‘Nela 1979’, by Juan Trejo: Where did the victims of heroin go?

We are going to review a book, Nela 1979which, without being a great book, offers valuable suggestions and curiously the most profound and interesting ones are collateral to the subject that properly inspires it. Its author, the novelist Juan Trejo, has already demonstrated in previous works his concern for what we define as a family novel. In this book he fully immerses himself in it by reconstructing as far as possible, and without an atom of fiction, the story of his older sister, Manuela Trejo (Nela), who died in 1979, at the age of 21, due to heroin. The author was nine years old when she died and only saw in her a problematic being: “Until her departure, Nela had been a problem, a disruptive and destabilizing element, a source of tension, of constant arguments and even spontaneous outbreaks of violence.” Over time he has wanted to know something more about that disruption that split his family down the axis and somehow answer the question Nela, where is it? Because she must have been one of the first victims of the drug that in later years would take down a generation of young people, most of whom were defenseless against the dangers they faced when consuming it.

So, to Nela’s personal story, the book adds the story of a few years and a youth – carefree, libertarian, anarchist – who, in 1977, felt dissatisfied with a nascent democracy that did not offer them a place of their own. And they looked for alternatives. The founder of the magazine reminded us of this. AjoblancoPepe Ribas, in his memoirs, The seventies in piecework. Ajoblanco and freedom (2011), a work that reminded us of the values ​​that united the young people of those years in an alternative project for society. Young people who were simultaneously disappointed with real politics and hungry for the spontaneous forces that imagination and personal experience lived to the limit could unleash. Because for a time it seemed that the only correct way to live had to be carried out in the intoxication of the moment. It was an experience as enthusiastic as it was fleeting, with very diverse political and ideological profiles, a pioneer in self-management, in a new feminism that marked a radical change in the customs of the country to end, however, in an unexpected and tragic way on the precipice. What happened to that intense period? Where are those young people who wanted to change the world by changing themselves?

Professor and essayist Germán Labrador is the one who has perhaps analyzed in greatest depth the consequences and repercussions of that seventies culture that today seems very far away from us —in Poetry and chemistry in the Transition (2009) and Guilty for literature (2017)—. And she has pointed out in her books that from the beginning, two destinies were swaying around her: those who learned from the countercultural experience to later reinvent themselves as cultural managers, creators, politicians, businessmen or teachers and those who could not escape the suggestion of believing in their beautiful utopian dreams and remained trapped in them. Because, in effect, many of those young people allergic to Franco’s double standards, sensitive to freedom and somewhat irresponsible fell into the deadly trap of heroin addiction, when it began to be available on the black market too easily.

Why such ease? Without having the answer – because this is not about blaming or exonerating anyone, but about revealing an incomprehensible political negligence – wounds were opened in the families that have been difficult to cauterize properly. And this is the pain that Trejo assumes as his own, exposing the fracture that Nela’s death caused in his family and at the same time proposing its collective projection. Nela’s death, in some way, concerns us all. It was not a mere private matter suffered in silence by many families. But for hers it was, she says, a before and after. Then silence fell. It also fell on everyone. As a society we did not assume it. We did not truly grieve for the losses. We did not encourage a serious debate about what happened, we did not make clear accounts, and the Madrid scene, with its macnamara and their boatiné robes, devoured the tragedy that in parallel was ravaging the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, ​​San Sebastian, Vigo, Cadiz, Valencia, fostering a trivializing account of what happened. So much suffering, so many lives ruined because of the horse, so many mothers plunged into depression, feeling powerless to save their sons and daughters from something they did not even know and therefore could not know how to face the cloud that brought so much misfortune and darkness to the houses. Then AIDS appeared and the initial stupor caused by the first deaths was followed by shame and exclusion in the face of those that came later. Everything happened dominated by a strident and painful silence.

The subject that inspires Juan Trejo’s book is his sister Nela. And that is also the Achilles heel of the story, because of the weak personality of the protagonist. The entire search undertaken by the author, the sober x-ray that he makes of the Barcelona of those years and of his own family (the best part of the book) comes up against an insurmountable wall, the little importance of the character. Finally we are left with the fact that Nela was nothing more than a 17-year-old teenager when she left home. A rebellious young woman who wanted to live her life, far from the submission she saw in her parents, immigrants in Catalonia and made to a life almost on their knees. Nela liked comics and got hooked on heroin too soon. A thread that is pulled excessively – the story does not allow the author to go further – but that responds to a noble purpose: to remember the common responsibility that we had. This has nothing to do with the imputation of a collective guilt that for conceptual reasons is absurd. I understand the book as an invitation to remember those young people who characterized a way of being and occupying the world. We were all, one day, those young people and their freedom, in some way, was our defeat.

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