By EUGENIO BUCCI*
To obtain the right to memory, we must invest in hard work to build the access roads to the past.
at the end of parallel mothers, the new film by Pedro Almodóvar (which is showing in São Paulo and will soon be shown on Netflix), a sentence by the Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) appears on the screen. In white letters on a black background, the words fulfill the function of summarizing the moral of the story, as if they were a post scriptum or a kind of dispatch: “There is no silent story. No matter how much they burn it, tear it apart, no matter how much they lie, human history refuses to shut up”.
It looks like a prayer. It sounds like a prophecy. It looks like a poem. It seems true. But will it be true?
parallel mothers narrates the encounters and disagreements of two women who give birth on the same day, in the same maternity hospital and stay in the same room. The two didn't know each other until they collapsed in their paired beds. They come from different backgrounds, separate classes, disconnected universes. One has nothing to do with the other, until the plot linked by Almodóvar begins to tangle the two in well-knotted, definitive and beautiful ties.
The film does not bring (almost) any touch of comedy. In this respect, it is different from the great successes of the Spanish filmmaker. The serious tempo combines some romance notes with a severe criticism of the oblivion of the atrocities committed by the fascists (Francoists) during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The plot weighs and moves. The two women, the so-called “parallel mothers”, live the experience of motherhood while discovering themselves: Ana (Milena Smit) wants to break free from her bourgeois family, while Janis (Penelope Cruz), older than her roommate, is committed to finding the place where her great-grandfather was buried, executed in the Civil War by Francoist troops.
From then on, the intimate truths of each of them unfold in parallel with the historical facts that are being exhumed. Ana and Janis' irreducible subjectivity is gaining consistency at the same pace at which crimes against humanity are brought to light.
Then, at the end of everything, the text by Eduardo Galeano, the famous author of The open veins of Latin America, from 1971. “Human history refuses to shut up”, he assures us. The passage in question is part of a brief essay, “La impunidad de los cazadores de gente”, within the book Paws up: the school of the world upside down, from 1998. It's beautiful to read the confident message, after seeing a film that is also beautiful and confident. The certainty that nothing will be forgotten, that nothing will go unpunished, comes to comfort and strengthen us. It makes you want to believe. You can even cry.
But is it really like that? Is the belief of Almodóvar and Galeano credible? Was there an impulse of their own in past events, an impulse that would prevent them from being silenced? Can we think about history as we think about what is repressed in psychoanalysis? The repressed, according to psychoanalysts, always comes back – and it comes back because, one way or another, it doesn't give the subject rest. What is repressed always conspires to return. Only with a lot of work, a lot of work, can the subject be able to keep hidden what is repressed. When the citizen gets tired, or when he is distracted, the thing erupts from the back of the closet and comes to the surface, like lava from a volcano. Returning to the film, does history, or, as Galeano says, “human history”, work in the same way as what is repressed in any person?
Maybe not. When a language disappears (and more than 200 languages have disappeared since 1950, according to Unesco, and another 2 have their existence threatened), a whole story disappears. Dead language, dead history. The facts also disappear. Human acts naturally tend to be forgotten, unless another human act, such as the work of reporters or historians, prevents them from being lost in the dark.
While the repressed requires psychic work to remain forgotten, history requires investigative work to not be forgotten. Without this work, the factual truth – the most fragile of truths, as Hannah Arendt teaches – would disappear in time. When left to its own inertia, history is silent. In order to have the right to memory – the theme par excellence of Almodóvar's film –, to fight for it, we have to invest in hard work to build access roads to the past.
In Brazil, the National Truth Commission had a federal hassle to objectively describe the serious violations of human rights committed by agents of the military dictatorship. What came next? Oblivion. The recommendations left by the commission remain silent, silent.
And what is not silent? Fascism. One of these days, a boy – who is said to be famous on social media – publicly defended the legalization of a Nazi party in our country. It is the repressed that returns, in the arms of ignorance and the oblivion of history.
The word alethia, in Greek, usually translated as “truth”, has the meaning of not forgetting. The problem is that humans forget. Forget and repeat.
*Eugenio Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of The superindustry of the imaginary (Authentic).
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul on February 10, 2022.
