I knew they had disappeared. Were disappeared. Husband #1’s brother and then his sister. I knew they were desaparecidos. Think that movie, with Cissy Spacek, and her disappeared husband. I knew this because Husband #1 told me, early in our relationship, while we were still in Spain, maybe even during our idyll in Sotillo de la Adrada. I believe we were eating when he told me, and I also think we were drinking (if we were in Sotillo, we were definitely drinking).
I know that we were alone. Which was remarkable—as readers of this sad little blog of Bad, Bad Love will know by now, Husband #1 and I were rarely ever alone, and I’m pretty sure this was one of the biggest of our very long list of problems. In Sotillo, the default would have been for us to be surrounded by other expat Argentinians, but I know that, when he told me, we were alone.
Most Argentinians, in the early ‘90s, knew desaparecidos. Most expat Argentinians, in particular. Many had become expats because of the desaparecidos they knew, particularly if those desaparecidos belonged to their immediate family. In that case, it could be dangerous not to become an expat, and the vast number of those expats headed for Spain. Which is some kind of through-the-looking-glass, history-repeating-itself phenomenon, considering the traffic back and forth between Spain and Argentina during the former’s civil war and its immediate aftermath.
Argentinian expats, as I’ve told y’all a couple of times, Bad, Bad Love friends that you are, or at least the Argentinian expats I knew, spent a whole lot of time talking about Argentina. Missing it, loving it. But they never talked about the desaparecidos. At least not around me.
So I know that we were alone when Husband #1 told me about his own desaparecidos, during that part of a relationship when stories are still being told, pasts still being revealed, wonders still pulled out of velvety storage, to be held close, marveled at, together. Where he’d studied, where I’d studied; why he painted, why I wrote and translated. Favorite foods, favorite pets. Favorite places in backyards to dream, favorite kinds of make-believe.
The fact that I was adopted, and hated my brother.
The fact that his country had existed, for nearly a decade, under an iron-fisted military dictatorship masquerading under the anodyne acronym, the “National Reorganization Process,” shortened in Spanish to el proceso militar.
Why am I talking about this here, now? Short answer: It’s been bugging me this week. I felt like I needed to.
Isn’t this blog supposed to be funny? Sure, maybe, for the most part. But I have spent a good part of it taking the piss out of Husband #1—and I am not about to deny that he deserves it: just because shitty things have happened to you in life, doesn’t grant you carte blanche to go through life being a shit. But the more distance the decades put between me and this sad relationship, the more convinced I become that this particular factor was a potent ingredient in the recipe that made of Husband #1 someone who could never find what he was looking for. Someone who reached for yet another woman, yet another self-help book, with the desperation of an addict. Of someone desperate to escape, or lose himself, or dissolve himself, and come out on the other side, unrecognizable even to himself.
It would, I think, have been a relief. For both of us. I’m not excusing his treatment of me (or my own acceptance of it; I brought my own little suitcase full of trauma to the table about which I’ve had a bit to say on here, but I don’t consider that acceptance excused by its contents). I’m just trying to contextualize it.
I don’t remember whether Husband #1 brought up what had happened to his siblings—significantly older than he, by about a decade, maybe a little more—unbidden, or I asked, the usual questions you ask about brothers and sisters. But I knew, the way you know things about your partner, throughout our relationship. That his brother—married, or at least with a live-in girlfriend and progeny; involved with labor organization—and his sister, whom he’d idolized—a university professor, or a post-doc, or a grad student, I can’t recall the exact details; she was an out lesbian—had been “taken.”
And never seen or heard from again.
There was another sister, sweet and unremarkable, living in a town to the north in the pampas, whom I would eventually meet. How she’d escaped, I don’t know—she was of an age with the disappeared brother and sister—but I had the sense of her hanging on to her normalcy the way you might grab a shield or a life raft. Her house, even as they weirdly celebrated me, and Husband #1, and our marriage, which I think I knew, even then, was not a ‘real’ one, was as dark and somber and full of ghosts as the place Husband #1 called home in La Plata.
Things about what might have happened to the disappeared brother and sister were known. I’d read about some of them, even before meeting Husband #1. There were prisons, tortures, rapes, mass murders. Mass graves. Occasionally someone returned to her or his family, thin and damaged and scarred, tormented by nightmares. Usually through connections or massive bribes, neither of which means of leverage Husband #1’s parents, or extended family, were able to marshal.
It was the not-knowing-for sure, as well as the knowledge of what might have been–probably had–that brought Husband #1’s father, an Italian immigrant, owner of a sort of general store that he ran out of the first floor of his house, to an early grave. If I remember correctly, it was his heart. And the same extended form of mental torture sent his mother—also an Italian immigrant, and with barely a high-school education—to bed. She never got up again.
In the midst of this not-knowing of the details, the country was trying to put itself back together again, life by life. Husband #1 had to grow up, fast. There was the store to tend, and his mother to care for. He did this all, and he did it alone, all while completing his university studies and going to art school.
Once she died, he inherited the house and some money, and it was time to live for himself. Desperately, as though someone might yank his life right out of his hands and abscond with all the days left to him if he wasn’t careful. Live it all, live a thousand lives, a million, live for the disappeared brother and especially the sister. And hurt others, occasionally, why not, people who lived in countries where uniformed soldiers didn’t bang doors down in the middle of the night and march people off to dark little nightmarish hells deserving of far worse designations than “prison.”
I tried to understand what the proceso militar must have been like, but of course, I couldn’t. And my own country hadn’t exactly stepped in and tried to stop it either. I didn’t realize the extent to which Husband #1 was affected by his desaparecidos because he told me in the most matter-of-fact tones imaginable, as though he were talking about someone else. And then he never mentioned them again.
Until right before the end, not long before I put my foot through that painting.
He’d been to Argentina, maybe a few weeks before, or maybe a couple of months, I can’t remember for sure. But one day—I do remember this, and clearly—when we were standing in the kitchen of our East Village apartment, he said, out of the blue, apropos of nothing, or maybe of everything, “I found out what happened to her. When I was there. Mi hermana. My sister. Ya sé lo que le pasó.”
Archives were being opened, people were researching, finding out things. Making them known publicly, lining them up along the cracked sidewalks of collective memory, hoping for the sun to disinfect. A few of the bad guys were even going to prison. And a family friend, I believe, had researched. And found things. And told him. His brother had gone first, the labor union activist, and for the sister, it was only a matter of time. She was on a list, the girlfriend was on a list. Their names had been given or were known anyway, or both. She was warned, the sister; her girlfriend was warned. The girlfriend, or maybe the sister, by that point, because of her connections in academe, was offered the chance, by a woman she knew whose husband was an official in el proceso, to board a plane to Brasil. To disappear that way.
And she refused. Husband #1 was unable to say why; the family friend hadn’t known either. Something about principles, about not accepting help from perros. From dogs. Estúpida, he kept saying, to me, but about her (if he was even talking to me; I’ve never been sure of that), qué estúpida. Stupid. How stupid.
She was one of the ones flown out over the ocean, in a little crop-duster of a plane. Drugged to render her defenseless, knifed in the stomach so she wouldn’t float, and pushed out.
Desaparecida, para siempre. Until the records were outed (the proceso clearly hadn’t envisioned the days when it wouldn’t be the proceso anymore).
This telling, in our kitchen, was a few weeks, maybe a month, before we finished.
And that’s all I know, Bad, Bad Lovers, for this week anyway.
I’m sure I’ll talk about this again; for the moment, thank you for reading. This is the first time I’ve told this story in anything approaching a coherent manner, and it’s given me some things to think about.
Husband #1’s still the villain in this tale, make no mistake. But all villains have backstories: remember his, as we go forward.
Catch you next week, friends. Till then, love your life. However shitty these next seven days might turn out to be, you’re not in a dark, dank prison somewhere, at the mercy of the proceso militar.
