FICTION

STEPS UNDER WATER by Alicia Kozameh, translated from the Spanish by David E. Davis (University of California Press: $12.95 paperback, 161 pp.). This slender novel is based on Alicia Kozameh’s experiences as a prisoner of the Argentine military regime during its “dirty war” against left-wing guerrillas in the 1970s. Like Sara, her fictional alter ego, Kozameh was jailed for more than three years in her home town, Rosario, and in Buenos Aires, then served an ambiguous term of “freedom under surveillance” before being allowed to leave the country in 1980. She now lives in Los Angeles.

“Steps Under Water” is a fragmented, surrealistic (and perhaps awkwardly translated) narrative that strives to be both personal and universal. What happens to Sara could happen in any police state. Kozameh seldom refers to Argentine politics specifically. Her interest isn’t in cataloging atrocities so much as in describing their subtler effects on the mind and spirit. A jacket, for instance, that belonged to Sara’s “disappeared” boyfriend is flaunted by a soldier at the army headquarters where she has to report regularly after her release; this appalls her almost as much as a fellow prisoner’s death from lack of medical care. Despite the toughness and humor that help her survive prison, Sara finds adjustment to the outside equally wrenching: “How could all those living trees be real, those cornfields? . . . There was only one truth and that was . . . confinement.”