Federico Lorenz: “The novel is also an exercise in memory” | The writer and historian published “For an unknown soldier”

A kaleidoscope of thirty-one voices, stitched together points of view to recount the life of the Negro, a conscript soldier of a town in which “he doesn’t even stop to load gasoline.” Short stories that recover possible stories of the lives crossed by the Malvinas War through the memory of different characters who in one way or another (parents, ex-girlfriend, fellow conscripts, English soldiers, islanders) met him. A story stitched through the passage of time that puts on the table little traveled dimensions of a war and its consequences, from everyday life and human relationships and not from the bronze that is the sacrificial martyr. This it is To an unknown soldier (Adriana Hidalgo Editora), the new novel by writer and historian Federico Lorenz. “There are counterpoints in some of the voices but there are also complementarities”, he explains to Page 12 the author. “I was interested in the stories, some better known and others less so, because each one leads to different emotions regarding Malvinas,” he says.

Lorenz specializes in the study of the Malvinas War, directed the Malvinas and South Atlantic Islands Museumlocated in the Espacio Memoria (former ESMA), and published other books on the conflict on the islands, such as Postcards from the Falklands O Montoneros or the white whale, among others. “I started thinking regarding this novel at the end of the first year of the pandemic,” he recalls, because “I thought that in two years it would be the 40th anniversary of the war, and the pandemic also had to do with death and survival.” “I wanted to write something regarding the Malvinas and I wanted to put together the complexity of how it works as a trigger for memories.” Therefore, in the book there is not a single view of the war but a range of assessments that put the reader at the crossroads of wondering if he might share, or not, the position of the characters. “It is a narrative device that I found it interesting, to show how contradictory and fragmentary memories can be”concede.

­-Why approach this story from different voices to reconstruct it?

-It had to do with including different perspectives that allowed me to show a very varied color palette to talk regarding the war and the post-war, both in terms of people’s lives and in different places in the country. Because that is another axis: what I was looking for, moreover, is to show that we are a very complex country, and to reduce it to one word is to simplify it. That is why he is an unknown soldier, because they can be everyone. And I had the will to include the look of the islanders because it seems to me that it is a missing piece in any imagination of Malvinas, and they stayed on the islands once the war ended. They saw the dispossession not only of our compatriots but also of a way of understanding ourselves as a country. It is what I understand in narrative terms and also in terms of study. They lived the war in another way, as the Patagonian Argentines lived it in another way and in the imaginary town of Negro. What was it like waiting for a letter? Or follow the radio thinking that at any moment they name your son? Or being young and seeing a village authority thinking he’s taking you the telegram? There are a number of very intense things that suddenly seemed like they hadn’t happened.

The stories in the book, in some cases, are versions or adaptations of testimonies that Lorenz obtained as a researcher through different means, such as letters, interviews or documents, some acquired during his visit to the islands. And there are also stories that he imagined, but always respecting the credibility of the testimonies that he was getting. Does it change anything in the output produced? For the author, “strictly speaking, everything that appears in the book happened, in the sense that either they told me regarding it, or I read it, or I found it in documents, or I imagined it but informed regarding everything I know regarding the history of the war”, he stands. “The novel is also an exercise in memory, and I wonder what novel on these subjects isn’t. The issue is how explicitly you assume it”, he challenges.

-The Negro’s mother says that “he is a child that doesn’t even know how to cook”, and the father answers that “he is already a man”. Many of the discussions regarding the war moved in that ambivalence. How to talk regarding those conscripts that perhaps it was the first time they saw the sea without falling into simplifications? How can we talk regarding them and not regarding the bronze statue?

-Years ago I interviewed an ex-combatant from Formosa and he told me that it made him angry, verbatim, that “they are going to remember us when we are dead.” I think the statue, like any homage initiative, freezes a sense of history. In the first place, it would have been wonderful if those who returned from the war had not encountered the climate of hostility or indifference that many perceived. And some shame too, because there was a guilty thing to wonder what was being accompanied, because as soon as the war ended, what had been State Terrorism began to circulate, with greater massiveness. That is why I was interested in the fact that the Negro had been born in an unknown town from the political point of view, which might be from anywhere in Argentina. They charged that it was inevitable that seeing them would remind them not only of the war but of the years of the dictatorship. And the novel is regarding that too, because the fragmentary, the different stories that can be read all together but each one is a story in itself, tell you regarding a lot of individual loneliness crossed by a common fact that is war.

-What do the islands represent today, with so many meanings that surround them?

-It’s not just one thing. It is a political fact, and it had a lot to do with what at that time we called the transition to democracy and today we call it, or at least some of us call it, post-dictatorship. Malvinas is intimately linked to that dictatorship, in some way it conditioned how we remember it because it was a war produced by the dictatorship, and many compatriots to whom I owe my respect and affection, went without being consulted if they wanted to go or not, fundamentally the conscripts. The second is if one weighs it in terms of our link with the islands and with the claim, which is another terrain. In that sense it was a huge mistake. And that’s why I think it’s so hard for us to approach the subject, because nobody likes to admit their mistakes openly. Socially there is something very shocking there. And thirdly, it is a conglomeration of feelings. There is a slogan that says that “Malvinas is a feeling”, but I prefer the plural: they are often very contradictory feelings. So, it boils down to the fact that Malvinas is for me, above all, a question. And it’s not rhetorical, it’s really a question.

“How we process things is a big question. In that sense, my novel is one more memory vehicle”, bets, and insists: “Memory is not only multiple, but also has different temporalities and channels. Without essentializing any of them, my wish is that a common date like April 2 be an occasion for multiple revisions of that past, but revisions that are prospective as well. Because if not, we’re still stuck there, in that ’82”, she concludes.

history and feelings

The writer says that he spent more than half his life working on this topic because professionally it represented a “gateway” to the study of those years, and that he also goes through it personally from his childhood memories. “I remember that when it was the defeat, the question I asked myself was why we lost in the Malvinas and not the Malvinas. It went through all of us, unlike other situations. And when I wanted to remember I was writing, teaching…”, he lists, and wonders how this issue can reach those who were not even born. “They are memory of memories”, he analyzes. “I remember that time, especially that winter and then the surrender, as a very sad moment. But not because of the surrender, the sadness was palpable for different reasons. Because at the same time we were a country that was economically destroyed, closed in on itself, quite selfish in broad sectors. Being in the street, seeing people, united by something that was support for the soldiers, not the dictatorship, and also support for the recovery. You have to take charge of all that”, he reflects and continues: “You shouldn’t be ashamed of being supportive, but you have to ask yourself politically, some time later, what it is that you supported. Because historical conduct cannot be essentialized. Yes, feelings can be essentialized if you want, but historically I cannot reduce everything to a feeling or an emotion, because there is no possible discussion. And we are obliged to explain that time historically and politically.”