Belén López Peiró was a fun and happy girl from Buenos Aires, where she was born in 1992. Summers in an Argentine town, at her uncle’s house, turned her into a moody and sad teenager. The hinge of abuse, which explains so many lives and so rarely even becomes a story, is undone between her own pain and the shame of others. But the teenager became a woman and, above all, a writer. And what was destined to be another apparently inexplicable silence, her life, became the subject of a debut film as brief as it was powerful, why did you come back every summer, in which he transcribed each and every one of the voices that cradle the taboo. He now he publishes a sequel.
The plot core of both works is simple: “My uncle sexually abused me repeatedly from the ages of 13 to 17,” according to the court complaint he cites in that first non-fiction novel. The way in which its author wanted to tell it, apparently as simple as the plot, consisted of “quoting, representing and recounting all the voices that speak to a woman, in this case a very young adolescent, when she suffers abuse and decides to report it ”. This is how it is summed up by the Argentine writer, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, teacher of Peiró and in whose literary workshop said work was forged. She now takes up that same procedure in the sequel published by Lumen in Spain, where I do not stand, about the judicial process unleashed and the “revictimization” that it entails.
With just turned 30 years old, López Peiró is an advanced. When she reported the events to the Argentine justice system, she was 22. #MeToo did not exist. In 2014, computer engineer Susan Fowler was three years away from blogging about the culture of harassment at Uber and inspiring so many others, including those that later came out against producer Harvey Weinstein in the fall of 2017. also broke the family cord before The consent (2020), by Vanessa Springora, and the big family (2021), by Camille Kouchner, the two Parisian chronicles about the interiors of Saint-Germain-des-Près, the neighborhood of pedophile love. Originally published in Argentina in 2018, and since then in Mexico, ChileUruguay and Spain, has been translated into Catalan, French, English, Italian and Portuguese.
Peiró came before and went further, along the straightest path: without changing names, without looking for an explanation, exposing what is heard and seen when the environment looks the other way. The polyphonic form of the story reveals the collective character of the abuse. The victim suffers it in his own flesh, but the silence consents to it and the shared secret generalizes it. Polyphony was his idea. The workshop helped her materialize it.
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“I grew up in a family in circulation,” says Peiró to EL PAÍS in the library of a Madrid hotel, recently landed. She is the daughter of divorced parents, she speaks only of her maternal family, because she does not know her father’s brothers. Her mother is the only one of five sisters who left the town, Santa Lucía, from the province of Buenos Aires. Her mother left to study, became a journalist and only returned to town on vacation. When one of her 10 cousins needed to stop in the capital, they slept at her house. In the summer, her mother continued to work in the city and she spent her vacations at the house of one of her aunts. Summer became the territory of the aggressor, her uncle, police commissioner, who had occupied the absent figure of her father.
Like his mother, Peiró also studied journalism. In 2015, she was an intern for a few months at the newspaper The world. She has now returned to Madrid to present his second novel, already dedicated to literature and owner of that voice and that life for which he fought in his first book. “Yes [hacé] whatever you want. Not what your old lady wanted to be and couldn’t, not what your dad expects before he dies. Don’t be the waste that thought [tío] motherfucker,” he wrote.
Peiró’s originality is also a form of betrayal. Most of the voices always speak to demand, and try to impose, silence. Intimacy, modesty, the passage of time, among other excuses, so familiar. Most respect silence not because they think it’s best, but because it’s most comfortable. Peiró’s betrayal is as rare socially as it is morally admirable. That gesture, combined with an aesthetic power that does not exclude tenderness, but never softens – “he eats you like a piece of meat that he has roasted for years in the patio of his house” – turned into a very short book about a small town in a transatlantic work.
“More than anger, I feel sorry,” he says, thinking of the cousins and aunts who sided with the aggressor, including his partner and his daughter. “Pity for not being able to rethink, not being able to be something different. What happened to me turned me into another person, ”he adds.
In addition to their voices, legal statements from the aggressor, aunts, cousins and even the nanny appear. Peiró betrays them all without justifying himself. “He betrays them, but with generosity,” says Spanish writer Nuria Labari, who presented Peiró’s second novel in Madrid. “The more you widen the circle, the further you move away from the act of abuse and the aggressor, and the more people appear involved,” says Labari, for whom why did you come back every summerwhile revealing that collective taboo, is a “very beautiful” book.
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