Blog 22-Adela, a Professional of Disappearance

Sooner or later, they say here, everyone turns up in Palenque. Soon enough it would be my old friend Adela. I couldn't sleep after all that coffee and all that talking. We women talked. We organized our lives and the world by weaving stories through our endless talking. I couldn't stop my reeling mind, resolve my insomnia. I'd charged my phone at Patria's so instead of going to my notebook I searched Adela Barro on the internet. There were hundreds of entries. Adela was featured in article after article on Desaparecidos. There were dozens of videos of her speaking to conventions, conferences, rallies, stadiums filled with activists, small gatherings in homes and street corners... She had become an academic of Desaparicion, an advocate for Desaparecidos, their families, for trackers, a professional of disappearance. I watched the video with most hits, Adela speaking to a crowd on a hillside at last year's Trackers Convergence, the largest conference on Desaparecidos. When she said, “In a rational world our profession will disappear,” the crowd stood and cheered. “In a rational world there will be no Desaparecidos. There will be no trackers...In collapsing capitalism there is almost no rational work to be had and in a rational world almost all our jobs will disappear.”
In the tiny screen on my phone Adela stood at a podium facing the hill someplace outdoors in the City. I went on the Tracker Convergence website and saw this year the conference was happening in Cayo Karaya at a convention center in Last Domino, a huge casino I didn't even know was here, on the Arrecife side, far away but because Karaya was a small island, actually very near.
I studied the clip of her speech at last year's Convergence, held in the mainland, the City. I couldn't tell which park. How had I never heard of it? She looked almost the same as she had 12 years ago. Her hair still braided around her head now showed some gray. She wore huge indigenous earrings, a filigree of silver dangling from an old coin. I remembered the earrings. Her tone was detached, professorial, sanitized, hardly passionate or rabble-rousing although the gathering looked more like a rally than a conference. Even when I knew her she distrusted charisma and toned hers down, a distrust we shared. Like my father, hers had been a charismatic public speaker. Hers had been a historian who had once run unsuccessfully for Governor for Pro-Independencia. Mine had been an evangelist.
Watching her I felt envy and didn't like myself. Then I saw another entry, several inches deep, a review of a novel she had published just last month. Was there nothing she didn't do much better than I did? I wondered how she was doing as a mother. When I knew her she had been pregnant. I'd heard she had a boy. I lost touch with Adela the way I lost touch with anyone who wasn't right in front of me, when I rushed back to the City after the Asalto al Presidio, having heard Ori had been disappeared in a City Force sweep. (He was released not long after I got back to the City, partly because I managed to get the advocate for the incarcerated Ana Marta Biaggi, and her group, to help me.) I could barely think about Adela's situation at the time, pregnant, husband disappeared after the Asalto al Presidio (which now was called el Primer Asalto, because there had been another one...almost two years ago. Ori had been disappeared in the City after the first one in one of the sweeps, but he'd come home. He'd disappeared the second time just after the Second Asalto al Presidio. But then, I wasn't sure he didn't just leave me. “Ori, he took off for a pack of cigarettes,” I 'd overheard my neighbor Senor Conde say the day after Ori disappeared. I was climbing up my stoop and he was speaking to neighbors gathered to gossip by the railing of his airy. He laughed at his own joke and I ran up the steps to get away from all of them.
I looked up just as Julia and Taina were passing by me on their way to the Señoras. They sat down beside me. Their day was beginning as mine was ending. She put her arm around me and said,“Te amaneciste?” I was still surprised when Julia showed love for me. I nodded. “Still waiting for Machi.” I remembered to tell her about La Escuelita. Taina jumped up. "Kindergarten on the beach! I loved my school and school on the beach will be better.”
I showed Julia the image of Adela's book cover on my phone. “Edad de la Indignacion,” Julia read out loud. She looked at me. I was almost in tears. She had no idea who Adela was and gave me a confused look. “Just crying cause I wasted my whole life. Where does she find the time and purpose to do everything she....” Julia grabbed my hand and dropped it, almost shoved it away. “No tengo la paciencia." But she was smiling so I couldn't quite tell whether she was irritated or amused. “I'd better go and see about that school...” They walked away faster than usual on the Hillside path heading to the Casita where the Senoras de los Frijoles ran the crews of women and men who did the cooking for much of Palenque. Again, I'd hit a nerve with Julia. Was my sense of regret, failure, of wasted life, too close to her own pain?”