The Dark Twilight
The town at Lake Totora is called San Cosme del Palmar. It gets its name from a saint who is very revered in the area and from a nearby palm grove that can be seen from the shore, in the distance. The place surprises me, subverts my prejudices. One of the hotels is simple but truly comfortable and pretty, with airy rooms, wicker furniture, the smell of wood and oranges. The concierge is also the owner, a woman maybe sixty years old who bought the place in the eighties. The house, she says, was pretty well abandoned; it had been one of the weekend properties of a moneyed local family that fell into misery after various misfortunes. She doesn’t name the misfortunes, as if relating them could contaminate the diaphanous atmosphere of her adorable hotel. She gives me the breakfast schedule, directions to the beach, recommendations for where to buy sunscreen if I didn’t bring it, and the few—but, she assures me, good—restaurants （“you have to try the pacú, they panfry it in yerba mate, it doesn’t sound good but it’s delicious, you won’t regret it”）， then takes me to my room, the only one available. In the doorway, after she explains that the key is a little tricky （“but the room locks up tight, and around here it’s totally safe”）， I ask her if there are family members of the dead from the Za?artú pit staying here. I ask like that, no beating around the bush, because for days now the silence has had me depressed and paralyzed. The woman stands straighter and says, sincerely, that she doesn’t ask her guests why they come, and it’s not her place to tell me. That hotel owners, like bartenders, are similar to psychologists; they hear confessions and the secrecy is implicit. “You can ask them, though,” she says as she turns on the light. The room doesn’t need it: it’s very bright and looks out on to an inner yard with lemon trees and freshly cut grass.
The pacú coated in yerba mate is indeed delicious. And I’m surprised to see that there are almost no empty tables in the restaurant. The small pier I walked along to get here was overflowing with boats. At this hour, just past noon, no one is fishing; they go out at twilight. Near the hotel is a small boardwalk with jacaranda trees: you can see the ruins of the weekend house that used to dominate that part of the lake. I wonder which of the region’s rich families was its owner. The town has a regional museum where I could find out about its history—the hotel concierge’s discretion is exaggerated—but it’s closed, and it’s possible that, as often happens in small towns, it has no employees, or maybe just one person who occasionally checks in at the office to organize old papers.
After eating, many people leave for their siestas. I can’t get used to the custom—I didn’t even take them in Za?artú, where the weight of the humidity and the anesthetized village can make you want to spend hours in a dreamless sleep. Instead, I get water for mate at the hotel and settle in on the boardwalk, under the trees, in one of the wicker chairs that turn out to be more comfortable than they look. I take notes in a notebook. I read for a while. There are others out, sitting on the little beach or the boardwalk. From where I am, I can see a couple, a man and a woman of about sixty years of age, and a young woman, very thin with pale arms, who is wearing a long dress. I approach the couple and dive right in, asking what I want to know. They open up immediately. They want to talk, or at least the woman does. That isn’t unusual, but I’m still surprised. People always want to talk, they want to tell their stories to a stranger, even knowing that that stranger is going to publish and surely distort what they’ve said, because that is the nature of the job.
They are the mother and father of a young man from Corrientes, a student leader at the National University of the Littoral. He was taken in April of 1976, just after the coup. He had lived with them in one of those large provincial houses where they build for all the family members on one piece of land: the business looks out on the sidewalk; the main building is for the parents; the back one, past the yard full of azaleas, is for the children. The parents had been tied up and gagged and couldn’t defend their son. They only took him; he had a girlfriend, but she wasn’t at home.
“He never believed they would come for him. He said those things happened in the capital, you know? We didn’t think so either. He had friends who’d gone to Brazil, and others who were in hiding, clandestine, all that. Honestly, we thought they were coming to . . . My son was just a student activist. I can assure you of that because he told us, and he said we shouldn’t be afraid. I’m not justifying what they did with the kids who chose armed struggle, but that just wasn’t the case with Gustavo.”
The woman participates in the small collective Mothers of the Corrientes Disappeared. I would have guessed as much from her way of expressing herself. The man says nothing. The victims’ fathers tend to be silent companions. Many have died during these years spent in the background, accompanying their wives. They’re killed by impotence and love; they’re unprepared. Women know how to manage these emotions better.
They offer to introduce me to other parents, even a few wives. It’s not a large group, they say, maybe eight or so, though there are some who don’t talk or are more hesitant. I want to know why they’re at Lake Totora, and that night, when we all meet to have dinner at the restaurant that serves pacú à la yerba mate—I’m the only one who orders it—they all give me a different but similar explanation. They won’t let us near the pit, and there’s not enough room for everyone in Za?artú. The people in the village recommended this place as nearby and comfortable. They’re not staying long. They’ve been coming for two months, since the pit was discovered. All of them go to Za?artú every day, to try their luck, see if they can get in, if someone will talk to them. They’ve already realized there isn’t much they can do.
“You might want to go to Corrientes, where the identifications are being done,” I tell them.
“It’s the most logical thing,” agrees one mother from Castelar, in the province of Buenos Aires. Her son, Guillermo Blanco, alias Piru, was one of the militants. She’s the only mother of a Liberation Army member here. I tell her about the survivors I interviewed, but the information makes her eyes fill with tears and her face harden. She never learned their names, her son never told her his comrades’ names. She doesn’t want to hear about the living: she can’t avoid the rage.
“We’ll find out about the identification anyway: I already gave a DNA sample, and when they identify him, they’ll call me at home. My husband is there waiting. He couldn’t come with me. His health is bad. He was estranged from Guille when he came up here. I myself didn’t even know he was in the north. My other son, his brother, only told me after it was all over.”
“Being here is the closest we can get to a funeral,” says Sonia, the mother of the student leader from Corrientes, Gustavo. “We want to be close, keep vigil over the remains. We’re several miles away, but I know he can feel me. We put flowers out, here at the lake and near the pit, in the trees. Did you see the Virgin of Itatí? They won’t let us get very close. They should, don’t you think? It’s disrespectful.”