Issue 19

Luciana Erregue-Sacchi

She, an Argentinian art historian, meets a Peruvian anthropologist at a Canadian cocktail party. Looking over the Edmonton skyline from the third-floor apartment he tells her—I almost went to Argentina on an excavation project; in the end I desisted. I could not imagine unearthing forty-year-old unmarked graves and all that horror, because I would not be able to see them as other than people … I preferred instead to remain in Peru, where I worked on exhuming two-thousand-year-old remains of decapitated, bound human beings, women, men, children, pristinely preserved due to soil, atmospheric conditions in the Andes. And you know? Their heads were nowhere to be found … they still haunt me.

She nods in empathy as he tells her that was traumatic enough. Do not worry, she thinks. She has not told him yet about the Argentinian guerrilla who had disappeared as she exited a church in Miraflores, Lima, Peru, on June 12, 1980. You do not even need to go to Argentina to work on the unmarked graves of the disappeared, you see? Because work always comes to you. On August 13, 1980, Spanish newspaper El País reported the kidnapping of Inés Raverta nearby the Miraflores Park at the hands of Argentinian officers, assisted by their Peruvian counterparts. According to El País, she died as a consequence of torture, conducted north of Lima at the summer residency of the Peruvian Army in Playa Hondable. All that the art historian recalls, as she nods.

She also thinks that other anthropologists have not chosen which graves to unearth, because they know that work always comes to you and beggars cannot be choosers. Of course it would never cross her mind to tell him that.

Those other anthropologists have not directly told her, though. She is just imagining parallel conversations with them as they glance through the balcony of her colleague’s sprawling apartment, towards Edmonton’s River Valley, on the North Saskatchewan River, still running to the rhythm of buried remains encased in a muddy cocoon, gliding, unseen for centuries, like the remains of the Papaschase from Rossdale Flats. In August and September 2016, their remains were uncovered in two separate locations while engineers worked during expansion of the area of the new Walterdale Bridge by the old Rossdale Power Plant. According to the chief of the Papaschase First Nation, Calvin Bruneau, the reburial ceremony at the old Fort Edmonton traditional burial grounds was important in order to show respect to their ancestors buried at the site. ”[It’s] very special in that we’re taking care of these people that were, they weren’t buried properly.”

The art historian also thinks of other anthropologists, unlike the one at the party, who must content themselves with remembering the smell of burning flesh, ashes levitating over their cities, rather than cradling their dead like a mother. Because you see, she wants to tell the Peruvian anthropologist—those suspended non-bodies will never be ancient fossils needing to be unearthed.

So she contents herself with dreaming up infinite New Year’s Day party conversations between people like her and other anthropologists at her colleague’s sprawling apartment, avoiding at all times discussing her need to cradle her Argentinian dead like a mother. And she knows for sure that Inés Raverta follows her alongside other Argentinian disappeared, like a great cloud of witnesses.