Dreams and torment of a child of Argentina’s taken
▶ Julián López’s haunting novel defines the grief of a country that slaughtered its own, writes Lucy Scholes
To read any of the excellent fiction in translation coming out of Argentina lately is to learn that it is a country still steeped in its recent history. The violence of which – and with it the repercussions played out in the lives of subsequent generations – is still raw enough to be worked through by its most exciting and talented contemporary authors.
Samanta Schweblin’s nightmarish eco-horror novella Fever Dream, for example, which was included on this year’s Man Booker International Prize shortlist; or Mariana Enriquez’s brilliant short story collection, Things
We Lost in the Fire, which, via her chilling use of gothic and supernatural motifs, depicts a country and a people haunted by the dictatorships of the 1970s and ‘80s. A Beautiful
Young Woman, the first novel by Argentinian poet and actor Julián López, approaches the legacy of the country’s so-called Dirty War by a more direct route. Although narrated by a now-grown man looking back on his childhood, the main body of the narrative plunges readers back into the midst of the dangerous years around the military coup, albeit as seen through the eyes of a child as yet unable to make sense of what is unfolding around him.
The novel’s two principal figures – the narrator and his mother – remain nameless: this is both their individual story, and that of an entire generation. She is a single mother bringing up her son alone in Buenos Aires, their intimacy resulting in a boyish idolisation that persists long into adulthood. “My mother was a beautiful young woman,” reads the first line. “Her skin was pale and opaque; I could almost say it was bluish, and it had a lustre that made it unique, of a natural aristocracy, removed from mundane trivialities.” It’s an oddly sensual description of a mother by her son, but theirs, we come to realise, is a relationship frozen in time.
One day, when the narrator is just seven years old, he returns home to his and mother’s apartment only to find it ransacked and her missing without a trace, just one of the many disappeared from this period – left-wing dissidents who spoke out against the military dictatorship, disposed of by the truckload, families torn apart, children left without parents. In some cases those too young to have clear memories of their mothers and fathers were handed over into the care of supporters of the regime and thereafter raised without knowledge of their real origins. This, however, isn’t the fate of López’s narrator. The burden he bears is a silence of a different kind; that of loss, not of lack. Although he’s ostensibly left the world of his childhood behind him, in reality he remains trapped in a sort of pre-pubescent limbo, in the same way his mother is entombed in her brutal fate: “There’s a beautiful young woman lost forever in horror and a broken man who is drowning and can’t distinguish his memories.”
As such, what we’re treated to is a narrative that’s heavy on sensory memory, certain recollections taking centre-stage. The images on postcards from Holland in tulip season that the narrator’s mother was so fond of and displayed in their apartment. The beans she cooked with: “When we were at home my mother used to shell green beans, broad beans, or pods of black beans; I can’t recall the meals she made with these vegetables, although I do recall the steam and the brilliance of some of them.” Or specific details from their monthly visits to one of the city’s grand cafes. The “little bottle of peach-flavoured Deli-frú” that the narrator always chose in the Bambi Patisserie or the “silver triolet tray alongside a glass platter with little pastries arranged according to how moist they were and what they had inside them” that the waiter in Casa Suiza always set down on their table.
So dexterously does López capture a child’s observations, for much of the book it’s possible to ignore the inevitable horror of what’s to come. Since the narrator tells his tale from the point of view at which the action unfolded, his innocence colours the reader’s experience. At the same time, we have our suspicions that something unusual, possibly dangerous, is going on, something that he is as yet not old enough to fully comprehend. One day in the park, his mother disappears for a few minutes while the narrator’s playing with another boy. One night she leaves him alone in their apartment: “She emptied the can where we kept our savings, kissed me on the forehead, went out, and turned each of the two locks on our door twice. She never locked up so much.” Earlier that evening the narrator was sent to his room while a man known to him as Uncle Rodolfo and his mother had a “grown-up talk”.
Often after she returns from such excursions, the air around her has a “metallic odour” that only later the narrator identifies as fear.
With its often dreamlike, sometimes vignette-style structure – “A very beautiful woman ran and fixed her brown eyes on mine, eyes full of anguish that had been devoured by a conflict that I couldn’t understand until many years later. I could explode, become a cluster of particles in the air around me, a brunette was running toward me even if she was taking a long time, even if she never arrived, even if she never existed” – Samuel Rutter’s graceful translation does justice to this delicate, evocative and tragic novel about the shattering of childhood innocence and a country that betrayed its own people.
The child’s innocence colours the reader’s experience but we feel dread that something dangerous is taking place