- Juan Gelman - Open Letter To My Grandson / Granddaughter - 
Within six months turns 19. Have been born sometime in October 1976 in a concentration camp. Shortly before or after your birth, the same year, your father killed by a shot in the neck shot within two feet distance. He was unarmed and killed a military command, perhaps the same as your mother kidnapped Aug. 24 in Buenos Aires and led to a concentration camp Automotive Orletti operating at full Floresta and the military had dubbed "the Garden." Your father's name was Marcelo . Your mother, Claudia. Both were 20 years and you, seven months in the womb when that happened. She moved her - and you with it - when he was about to give birth. Must have given birth alone , under the gaze of a doctor complicit military dictatorship. We then took him and went to stop - this was almost always - at the hands of an infertile couple from military husband or police, or judge, or a journalist friend of police or military. There was then a grim waiting list for each camp: the annotated expected to keep the child stolen from the prisoners who gave birth and, with some exceptions, were killed immediately later. It has been 12 years since the military left the government and nothing is known about your mother. In contrast, a drum of 200 liters of fat that the military filled with cement and sand and dumped into the Rio San Fernando, were the remains your father 13 years later. He is buried at La Tablada. At least that certainty about him.
I find it very strange to talk to my children as your parents were not. I do not know if you're male or female. I know you were born. Father assured me Fiorello Cavalli, the Vatican Secretariat of State in February 1978. Since then I wonder what was your destination. Contrary ideas assault me. On the one hand, the possibility always disgusts me that you called "dad" to a soldier or police officer you thief, or a friend of the murderers of your parents. On the other hand, I always wanted that anyone had been home to did you end up, you will raise and educate well and wish you a lot. However, I never stopped to think that even so, a hole or failure had to be in love you have, not because your parents today are not the biological - as they say - but for the fact that they have some awareness of your history and how they took over your history and falsified. I imagine that you have lied a lot.
all these years I also thought about what to do if you was: If you had pluck from home or talk to your adoptive parents to establish an agreement let me see you and accompany you, provided on the basis that you knew who you were and where they came from. The dilemma is repeated each time - and they were many - that loomed the possibility that the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo you have found. Reiterated in different ways, depending on your age at all times. I was worried that you were too young or girl - to be sufficiently boy or girl - to understand what had happened. To understand what had happened. To understand why your parents were not who you thought your parents and maybe wanted them as fathers. I was worried that suffer even a double wound, a kind of hack into the fabric of your subjectivity in training. But now you're great. You can find out who you are and then decide what to do with what you were. There are the Grandmothers and blood bank data for determining with scientific precision the origin of missing children. Your origin.
Now you have almost the age of your parents when you will soon be killed and more than them. They stayed in the 20 years forever. Much with you and dreamed of a world more livable for you. I would like to talk to them and tell me about you. To recognize in you my son and me to recognize what your father I have: we are both orphans from him. To fix this somehow or silence brutal cut into the flesh of the family perpetrated the military dictatorship. To give your story, not to turn away from what you do not want away. Already large, said.
's dreams Marcelo and Claudia have not met yet. Less than you, you were born and you are who knows where or with whom. Maybe your gray-green eyes or my child's brown eyes his wife, who had a special glow and cuddly and playful. Who knows what you will be if you're male. Who knows what you will be if you're a woman. Maybe you can leave that mystery to go into another: the encounter with an old man waiting for you.
