Leila Guerriero (Junín, 1967) achieves a milestone in non-fiction with The Call, by telling the story of a survivor of ESMA torture who questions those who prefer clean stories
If there is an “ideal victim”, a concept coined by criminologist Nils Christie and that feminisms have shaped, only one thing is clear. Silvia Labayru is not. She does not fit into the canon of the perfect (that is) political retaliation nor into that of being raped, traumatized, sunken and emaciated. Leila Guerriero, journalist and narrator who always says about her own work that she is good at two formats (the short column and the “insanely long”), learned about her from an interview in the newspaper Página/12 that gave a lot of talk in Argentina and sensed that there he had a perfect candidate for his method, which he has already put into practice in non-fiction books such as Una historia simple (Anagrama, 2013) or Los suicidas del fin del mundo (Tusquets, 2005).
Guerriero and Labayru spent hundreds of hours together, in Buenos Aires and Madrid, for two years and at the same time the journalist interviewed about 80 relevant people in Labayru's life. All the questions that needed to be asked were asked. Why did an upper-class teenager, the daughter of a pilot, become a mob, what kind of torture was she subjected to at the ESMA, what was it like to give birth to a girl on a table while she was kidnapped, why did she survive when so many died (5,000 people were murdered In that torture center of the Military Junta, 200 came out alive, 34 babies were born, among them Vera Lennie, the daughter of Silvia Labayru), why the shadow of collaborationism was cast over her, in what ways the Argentine exile repudiated her in Spain, what those 40 years of later and very fertile life have been like, with another child, several partners, many scenarios. The person questioned answered everything with torrents of words, sometimes contradictory, opinionated, more spontaneous than rehearsed. And with all this Guerriero builds what is probably her most complex and finished book.
She did not want, and she has said so, to write another story about the seventies in Argentina, another story of militancy, violence and exile, and she has not done so, because The Call is above all the story of Labayru, which is similar to others ( the good girl going to Marxism classes, the beautiful student at the Nacional in Buenos Aires, the Argentine exile who studies psychoanalysis, earns a lot of money and takes her children to school with the children of the Real Madrid soccer players) but she is not like any other .
It is not well regarded, because it seems to cheapen it, to say that a literary text deals with “themes”, as if it were a radio magazine, but good books do, deal with topics, and in this one there are new and important ones. The double victimization suffered by the women raped by the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone – rapes were not judged in Argentina as a specific crime until 2010 –, on whom the suspicion of not having been a little promiscuous and interested weighed on them. His own fellow militants did not want to know. Or the nature of what constitutes rape, which is rape even if the raped person may feel pleasure. Also the privilege that comes with such stunning beauty as Labayru, which Guerriero constantly highlights.
There are surprising facts in Silvia Labayru's story. That the military took her, dressed as a doll, to elegant clubs in Buenos Aires (also to her houses, to attack her) while she was kidnapped, that they put her on planes to visit her partner. Nothing is clean in this story and that is why everything is subjugating. And the Guerriero Method does justice to such excellent material. She is there, recounting those encounters and revealing the scaffolding of her journalistic practice, respecting the time jumps, the repetitions – sometimes excessive –, cleverly supplying the peaks of interest and also making it clear that she is as involved in this as he knows readers will be.
Leila Guerriero The call. An Anagram portrait 432 pages 20.90 euros
