Epitaph for Sorrows

E Sanderson Steven

Description

This remarkable and highly original novel, the mesmerizing tale of Dolores Rivas, begins in an orphanage in 1950s Buenos Aires. A wounded girl, she becomes convinced that her mother is the child mistress of ex-President Juan Peron. 'Epitaph for Sorrows' builds on the true-life affair of Peron and fourteen-year-old Nelly Rivas, a scandal contributing to Peron's overthrow. Dolores fashions a meticulous journal to record her life, entrusting it to a prominent journalist. At great risk, he transforms it into a poignant epitaph indicting a system that embraces death and dismisses Dolores' life. Her quixotic search for her mother personifies Argentina's quest for truth in a world of lies and records the human costs of state terror.

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The Conrad Press
• Date de parution: 09 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839783685
• Langue: English

Extrait

‘Vivid storytelling and dangerous dreams become our most reliable guides in this heartbreaking story of orphan Dolores Rivas’ search for wholeness during political mayhem in Argentina. In the spirit of Borges, this novel confronts the past with the truths of fiction.’
Rosemary Magee, PhD, Director emerita, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University
‘Dolores’s quest for her mother leads her deep into a labyrinth where dreams and stories are both a curse and a lifeline. Epitaph for Sorrows, a riveting novel set amidst the violence of Argentina’s dirty war, questions the dual nature of the fabulist: are fábulas merely lies, or our best hope for grasping the truths that keep us going?’
Kathryn Burns, PhD, Professor emerita of Latin American History, University of North Carolina


Epitaph for Sorrows
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2021
Tel: [phone] www.theconradpress.com [e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-839783-68-5
Copyright © Steven E. Sanderson, 2021
The moral right of Steven E. Sanderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


Contents
Orphan at the threshold
Essay: ‘Última carcajada’ [The Last Guffaw],
October 17, 2007
Chapter 1 Sorrows
Chapter 2 Carriego receives a gift
Chapter 3 The orphanage
Chapter 4 Amargura
Chapter 5 Blanca
Essay: ‘ Sorcerer in the Casa Rosada , ’
Chapter 6 Searching for Dolores
Chapter 7 Ezeiza
Chapter 8 Facundo Quiroga
Essay: ‘Raging relativism and the demise of Perón,’
Chapter 9 Falcons
Chapter 10 A reporter once more
Chapter 11 Snotty
Chapter 12 Cleaning the library
Chapter 13 La Difunta Correa
Chapter 14 Finding Nelly
Essay: ‘The bloody fetish of Argentine exceptionalism,’
Chapter 15 Villa 31
Chapter 16 Nelly and Perón
Chapter 17 El ogro
Essay: ‘Salvation in cowardice,’
Chapter 18 The question of Dolores
Chapter 19 Memory and vision
Chapter 20 Finding Beata
Chapter 21 Expulsion
Essay: ‘Open letter to the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights, on the occasion of its visit to Argentina,’
Chapter 22 G2
Chapter 23 1988
Chapter 24 First light
Chapter 25 Darkness
Essay: ‘Remembering the discarded,’
Chapter 26 Tomorrow
Epilogue
Author’s note
Suggested reading


Epitaph for Sorrows
Steven E. Sanderson


This is a work of fiction, based on real events in Argentina from 1954 to 2006. The facts and personages of the Perón era are consistent with the historical record, including Nélida Haydeé Rivas, the teenage girl who lived with Perón prior to his overthrow. Dolores Rivas, Andrés Carriego, and the rest are inventions of fiction. Likewise, the essays of Carriego under his pen name Funes are fictional. The name Funes refers to a famous short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the protagonist Ireneo Funes is a disabled man whose gift is the perfect, and perfectly useless, recollection of the past.


Perhaps nothing of what was apparently happening was happening at all. Perhaps history was not made up of realities but of dreams. People dreamed facts and then writing reinvented the past. There was no such thing as life, only stories.
Tomás Eloy Martínez, Santa Evita.


Orphan at the threshold
W inter nights in Buenos Aires are raw. A temperate Austral latitude means little when air is viscous with mist, temperature sinks as low as the fog, and puffs of breeze from La Plata chill one’s bones.
The night of June 16, 1956 was just so, sucking the warmth from a solitary man as he walked briskly toward the inconspicuous entrance of an unremarkable building housing a small orphanage with the name of a sanctuary, the Asilo Socorro de Niños . Seeing light in the kitchen, he pounded on the window, startling the young nun working there. With an impatient hand gesture, he summoned her to the latched metal door.
It was the first anniversary of the Air Force bombing of the iconic presidential palace and the Plaza de Mayo, and Sister Inocencia thought it strange that a man would be on the street at night. The bombing had portended the overthrow of Perón two months later, after which the city had been locked down by curfews, censorship laws, and military presence even in quiet neighborhoods such as this. Either the man was being reckless or had the sanction of military authorities. Either possibility left her nervous as she opened the door.
He wore a brown suit and a Donegal tweed topcoat weighted with damp. His Italian felt fedora hung low at the brim, as if designed to shake loose clinging drops of moisture. Without a word, the man held out to her a canvas duffel with an infant swaddled inside. The baby was still, but Sister Inocencia could tell it was newly born. She backed away.
‘Sister, this child has no one. Her mother is a prostitute, confined to the Asilo San José with other street girls of her kind. I’m entrusting her to you and to God and ask you to take her now and forever.’ He sounded like a father giving away a daughter in marriage, save for his abrupt and affectless tone.
She began to speak but was interrupted as he held up a cloth case.
‘This is all the explanation you need or will receive. You’ll find enough in this portfolio to support the child and to ensure the continuation of your vocation at the asilo . That’s all that can be said.’ He began to turn, then added: ‘Well, one other thing that probably needn’t be said: we are watching you, and your behavior will determine the prospects for any further benefactions, as well as the safety of your community.’
Without waiting for a response, which in any case was not forthcoming from the frightened nun, the man put the duffel and child on the threshold, adjusted his collar and re-entered the night. Wet leaves from wintering plane trees paved a slick path to the street. For no reason, it came to the young woman that they looked like fish scales.
Sister Inocencia shook off her distraction and looked at the baby, whereupon they both were overcome with tears. On that same night, perhaps even at that same moment, a fifteen-year-old girl imprisoned in a detention center across town also began to cry. Locked up as a criminal, called a whore, feeling her health slip away, Nélida Haydeé Rivas, at once a child and the scandalous former mistress of Perón, felt she had lost everything.


‘Última carcajada’ [The Last Guffaw],
by Funes, el memorioso. Published in Porvenir , a magazine of culture and politics, Buenos Aires (Vol 2:11 November 2006).
O n October 17, 2006, Peronist forces engaged in what one hopes is the last calumnious act to be associated with their late leader. As is well known, the tireless faithful of Peronism have planned for thirty years to move the remains of Juan Domingo Perón from his family crypt in Chacarita to a setting more appropriate to his outsized personality. Thus, the construction of yet another monumentalist crypt for yet another dead defiler of the Argentine Nation. With the expenditure of more than US$ 1 million, the Peronist government of Néstor Kirchner did not hesitate to waste public funds on another round of political necrophilia. Perón’s corpse has been moved three times since his death, which is nothing compared to the peripatetic Eva Perón, who crossed the Atlantic twice and visited Italy and Spain, before taking up permanent residence in the Recoleta Cemetery.
The procession of the remains involved a 30-kilometer trip to San Vicente, a favored estate of Perón during his lifetime. During the preparations and the parade, itself, rival Peronist gangs fought over matters that no one else could understand or care about, but that, nevertheless, have a familiar bloody ring. In a fitting end to such a day, participants engaged with police in stone-throwing, tear gas and rubber bullets. A man was seen firing a handgun into a crowd. More than forty people were injured, and it has been reported that at least two people died, one of whom was a woman uninvolved in the idiocy.
It is this last sadness that provokes my column. I have been on record for more than thirty years as an opponent of the self-destructive politics of Argentina, in which Perón, his enemies and their successors have slaughtered so many Argentines. They say it is about ideas, or social revolution, or national security, or infamously ‘the process’ of national restoration, an honorable sounding name for merciless and arbitrary murders. What none of the perpetrators will admit is that their so-called mission is covered in the blood of bystanders and young people, grandparents, and grandchildren, mainly invisible to the vicious ideologues of political vengeance.
Perón is now reburied. Let his ideas and those of his enemies be buried with him, once and for all.


October 17, 2007
T o the reader of the manuscript entitled Epitaph for Sorrows :
Last year at this time I wrote an essay reflecting on the ghoulish gangsters of the Peronist movement on the occasion of the reinterment of Perón’s remains at San Vicente. I reproduce that essay above as a weak herald, an unknowing companion, of a rare gift: a record of a life, written as it happened. As you will see, it’s something of a journal, with aspects of a dream or fantasy. It ends as an epitaph, written uniquely by the person being memorialized, before her death a year ago.
I need add nothing to my original words of outrage, as they have had their sad effect, both to ratify the idiocy named therein and to threaten free expression. The journ