Against a historical backdrop of military intervention, the period 1973-1983 was characterised by terror both before and after the military coup in March 1976. Buenos Aires, the South American city said to most resemble New York should have been redolent with night life. Instead, it was pungent with night death as the ubiquitous Ford Cortina favoured by the military death squads roamed the streets in search of victims to be hauled off to the School of Mechanics for a meeting with 'Susan', the name given to the cattle prod used for administering electric shocks to the genitalia of prisoners. The process of disappearing 'always happened at the hour of the day when dawn is just barely breaking.'
I decided that I could indeed do something: I could refuse to forget . . . this novel burst forth, surging up from my deepest being, where it had been stored in memories.
The 23rd March 1976 proved a horrendous day for Berta, a medical student. She watched as her boy friend Atilla, a trade union activist with the Tucumán Federation of Sugar Cane Workers and a Peronist, was hurled to his death by soldiers. 'Because of his beliefs, he had to fly off a balcony.' Crushed by having to walk away from the scene without revealing that she knew the murdered man, she fumed at him for not having listened to her advice, to get away from it all, to abandon any hope in justice.
Unlike sixteen of her friends and colleagues Berta had never joined a political party or guerrilla organisation. Not for her the path of eighteen year old Ana Marie Gonzales who killed the chief of police with a bomb concealed in an alarm clock as he slept in his bed. Poverty at home shaped her single mindedness to succeed in achieving her degree. It was the best a rural woman could do. Poverty, according to her mother was something that the individual was responsible for, not the military junta represented by the army officer her mother would vote for.
The government of national reconstruction began its mission of national destruction as soon as it came to power. Its death squads had been carrying out political assassinations for the three years previous. 'It seemed Peronism had finally come to an end and that from now on to call yourself a Peronist would be to say a bad word.' Even Jehovah's Witnesses had been outlawed. Andrew Graham-Yooll gave his book the title A State Of Fear, for reasons readily understandable; a state where 'when people are taken away, they never return, but they don't show up dead either or in the hospital.' If they reappeared it was usually in the mouth of the River Plate estuary, where they had been hurled from helicopters after being paralysed with drugs and their stomachs cut open so fish could feed on them.
In order to avoid ending up as fish food food Berta fled into hiding. She posed no threat but the military believed she had knowledge of the whereabouts of union funds her late boyfriend had been responsible for. She goes off to stay with an aunt, Avelina, and becomes immersed in the day to challenges of merely living. Her internal exile was lived under the dark shadow cast by the regime of Jorge Videla which blocked out the sunlight. There was always a chill.
A novel born in the Dirty War, it complements non-fiction work such as that produced by Jacobo Timerman in his memoir, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. Gloria Lisé masters the art of writing beautifully about an ugly subject.
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