Memorias del subdesarrollo: Nothing Is Ever Enough

Notes on "Papá Iván," a film by María Inés Roqué. México, 2000.

This morning I spent the better part of an hour on the phone with a woman I had never met, talking about things I have carried for fifty years. Her name is María Inés Roqué. She makes documentary films; so do I. She left Argentina around the time I did. Somewhere in that hour we discovered we have many friends in common. It should not have surprised either of us: the country we left was small in that particular way, and the catastrophe that pushed us out was smaller still — a village, really, where everyone eventually turns out to know everyone, or to have buried them.

I did not find her the way one usually finds a filmmaker, through her work. I found her through a newspaper clipping about a killing.

Rosario, April 1972

For some time now I have been trying to clear a period — that is the only verb that fits. Not to settle it, not to close it, but to clear it the way one clears a mined field: to see what else is actually there under the growth. The period is the Argentine 1970s, the years of the so called dirty war, which touched my family the way a wave touches a sandcastle.

At the center of my search was one episode. On the morning of April 10, 1972, a guerrila styled commando in Rosario ambushed and executed General Juan Carlos Sánchez. I was born in Rosario, so was Messi. The action was claimed jointly by the FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias) and the ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo). It was a pivotal moment in Argentine modern history in terms of insurrectional operations: an active-duty general, the man running the counterinsurgency in several provinces, gunned down in the street in broad daylight — something without precedent in the country's modern memory. A woman named Elvira Cucco, who kept the newspaper kiosk on that corner, died in the crossfire. Her name rarely makes it into the accounts. I want it in mine, because this article is, among other things, about the price of these stories, and the price was never paid only by those who chose to be in them.

I have always suspected that my uncle, Roald Montes aka Leandro, played an important role in that operation. Beyond my suspicions, it was also a silent fact in family lore. That belief is what sent me into the archives. And in the clippings, alongside the name I was looking for, I found another: the name of the man who, according to what I was able to piece together, commanded the operation. Julio Roqué. Within the organizations he was known as Iván. His children knew him simply papá.

That is how I arrived at Papá Iván, the documentary his daughter María Inés made in 2000, and that is how, decades after a burst of gun fire bound our families together without either of them knowing it, I came to pick up the phone and call her. I dialed...

The chain of events

I should say plainly why Roald mattered so much to my search, beyond blood. His actions set off a chain of events that broke my family in more ways than I know how to count. Following his trail, the army ransacked my grandmother's house, also in Rosario, where they arrested and imprisioned my aunt Lelia who were to spend several years in jail. Following leds from multiple interrogations the military dispatched a team to Buenos Aires looking for my father, and perhaps other relatives. My grandmother was able to alert my father by phone, and my brother and I were waken up in the middle of the night to clean up the house, which meant to get rid of books, papers, and images that could be compromising. We spent most to the night burning it all in the building incinerator with the help of don Oscar, the always faithful and caring superintendent. The ride from Rosario to Buenos Aires waasof about fice hours, we were expecting the arrival of the artmyat between 6:00 and 7:00 am. So, by 5:45 all four, my father, mother, my brother and I sat at the table perfectly set for breakfast waiting for the guests of honor. If it sounds surrealistic, it was. They soldiers didn't show up for breakfast. At 7:30 my brother and I went to school. Just another day in Buenos Aires.

Fear travels through a family faster than news does, and it stays longer. What the militancy of one man set in motion did not end with him; it rearranged the lives of everyone who carried the name, and of some who didn't.

Roald was excecuted in November 1976, when the house he was occupying with wife and other militants came under fire. The battle — and it was a battle lasted for hours. Roald and his wife were wounded in the process and ultimately executed with direct shot to the back of the head with a 7.62 mm projectile.

Hold that image. We will need it.

The newsreel

And then, in the middle of María Inés's film, my family appeared a second time — on the other side of the equation. Let's rewind a few years

To contextualize her father's radicalization, the filmmaker edits into her film a newsreel of the June 1966 when a military coup overthrew President Arturo Illia: the solemn narration, the troops occupying the key points of the city, the new junta arriving at the presidencial palace (Casa Rosada). Three men walk passed the camera lens of the reporters: a lieutenant general, a brigadier, and the commander-in-chief of the Navy — Admiral Benigno Ignacio Varela, my uncle. There he was in the grain of the archival footage, walking into the Casa Rosada in his admiral's uniform, one of the three faces of the Revolución Argentina that would in a few years set Julio Roqué — and Roald Montes, amongst many — on the road to armed struggle.

So there I was, watching a film made by the daughter of a guerrilla commander, and finding both of my uncles were part of that story: one implied in the operation that took the like of General S'anched and an inocent ,bystander, the other on the newsreel, at the founding ceremony of the regime the first one took up arms against.

This is the complexity of the period that the tidy versions — the epic and the indictment alike — cannot hold. One Sunday I would go to a barbecue at my uncle Ignacio's home to visit with my cousins, whom I adored. And running underneath those Sundays, unmentioned and unmentionable, was the other life, the secret one, the ransacked house, the soldiers... The family was divided in two — not by a quarrel, but by history itself, which had run its front line through our living room. Nobody chose the seating arrangement. We were children; we ate at both tables.

The film

Papá Iván opens with a letter. On August 26, 1972, Julio Roqué, already underground, sat down and wrote to his two small children, Iván and María Inés, "for fear of never being able to explain to you what happened to me." He wrote it in case he died before they were old enough to understand. He died on May 29, 1977. María Inés spent the following decades growing up inside that letter, and the film is her attempt to write back.

It is an extraordinary film. I say this as a viewer and I say it as a colleague, because it is exactly the kind of film I wish I could make: introspective, confessional, a film that tries to work out in strictly cinematographic terms something that cannot be worked out at all. She uses Super 8 the way I use it in my own work — not as decoration, not as period wallpaper, but as the very texture of memory, film grain standing in for everything that can no longer be verified.

Watching it, I had the disorienting sense of recognizing not only the history but the toolbox.

The father who emerges from the testimonies is a man of parts that do not quite assemble. His students remember the impeccable professor with two books under his arm who allowed dialogue in the classroom. His comrades remember the most lucid theorist, an intelectual, a disciplined military cadre of enormous personal courage. His wife remembers a tender man who loved children, who liked nothing better than an asadito in the patio with plenty of wine, tucking in his kids and giving them a last kiss before bed. And she also remembers a man "very, very sure of himself, always feeling he was never wrong" — and, she adds, with the precision of someone who has had thirty years to choose the words, "those things carry great costs."

The film's most devastating image is almost a throwaway. His second companion, Gabriela, recalls a tree in the yard of a safe house in Buenos Aires, its trunk scarred with hatchet marks. She asked him what had happened to the tree. He admitted, evasively, that he sometimes hit it — one blow, it turned out, for every comrade who fell. The revolutionary discipline that forbade him from showing feeling had to go somewhere. It went into the tree. No screenwriter would dare invent it.

The moral compass

The moral center of the film — undeniably, I said to María Inés on the phone, and I repeat it here — is her mother, Azucena.

She was there at the beginning, when they were two teachers at the Colegio San Francisco de Asís dreaming of founding a little school somewhere in Patagonia. And she was there at the fork in the road, and she did not follow. Her refusal was not timidity; it was a philosophy, stated in the film with a clarity that fifty years of hindsight cannot improve: "I could never exercise violence, not even against those who have exercised it arbitrarily... I always felt it meant immolating your life, and I thought life is for living, not for immolating. The struggle that makes sense is the one you wage every day, with your children, with what you do, with what you build. That project had death as its purpose — and against that I rebelled, and I rebelled always."

When he went underground in 1971, she refused to follow: "One does not pass into clandestinity for being somebody's wife." When he was imprisoned in Devoto and demanded she bring the children to visit — where, he wrote, the children of revolutionaries sang the Montonero anthem — she refused that too. He answered that she was a bourgeois who understood nothing. She answered that she was the one raising the children, and that while she raised them he would not be handing down the ideological line from a cell. The film does not editorialize. It does not need to. Every year that has passed since 1977 has been quietly ruling in her favor.

And yet — this is what keeps the film honest — she never turns him into a villain. "It hurt me that he left us," she says, "because he was the father I chose, the father I thought my children needed. But I never doubted his honesty." The film allows both things to be true: that he was a man of good feelings, and that he left; that he loved his children, and that he chose a project whose end was death.

Two houses

Roqué's final stand came in Haedo, in the western suburbs of Buenos Aires, on May 29, 1977. A safe house, betrayed under torture at the ESMA. The house was surrounded. What followed was not an arrest but a siege: hours of combat, a grenade, a fire, an explosion, a man holding off a heavily armed task group while — it is presumed — he burned the organization's papers. He did not come out. Even his enemies conceded the point; the film records the head of the ESMA task group saying he would not celebrate the death of an enemy who died fighting like that. There was no body for the family. There is no tomb.

Six months earlier, in November 1976, another house had been surrounded, and another man had held out for hours while the military brought up its firepower, and had died rather than be taken. That man was my uncle.

I do not know what to do with this symmetry, and I have decided that not knowing is the honest position. Two houses, six months apart. Two men who died what the epic calls an exemplary death — with courage, with coherence, weapon in hand. A comrade in the film says of Roqué: "If it had been my turn to die, I would have wanted to die like him... he truly believed in what he was doing and he was coherent with it, and I don't know if one can ask more of life."

I understand that sentence. I have heard versions of it about Roald. And I no longer believe it — or rather, I believe it is an answer to the wrong question. Whether one can ask more of a life is not the same as whether one can ask more for the lives around it. The heroic death, the martyrdom — and it was martyrdom, in the full liturgical sense our generation gave the word — did not do much good to those of us who carried the name. It did not warm anyone at my grandmother's ransacked house. María Inés puts it in one line that should be carved over the entrance to every archive of that period: "I once said I would rather have a living father than a dead hero."

The phone call

Which brings me back to this morning. REmember the call?

We talked for an hour, María Inés and I. About the friends we have in common. About leaving Argentina around the same time — I will not say the same year, because neither of us was keeping records; we were keeping ourselves. About the films we make and the strange, stubborn choice we both made to work in the first person, in the confessional register, with the small-gauge film stock of our childhoods, as if memory itself came perforated at eight millimeters.

But mostly we talked, without ever quite naming it, about a position — a place to stand with respect to that period that is still, in Argentina, uncomfortable to occupy. It is the position of the children. Not the prosecutors and not the hagiographers. We do not question the sincerity of our dead; we lived with them, we know what they believed and what it cost them to believe it. What we question is the price — the one they paid, the one they made everyone around them pay, the one that was extracted from bystanders like the woman at the kiosk in Rosario, and the one that is still being paid, in installments, by people now in their sixties who never chose any of it. We are not the only two. There were many others; there are many others. We are a generation of auditors going through the books of an epic, and the books do not balance.

Near the end of her film, María Inés says something that I have not been able to shake since I heard it. She thought the film would be a tomb — the tomb her father never had, a place to put all of it down. "But I realize it isn't," she says. "Nothing is ever enough." She made an extraordinary film to bury her father and discovered that films do not bury anyone. And still she leaves the question on the table, the only one that matters and the only one no witness could answer: did he ever, even once, doubt?

I called her because I was chasing a newspaper clipping about my uncle. I found instead something I did not know I was looking for: confirmation that the search itself is the inheritance. Her father ended the 1972 letter with the slogan of his war — libres o muertos, jamás esclavos — free or dead, never slaves. He kept his word; that was never in question. It is the rest of us, the ones who got neither the freedom promised nor the death, who have spent fifty years working out what the words actually cost.

I have no tomb for Roald (neither do I for my father). Perhaps this page is not one. Nothing, as María Inés says, is ever enough. But this morning, for an hour, on the telephone, between two people who had never met and knew everything about each other, there was something better than a tomb. There was company.