Tununa Mercado – In A State Of Memory

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Peter Robertson

In A State Of Memory - Tununa Mercado

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Tununa Mercado’s memoir, In a State of Memory, recounts the pain of exile and the even greater pain of return. Mercado, an Argentine writer, experienced two periods of exile: the first, in the wake of the 1966 coup, was spent in France and lasted for three years; during the second period, spanning 1974 to 1986, she lived with her family in Mexico.

Mercado is particularly engaging when she describes the dislocation of the so-called “ArgenMex”, those Argentines forced into exile in Mexico after political upheaval back home had ushered in the “de facto” regime. While some of these “ArgenMex” succeed in bridging the cultural divide, most cling to their national heritage, hanging up the Argentine flag in their living-rooms and turning up their noses at fríjoles. During this exile, Mercado writes for Ovidio Gondi’s political journal, seeks to ward off alienation—and perhaps even madness—by the daily repetition of banal tasks, makes regular, quasi-religious visits to the former home of fellow-exile Leon Trotsky, and treasures a special folder in which she keeps mementos of those friends who have disappeared during Argentina’s “Dirty War”.

There is, however, nothing uplifting about Mercado’s account of her Mexican exile: she even compares it to a lead-coloured Rivera mural. Indeed, her attitude towards her adopted country—she is “possessed by the covetous and impossible desire to be Mexican”—is inspired not so much by any affection as by a feeling of having been betrayed by the homeland which had cast her out. Mercado and her compatriots spend most of the day fretting over events in Argentina. The nights bring no respite—they “almost always dream of death”.

When Mercado admits to her sensation of nakedness, this can be read as a metaphor for her feeling of statelessness. After a total of sixteen years in exile, she finally returns to Buenos Aires. After a few days, she summons up the courage to attempt to reclaim the city only to find that memory assails her at every turn. On one occasion the sudden onrush is so harrowing that, in an act of supreme decorum, she swallows back her own vomit. Months later she again ventures out but recollection, held temporarily at bay by willed amnesia, can be triggered by even an odour—this time garlic emanating from a restaurant. Mercado finds that she is face-to-face with the building where she had once worked, and from which many former colleagues had been abducted, and just a stone’s throw from the former home of Rodolfo Walsh, the murdered writer.

And yet it is clear that Mercado’s attempts to “fill the void” pre-date exile. While the subsequent violent deaths of her friends provoke in her spasms of gastritis, throat infections and neck-cramps, even before her first period of exile in France she had sought out the services of shrinks, cranks and faith-healers. In her quest to find a cure for her sense of splintered self, Mercado drops acid, psilocybin and mescaline. Desperate to spill out her angst, she turns to friends; but they prefer not to listen, instead “scrutinizing her for signs of lasting damage”. While Mercado’s void has much to do with exile and statelessness, it is essentially existential: “Not even my loved ones seemed really to belong to me”.

Despite some lazy writing—”so that reality would reveal its reality”— this memoir is worth reading. Mercado distils the bitter after-taste of exile and conjures up some sharp vignettes such as that of the woman who, having lost all the members of her family during the military dictatorship, and having designed a banner to commemorate each one, cannot find the strength to hold them all up as she protests outside the Argentine Embassy in Mexico City.

The end of In a State of Memory finds Mercado ensconced in Buenos Aires, alone in her study. She has reached an impasse, staring at a seemingly insurmountable wall. But suddenly, in a surrealistic image, her pen takes on a life of its own and fills up the blank wall with cryptic writing. Perhaps there is something cathartic about the verbal expression of even the most painful memory: the words bear down on the structure and force it to fall.

Posted on November 1st, 2004.

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