Videla
made the news again this week, as a federal court in Buenos
Aires sentenced him to 50 years in prison for plotting the theft of babies
from political prisoners and their subsequent “adoption” by supporters of the coup.
The events in question took place at the Escuela
Mecánica de la Armada (pictured above), the naval engineering school that was one of the regime’s
most notorious detention and torture sites. It is now a museum, open to the
public, where visitors can see the cell where pregnant detainees gave birth to
children most of them never saw again.
The exact date when the novel takes place is unclear, but
the title character Perla, a young woman in suburban Buenos Aires, has a
surprise guest – a sopping wet young man who can only nourish himself with
water - while her Argentine family (a naval officer and his wife) are on
vacation in Punta del
Este (Uruguay). As happens,
Perla’s parents (whom she is due to join across the River Plate) were
directly involved in the trafficking of Dirty War babies. In the tradition of magical realism, as the
ghostly figure’s presence becomes more tangible – it’s also worth noting the naval “death
flight” pilot Adolfo
Scilingo is a family friend – Perla has to confront truths she’d rather
avoid. Just as Argentina has had to confront figures like Videla, who is
already serving a lengthy prison sentence for other Dirty War crimes.
Argentina has dealt with this theme cinematically, in the
Oscar-winning film The
Official Story (1985), and in many non-fiction books, but Perla appears to
be the first to grapple with it in fiction. One of the book’s protagonists is
Perla’s crusading journalist boyfriend, to whom she eventually returns when the
issue of her origins becomes too difficult to face alone. In the end, De
Robertis, who hails from Uruguay via Europe, has written an absorbing novel, in elegant language, that leaves an enduring impression on the reader.
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