"My dad already knows where he is, there, but I can't go where he is," says Rosa Grilo.
She remains silent for a few seconds, closes her tiny eyes, smooths her flowery skirt and folds her hands.
She is in a wheelchair, in the shade of a young carob tree.
The hot breeze from the Chaco mountain raises dust on the road.
The family's multicolored clothes dry in the sun on the fence.
When she is asked about the Napalpí massacre, Rosa Grilo cunningly changes the subject.
“They always tell me: 'When is that old woman going to die?'
I raise my hand, they come to look around my house, 'ah, grandma is still here'.
Thank you Lord, one more step”, she celebrates with a finite voice.
And she laughs toothlessly.
Rosa Grilo is indigenous Qom and is over 100 years old.
She doesn't know exactly how many.
She was a child on July 19, 1924, when police machine guns and machetes killed her father and 500 other members of her community.
She survived thanks to her grandfather, who warned that the plane flying over the camp “carried the bomb”.
Rosa Grilo then sank into silence, like the rest of those who had come out alive from that carnage.
She got married, had 14 children, worked the land, took care of her in-laws, became an evangelical and grew old.
She today she is the last survivor of Napalpí.
Rosa Grilo lives about five kilometers from the site of the massacre.
Since last year there is a memorial there.
At the end of a dirt road bordered by carob trees and fellings, a cement circle recalls the place where the Qom and Mocoví caciques waited for the governor 98 years ago.
The visit of the political chief of the area was the epilogue of a long negotiation.
Dispossessed of their land, communities grew cotton in state-run labor camps.
The reductions, as they were called, were paid in spices.
The indigenous demanded money in hand and freedom to sell the production to whomever they wanted.
The tension rose with the declaration of a strike.
The Government of Buenos Aires sent military and police.
“The governor then promised a solution and said that he was going to bring cookies to share a barbecue with the community,” explains David García, from the Napalpí Foundation.
“The leaders got up early to meet and prepare to receive him.
But it turns out that before dawn there was the shooting.
The leaders fell dead, and the mothers and grandmothers left their ranches embracing their children and grandchildren.
A day before the massacre, a plane toured the area.
Later we learned that it was to verify the location of the communities and how many there were,” says García.
David García, from the Napalpí Foundation talks with Rosa Grilo.Roly Ruiz
In 1924, Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear, the second president of the Radical Civic Union (UCR), ruled Argentina.
The party had emerged at the end of the 19th century as a counterweight to the conservatives, in the heat of an incipient mass movement, the new proletariat.
Those were the times of "Argentina power", an idyllic image that Argentines rescue every time the crisis worsens.
In that longed-for past, the indigenous had no place.
When the strike was declared, the radical government authorized a massacre to serve as an example.
There were no convictions or political culprits.
A month ago, Rosa Grilo visited the site where her father and the rest of the members of her community were shot.
She broke out in a cold sweat and froze.
"She had never been back to this place," says Garcia, standing in front of the memorial.
“When she arrived she vanished, her whole body went numb, feeling the energy of the dead.
That is a knowledge of our people.
It hurt her a lot to get to the place, it was a very strong blow for her, ”he adds.
Since then, Rosa Grilo keeps quiet about the memories of the massacre.
Four years ago, she was interviewed by this newspaper, she still recounted how her grandfather had saved her life.
And the noise of the plane, which dropped candies and food from the air to get the indigenous people out of their shelters in the mountains.
“They thought it was merchandise.
And my grandfather says: 'Don't go, because he's carrying the bomb, we're going to run away'.
"I was a neat Indian, I didn't know how to speak Spanish, but when I entered that house I changed everything," she says now, sitting in her wheelchair.
The house is still in its place, in ruins.
The Government built a new one two years ago, with electricity and well water.
Rosa Grilo wanders in her memories.
She now speaks of her marriage to a man “of another race”, and of the adoration she cultivated for her in-laws.
“When I got together they brought me here and I'm still here.
My father-in-law left me here.
The Lord took my father-in-law.
And my mother-in-law was old too.
There I have the photo of the church, because it is nice to have a memory”.
She says that when she got married she already had a daughter from a previous couple, and then she takes a step back in time.
“There is everything here, with that I ate.
She drank thistle water, my grandfather took out the thistle and put a small jar.
"Here we work the farm," he says.
“There was no shortage of sweet potatoes, cassava, pumpkin, everything you eat;
onion, dad, there's nothing I didn't have.
'You can see that you work,' my father-in-law told me.
'He will take hold of the plow handle, he will take hold of the horse's rein.'
Once he gave me the ox, but I didn't understand the ox and I stayed in the farm doing nothing;
my father-in-law would laugh,” she recalls, and she laughs too.
"He is not going to find me in bed sleeping, I work," she warns right away, in case there were any doubts.
“We made cheese, with a press.
He [the father-in-law] bought a machine to squeeze cheese and remove all the whey.
We also made mattresses, of everything, with a needle and unraveled the sheep's wool with a machine.
I have worked a lot with them, that is a memory for me”, says Grilo.
Nothing remains of that work or of that land that provided food.
The Grilo family has rights to 25 hectares of community land, but there are no longer any hands to till or seeds to sow.
Grilo's is a story of segregation, but also of poverty.
The house she received and the pension she receives each month have made her "the rich" of the rural community where she lives, despite the wishes of her daughter, Florenciana, who insists that she barely has to feed.
Original seat of the reduction, in Aboriginal Colony.
This site is located 10 kilometers from where the massacre took place.
From that building the state labor camp was administered where the indigenous people were killed Roly Ruiz
The youngest of Rosa Grilo's grandchildren lives with her partner and two children in a room in the new house.
He takes care of the family's horses and from time to time does some “changa” or temporary work.
The other granddaughter once set up a kiosk to sell drinks, but the business did not survive the pandemic.
Family life now revolves around Rosa, the matriarch to be looked after and responsible for the only family income.
“There is my dear daughter.
She gets up and I'm already awake.
This is how I do it to bed”, says Grilo, and pretends that he hits with the cane to let him know that he wants breakfast.
Florenciana, the daughter, reproduces the circle of servitude of the women of the house.
She takes care of her mother, as her mother took care of her in-laws.
Rosa Grilo celebrates those times of home work.
“I grab the broom in the morning, I grab the kettle, I heat the kettle for my father-in-law when he gets up and everything is ready on the table.
Who is a woman, what will she say?
My mother-in-law treated my father-in-law poorly”, she complains.
And she then speaks of the holidays, when people came from far away to participate in the branding of cattle with hot irons, or to celebrate a popular festival.
She was there, as always.
“When people arrive, when there is marking of the cows, I have to attend.
They eat empanadas, cake, what do I know, they drink wine.
I attended to people, because I am not a rebellious woman [rebellious], no, I pay attention”, she says.
Over the years, Rosa has exchanged working hours in the fields for long visits to the evangelical church next to her house.
The indigenous communities of northern Argentina are deeply religious.
And it was the Baptists who managed to fill the gap left by ancestral customs.
The key to their success was the language: while the traditional church forced them to speak Spanish, the evangelicals respected Qom and Moqoit.
If those languages still survive it is partly thanks to them.
And to Juan Chico, a Qom researcher who managed to rescue the Napalpí massacre from oblivion and put it on the public agenda.
Chico died last year of covid, but he left the wheel in motion.
Three weeks ago, a trial for the truth began in Chaco that will put black on white in the history of the massacre, attributed until now to a confrontation between indigenous communities.
The State will be held responsible for these deaths, and one day there may even be financial compensation for the descendants.
"Grandma still makes sense," warns Rosa Grilo, when she is asked about the trial.
“How could I not have?
I have an ear, I have the eyes to see,” she adds, and she laughs again out loud.
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