‘Secret’ Skillfully Weaves Repression Into a Fictional Tale of Courage

Not all that long ago, in Argentina in the 1970s, people who criticized the government were summarily arrested, imprisoned, interrogated, tortured and, in many cases, killed. The mothers of those who had “disappeared” held vigils, standing for hours in all kinds of weather holding signs and pictures of their children.

A lot has happened since then. The military dictatorship that had been “macho” enough when it came to bullying its own citizens suffered a humiliating defeat fighting British soldiers in the Falklands War. Subsequently (though not as a direct consequence), a democratic civilian government eventually was restored. But the legacy of those baneful years lives on.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1953, Patricia Sagastizabal witnessed violence and repression throughout her youth. Although she set out to study law, it soon occurred to her that it was, in her words, “a rather lunatic undertaking” to be studying the Constitution of a country where it was routinely flouted by a dictatorship. In 1976, two of her activist friends, a married couple, were kidnapped, never to be seen again.

Only after the passage of more than two decades was Sagastizabal able to transform the painful and disorienting experiences of the 1970s into a work of fiction. Published last year in Argentina, “Un Secreto para Julia,” won her country’s prestigious literary award, Premio La Nacion. One of the secrets of creating a strong work of fiction is transforming the raw materials of experience into something more ordered, shapely and coherent than life, which at the same time impresses us as more vivid, more intense, more “real” than life. This is what Sagastizabal has managed to do.

The story she tells in this novel is not autobiographical: It gives a clarifying form to the difficult plight of victims struggling to overcome the past, a task that requires both forgetting--and refusing to forget--the wrongs one has suffered.

The novel opens in London in the 1990s, where the narrator, Mercedes Beecham, now lives with Julia, her teenage daughter. Although she has managed to make a new life for herself, Mercedes is still troubled by memories of the horrors she endured in Argentina: the police murders of her husband and her sister and her own imprisonment and torture. Her anxieties give way to an almost paralyzing fear when her former jailer shows up in London, unrepentant, self-assured, bold as brass and downright menacing.

At the same time, Mercedes has been experiencing increasing difficulties in her relationship with her daughter. Julia has been demanding to know who her father is, and Mercedes has been deflecting her questions with vague, unresponsive answers. The older she gets, the more dissatisfied Julia becomes, and, by now, the mother-daughter relationship is strained almost to the breaking point. Mercedes has tried to shield her daughter from the poisonous knowledge she carries in her memory, but her refusal to tell the truth has itself become a poison.

If the relationship between Mercedes and Julia forms the primary axis of this novel, it is by no means the sole focus. Sagastizabal thoughtfully portrays the complex emotions of her exiled heroine as she adapts, not only to a different language, climate and culture, but also to a society where the political and philosophical questions that mattered so much in Argentina are not central. Although her experience of torture has not destroyed her faith in her fellow humans, it has severely shaken her self-confidence. Mercedes is assailed by doubts and fears that become stark realities when she again meets up with the man she hates most in the world. Worse even than her memories of the torture is the injustice that would allow such a man to go unpunished.

The squeamish reader need not run for cover: Sagastizabal does not place undue emphasis on the grisly details of torture. But she does achieve a strong, almost visceral, effect through her powerful evocation of her heroine’s thoughts and actions: her fear, her anger, her determination and her courage.