Leila Guerriero was in the back seat of her parents' car when, looking at a road sign, she suddenly learned to read. The memory, like everything that belongs to childhood, was an invention, she realized. The 700 people who filled the Teatro Oriente continued listening, attentive. If we were there it was because of those lies that we readers need. For now, knowing what happened to the girl once she deciphered that first word, did she scream? Did she open the window and wave her hand, as if to say hello? Did she cry?
As we read or listen to someone else's reading we select images. We do it for biographical proximity; or recognition of that which we consider beautiful or terrible; In both cases, there is arbitrariness. Leila Guerriero is in Santiago, invited by the Santiago in 100 words short story contest to tell us how she became a writer and why once she did, she continued writing. Interested as I am in the time of childhood, it is from that whim that I make a selection of what she names: a notebook, a Bic pencil with a fine tip, a German grandmother who read her stories that were not for children.
I look on the shelf inside my head for an old German children's story. In Struwwelpeter —translated as Pedro Melenas— a child who doesn't like vegetables loses weight to death; a disobedient girl is reduced to dust; and another child, who insists on sucking his fingers, ends up receiving a visit from the tailor with his scissors. Was that book, Heinrich Hoffman's terrifying German classic, the one the grandmother read to the girl? Did she understand – only she, the others laughed – that this was a first warning not of the causes and their effects, but of the forms that cruelty takes?
Do not ask. And the truth is that the writer did not mention any title when she talked about the stories from her childhood: in addition to selecting images, those of us who read or listen to the reading of others – 700 people, on a Thursday, in a theater – distort, mix and end up telling each other. , before going to sleep, a story that has little to do with the original. With the warning made, let's return to the facts and the objects that the writer did name: a lamp illuminated the stories that the girl wrote in her notebook.
Fleur Jaeggy in her biographical essay on Thomas de Quincey, tells that the British writer and journalist of Romanticism became a visionary in 1791, at the age of six. Also that after the death of his sister due to hydrocephalus, the boy began to write: “he dictated his memories to the stillness without a breeze, to the ashes.” And Silvia Plath, in an essay about childhood, remembers: “As from a star, I saw, coldly and soberly, the separation of everything.” The list of vocations that manifest themselves early and absolutely is long. If she had known, says Leila Guerriero, regarding her own revelation, she would have turned off the lamp. But she didn't do it. Or yes, but he continued writing, in the middle of the darkness.
The year 2021 began the series of interviews on the case of the Argentine Sylvia Labayru who, in March 1976, at the time of the military coup in Argentina, was a member of the intelligence of the armed group of Peronist extraction, Montoneros. In December of the same year, at 20 years old and five months pregnant, she was kidnapped by the military and transferred to the Navy Mechanical School (ESMA) which functioned as a detention center. In that place she was repeatedly raped by an officer and forced to do forced labor. Only in June 1978, when she was released, was she able to see her daughter who, after being born in captivity, had been handed over, barely a week old, to her paternal grandparents and she went with her to Madrid.
Leila Guerriero says that among the questions she is asked there is a recurring one: what happens to her when she hears these stories? The important thing, he explains, is not what happened to her. And the next day, in a meeting with journalists, she insists: thinking about herself, while she was doing interviews, is not in her nature. She trusts in the distance it allows to look and in her ability to continue listening to the story.
When Sylvia Labayru arrived in Spain, with her one and a half year old daughter, she thought the horror was over. But her former companions, the Argentines in exile, added a new blow: rejection. Among many other things, she had been forced to play the role of sister to a member of the Navy who infiltrated the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo organization. The incident resulted in the disappearance of five women. It wasn't something they were going to forgive.
How did he survive? The second recurring question, Guerriero explains, is even more cruel than the first, because it contains a third question that is not spoken but remains suspended in the air, like a specter: what did he do to survive? Transferring responsibility from the perpetrator once again, as we have seen so many times, to the victim, is one of the forms that cruelty takes.
When the interviews began, in 2021, the sentence of the first trial for sexual crimes committed against women kidnapped during the Argentine dictatorship was expected. Two years later, on the writer's desk there were almost 2,000 pages containing the transcription of interviews with Sylvia Labayru's friends, her partner, her ex-partners, her children and some of her classmates. militancy and captivity. The book, published in January 2024, is titled The call. As I read it I think about the darkness, not of the stories, but of the reality that dictates them. And I try to see the writer but I see the girl, illuminated by the weak light of the lamp, writing.
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