My mother was murdered on February 3, 1977, at 2.05 of the morning, at the corner of Santamarina y Chubut, Citadel. His death certificate says: "Multiple gunshot wounds. NN female, slim, 1.65, dyed blond hair. " None of his blue eyes. May have tight eyelids the moment before the shot. Maybe it was dark in the morgue or had accumulated too many bodies and seemed in vain to score a stupid data when the holder of the blue eyes she was dead and to those pupils of water on your eyelashes falling like a tide of corruption just waiting for them.
My mother is now, namely, a skull with few teeth, a jawbone assigned morphologically, tibias and femurs, radii and ulnae, clavicles. Sure I make a mistake in the listing of the bones, the truth is that his torso is still missing. She
, no.
Now I can trace a path from his years of silence. Their years underground. His choking anonymous.
Where was I the night she was killed?, I asked a friend. I can not know, was 10 and was waiting. As I waited until now even though he knows he would not return.
Some of it has returned with the remains of his body, with traces of his last day.
My brother asked if she had been shot from the front or back.
There are things we can never know.
has a shot in the leg. Until her skull was pink '85. There were scraps of meat, the remains of what I had kissed. Blow it back to earth without a caress without a consolation for the long death of anonymity. Was excavated, photographed, cataloged and reburied. It ended up decomposing in a bag, his body mingled with others who were also riddled the same night, which were collected from a corner in Citadel after the repressive finish their task and began his state bureaucracy. So my mother has her death certificate signed and sealed as the expected or hoped for some news of him.
At that time my father used to ask when we would view it. I thought it would be prey to the end of the day were policemen who had entered and destroyed the house where she lived, my brothers and me, her friend, Gladys Porcel, her boyfriend, Juan Carlos Arroyo. The three missing the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team returned to us, 34 years later to we can finally say goodbye. Because until now we finished it. And now, when I know that what is left of it rests in a box with so many skeletons as yet unnamed, awaiting an official entry form and rituals we invent for it, now I can not finish me off. Although time is compressed and I suddenly feel like the 10 year old girl who heard his voice seen as a repressor of questioning and even promised him "for me would give you a rose, but you're not helping me" . She was not helping and that is enough to know me for a gesture of dignity that probably squeezed until the cows on a torture table. I can not believe what it was that rose but could never stop inquiring about the cruelty of the oppressors against the captive women.
"All my life I come over," said his friend Laly when he learned of the identification of the bones of my mother in Spain, where he was me, but luck would have it that day can not embrace. My life also came up. And that last night on some unknown factors such as fog began to dissipate by noon becomes new questions: Who heard the shots? Who advised to withdraw the bodies? "I wore a skirt that the painting itself? Someone gave him hand before the flurry of disconnected as a puppet of tow? Who saw his blue eyes? Who knew that he would not drop your tabs to conquer this gesture all you needed? Did you have shoes on? Where are the platforms that were never down?
there something real that is beginning to take shape. My mother was killed at dawn on February 3, 1977. I was ten. My brother John just two. Santiago, eight. Andrew, five. The four we miss you, mom, and so far we have done what we can with your absence and your presence intermittent.
There is a page of a book she gave me shortly before the end, is written with the letter and says, "For Martha, my partner, who is learning to call their own joys and struggles of Latin American people." Pompous dedication for a girl of 44 wants to remain Martita and learning that what he was when you were with me. Now I just got married for the first time, love and a family impossible, but rather be: my love, Albertine, my two sons with twenty years of distance between them, a granddaughter, three dogs, two cats, a number of friends about which I know I can break down and get up with my eyes closed. Nobody cares about these details, except to me because they are proof that I survived. More than that, I have lived all these years and looking for you is like my family forged. Or seek justice for you. Or looking for a language in which to name you.
Someone once told me that in the concentration camp where he spent three long months, the women changed clothes between them to feel that they dressed in the morning. Or at that time became diffuse closure tomorrow. This story calls you, Mom.
I cried like a baby on any shoulder or on all the friends of EAAF while I recounted what they knew about you. I lovingly rescued from a mass grave in the cemetery of San MartÃn. Lovingly told me "there a coxal could still be in your mom "with the same love with which my friend Rachel told me she wanted to be my velority planner. A remnant of black humor to save us all and all of this wreckage on the ground which means I found you, Mom.
more quiet, Rachel called me later to say she had been shot in the chest in a clash between policemen and thieves who had nothing to do, that the bullets do not hurt. Own death, I imagine, does not hurt. What hurts is that life goes on as if nothing, ten, twenty, thirty years. And it hurts especially because they also found their balms.
All words jumbled and due to the burial not yet the case, now that meet your demise 34 years and barely a month since we returned from suffocation under the earth, the anonymity, the comfort of a ritual to boot once and for all the little girl clings the window waiting for the knock knock of the missile in the village will bring you back.
all of this and all that still I can not name it I found you. An endpoint for a text that I will continue writing for a showdown that may start at once to let go.
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