Padilla and his wife, the poet Belkis Cuza Malé, were imprisoned, accused of counterrevolutionary ideological attitudes in their writings and in their public opinions on the direction the Cuban government was taking. Padilla remained detained in a State Security facility known as Villa Marista without any official charge until April 25. During that month, prominent left-leaning intellectuals from around the world sent a letter to the Cuban government protesting the poet’s imprisonment, creating fractions between key international supporters of the revolutionary government and the increasingly repressive Cuban state apparatus, thus eroding the benevolent image of itself that the Revolution was so invested in promoting and maintaining.Footnote ⁶ As international pressure mounted, the Fidel Castro–led regime sought to find a way out of the international scrutiny while trying to salvage its facade as a progressive and democratic political process. The plan was to arrange a seemingly open and democratic discussion with Cuban writers and intellectuals to display the supposed freedom proper of the Cuban revolutionary process. Thus, on April 27, just two days after his release, Padilla was forced to attend the meeting organized by the secret police and the Cuban government.

The “show” was organized around Padilla’s lengthy address to his “comrades” to “confess” his faults as a counterrevolutionary. The repressive apparatus expected him to acknowledge that his attitude was damaging the Revolution and to publicly accuse those friends and fellow intellectuals close to him who were engaging in the same political and literary “errors.” According to the Cuban historian Rafael Rojas, it is widely accepted among Cuban intellectuals and scholars that the meeting was a scripted performance.Footnote ⁷ Tellingly, the staging of the meeting involved a cinematic mise-en-scène as undisclosed members of the Instituto de Artes e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC, Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry) set up 16mm cameras and sound recorders in the room to document the event and then edited the material. However, as one might expect, the “spectacle” backfired, and the meeting turned out to be shameful evidence of the inner workings of state repression and its devastating and dehumanizing consequences for Padilla.

Although the recording of the sweaty, defenseless poet admitting to his nonexistent “crimes” and accusing his friends and family of being counterrevolutionaries was never made public, written chronicles and witnesses’ testimonies were enough to unveil the Cuban state apparatus’s procedures to extract “confessions.” The footage was shelved and buried at the ICAIC facilities for fifty years until Giroud’s documentary mysteriously recovered it, and it is still unclear how the filmmaker managed to access the material and take it outside Cuba. Moreover, for the most dramatic moments that expose the poet progressively crumbling as he carries his mea culpa and blends himself with the part he was commanded to represent, Giroud included other archival documents to provide context for the audience. Those documents include newspaper excerpts, a French television program in which the poet was interviewed, and recorded interventions by figures such as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Edwards, Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Julio Cortázar.

Because the film focuses only on Padilla’s confession, offering glimpses about larger issues of the entire “affair” as supporting evidence, a tension arises in the relationship between the intent of the film and its very structure. By naming the film after the complex set of events and circumstances that even today remain not fully clarified, the interplay between the particular, or the confession, and the general, or the affair and the Cuban government’s persecution of dissenting voices, highlights not only the informed spectator Giroud envisioned, even as he tried to make the film as universal as possible, but also the appropriated footage attempt to revert the original purpose of the images. The title of the film proposes a metonymic procedure: naming the part (the confession) after the whole (state repression in Cuba) turns the event into a larger reflection of the revolution’s long history of state violence using Padilla’s case as an archetypal example that provides an insight into general modus operandi of the state’s repressive apparatus and surveillance that could be applied to most of the cases of political persecution then and now.

If the archival document is the backbone of the film, the editing of the original footage, the reordering of documents, and the nonlinear timeline produce a strong sense of intervention and appropriation by the filmmaker to (mis)use Padilla’s voice and circumstances to produce new meanings and a retrospective political message. The film limits itself to ordering archival footage and contextual information with minimal intervention to highlight the power of the images as compelling political statements about the functioning of the repressive logic of the Cuban government, using a set of recordings produced and archived by that very government. According to Jaimie Baron, audiovisual appropriations “are often compelling precisely because the recordings they find and appropriate seem to have been ‘misused,’ intended for another purpose. Recordings that we recognize as having been taken from one context of use and placed in another may carry with them a trace of their earlier intended uses even as they are now mobilized for a different intent.”Footnote ⁸ The (mis)use of the archival footage in El caso Padilla underscores the source of the material being used and its possible journey out of Cuba as archival material in itself. The compilation of the footage from 1971, alongside the other documents that offer context about the Padilla affair, sheds light not only on the initial event recorded—the meeting—but also on the journey of that recording as an archive of censorship and ownership. The images, thus (mis)used and taken out of context, point to the very fact that the state’s repressive apparatus produced them in the first place.

The footage bears traces of its earlier use—both as a record of the breaking of a critical voice and as part of a State Security file on a dissident poet—while now offering a political reflection on its original intended use. The reflection, which frames the original purpose as a misuse, raises the issue of the “memory war” in relation to the cinematic image, highlighting how this mediated take on the past articulates retrospective politics. Any newness attached to the appropriated footage that El caso Padilla uses is ambiguous. The Padilla affair was widely reported and discussed by prominent intellectuals in influential media outlets in the Western world. Even the meeting had been recounted by many participants throughout the years, including Padilla himself in his memoir La mala memoria. Such ambiguity about the newness of the footage begs the question of what the audiovisual record of the meeting brings to the Cuban memory wars and, more generally, what effect these never-seen-before objects have on our perception of the past.

The answer seems to be twofold. The indexicality of the poet’s image undergoing the traumatic experience adds a human depth to the events that is impossible to capture in any other type of record. Indeed, as Baron puts it, through archival audiovisual, “the past seems to become not only knowable but also perceptible in these images. They offer us an experience of pastness, an experience that no written word can quite match.”Footnote ⁹ Hence, the first political effect of the appropriation of footage in El caso Padilla is its articulation of a different kind of retrospective politics that generates a connection with the past rooted in knowledge and evidence. While the written accounts of the meeting are not less accurate, they pertain to a different order of reality. The appropriated footage offers a window into the past by showing Padilla’s suffering through the lens of a hostile camera set up by the oppressor. Appropriated footage follows a similar path to what Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out about found footage, because “found footage films do not combine material but compose material into a new coherent totality or unity, and thus tends to create new contexts for the images, which in turn allows for new associations” (original emphasis).Footnote ¹⁰ El caso Padilla composes a new unity that deviates from the organization of the original material, creating a critical framework for the reception of the images and meticulously scrutinizing the repressive practices of the Cuban government as an act of political resistance.

Most of the footage from the meeting is composed of obsessive close-ups of the poet and the microphone he used, combined with occasional pans to the audience, often followed by zoom-ins that seek to record the individual reactions of the participants. The film’s editing consistently underscored these close-ups and the original footage’s obsessive framing of faces and emotional reactions. In so doing, El caso Padilla unveils a different account of the meeting, that of the state apparatus that was concerned with every detail of the mise-en-scène and saw in the possibility of recording the meeting a chance to extract information about other possible “enemies” of the Cuban Revolution. The selection of shots and how they are spliced together tells the retrospective story of the fixation of the Cuban secret police on surveilling every aspect of social life, including faces and reactions to Padilla’s “confession” as well as the heightened emotional expectations of the participants in the meeting about the impending denunciations the poet was forced to execute.

In contrast, Giroud’s political appropriation of the archival footage calls attention to the presence of the recording apparatus, producing what Jean-Louis Baudry called a “knowledge effect” that brings the work being done by the apparatus to the center of the cinematic image, thus exposing its ideology and the falseness of a universal point of view.Footnote ¹¹ The images of the meeting abound in shots of camerapeople moving through the audience, cameras set up on tripods, microphones, and tape recorders, revealing—perhaps for the first time in Cuban media history—the inner workings of the surveillance machine built by the revolutionary government from its earliest days. The film’s editing cleverly selects these moments that could have been easily discarded in the process of bringing the three-hour-long meeting to a seventy-eight minute film and transforms the seemingly banal details—tripods, someone walking across the room with a camera in hand, speakers moving the microphone so the tape recorder could capture the sound with clarity—into relevant pieces of information, producing new (political) readings of the original context in which those images were recorded and directing our perception to previously unexplored aspects of the “confession.”

Close-ups and the presence of recording technology hint at the traces of the footage’s previously intended uses. However, once they are rearranged in postproduction, these images stress the openness of the archive, ultimately confirming the fears of the censors who kept the footage buried for five decades: access to and possession of archival materials is a political break, allowing the renarrativization not only of the past but also of history as a disputed field mediated by retrospective politics. This is partly possible due to the “intentional disparity,” to borrow Baron’s words, that lies at the center of appropriated footage. In addition to their sense of pastness and belonging to a relative out-of-reach moment—the sense of “oldness” that comes with the very notion of the archive—these images draw attention to the different “intent” behind their original production. It is this contradiction of the audiovisual archive that allows the emergence of a political contrast and, thus, an active critique of the very existence of such images. If such “intentional disparity,” “based on our perception of a previous intention ascribed to and (seemingly) inscribed within the archival document,” arises from the footage of Padilla’s confession as an indexical trace of the shameful event, then the images ostensibly carry within them the inscription of its producer and original surveillance-like purpose.Footnote ¹² In this manner, the attention is turned to the precondition for the existence of the footage: the authoritarian machine that staged the recording and shelved it for five decades.

However, how did the footage end up serving the exact opposite of the intent it was created to fulfill? How did the Cuban government let the indexical trace of one of its most repressive moments escape from its control? It is still unclear how Giroud acquired the footage, and he even confirmed in an interview with Andrés Rodríguez for the English edition of the Spanish newspaper El País that his silence was part of the deal that made possible access to the material: “I was given a copy of one of these Betamax videotapes, but I was asked not to disclose my source.”Footnote ¹³ After the film’s release, the mystery of how such sensitive material leaked from inside Cuban institutions sparked a heated debate among scholars, journalists, and the general public alike. The polemic was not so much about the source of the leaking but about the possession of the archival materials, especially due to Giroud’s reluctance to make public the footage, given undisclosed agreements with unknown parties that established a timeline for the release of the original images of Padilla’s mea culpa in exchange for the materials.Footnote ¹⁴ As Giroud held the footage in his possession until the “right moment” arrived, Cubans debated to what extent he had the right over the material to do so and who had imposed such conditions—conditions that seemingly benefited the circulation of his film and placed his personal interests over the collective memory of the country. Giroud argued that his film needed to circulate first and that he had to comply with the agreements that, according to him, made the availability of the footage for his film possible in the first place.

However, just one day after an interview with the independent media outlet 23yFlagler, in which Giroud vehemently defended his position to keep the original footage away from the public eye, the Cuban writer Jorge Ferrer posted a version of the videos on YouTube. In his blog El tono de la voz, Ferrer declared: “I am sharing them because the person who shared them with me has authorized me to do so. And because our shared history obliges me to do so, a shared history that is both mine and everyone’s.”Footnote ¹⁵ The emphasis on the “shared history” and the obligation to share the footage with the broader Cuban community as the rightful owner of these audiovisual archival objects that documented the history of political violence on the island was a conspicuous reference to Giroud’s secretive dealings with whoever possessed the footage and imposed conditions on its release to the public. New questions were raised: Was this material made digitally available the same as the footage Giroud possessed? Was it truly impossible for Giroud to share the images? To what extent was the filmmaker pushed (at best) into an unfavorable position by some anonymous, obscure figure inside the island? Regardless of any speculative answer to these questions that lingered in the Cuban public sphere for weeks, the contradiction between the strict limitations explained by Giroud and the swiftness with which a digital version of the material found its way to escape its gatekeepers call attention to issues of ethics, ownership, and the circulation of audiovisual archival objects in the digital era.

The footage that can still be found on YouTube does not correspond with the fragments restored and used by Giroud in El caso Padilla, and the filmmaker has not made available the material he possesses for public access, calling attention to the undisclosed terms he maintains he agreed with his source three years after the film’s release. However, a few aspects of the fragments made available by Ferrer provide a glimpse into certain strategies and characteristics of the original footage. The YouTube images of the “confession” are incomplete in significant ways. Key interventions are missing for unexplained reasons. Among the key moments edited out of this version of the material and used by Giroud in his films are Belkis Cuza Malé’s address to the audience, the full hostile exchange between the writer Norberto Fuentes and Armando Quesada (a military officer, director of the cultural publication El Caimán Barbudo, and a brutal censor that led the persecution and repression of intellectuals with “ideological problems” at the time), the key moments in which Padilla denounced his friends and forced them to follow him in “confessing” to counterrevolutionary attitudes, and other intellectuals, like the writer Manuel Díaz Martínez, who spoke at the meeting. The missing portions coincide with many of the key moments of the meeting that can only be seen in the film. The interplay of the two sets of images prompts us to think about the extent to which there is a connection between the sources and whether the material made available was curated to keep the most damaging moments of the meeting—and the most impactful from Giroud’s film point of view—under control and exclusive to Giroud’s film. It would seem that the prompt circulation of the incomplete footage aims at solving the problem of the questionable handling of the material by Giroud and, at the same time, to keep his film’s relevance intact. As with all coincidences, it is hard to draw a definitive interpretation of the “spontaneous” convergence of Giroud’s strong refusal to share the images and their release in such a short period of time, but in any case, it benefited Giroud, because pressure eased on him, and as I type these words, he has managed to control and keep the original material out of the public eye.

The journey of the very footage at the center of the controversy shows the new conditions in which these objects exist and circulate. Recorded by ICAIC technicians following orders of the repressive apparatus and supposedly only intended for the eyes of the high ranks of the Cuban government, the footage was not screened until the 1990s, when, according to some rumors corroborated by Giroud in his interview with El País, it was shown as part of a set of meetings that Communist Party officials held with younger Cubans as the crisis of that decade approached. Then, the footage was again off the public’s radar until Giroud acquired it in the form of Betamax copies made of the original 16mm footage and used it in his film.

Technical aspects of the original footage—which can be observed both in Giroud’s film and the YouTube copy—and how it was filmed point to its original use and intent and, simultaneously, to the failures of those intents. The meeting was shot on 16mm, in a 4:3 format, and direct sound was recorded with a portable tape recorder seen in the film by Padilla’s microphone. These conditions of recording hint at ICAIC’s common practices of documentary filmmaking at the time that give the film a newsreel look and feel. A clear staging and emphasis on the mise-en-scène of the event, revealed by the use of two cameras situated on each side of the room and the editing that alternates between the footage recorded by those cameras, renders visible the workings of the repressive apparatus and its presence behind the act of organizing and shooting the meeting. The controlled environment and the arrangement of the room are clearly designed to minimize spontaneity and interventions that would reframe the event into a democratic and open discussion about repression and ideological persecution on the island. The desire to control and register all aspects of both social and private life is translated in the footage in deliberate framing and shot scale decisions. The profuse utilization of close-ups and medium close-ups appears to be an attempt to penetrate the participants’ reactions and thoughts about what they were witnessing. The scale of the shots betrays a belief in the cinematic medium to capture evidence of any political disagreement made visible by uncontrolled bodily and facial reactions to the events as an archive of the ideological positions of the bodies being recorded. The indexical trace of those expressions would be added to each of the participants’ files kept by State Security. However, there is yet another, uncontrolled implication arising from this anonymous choice—a third meaning, as Roland Barthes would have it.Footnote ¹⁶ The close-ups of Padilla, the captivation of the cameras with his face, gestures, hands, the handkerchief he uses to dry the sweat from his face, accentuate the sense of the act as a performance, as a part of a spectacle in which the poet is well aware he had to star and satisfy the demands of his captors. Padilla fascinates the camera because he becomes a cinematic product in himself, a performer who understands the conventions of live theater and the moving image, guiding both shows at the same time. In so doing, the poet not only ensured the images matched the desires of the repressive apparatus. He cast a fascinating spell on the cameras, turning them into his tools to amplify a fake conversion, a fake auto de fé in front of his inquisitors, making his performance irresistible for the camera operators. And they walked willingly into the poet’s trap. In effect, the close-ups do not document a conversion but the emotional and psychological violence of repression, ultimately shedding light on the true project of the government: banning independent critical thinking and creation from Cuban intellectual life. Poets were not needed.

Finally, the footage’s journey from absolute control to near-total availability underscores the challenge of containing information in the digital age, which holds both emancipatory potential and inherent risks. Unrestrained information flow and lack of privacy can have devastating impacts. How Giroud used the found footage also reveals something about contemporary filmmaking practices and the evolving value and quality of the cinematic image. As Elsaesser puts it: “Whereas analog filmmaking centered on production, and seeks to capture reality in order to harness it into a representation, digital filmmaking, conceived from postproduction, proceeds by way of extracting reality, in order to harvest it. Instead of disclosure and revelation … postproduction treats the world as data to be processed or mined, as raw materials and resources to be exploited.”Footnote ¹⁷ Giroud’s treatment of the Betamax tapes containing the original footage as data to be “processed and mined” articulates the question of ownership in commercial terms rather than the traditional archival approach of gatekeeping and controlling access to a given object. Giroud’s concerns seemed to be that the actual footage could have eclipsed his film, rendering it irrelevant. This logic suggests that access to audiovisual archival objects that, in turn, make possible the existence of found footage films has increasingly shifted from a matter of originality in the organization and composition of meanings to a matter of timing, a commercial competition between the original footage and the recomposed product. To “harvest” reality and the past to articulate a retrospective political intervention in the Cuban memory war, Giroud first had to agree to a certain kind of timed censorship, holding information from the public to make his product profitable—be it politically, ideologically, or (the less likely option) financially profitable. Such a scenario points to an increasingly common paradox: the political potential of the cinematic image can be co-opted by market logic and commercial imperatives of owning and selling—through various forms of exchange—something unique, for which restricted access only adds to its value.

Making political films today should resist “harvesting” reality and the market logic that constrains access to knowledge. If the moving image is a powerful political tool, it must first be shown if it is to articulate any political resistance and dissidence. In Padilla’s words—and appropriating the verses that Giroud selected to open El caso Padilla: “Tell the truth./At least tell your truth./And then/let things go their way.”Footnote ¹⁸