The three deaths of Gerardo Pisarello

When he was five years old, little Gerardo saw hooded men enter his room and take his father away in his underwear and without his glasses. It was the last time he saw him. His mother told him he had died of a heart attack. He believed her. A compelling self-deception. Until, at 23, he found the document certifying that he had suffered "various traumas." That lawyer and politician had been tortured and murdered by the Argentine dictatorship. This happened in San Miguel de Tucumán on June 24, 1976, one day after another grandchild was born to that father-grandfather. Skinny Pisarello had dared to defend political prisoners after General Videla's coup d'état three months earlier, on March 24th of that year. Half a century has passed since that infamy.

This death has marked the destiny of Gerardo Pisarello, the youngest in a family they tried to protect from barbarity by erasing it. He should have had the right to start over, without trauma. But it was he who ended up following in his father's political footsteps. When his mother, the teacher Aurora Prados, known as Aurorita, saw him acting like a cat, she would say: "Jump out of bed, smile, and show your teeth, Gerardito!" And so he did. This is the quote that opens and closes the autobiographical work. Under that opening sky. Travel, love, and revolutionwhich arrives in bookstores next week.

Published by the historic Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica, it is being released simultaneously in Spanish (the language in which it was written) and Catalan (the language of his children, Dani and Lua, and his adopted language; translated by Eva Pallarès). It is a moving book, a journey back to Argentina to reconnect with the memory of his father, but also to try to overcome the recent and almost simultaneous deaths of his wife, Vanesa Valiño (from cancer), and his older sister, Tatá (from a sudden heart attack). Overlapping grief. A journey through an ash storm with music by Bob Dylan, Silvio Rodríguez, and others. Prayer of the still water of Jorge Fandermole and Atahualpa Yupanqui (at whose house they stop), and evoking Lorca embodied by his friend Juan Diego BottoA fabulous actor and also the son of a victim of the dictatorship.

He makes Martí i Pol his own: "Walk. There are people / to keep you company. / Don't reject any / of the horizons that call to you." Accompanied by two friends, also with family members persecuted by the dictatorship, Mario (who lost his father and mother; he is a social activist without party affiliation) and Nati (who still has an aunt who disappeared; she is a militant feminist and union member in the aeronautics industry), they embark on a road trip from Buenos Aires—to Tucumán, 1300 kilometers away. Fearless, ready to remember "in this crazy world that welcomes us": "A world often so ferocious and, at the same time, so full of beauty and life."

They travel north and into the depths of themselves. They remember, they believe. After their father's death, with their three older sisters now independent, Gerardo and Aurorita were taken in by an aunt, where, "as in many Argentine homes, the abuses committed by the dictatorship were overlooked, or even justified." "In football, my father was a Boca Juniors fan. I was raised to support River Plate. He lived with political and social commitment. I was instilled with anti-politics. I grew up and developed amidst this singular illegitimacy, the son of my mother's enduring dignity and my father's lingering, proscribed ghost." He attended a public primary school, then a Salesian school, was able to attend university in Berkeley, and earned his doctorate in Madrid. From there, he went on to Barcelona.

"I have made Catalonia my little adopted nation. But, deep down, and by nature, I am like Don Quixote, an enthusiast of all the peninsular peoples and their good people: Basque, Galician, Asturian, Castilian, Portuguese, and always far, of course, from definitions of arrogance." SpanishTo name just two, he is a friend of the Galician nationalist Xosé Manuel Beiras and the Bildu senator Gorka Elejabarrieta. And, again on the subject of his Catalan roots, he adds: "Many of my ideals of freedom and equality have found inspiration in the history of rebellious Catalonia," he says, citing figures from Frederica Montseny to Lluís Companys and, further back, the Christian pacifist Arcadi Oliveres, "who loved Vane very much and whom we both admired." He also, of course, holds the Americas dear. He was able to meet the wise Uruguayan president Pepe Mujica in his modest ranchHe fell in love with Mexico during his university years and longs to exhume his buried Quechua and Aymara identity. He even feels African: his family lived for a few years in Tanzania, where his father was ambassador. Its president, Julius Nyerere, advocated a communitarian path to socialism through the ujamaa, "which in Swahili means more or less fraternity"Or, perhaps, in the political language of this Indo-Afro-American Gerardo, it would be Broad Front.

With Vane, Tatá and the Skinny Pisarello in his heart, Gerardo reaches the end of the journey, Tucumán, street Las Piedras, 772. Absences are palpable, including that of the mother who "filled us with love and protection so that resentment wouldn't take hold." Alongside the beloved dead, a patient impatience keeps him alive. The journey continues.