Lea Vélez (Madrid, 1975), writer, filmmaker, has delved deeply into the biggest sewer of guilt that Argentina has ever experienced: the ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School, in which the military rehearsed the worst episode. continued evil of his country's history.
The matter occurred to her thirty years ago, when she was working on finding stories for her film rehearsals, in Madrid.
For years she had other occupations, she worked on other books (
Our Tree House, The Garden of Memory...
), she changed countries (she lives in England), but she never left aside that scene of horror that she discovered as a girl.
The book (
La hija de Gardel
, Contraluz) coincides in the Spanish bookstore with
The Call
(Anagrama), the true story in which Leila Guerriero tells how ESMA and its military degraded the lives of Argentinians.
That trace of horror is also in the work of the Spanish writer.
Vélez, who also has the spirit of journalism in her DNA (her father was the director of an important television program dedicated to books, she is a screenwriter and journalist as well), tells here how her literary testimony was born and what mark the experience has left on her. evil that counts.
-It is a book about evil. What is evil for you?
-There are good people, there are bad people.
Let's say there is a bottle, 60% is full of goodness, the rest is evil.
We all have an evil face with certain people, and a generally good face with most people.
Here, in Spain, in the post-war period that Franco won, there were people who were not necessarily in favor of the coup, they did not agree with those ideas, and they were not necessarily bad, they just lived immersed in that situation... I think that evil is an element that occurs in certain circumstances and with certain people, with the exception of sons of bitches, who are always bad.
-So you can combine goodness with evil?
-I wonder about it too.
There may be times when you believe that evil is not evil.
In the case that this novel tells, the presence of evil washes your brain temporarily, but enough to justify certain behaviors that are evil.
History then puts everything into perspective, and those who were evil believe that they were not, even though they were, and without palliatives.
Evil is seen more with the distance of time... It may happen that a person commits very despicable acts and beautiful acts, but we are talking about people who live among the shadows of evil.
There are very bad bad guys, horrible psychopaths, and people who are not souls of charity either.
I am interested in these characters, capable of the most surprising things.
-Which of those scenarios of evil touched you the most when writing this book?
-The theft of children.
The fact of justifying from an ideological position something that was actually a robbery, and also a robbery for money... They would believe that they were being saved;
They were going to kill their mothers, but they would save them, putting them in houses where they knew how to raise them.
They would falsify their identities, their birth certificates, they would steal their identity... That is for me the evil: the scam, something that was done for money, to the point of harming the mothers, the children, and that is what always bothers me. stirred.
Then there was the abject part of blaming the mothers for their own sexual slavery.
-You tell it, it happened. How was it possible that seems from the dark beginning of time?
-Because of corruption, which is ultimately corruption for money... I started thirty years ago to investigate all this... I was a young 23-year-old journalist.
She opened my eyes in amazement that this was done for money, stealing children for money, to maintain an established system, in which hounds and hitmen who looked like people from the Middle Ages thrived.
The looters.
Looters of lives, protected by a totalitarian government.
Those who stole silverware from looted houses, those who told mothers that their children had died.
People who have no moral direction, psychopathic narcissists who have no empathy and create a narrative to justify what is a crime of fraud.
-Thirty years ago he started writing this book. What was the spark?
-I was in Madrid, at the Film School;
I wanted to write a film, like Spielberg's Schindler's List... And I read an article about a forger from the ESMA, who had previously been a forger for Montoneros and decided to retrain and put himself under the orders of the military... That's when my instinct was awakened as a writer, when I felt that my literature was going to be that of John Le Carré or that of Graham Greene... With that material I could try an interesting plot, so I started to investigate.
I knew about the Argentine dictatorship, the cases of the disappeared, of the children who were already teenagers who were finding their real mothers... There was a lot of talk about it at home, where friends of those who had suffered that dictatorship and who had come came to live in Madrid… All that nebula of influences made me research and write.
I read the CONADEP report and began to connect the dots, among them those that corresponded to the organization of the ESMA as an example of what was happening in that country during the dictatorship... It seemed to me that the ESMA was an example of what was happening, Well, that organization encapsulated all the most horrifying stories of those times.
-There is a scene in the novel in which some cadets abuse a specific woman. What they say, and what they do, represents a summary of those episodes of evil to which you allude. Did she feel it as she told it, as her own suffering, or as the obligation of a narrator?
-When I tell it is because in some way what happens has touched me personally.
I have not been raped, but I have suffered situations close to something like that.
Obviously, when you are also deprived of your freedom, you are tied up and you are nothing more than an object, there is no one who can defend you... That situation is terrible for me.
It seems like part of the spoils of war: some cadets supposedly educated in the values of military brotherhood use these women as entertainment, as hazing, until they rape them.
-It is a portrait of evil and also an examination of guilt. What has been the future of Argentine guilt?
-The guilt is hidden in the subconscious, in the secrets of each person... It is below the surface, it is part of a collective guilt that I am incapable of analyzing.
It is difficult, and not only for Argentines, or certain Argentines, to tell this story without taking judgment or sides.
For me, as a Spaniard, it is more complicated because I do not have a direct relationship, neither family nor ancestral.
That gives me, so to speak, a naïve innocence... In this novel I am the camera that watches, I offer some characters, some facts, about real episodes about which the reader will have his own vision about the guilt of the survivor or the that they were saved and feel the guilt of having been saved and that they live with assumed names to get away from that gaze of the other that is the fault.
-The episode in which you evoke the case of a stolen girl recalls some of the essences of The Call, Leila Guerriero's book about the sordid history of Esma...
-I haven't read the book yet, and look what a coincidence.
I have based the character of Alicia, who is the mother who loses that girl, on a woman who may resemble the same woman who is the essential character on which she bases her book... These things happened at ESMA, Alicia was there, and there was the real character of Leila Guerriero... I had been working on this story for thirty years, I put this project aside to take care of others.
And now it seems that the new generations, with a new, perhaps more distant innocence, are able to look into the hole of fear without feeling their own horror, without feeling the guilt of whoever had been there.
As if that terrible episode could already be told with a voice that is now in Leila's book and also in this one that I offer readers, as a way of telling, from my point of view, what was never wanted to be seen or they never wanted to know.
I don't know if I got it, but there it is.