The Will to Heal : Psychological Recovery in the Novels of Latina Writers

3: Going Home: Returning from Exile in Luisa Valenzuela’s La travesía

u 47 Chapter three Going Home Returning from Exile in Luisa Valenzuela’s La travesía Published in the summer of 200, Luisa Valenzuela’s La travesía narrates one woman’s psychological journey of return to Buenos Aires after living in exile for twenty years. As in the author’s other works, the novel is imaginatively inspired by her lived experiences. Much like the protagonist of La travesía, Valenzuela was one of those “que se iban” (“those who left”). She returned to Buenos Aires after living in exile for more than a decade (979–989). In La travesía Valenzuela explores the repressed identity of the exile and the difficult process of conceiving return once another identity has been created. This exploration has no small consequence for readers, given that the exile of Argentines to the exterior was massive. The diaspora began to take shape in the summer of 974 with the emergence of the Anticommunist Alliance and its death squads. Fifty thousand Argentines departed the country shortly after the military coup on March 23, 976, and it is estimated that throughout the dictatorship a total of two million Argentines sought exile in other Latin American countries, Europe, the United States, and Canada (Corbatta, Narrativas 28). The return of exiles to Argentina in the aftermath of the dictatorship initially created unforeseen tensions between two groups of artists, activists, and intellectuals: los que se iban, those who left, and los que se quedaron, those who stayed. As Alicia Dujovne Ortiz has explained in her Al que se va, the dictatorship and the event of exile succeeded in dividing intellectuals into two camps, “como si pertenecieran a dos pueblos distintos” (“as if they each belonged to distinct pueblos”): “[C]ada uno de esos pueblos se estimaba más sufrido que el otro, [. . .] Competían por el sufrimiento y la conciencia, corrían una carrera cuyo premio consistía en determinar quién había entendido mejor y a quién fahey.indd 47 8/10/07 10:13:28 AM 48 u Chapter Three le había dolido más” (6) (“[E]ach one of these pueblos believed that it had suffered more than the other, [. . .] They competed for suffering and consciousness; they entered a race in which the prize consisted of determining who had understood best and who had been hurt worst”). Unfortunately, as Beatriz Sarlo has written, both sides failed to see the crisis as “el producto de las políticas del régimen y no de opciones libres” (“El campo intelectual” 02) (“the product of the politics of the regimen and not of free choice”). Efforts to diminish this tension between those who left and those who stayed include Mario Benedetti’s essay “El desexilio y otras conjeturas ,” published in 984 at the horizon of the return to democracy. Here Benedetti warns exiles that the process of return, or desexilio, will be “disquieting” precisely because it will involve an encounter with the others, those who stayed. Prejudice, he warns, will emerge from all corners. And yet: [S]ólo tendrá un buen desenlace si tanto los de fuera como los de dentro proceden sin esquematismos, dispuestos a recibir no sólo las noticias, sino también los estados de ánimo, las preguntas acuciosas, los análisis temerarios, las transformaciones, aun las tempermentales, que pueden darse en uno u otro lado. Que los amigos, o los hermanos, o los miembros de una pareja, al reencontrarse, sepan de antemano que no son ni podrían ser los mismos. (4) [I]t will only have a good outcome if those from away and those who stayed proceed without schemes, willing to receive not only the news of what happened, but also the moods, the urgent questions, the fearful analyses, the transformations, even the temperaments, that might emerge from one or the other sides. May the friends, or the siblings, or the members of a couple, upon reuniting, know ahead of time that they are not nor could they be the same. fahey.indd 48 8/10/07 10:13:28 AM Going Home u 49 While Benedetti writes here about a collective process of desexilio, Luisa Valenzuela’s La travesía suggests that these difficult confrontations also occur at the interior as part of the individual process of desexilio. Like Mario Benedetti, Valenzuela recognizes the difficulties of the task of desexilio, especially where...