The Call (A Portrait of Survival)

A clear-eyed, haunting story of an ordinary woman struggling to survive captivity, and its aftermath, in the volatile world of 1970s Argentina

“Infused with the intensity of a thriller and with such poetic force, The Call is a masterclass. A hundred years from now, we’ll still be talking about this tour de force.” —Samanta Schweblin, National Book Award-winning author of Good & Evil and Other Stories

In December 1976, twenty-year-old Silvia Labayru, five months pregnant, was kidnapped by paramilitary soldiers and taken to a clandestine Buenos Aires detention center called ESMA where thousands of people were tortured and murdered. For years, Labayru was forced to perform slave labor, repeatedly raped, and coerced into playing a part in a military operation that resulted, to international outrage, in the high-profile disappearance of three Argentine activists and two French nuns. When Labayru was finally freed in 1979, she fled to Madrid, where she thought the agony was over—but the Argentine expat community condemned her, accusing her of collusion with her captors. Nonetheless, she built a life for herself in Spain, until, decades later, she received a phone call from an ex-lover, with whom she returns to Argentina, her beloved homeland and the site of her indescribable trauma.

Over the course of two years, Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero sat down to interview Labayru and her family, friends, children, lovers, and ex-militants. With The Call, she has woven their voices together into a polyphonic picture of a woman, a family, an ex-pat community, and a nation wading through memories distorted by trauma and edited by fear, shame, denial, and hubris. Portraitist and investigator, archeologist and witness—Guerriero has earned comparisons to Svetlana Alexievich for her ability to excavate facts even as she wrings from them a propulsive tale of redemption, memory, and betrayal.