One Sunday in 1998 I read a note about the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. 1998: It was possible not to know who they were and I just found out. I asked for the number of one of the interviewees at the Information Service: my parents had been missing for twenty-one years, but suddenly I couldn’t wait until Monday to call the office.
In Anthropologists a certain Maco received me. She said my first and last name and, without further ado, she asked me if she was Roberto’s daughter. Am. They kidnapped us in February 1977; I was two months old and the mob left me at my maternal grandparents’ house who didn’t tell me the truth because they wanted to spare me the bad blood and because they were convinced that they were going to find them. It was not difficult not to talk about it in the 1980s, not in Adrogué, not in my nun school, not to the overadjusted girl in which I became aware of a tragedy whose details I did not know but whose dimensions were clear to me.
I never asked and, instead, I started telling stories, the first ones were the ones I told myself. I made my parents spies, farmers, fans of The Beatles of those who were seen on TV and among those who looked for them. But I never asked, and since I didn’t ask, no one offered answers until, when I was ten years old, my teacher gave me an ultimatum. My grandmother took me for a walk on the beach and told me: they were kidnapped. I didn’t ask then either, I saw how her words burned her soul and she would have covered her mouth. My grandfather died shortly after, at the hands of Menem’s pardons.
It’s not that they didn’t tell me about them, they just left out the ending. I grew up in my mother’s house, among her photos, her books and records; I was raised by her parents and her sisters. There were loving and brief memories of my dad; his father had abandoned him as a child, his mother and his sister had had to go into exile; We adore each other but we rarely see each other. Nobody had much to say about Roberto Coria.
But Maco asked me if I was his daughter. He knew the complaints by heart and twenty-one years after the kidnapping he heard my name and recognized the woman he had become his baby. That afternoon he showed me a file thanks to which I learned about my parents’ militancy and also that they had spent their captivity on Vesuvius. I also found out that it was not possible to compare the blood sample they took from me with the remains of the disappeared that they had already recovered. 1998: the technology with which later all this would become easier did not exist. Each analysis was so expensive that they could be right there without their identity being known for a long time (perhaps ever) in the absence of a hypothesis leading to them.
Where did the information they gave me come from? From the letter of a former Uruguayan detainee, a certain Juan. Maco looked for it, gave me the original and kept a copy. The sender was from Amsterdam.
Amsterdam. It was full one-on-one and I had just received back pay for a scholarship. The afternoon my wallet was stolen, I had already bought my ticket and placed too many expectations on that trip to turn back even though the address of this Juan (on the envelope of his letter, of which there was no copy) had been lost with the rest of my stuff. Before traveling I met a Vesuvius survivor named Ana. I wanted to know if I had seen my parents. No. Neither from Juan: Don’t go. Ana saw no reason to believe someone nobody knew anything about. Although I promised her that she would think about it, I never doubted, she would leave anyway.
On the eve of my departure he remembered him: the day they took him to where the women were so that he could say goodbye to his wife before they released him and she was killed. Ana’s blessing came when I already had my backpacking gear ready.
In Paris, I first contacted María Laura, whose testimony I had read in a book by Gelman. She and her sister had been raised by her maternal grandmother after her father’s disappearance and her mother’s PEN incarceration. She had told them that her father had abandoned them and that her mother had gone mad because of her. With democracy, the mother had taken the little sisters to France and María Laura, now an adult, won a scholarship to study in Argentina, but in reality she was traveling to look for the remains of her father. She found them; They held a wake for him in the town where the lying grandmother had raised them.
We met at an event called before the possibility of trying Pinochet in London. I wanted to talk to her, I thought she could teach me how to look for Juan. I finished the day at her house, listening to a story riddled with magical elements that her father had left for her to find: when in an archive, fed up with turning pages behind the false news of the «fall in combat», she rummaged through a folder from which the desired cut was released; the dream in which she spoke to a bible character whose name she led to her father’s in the NN register of the cemetery. There was nothing esoteric in my search. Would the usual traces be enough to find Juan?
Once in Amsterdam I went to the post office to ask for help to find a man whose name I only knew. The employees looked at me strangely and suggested that I look in the phone book: dozens of volumes since I didn’t know where Juan lived. It took me a few hours to give up, impossible to read Dutch names and names of such strangers.
My psychologist had given me the phone number of a colleague: I settled into her chair and talked non-stop until she interrupted me Ah, Juan! She had taken care of him when he arrived in the Netherlands in 1977. She didn’t say any more and searched the files for a telephone number that a while later I verified out of service.
Next attempt, the Center for Latin American Studies. Argentines, Chileans, Uruguayans and Dutch celebrating: it had just been decided that Pinochet would be tried in England. It was like being teleported from Europe to an assembly of SONS, only I didn’t know anyone and nobody knew Juan.
Before I left, I asked permission to use a computer to check my mail and thus save myself the fortune that that meant then. I went to a room where there were several, only one occupied. I saluted and sat across from another. In my box, infinite messages of encouragement: everyone knew that I had arrived in Amsterdam.
The man behind me turned to give me his handkerchief. His name was Pablo, he was Chilean and had gone into exile with his parents. He told him my story and he offered me help, we agreed to meet later. So that she would not be alone, he gave me the phone number of an Argentine exile friend of his, Raquel.
I left a giddy message on his answering machine: who was I and what was I doing in town; I didn’t know why I was calling but, in case there was someone willing to answer the same, I left my hostel phone number. The rest of the day I explored the labyrinth of canals, the squandering of tulips, the sweet smell of marijuana at that time so rare in Buenos Aires.
The night, at Pablo’s, was a marathon of calls to Uruguayan exiles. The first said that Juan was in Barcelona, with his daughter. He didn’t have the address, but he did have the girl’s name. Just in case Pablo made another call: No, he is in Madrid, with his son. One more call and apparently he was in Belgium. Hours of going back and forth until finally the majority affirmed that Juan had returned to Montevideo. He would have to try again from Buenos Aires, it was a kind of disappointment. We drank Chilean wine and Pablo accompanied me to take the tram.
A message from Raquel was waiting for me at the hostel. I called; she hadn’t understood anything, she wanted me to explain, she also interrupted me Ah, Juan! His family and his family had shared shelter when they arrived in the Netherlands.
It didn’t take much to convince me to stay to meet her, her and her daughters, who had their father missing and were curious about my story. I liked that my story mattered to someone. They welcomed me, they took me everywhere on the seat of her bike, they listened to me with fascination. Raquel got me Juan’s phone number in Montevideo and I called him from Buenos Aires, but I verified that he was not a subscriber in service. Fed up, I decided to forget it.
A year later I was preparing a paper for the university with two friends; she had been joined by a girl we knew less about. We were discussing a text by Foucault, someone mentioned the captivity of the protagonist of Garaje Olimpo and I made a comment about the dimensions of my father’s cell; The girl asked me how she knew these details and I explained that she had read it in the letter of a survivor whom she had gone to look for in the Netherlands but who was in Montevideo. The girl said: It’s not Juan, is it? Her boyfriend, Rodrigo, was Juan’s lawyer, but his agenda had been stolen. We had to wait for him to call.
And called. Three months later Juan called, his lawyer told him about me and he agreed to see me. Rodrigo told me not to get my hopes up, Juan spoke little: the trauma, yes, but he was also a little rudimentary guy; I assured him that he did not expect anything.
We meet in a bar. The Juan I had imagined was nothing like that stooped man who shuffled when he walked. I had anticipated a hug, but he barely extended a hand. While we drank coffee, he answered my questions with yes, no or ahá, and between that and the fact that he mentioned that the detainees were not allowed to speak, I limited myself to asking simple things that also mattered to me, like if they were allowed to bathe or what they ate. He answered everything, but always concise and with a voice that frayed.
We had already asked for the bill when he said in passing: The only one I saw the face of was Roberto Coria. I said: But Juan! Roberto Coria is my dad! He found a way to answer me there, and then he managed to tell me.
They were going down a stairway, their hoods barely raised to keep from falling off; Leaning against the wall, my dad noticed a hole and looked out; he turned, behind was Juan. They didn’t know each other. If you go out let us know that we are at Puente 12. I am Roberto Coria. My wife is here too.
Only when he touched European soil did Juan transmit that message, in the letter that some twenty years later would be delivered to me in Anthropologists. In the end, I did what your dad asked me to do, he finished, and that lucidity caught me off guard.
Two nights later we went to dinner at Rodrigo’s. Then Juan dwelled on details that he had avoided on the first date: the chains, the wormy food, the rapes. I kept calm so he wouldn’t shut up.
At some point during the night they accompanied me to the bus stop and we said goodbye. Another twenty years passed before we saw each other again, in the trial that put our kidnappers and the murderers of Juan’s partner and my parents in prison. Rodrigo was in the room; Juan spoke from Uruguay, he had forgotten that it was his turn to testify and when they picked him up he was in his pajamas. I was terrified that this was not the only forgetfulness of the day, but when they asked him about Roberto Julio Coria and María Ester Donza, he confirmed that they had been to Vesuvius.
Three years ago I had to testify. I practiced my testimony like someone who writes a novel, Juan played an important role. I am still a close friend of Eugenia, one of Raquel’s daughters. A few years after our meeting, her family received Maco’s call. I was there when they watched over the remains of his father in Buenos Aires. My eldest daughter is called Juana.
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julia coria She is a writer and sociologist. She published the storybook «Permission to love you» and the novels «Everything goes well for us» and «The primitive horde»; In 2009 she was a finalist for the Clarín Award with a still unpublished novel. She coordinates writing and reading workshops individually and at the CCEBA. She reviews books online in the AhReseñas project, organizes the Club1985 gastronomic reading club and is part of the group of writers Fuego Amigo. Although she is very dispersed, she tries to pace the writing because she is tormented by the thought of what would become of the stories she has in her head if she didn’t get to write them.
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Fuente: Titulares.com