Memory Tracks: Fragments from Prison (1975-1980) by Margarita Drago recounts the memories of an Argentine political prisoner from 1975 to 1980. A teacher, under house arrest and accused of political crimes, is transferred to the Women´s Prison of Rosario. Terrorized, she will become witness and victim of multiple interrogations, tortures and rapes. But there in the basement, where she lives along with other companions, she will begin a press using cigarette packages, and neither strength nor hope will abandon her. Intimate parts of the body will become secure, secret hiding places to keep study materials and prison information. Day after day she will feel the terror and cold of machine guns. She will hear the noise of the soldiers' boots and the bark of police dogs a few centimeters away.
Family visits, increasingly more scarce, are reduced to almost a memory by the time she was transferred to the Villa Devoto Prison. For five years she sees, behind bars and doors, her companions being transferred to hidden jails. She knows of the manipulations of the priest who, cloaked in the sacrament of confession, betrayed many women who ended up assassinated. She lives through the tensions of cohabitation and political differences impossible to resolve.
“Homage,” “The Mind Plays Tricks,” “Good-bye,” “The Women´s Prison of Rosario,” and some wrenching first pages signed by the author complete this book of hair-raising tensions and encounters. Memory Tracks: Fragments from Prison (1975-1980) is a piece of autobiographical writing that goes further than an act of restoring the past. Here, the protagonist proclaims identity as a gesture that repeats itself: the subject generates an answer and responsibility toward others. Indispensable.
Alicia Perdomo H.