77 - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Guillermo Saccomanno is the author of numerous novels and story collections, including El buen dolor, winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura, and 77 and Gesell Dome, both of which won the Dashiell Hammett Prize. (Both available from Open Letter.) He also received Seix Barral's Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista and the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction for Un maestro. Critics tend to compare his works to those of Balzac, Zola, Dos Passos, and Faulkner.

Andrea G. Labinger is the translator of more than a dozen works from the Spanish, including books by Ana María Shua, Liliana Heker, Luisa Valenzuela, and Alicia Steimberg, among others.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

(From the beginning.) The way I tell this story may be terrifying, Professor Gómez begins. And he adds: How can you narrate terror. But I won’t back down, he says. Even if people criticize my story and the thoughts it provokes, I won’t back down. As Martín Fierro says, “I sing what I think, which is my way of singing.” I know my story makes me sound like a gaucho singer on the run. Because anyone who tells it straight will always be a gaucho singer on the run.
Attention, demands the professor. When a song is popular with the powerful, it can’t be trusted. People sing it for convenience’s sake. They say fear’s no fool. And what about terror. Terror makes a person more cunning. Not more intelligent, more cunning. Like a fox that eludes the hunting party. But that survival skill, when it’s honed, becomes madness. Terror, that’s what I’m going to talk about. I’ll say it again: my story’s not likely to amuse, because for me there’s no joy in telling it.
In more than one way, this could be the story of an act of submission. Some might say it’s brave to confess to an act of submission, but it’s better not to commit it in the first place. And yet, if my story strikes anyone as funny, the humor probably has its merit: terror and laughter are incestuous siblings. The fact that it seems to take on a bolder tone now, perhaps more like a confession than a tale to be told, doesn’t redeem me. I’m an old man who repeats himself. I’m over eighty. And I have nothing to lose anymore except my papers. But papers, like words, blow away in the wind.
The professor adjusts his glasses and observes the overloaded, sagging shelves of his library, the double row of books, the piles of magazines and journals stashed against the walls, the tables, the chairs. He’s surrounded by folders. There’s a file cabinet on the table where he sets down his pitcher of iced tea. My mouth gets dry, he says. Then he asks about words. What are they good for. To name the unnamable, he reflects. We struggle to find the exact words to explain what hurts us most, as if by naming them our suffering might diminish. In our urgency to name it, we’re distracted from pain.
Because in those days terror and poverty were all around us, the professor goes on. It was impossible not to see it, not to feel it. Then there was the cold snap of ’77. For anyone who doesn’t know what that fatal combination, terror and poverty, consists of, I’ll explain it with a smell: the smell of jails and hospitals. There’s a certain smell in jails, the same one you’ll find in hospitals. Ammonia and piss, blending together in a kind of sweet stench. You can smell the shakes. It’s a nausea that comes from filthy bodies and sticks to your clothes. Those out-of-date clothes that you rescue from the closet at the first frost. A jacket, a coat. Camphor and cheap cologne, the smell of poverty, the smell of cold shoes, which, logically, is also the smell of fear, of followed footsteps. Because fear and hunger go hand in hand, inseparable: a poor man always walks around frightened. He’ll always get the blame for some debt, some failing.
I was around fifty-six at the time. But I was afraid I’d be blown up along with the kids, the suspected young militants. Gray hair didn’t guarantee your safety. My condition, like everyone else’s, was one of terror. The only thing available, at least for believers, was the consolation of prayer. But who was there to pray to when God gives His blessing to the rich. There were a few parish saints left. The priests who accompanied the poor in their grief, whether because of their abject poverty or a disappearance, were fired by their church superiors, that is, when they weren’t shot outright. God, if He had ever existed, was dead. It was more useful to seek help from the charlatans who pretended to be miracle workers. La Difunta Correa or Pancho Sierra offered more hope. Everyone latched onto what they could just to keep going. At that time, I was sick with fear, but in addition to my medical license, I could also fall back on some unexpected money, my mother’s inheritance. Neither her house nor her store on the coast, in a province that was the start of Patagonia, was worth very much. But that money gave me some breathing room. I could hold on for a long time with no concerns but literary ones, even if they weren’t so literary. In other words, I was in a privileged situation: like a tourist in a concentration camp. It drizzled all the time. You might ask, if I was aware of everything going on around me, why I didn’t get the hell out of there. One explanation might be that I was paralyzed by terror. But it seems more reasonable to say that I was surviving by guiltily waiting for punishment. I still think so today.
The drizzle continues.
The professor grows silent. His mouth is dry; he needs more tea. He stands, walks to the kitchen and after a while returns with a pitcher. He sits, adds a half-teaspoon of sugar to his glass, a heavy glass, stirs, drinks, and after pushing the glass to one side, rummages in the file cards, removes one, looks at it, and puts it back again.
And I still don’t know the answer, he reflects. Why I didn’t get out. Instead of answers, more questions.
Enough preamble. Let me tell you the story.