“It’s a very cloudy and dark day, but you’ll see how it gets better,” promises me the brother of a sailor who disappeared in the sinking of the cruiser General Belgrano: Margaret Thatcher ordered on May 2, 1982 to attack that Argentine ship outside the exclusion zone and more than three hundred crew members died in the harsh waters of the South Atlantic. My interlocutor, like so many others, is content to travel to the Darwin cemetery, in the Falkland Islands, only to run his fingertips over the name of his dead brother, which is inscribed on a granite cenotaph. They are the ‘sintumba’ of a cursed war, condemned only to that tactile ritual, to that no place where their loved ones come to say a prayer to them. Others are luckier: they lie in royal tombs, with white crosses and a rosary, although until very recently many were listed under the poetic nomination “Argentine soldier only known to God.” With the help of the Forensic Anthropology Team and the modern technique of genetic profiles, the anonymous dead were exhumed and gradually recovered their identity. We traveled this time with 130 family members and under strict protocol of the British forces: the entire Soledad Island looks like a military fortress, and it is not possible to deviate an inch from the protocol. At least thirty elderly people in wheelchairs march with us through that soulless steppe full of spectral echoes: they come to say goodbye to their children; some will see his name or his grave for the first and last time in their lives. Everyone has an hour to talk to them imaginatively and then participate in a religious ceremony; Then, they will begin their return: nothing other than a lightning visit is allowed, and I feel privileged to have been invited to that humanitarian mission. They are the ‘sintumba’ of a cursed war, condemned to that tactile ritual, to that not a place where their loved ones come to say a prayer. As a young man, when I was a left-wing nationalist and a real idiot, I was days away from signing up as a volunteer to go to that war, which was led by a fascist called Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri but that seemed to us an act of anti-colonialism: the surrender of Puerto Argentino prevented me from that madness. But I never forgot my generation companions who fought and died there, a fact that Borges translated into a poem where he imagined the meeting between two soldiers: an Argentine, who had read Conrad, and another Englishman, who had studied ‘Don Quixote’: «They would have been friends, but they met face to face only once, on some too famous islands, and each of them was Cain, and each one, Abel. They were buried together. Snow and corruption know them. The event I am referring to happened in a time that we cannot understand. Argentine society, with a bad conscience for having supported that disaster, wanted to erase it from the collective memory, and condemned its combatants to ostracism, which is a double defeat. I, however, became literary interested in them; I interviewed them and narrated many of their adventures, despite the fact that a well-known mandarin of my country’s culture decreed that this epic was right-wing and very dangerous; What corresponded to good taste, to what was politically correct, was to treat them as victims.Heroic ghostsPersonal courage can be recognized—Borges knew it—without accompanying a political or warlike idea, but few are willing to access that simple truth. The curious thing is that, upon arriving at the Darwin cemetery, the wishes of the relatives were verified: the ‘babies’ opened the sky, although it was for only one or two minutes; Then it closed again and gave us a blizzard, eight degrees below zero and a wind of seventy kilometers per hour that stabbed our souls. I lived in Patagonia for five years, but I never felt so cold. We all trembled in front of the white tombs. And then, that old mourner rested his hand on my shoulder and said to me, with sarcasm: “The children wanted us to suffer firsthand the real climate under which they lived and fought for seventy days.” Not the warm temperature of our December, but that of May and June: the freezing southern autumn. Not only had they had to fight against one of the most powerful armies on Earth, but also against a supernatural cold: the heroic ghosts of Malvinas refused to be victims and were teaching us a new lesson in that weather at the end of the world.
#Jorge #Fernández #Díaz #Journey #white #tombs
