Harder to get rid of

I teach history at a school in Villa Crespo, Buenos Aires, and I have taught the dirty war period for twenty years, and I know the facts and I know the documentation and I know that the documentation is incomplete in the specific way that systematic violence always leaves it incomplete. Facts can be erased. I still believe this. The records from 1976 to 1983 that should exist and do not exist are a form of evidence about what was done to the records, and this is history of a kind, but it is not the same as knowing what happened in the rooms. Fiction is the only tool I have for the rooms. I started writing historical fiction set in this period in 2015, after my mother told me something she had never told me before about her cousin, who disappeared in 1978. The fact was there before she told me. What changed when she told me was the weight of it. I'm trying to put that weight into a novel. The novel follows three families in Buenos Aires between 1975 and 1983, through the period, through what comes after. I write on Sunday mornings at the kitchen table in my apartment in Almagro. It is slow work. It should be.