Achilles, you who listen

One day in 2019, Adriana Rodríguez, a 57-year-old woman, told me about her brother Gustavo, a soldier who fell during the Malvinas war that took place in 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom.

He, like hundreds of others, was buried on those islands, in an anonymous grave and under a tombstone with this inscription: "Argentine soldier known only to God."

In 2017, both countries agreed to launch a plan to identify those bodies.

In 2018, almost 40 years later, Adriana learned in which grave her brother was buried.

“I started to duel only now.

I thought that in these 37 years it had already passed, and no: I was still waiting for it.

It seemed to me that at any moment he would call me to enter.

After recognition of the body, that was cut.

He received an official report with photos of the teeth, of the objects with which he had been buried.

After that, her brother was no longer a shadow, a hole, someone whose inert body she did not see, but a dead person.

In the world, and so far, 1,600,000 people have died from covid-19.

The procedure for burial is similar everywhere.

The funeral rites are carried out in a closed drawer and, except for a family member required to recognize him, no one can see the deceased.

Following the recommendations of the WHO —author of the

“Chinstrap no / chinstrap yes”, among others—, the States, to avoid contagion caused by the virus present in the corpses, decided to prohibit the relatives of the deceased from seeing the bodies and condemned them Thus, to live in the swampy limbo produced by duels that do not take place: "He will not return, but I hope so."

If the situation is disturbing at a global level, I find it particularly unbearable in my country, Argentina, where the psychic consequences produced by the absence of the body at the time of elaborating a duel have been long thought about as a result of the quarry of 30,000 disappeared people who he left the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Here, where the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team has been working since 1984 in order to restore the identity of the remains of the disappeared and offer their families a symbolic and necessary reparation;

Here, where hundreds of people like Adriana Rodríguez were relieved after almost 40 years when they received the identification of the remains housed in the graves of the Malvinas, I have heard stories of people who last saw their grandfather while they put him into an ambulance or who they tried unsuccessfully to bribe orderlies from funeral companies to allow them to open the body bag just to look at it;

or like that of Pablo Giorgelli, whose mother was hospitalized with a lung infection and treated according to the covid-19 protocol even though she had no confirmed diagnosis: “I started chasing the stretcher and I was talking to him and I was yelling: 'Here I am, Mom, I'm Pablo, I love you very much, I'm here with you. '

And I followed her through the corridors of the hospital and we reached an area (…) where you can no longer pass ”, said Giorgelli in a note written for

by journalist Mariana Carbajal.

The next day, his mother passed away: "It's as if she had disappeared," Giorgelli said.

"At some point I cry and at another I am as if it had not happened."

I have read and heard stories like that.

But I have not heard alarmed voices about what those absent bodies, those ghosts, will do to our future.

In the

, Priam, King of Troy, kneels before Achilles, who has just killed his son Hector, to beg him to return the corpse: “Respect the gods, Achilles (…), have mercy on me (…) for I have been forced to do what no man did on earth, to bring my mouth close to the hands of the one who killed my children ”.

Achilles says to him: "Speak and tell me honestly how many days you want to honor the divine Hector."

Priam asks for nine days to mourn him, one to bury him, another to erect a burial mound.

"And in the twelfth we will fight again, if necessary."

"What you order will be done, old Priam, and I will suspend the fight for as long as you ask," Achilles replies.

I don't know what can be done.

We could start by asking ourselves if we do not have the right to demand what Priam was begging for: to live the death of his son, not to be buried under the weight of what never happened.