Los Desaparecidos

Today I went to a free event at my local library on 'Los Demonios'. It's both a novel and a play, written simultaneously by a French author called Valérie Boronad, currently showing at the Vingtième Théâtre. VB gave a lecture on her work and read extracts from it, before a group discussion.

She seemed to find it difficult to get away from the topic of how someone who has no connection whatsoever with the events she describes has the right to enter into their world, almost as if she feels guilty for doing so. The group vacillated between the admission that all horror is shared human pain, whether it be the war in Algeria, Nazi atrocities, Bosnia, Spain under Franco, or Argentina's Dirty War, and the criticisms of two Argentinian woman who had fled to France during the period and who had plenty to say, largely along the lines of, "I know this is fiction, bien sûr, and not la vérité, but honestly if your protagonist had done that he would have not been allowed to live, he would have been shot instantly." Boronad patiently (yet slightly defensively) tried to explain that in her novel, Luis is more useful to the junta alive than dead, and he will die soon in fulfilling his mission, but they laughed together and speculated that, in fact, he was more useful to the author alive than dead. They may have had a point.

We had assembled in the amphithéâtre underneath the Bibliothèque Place des Fêtes, a warm, carpeted space with wicker chairs and lamps, perfect for intimate readings and discussions. It became full of ghosts, from Tango's dead father, Luis, to the invisible audience of one to whom all art is, perhaps, directed. One Argentine lady with a deep, husky voice was a singer: "When I sing," she said, "I don't sing for the audience, or even for myself. I sing to some intangible being who becomes the focus of my expression." Boronad agreed. She quoted Russell Banks, the American writer, who she implied wrote to 'The Angel On The Roof,' and who defines the relationship between the reader and the writer thus: ‘A story is ultimately, of course, about the teller, but the ambition is to try to make it seem like it's about the listener or the reader.’ You write for your imaginary audience, though you don't yet know who they are. The connection, the moment of identification, of reaching out and hooking in whoever happens to be standing by is what counts. Strangely, she tried to convince us that she wasn't one of those authors who writes only about themselves, but one to whom a story arrives, fully-formed, as if she is merely the conduit. A mysterious example of this, she explained, was the occasion on which she invited members of the Argentinian association for los desaparecidos to watch her play. Beforehand, they were reticent, skeptical that some foreigner could claim to grasp what they had been through. After the performance, they were profoundly moved. She had created something genuinely Argentinian, (she said) they said.

I was tempted to go to the play, which is apparently a mixture of theatre and film, an experience rather than an entertainment. It even incorporates smells, for example, the perfumed, maternal smell of the mother who leaves her husband and her country clutching her infant to her breast. Wacky and cool. As the boat pulls away, the baby tastes salt. The salty sea, which has a great presence in the novel, blends with the tears of Anna, and to her child's senses they become one.

At the end of the reading, we're discussing the evocative nature of the sea-scenes. Boronad says she was born by the sea in the south of France and grew up by the coast. It is always there, she says, always present in her mind. You can't not write about yourself, I think, even if you don't realise it at the time. I am with Russell Banks on this one, and so have shifted him to the top of my reading list. Man sounds great. Can't wait to dive in.