Matilde Mellibovsky, mother of a disappeared child, is one of the founding members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Matilde wrote the book Circle of Love over Death: Testimonies of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in 1990. This was her first book and also the first book of its kind. When a foreign writer approached her at a conference in Buenos Aires, looking for a book in Spanish with testimonies by the Mothers, she had to admit that no such book had been written. Mellibovsky decided then to face the hard task of interviewing the other mothers of the organization, taping or writing their painful experiences as well as her own. “I want to write this book so that the next generations can have an exact image of what happened, so that they know us, the Mothers, as if we were their contemporaries. So that they know how we felt and how we lived out this part of Argentina’s history, which scarred our families forever,” she wrote. In a chapter where she discusses the difference between death and disappearance we can read: “A disappearance places you in a very large, dense cloud from which you cannot escape, because in the unconscious a hope always survives, while you can rationally assume the absoluteness of death.”
Arriving at the Plaza
ARRIVING AT THE PLAZA
One Thursday, during our walk in the circle, I feel the urge to find out what exactly the Plaza had like in earlier days. So I delve into a fat book of Argentinean history: “The Plaza was always bustling, movement never ceased. Around 1810 neighborhood people would come: children, black women and vendors. They would add to the shouting and the din.” Looking at the illustrations from that time, my own childhood memories of them come alive: countrymen on horseback, poultry vendors, black women selling pastries or sweets, above all the water sellers’ carts.
Washerwomen on their way back from the river carrying enormous bundles on their heads. Lots of dogs. And strolling ladies wearing dresses with very white skirts. By 1844 we can already see the “pyramid” in the Plaza, a new market, the Government House, the Cabildo’s outline, and coaches drawn by four or six horses. . .
Actually, I always thought of it as a foolish place and to me it still seems so; but not when I find myself there together with the Mothers.
But after so many marches I came to imagine it a small liberated zone separated from the rest of the country. Then I began to discover that it has beautiful trees, and I started to look for some beauty in its two or three standing monuments. On Thursdays when we are there, I love to see the children running, climbing onto the “pyramid”. . . At that moment I feel as if I were in a very intimate place. We have stepped on each street-tile surrounding the “pyramid” so many times. . .Invariably, I ask myself how many miles have we Mothers walked around this monument. . .
When we are all together, the Plaza is my place, it is our Plaza, and all the disappeared are there and everybody is there.
Moreover as we Mothers have sometimes commented, it was in this Plaza that the
Assembly of 1813 resolved that all the instruments of torture had to be burnt: “The use of instruments of torture to get information about crimes is forbidden,”and they decreed that “all the instruments of torture should be burnt by the executioners’s hands on May 25 at the Plaza Victoria.”
Over a hundred years later, we stand in horror in this place thinking about our savagely tortured children and their fate.
It is true that the Mothers di not choose the Plaza de Mayo because it is itself a political center or because it is very close to Argentina’s great political center, still. . . how very odd something like destiny came about, because it is precisely in the Plaza de Mayo that very important events in the life of the country had occurred.
This place, center of celebrations and of rejoicing during colonial times, was also the place where tragic sentences of justice were executed. . . before everybody’s eyes. . . It is not mere happenstance either that Garay, the founder of Buenos Aires, had the “Tree of Justice,” or “el Rollo,” erected nearby. An it is here that we Mothers come every Thursday to demand that justice be done.
The Plaza is a throbbing heart. . . I appears to be a spot predestined to be a center of world interest, a window to the world, for half an hour one day a week. . .
Yesterday I went to the Plaza and I was watching my companions-and everybody else-observing that takes place there, and I insist that at these very moments the Plaza is a throbbing heart, perhaps with a touch of tachycardia. . . People approach full of curiosity, some from California, others from Australia. One of these foreigners, who could not express himself very well, said something like: ” What is it that keeps you in a state of such high emotion besides the suffering, of course? What makes you keep moving? And I spent the night asking myself that question until I found the answer: the fact that they have eliminated
the generation that comes after me, that they have isolated me from the future, that they have separated me completely from my sense of continuity. . .and that I want to recover it, through Memory.
Without memory, continuity in life does not exist.
Memory is the well-hidden roots which nourish the flowers with their sap and the fruits that we can see. Without the roots neither the flowers nor the fruits are possible.
I would say that Memory is the root that culminates in the seed which makes de circle of life cycle.
“You have to feel the fire of the desert under the soles of your feet,” Rabbi Marshal Meyer used to tell us Mothers.
Memory gives life. An the Plaza, with all its multitudes, is the perennial Memory of all that had happened since its origin. . .Everybody leaves their testimony. . . but the children? Where are they? I miss something. . .those children who made me thrill more than I ever had before, who jumped so happily that it looked as if they caused the clouds to run faster. . .To see them so united by their songs and cath-words filled me with illusion and brought me closer than ever to a faire, more human world.. . .Never in my entire life have I spent such happy hours. . .of real fellowship.
That is why when I walk around the Plaza I fell the Plaza asking me: What has happened? I miss those children.
Excerpts from the book “Circle Of Love Over Death” by Matilde Mellibovsky.
Transladed by Maria and Mattew Proser.
With the authorization of the tranladors to be published in this site.