Post-dictatorship Argentina and Drucaroffian narrative esthetics: Cuentas pendientes by Martín Kohan

Argentine author Martín Kohan,^[1] writer of Dos veces junio (2002) as well as the winner of the coveted Premio Herralde de Novela for his celebrated work Ciencias morales (2007) has more recently produced another meritorious narrative in the form of his short novel Cuentas pendientes (2010). The sociohistorical settings of all three novels are influenced to varying degrees by the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-1983; whereas the first two mentioned works are set during the years of the "Proceso," Cuentas pendientes is placed some twenty plus years after the period of said military government yet is uniquely linked to it. These circumstances optimally lend Kohan’s novel to an analysis reliant on Elsa Drucaroff’s compelling proposition of the nueva narrativa argentina laid out in her Los prisioneros de la torre: Política, relatos, y jóvenes en la postdictadura (2011). This study seeks to contribute to the growing body of scholarly work dedicated to Cuentas pendientes utilizing Drucaroff’s critical study of certain “new” post-dictatorship narratives she refers to above. In Los prisioneros Drucaroff scrutinizes over five hundred works published post 1990^[2] by more than two hundred Argentine writers that she denominates as the nueva narrativa argentina or the “NNA” belonging to that epoch. In her book she describes this corpus of narratives as having innovative attributes while also possessing a distinctive historical nexus to the military dictatorship in question. Whereas in Los prisioneros Drucaroff points out the original and novel traits ascertained in her ambitious study of literature produced after 1990, she also affirms that these novelties respective of said works are intimately related to a “trauma” that affects Argentina society and that stems from a denied and painful past, a clear reference to the Proceso de la Reorganización Nacional and its grievous legacy. At a certain point in her text she indicates that themes associated with the Argentine Guerra Sucia continue to be ever present in the works of this new generation of authors as well as motifs pertaining to post-dictatorship Argentina.

En la NNA se lee hasta qué punto aquella historia de espanto y muerte, tan lejos en la experiencia vital de sus autores, está sin embargo viva, y cómo opera. No se trata necesariamente de alusiones referenciales o temáticas sino de su presencia sutil de connotada en una superficie significante, de la misma textualidad que sueña de muchos modos el pasado traumático y se ofrece a la lectura y a la interpretación, como un inconsciente abierto, o que habla de un presente derrotado y sin raíces, un desierto sin historia. (27)

As Drucaroff maintains, the military dictatorship in question continues to be an active and operative thematic influence and presence in Argentine narratives published by a new group of coetaneous writers. Of notable significance is her assertion that the repression and crimes of the military Junta are narrated via an assortment of literary techniques in these texts, to include not only direct thematic or referential portrayals but also through more subtle and connotative approaches. Also noteworthy is her juxtaposition of dictatorship era themes with those of Argentina circa the turn of the century, even those treating an unstable and precarious “defeated present” for the nation’s populace. Respecting this, as well as the societal “trauma” of postdictatorship Argentina as previously cited, Drucaroff references them anew amidst the main objectives of her exhaustive study. She declares her ambitions are to: “perseguir en algunos libros de la NNA, y en algunos problemas literarios, ideologías, imaginarios inconscientes y conflictos hasta ahora irresueltos que laten en nuestra tierra y que la literatura condensa más allá de la voluntad individual de los escritores. Leer, en definitiva, en las obras, deseos o traumas sociales; leer este tiempo y este país” (20).

Kohan’s Cuentas pendientes optimally achieves some of the common designs of postdictatorship narratives as presented above in that it contains unequivocal references to Argentina’s last dictatorship while conjointly narrating an assortment of polemical historical questions occurring near the turn of the 21st century. The 1990s and the early 2000s were crucial times in Argentina regarding the project of national reorganization that the military Junta had attempted to carry out through state terrorism. President Carlos Menem (July 1989 - December 1999) granted pardons to the convicted members of the cited junta in 1990. As Jorge Lanata indicates: “El indulto de Menem cerró el círculo de la impunidad en la Argentina, que comenzó a trazarse cuatro años antes, con la Ley de Punto Final de Alfonsín; la estrategia de reconciliación sin justicia resultó estéril e impuso sobre el futuro del país la hipoteca más pesada: la ausencia del Estado de derecho” (614). Silvia Bleichmar appears to allude to this same generalized lack of adherence to law occasioned by Menem’s pardons, together with a widespread loss of moral values: “el menemismo selló de manera inédita la caída de valores básicos como la solidaridad, la honestidad e, incluso, el respeto al semejante” (89). Menem is also known for the neoliberalization of the economy which led to increased levels of poverty and corruption. Jonathan C. Brown writes of the massive unemployment caused by these reforms (268). Marcos Aguinis describes the neoliberal age as a relapse from Argentina’s former economic puissance at the turn of the 20th century, while lamenting: “¿Cuántos puestos de trabajo se han perdido, cuánta hambre, exclusión, analfabetismo, mala atención sanitaria y deterioro de la calidad de vida significa ese retroceso?” (El atroz encanto 2 27). Additionally, near the end of and immediately after Menem’s administration, the country underwent a devastating economic depression which culminated in December of 2001.^[3]

The trifecta of themes in Kohan’s text, or military crimes during the Proceso era and criminal offenses as well as other controversial issues of post-dictatorship Argentina are rendered from the perspective of an omniscient narrator together with the lugubrious life and outlook of the protagonist “Giménez.” Also called “Lito,” this solitary seventy-something man is separated from his wife “Elvira,” is socioeconomically disadvantaged, and resides in a small apartment in Buenos Aires. A prominent secondary character and friend of Giménez is that of “Vilanova,” a retired colonel from Argentina’s Armed Forces who participated in the crimes of the dictatorship. Kohan divulges to the reader that Giménez and Elvira’s only daughter “Inesita” was adopted at birth after having been kidnapped from her biological parents during the Proceso years and given to them by Vilanova. Respecting the narration of societal phenomena taking place over two decades since Inesita’s adoption, Kohan’s text realistically treats an array of issues including, but not limited to, different forms of violent criminality, judicial ineffectiveness, sexual misconduct, substance abuse, an acute type of moral desensitization, and abortion. All these questions can in varying degrees be defined as the “defeated” and “traumatic” present as well as the “unresolved conflicts” and “social works” read in the contemporary body of Argentine narratives as proposed by Drucaroff.

Cuentas pendientes is a novel of paradox and irony. While the septuagenarian Giménez and others like him denounce with a generationally condescending tone criminality and other morally charged issues in post-Proceso Argentina, they conveniently forget the immorality of the military dictatorship and even attempt to condone their crimes. As regards these characters, Luz C. Souto observes: “Kohan utiliza sus voces para ridiculizar los argumentos dictatoriales, pone en evidencia que los excesos fueron cometidos desde la estupidez y la carencia de razonamiento” (278). But while Giménez execrates the questionable behaviors of others to include Argentina’s youth, he readily ignores the pernicious immorality that he himself collaborated in, even the contemptible appropriation of an infant belonging to murdered victims of the Junta militar. In the express case these distinct phenomena in the novel are comparatively collated and scrutinized, it is conclusive that Kohan employs the extreme irony at hand to mock the hypocrisy of the moralizing discourse by Giménez et al. regarding different controversial matters in Argentine society. As Valeria Isabel Garza Escalante rightly asserts: “la hipocresía y la desfachatez de las acciones de Giménez, así como su relación subordinada con el coronel Vilanova, van proyectando una faceta de la dictadura desde la mirada de un sujeto mustio” (178).

However, my study differs from Escalante’s in that I endeavor to highlight and factually corroborate key societal issues appearing in Kohan’s text which are anathematized by Giménez and others. This in turn brings about another differing focus of my research, or rather, Kohan’s work presents an additional paradoxical conundrum beyond those examined by myself or Escalante. Given the gravity of the nonfictional social questions verisimilarly depicted in the narrative, Giménez’s condemnations of such are arguably warranted in some instances despite the duplicity of the condemner. Moreover, it is worth noting Kohan’s clever twist on the title of his novel. While the unaffluent Giménez is several months late on his rent which constitutes for him an unresolved financial matter, the true unsettled account is that of justice and accountability for the crimes perpetuated by the military government.

Amid the first pages Kohan renders the stark realities of criminal and other controversial acts on a nationwide scale while harnessing the uneventful state of Giménez’s personal life as a narrative vehicle through which the aforesaid acts are depicted. Whereas Giménez harshly denounces these different occurrences, at a proximate subsequent point in the linear timeline Kohan points out the crimes of the dictatorship including his main character’s direct involvement in them, thus presumedly ridiculing the blatant and contradictory irony at hand. Towards the beginning of the narration, we read of a late-night request from his estranged wife who lives in an adjacent apartment and “viene a inflarle redondamente los huevos con alguna requisitoria que no admite esperas” (17). The nocturnal setting would seem to amplify the somber nature of a newscast heard on Elvira’s transistor radio.

En la habitación de su señora está prendido un velador, y también, como siempre, la radio a transistores, donde justo en este instante una voz nocturna y grave explica a los noctámbulos que no habrá remedio posible para el flagelo de la delincuencia en la Argentina mientras las leyes sigan permitiendo que los criminales entren por una puerta y salgan por la otra, se deduce que de la cárcel.

−¿Los chorros sueltos, y nosotros detrás de las rejas? (18-19).

Scarcely a few moments later in the timeline, the radio is heard again, and the announcer makes direct reference to a current crime wave throughout the nation. Additionally, his/her personalized observation is made with a satirical tone that denounces the apparent escalation of violent criminal acts, including rape. “La voz de la radio, que en verdad nunca cesó, se deja oír otra vez en el resuello de la habitación. –Si los violadores no tienen curación, ¿qué esperan nuestros legisladores para votar la pena de muerte?” (22). We perceive three eminent points from these passages. First, in making explicit reference to the problem of chorros or Argentine slang for “thieves” together with that of sexual assault, the text alludes to a rise of criminal wrongdoing in Argentina circa the turn of the century. Secondly, in both instances Kohan adds a hyperbolic element to underscore the severity of the offenses portrayed in the text. The image of numerous larcenists at large among the public contrasted with a dramatic increase in home security in Argentina would appear to corroborate the gravity of the matters in question. Thirdly, the novel reflects a serious mistrust of many Argentines towards the legislative and criminal justice systems of the nation overall. This marked uncertainty regarding the effectiveness of the justice system, as well as the portrayal of illicit and abhorrent acts, are seen only a short time later in the storyline as the reader again accompanies Giménez in his typical daily routine:

Por lo común se viste (la camisa del día anterior puesta sobre la camiseta sin mangas que utilizó al dormir) y se va al café de Cabildo y Arenal, cerquita del regimiento. Ahí le prestan un rato el diario y le sirven un café con leche que a veces paga y a veces queda debiendo. Revisa el diario un poco someramente, porque lo único que de veras le interesa de la actualidad del país y del mundo es el avance incontenible de la delincuencia armada. De eso se informa a conciencia: un asalto con toma de rehenes en Burzaco, un joven de diecinueve años al que le pegaron un tiro para robarle la bicicleta, un linchamiento vecinal en Núñez al presunto violador que asuela el barrio, una banda de asaltantes de blindados que ejecuta con todo éxito su tercer golpe consecutivo, el auge del pungueo descuidista en los andenes de las estaciones del tren. (27)

As Giménez reads a newspaper in a café that is, interestingly, factually located very close to several prominent military institutes in Buenos Aires, we learn that what verily interests him are current events in the nation dealing with a surge of criminal activity. Most noteworthy from this passage is how Kohan narrates an assortment of violent crimes in different urban sites in the province of Buenos Aires that achieve a verisimilar aspect due to his assiduous attention to pertinent details. Yet another observable factor of the passage in question is that it depicts crimes such as armed assault, homicide, rape, brazen lawlessness, and petty theft in a manner that characterizes them as irrepressible facets of Argentine society. These elements in Kohan’s representation of urban criminality near the turn of the century do have factual underpinnings. Föhrig, Pomares, and Gortari point out a disturbing uptick of criminal activity of a violent nature in Argentina from 1995-1999 (243-44).^[4] Aguinis elaborates on what has been an increase of homicide and other violent assaults in Argentine cities from 1997 onward (El atroz encanto 216). Hinton has commented on the dramatic rise in the crime rate in the metropolitan area of the capital during the years of the Menem presidency of 1989-1999 (20). Luis Alberto Romero avouches that after 2007: “el delito aumentó de manera evidente, tanto en número como en violencia y espectacularidad, y la seguridad se convirtió en el problema que más preocupó a la opinión. Muchos lo asociaron con la emergencia y el descontrol del mundo de la pobreza” (382).

As we continue to read about Gimenez’s visit to the café:

Comenta un poco con Salazar, el de la caja, que nunca deja de darle la razón, la desgracia de tener una justicia que es blanda o es cómplice y le hace el caldo gordo a los criminales atando de pies y manos a la fuerza policial. El resto del diario lo sobrevuela o lo descarta: las mentiras de la política, el deporte que ahora es puro negocio, la manga de desviados que sale en la televisión y en el cine, la droga en el rock and roll, el sida. Un mundo en crisis, le propone a Salazar, que ajusta el concepto con la sugerencia de que la crisis es moral antes que nada. (27-28)

What is noted here is that Giménez and Salazar allege the complicity of the Argentine judiciary in the nation’s criminality while also vaguely assigning blame to a worldwide moral crisis. Indeed, as previously stated, the novel goes beyond the mere delineation of violent crime in Argentina. In this and the previous three passages Kohan indicates a generalized public skepticism and resentment for the blatant inability of Argentina’s political and judicial institutions to deter and/or prosecute violent crime throughout the state. Giardinelli has assertively challenged the fundamental legitimacy of the criminal justice system in Argentina in recent years^[5] and has even alleged corruption in the Argentine judicial plexus in the selfsame period.^[6] As regards the character Salazar, he appears very little throughout the novel. However, he distinctly comes across as belonging to the same generation and mind-set as that of Giménez as observed above. What’s more, at another point in the text Kohan discloses that Salazar acts as an individual with whom Giménez, on occasion, “intercambia frases vagas” (48) and whose light exchanges with Lito entail only “un temario que es amplio y es general” (48).

Immediately following the above episode Kohan establishes a direct ligature between Giménez and Vilanova and the crimes of the military Junta. We learn that Giménez works a part time job or changa for the retired Vilanova assisting him with his buying and selling of used cars and rare auto parts. Regarding the same newspaper cited earlier:

Del diario Giménez retiene la sección de los clasificados, que se lleva a una mesa del bar (la de la ventana, si está disponible) para revisarla más puntilloso. Es una changa que se consiguió, un trabajito sencillo que le permite ganarse unos pesos más de los que recibe por la jubilación vital y móvil. Al coronel Vilanova le debe este favor. Se lo debe a Vilanova, coronel con retiro efectivo, que es a quien le debe además el gran favor de toda su vida: la ayuda decisiva que les prestó, hace más de veinte años, para que a Inesita la tuvieran ellos y no alguna otra familia y el sueño de la hija propia pudiese hacerse realidad. Ese favor le debe Giménez al coronel Vilanova: nada menos que ese favor, que es para toda la vida. (28)

This revelation of the shocking circumstances of Inesita’s adoption during the dictatorship era as well as its immediate proximity to the previous excerpt is decisive and compelling. The historicity of the confiscation of infants from kidnapped mothers and their placement with families who supported the Junta and others is a documented reality and constitutes a profound unhealed wound for Argentine society to the present day. Romero points out respective of the desaparecidos, to include pregnant women, held in clandestine centers: “En esta etapa final de calvario, de duración imprecisa, se completaba la degradación de las víctimas, mal alimentadas, sin atención médica y siempre encapuchadas o ‘tabicadas’. Muchas detenidas embarazadas dieron a luz en esas condiciones; muchas veces los mismos secuestradores se apropiaban de sus hijos, o los entregaban a conocidos” (241). In his El proceso: 1976/1983, Alberto R. Jordán writes concerning: “el triste capítulo del trato que las fuerzas encargadas de la lucha antisubversiva dieron a los hijos de sus víctimas, quienes a menudo conformaban matrimonio o parejas” (original italics, 74). He goes on to describe the grossly unlawful and appalling acts of the repressors pertaining to the children and infants of those abducted, to include being illegally adopted at times by families of police and military groups (74). Furthermore, as he points out regarding these young victims: “Al margen de las consideraciones de tipo jurídico, lo más lamentable es que en muchos de los casos se procedió con una evidente despreocupación por la suerte de estos inocentes, que tal vez deben soportar por siempre la carga de los sucesos traumáticos que los afectaron en sus primeros años de vida” (74). The widely known documentary text Nunca Más Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas or (CONADEP) not only potently underscores the horrors in question but also points to the prolonged and painful legacy in Argentine society relating to the fate of these stolen children: “Despojados de su identidad y arrebatados a sus familiares, los niños desparecidos constituyen y constituirán por largo tiempo una profunda herida abierta en nuestra sociedad. En ellos se ha golpeado a lo indefenso, lo vulnerable, lo inocente y se ha dado forma a una nueva modalidad de tormento” (299).

Indeed, Kohan’s text illustrates one of the pivotal components of the nueva narrativa argentina concerning the Proceso years. Clearly, “aquella historia de espanto y muerte, tan lejos en la experiencia vital de sus autores,” (Drucaroff 27) is nevertheless alive and operative in Cuentas pendientes. The historicity in support of the representation of the illegal adoption of Inesita also coincides with the NNA in that we perceive in the novel “conflictos hasta ahora irresueltos que laten en nuestra tierra” (Drucaroff 20) apropos of unresolved accountability for the criminality in question. What’s more, by closely situating in the text Giménez and Elvira’s stark connivance with the crimes of the military Junta with his protagonist’s moralizing with respect to different controversial social issues, it is reasonable to conclude that Kohan seeks to mock and undermine said moralistic platitudes. This is not to contend that some of the morally charged human behaviors in post-dictatorship Argentina mimetically portrayed in the text are not worthy of reproval. The assortment of reprehensible comportments so vividly illustrated would assuredly be deemed unethical, immoral, or even egregiously appalling by many of Argentina’s populace. In this vein and detached from his own individual doings, Gimenez’s condemnations of these behaviors are justifiably merited and credible. These highly problematic and polemical societal questions of post-Proceso Argentina narrated in Cuentas pendientes can be linked in many instances back to the Proceso era itself. Respecting the “social traumas” as well as the “defeated present” read in the contemporary body of Argentine narratives as proposed by Drucaroff, that which psychoanalyst and historian Silvia Bleichmar affirms in her No me hubiera gustado morir en los 90 (2006) is unequivocally relevant. She makes the compelling argument that since the inception of Argentina’s last military dictatorship, the nation has suffered a troublesome and unsettling breakdown of what she calls the “las reglas del juego” (185) these understood to be several basic moral principles and practices that, having considerably declined and eroded, have given way to various manifestations of immorality and degeneracy (185-86).

In Bleichmar’s estimation, since the year 1976 onward Argentina has undergone a gradual degradation of values that has been superseded by a series of behaviors and attitudes that she execrates as the “los restos ideológicos de la dictadura” (185). The perturbing catalog of deportments and mentalities as put forth by Bleichmar entails, among other matters, phenomena seen in Kohan’s text, such as physical violence, thievery, governmental and judicial corruption, a widespread absence of criminal justice, the destruction of solidary or commonly held principles, and a loss of a collective social responsibility in the face of the victimization of innocents. By detecting some of the aforesaid issues in the narrative before us, we contemporaneously discern that which can be regarded as traumatic and volatile societal conflicts and questions in Argentina near the turn of millennium. In consequence, it seems evident that we are allowed to: “leer, en definitiva, en las obras, deseos o traumas sociales; leer este tiempo y este país” (20) as attested by Drucaroff. She further elaborates below on the particularities of the works produced by writers born post-1960 and categorized as the NNA. The literary themes inherent to these once again lend themselves theoretically to Kohan’s novel.

En resumen, entiendo a la generación como grupo humano dinámico y coetáneo, particularmente sensible a su tiempo histórico, conjunto de personas que intentan protagonizarlo en algún aspecto, en este caso, el de la producción literaria. . . Una generación es un lugar de pertenencia histórica y, sobre todo, social, en el que lo biológico apenas impone ciertos límites, condiciones de posibilidad. En ese espacio se intercambian experiencias públicas o privadas, hábitos, modas, consensos, debates, conflictos. (169-70)

Here Drucaroff outlines multiple aesthetical attributes and motifs pertaining to the narratives of this new generation of authors who she defines as “dynamic” and exceedingly sensitive to their distinct period of history as they attempt to narratively represent some express aspect(s) of their particular time of sociohistorical “belonging” of post-dictatorship Argentina. As explained by Drucaroff, their fictional works feature common prevailing social habits, customs, debates, and conflicts of both a public/private nature which prove to be markedly inherent in the citizenry or society in their dual space and time, or in this case Argentina circa the onset of the new millennium. As we have observed and will yet do so, Kohan himself appears to be keenly sensitive to his own historical period, or that of post-dictatorship Argentina. This sensitivity is evidenced by his compellingly verisimilar narration of key factual issues in the time frame before us.

The explicit realism inherent to distinct passages in Cuentas pendientes becomes apparent to the reader a very short time later in the linear timeline. Giménez, a chronic victim of insomnia, decides to remedy his lack of sleep by scanning through the channels on his television. In view of the proposed critical objectives in question, it is of particular interest that at this moment in the narration Kohan once again infuses into his novel themes of a perspicuously moralistic nature that delve deeply into controversial national issues:

De los programas que va consultando, descarta casi todos. Le parecen en general una bazofia de vulgaridad y lascivia; la degeneración avanza, incontenible (como dice el coronel Vilanova: ser un hombre de verdad va a ser pronto una rareza) y los entretenimientos más chabacanos no buscan otra cosa que el embrutecimiento de la masa ignorante. Giménez saltea todo: los veintidós tarados que corren atrás de una pelota, los periodistas afeminados que sin embargo recorren el mundo, los dibujitos animados que no hacen sino preparar a los niños para la violencia y la destrucción, los videos musicales plagados de drogadictos, los noticieros mentirosos que les hacen el juego a los políticos. Saltea todo, busca otra cosa, lo que quiere es cultivarse y no dejarse idiotizar por el pan y por el circo. (72-73)

By portraying a broad medley of televised entertainment all of which Giménez (and Vilanova also) judge as fundamentally immoral, degenerate, or even mindlessly inconsequential, Kohan again establishes his protagonist as a communicator of moralistic discourse concerning the moral and ethical disposition of the Argentine people in recent years. What is particularly noted is how Giménez describes a “desensitization of the ignorant masses” as it relates to the decadence he perceives, thus indicating a populace whose moral sensibility has been cauterized and deadened to what he deems as the utterly frivolous, as base, immoral, and unsavory. As Giménez continues to flip through channels he comes across a documentary program dedicated to an historical event that he finds most absorbing, specifically that of the suicides of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials and their families to avoid capture and prosecution for war crimes as well as possible retaliatory cruelty by approaching Russian troops. As Giménez notes the suicides of Hitler and Eva Braun as well as those of Joseph Goebbels and his spouse in addition to the tragic filicide of their six children amid the catastrophic defeat and ruin of Nazi Germany, he makes a strikingly provocative comparison to the overall moral climate of the Argentine masses near the turn of the century. “En cambio en la Argentina, coteja Giménez, las cosas son siempre una joda. Puede pasar lo peor, concluye reflexivo, y no hay nadie que se suicide nunca por nada” (74). In no uncertain terms, Kohan’s character makes an audacious rhetorical argument as to the issue at hand. Although Giménez’s assumption undeniably includes a marked hyperbolic component, the moral question inherent to his statement would appear to point to a literal and nonfictional conclusion. Unlike those Nazi perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes who resorted to suicide/filicide to avoid prosecution and to presumably conceal their profound ignominy,^[7] essentially hiding their shame and “saving face” as it were notwithstanding their deplorable crimes, Kohan appears to suggest an opposite recourse and mind-set for the Argentine public, at least as it relates to general societal morality and probity. In essence, the author employs an extreme comparative analogy to describe a society that is unabashedly and irredeemably numb or anesthetized as it were towards that which many would consider to be fundamentally unethical, immoral, or objectionable to varying degrees.

Gimenez’s suppositions that suggest a grossly insensitive or nonreactive moral state of the Argentine public may be connotatively linked to the social and historical aftereffects of the Proceso of 1976-1983. Indeed, there is an unmistakable albeit subtle correlation between the two. I again turn to Bleichmar’s insightful theories on contemporary Argentina for better understanding. In reference to Gimenez’s provocative assertion dealing with a generalized and deep phlegm and insensibility towards the moral/ethical ambient of the nation, Bleichmar makes a bold declaration concerning her fellow citizens between the 30-year period spanning 1976- 2006. “El saldo más penoso de estos treinta años lo constituye el hecho de que nos hemos habituado a convivir con la inmoralidad” (25). Bleichmar further explains this assertion in her book by indicating that the most pitiful “balance” of the three-decade space in question deals with the lamentable fact of the Argentine public becoming generally habituated to coexist with immoral conduct or practices harmful or offensive to society. Bleichmar also affirms that her fellow citizens are not congenitally immoral, but rather have become incorrigibly accustomed to nefarious behaviors on account of a pervasive loss of collective confidence as it relates to the capacity to amend or transform for the better a society surrendered to profligacy and immorality. In a very similar contextual vein, in her Dolor país y después… (2007) Bleichmar again writes concerning a type of diurnal national desensitization and skepticism in recent years amid a stark absence of morally sound actions and behaviors in Argentina, which she succinctly describes as: “la sequía moral y psíquica que invade al territorio” (158). As she attests below, her countrymen seem to be overcome by a profound and despairing resignation due to widespread libertinism in Argentina.

Desde el escepticismo a la suspicacia, los argentinos vamos recorriendo la gama de posibilidades de una filosofía cotidiana que, si tiene su espacio paradigmático en los cafés y taxis, tiñe todos los intercambios en los cuales, muchas veces, basta un gesto de hombros acompañado de un retraimiento de mentón para que el interlocutor sepa que ya nada nos asombra. (158)

Bleichmar indicates an apparently normalization of the negative for Argentines in that they live with a state of perpetually cynical attitudes such as skepticism and suspicion regarding immoral behaviors so common that they are no longer shocking or unexpected. Aguinis has also written concerning the societal aftershocks of the Proceso era. In regard to “la anemia y el autoritarismo que nos lega el Proceso” (219), he indicates: “En qué consisten? Nada menos que en un agudo debilitamiento de la normativa (la Ley, lejos…). Se oscurece la diferencia entre lo justo y lo injusto, lo permitido y lo prohibido, lo perjudicial y lo beneficioso” (Un país de novela, original italics 219). Tomás Eloy Martínez has pointed to the prevalence of an acute moral skepticism among the Argentine people near the turn of the century in the face of rampant governmental corruption and impunity having written in 2000: “La impresión de que el ejercicio del poder y el paso del tiempo disuelven todas las culpas ha sembrado en la sociedad argentina un escepticismo moral y un hartazgo ante la impunidad que podría abrir paso a cualquier aventura política. La Argentina es, desde hace tiempo, un país imprevisible” (279). Respecting this and also Bleichmar’s hypotheses above, Martinez’s own El vuelo de la reina (2002) furnishes a noteworthy and meaningful intertextuality to Kohan’s work. Set in Buenos Aires in essentially the same era as that of Cuentas pendientes, Martinez’s award-winning novel (Premio Alfaguara de Novela) portrays a nation devastated by widespread political corruption, impunity by those corrupt individuals, and expansive poverty and misery. One of the main characters in the work, a young and idealistic journalist by the name of Reina Remis, struggles to comprehend the moral and economic collapse all around her. At one point in the text, she also ponders the torpid and stupefied state of her fellow Argentines, even depicting the metaphorically as “deaf” to the perverse immorality of many. “En qué abismos ha caído el pobre país, cómo va a levantarse de esta postración sin fin. ¿Podrá ayudar en algo lo que yo escriba?, se dijo Reina. ¿Ayuda en algo mostrar las llagas? Creo que de nada sirve, que nada ayuda, todos vamos a morir clamando al vacío en este desierto de sordos” (112). A few moments later she seems to again refer to the previously mentioned, this time oddly contrasting the sounds of trucks’ horns in the city with the moral passivity of the population of Buenos Aires: “El resto era silencio: la terca mudez de la ciudad infinita” (112-13). Thus, Giménez’s previous assertions of a type of collective and severe mental insensibility to questionable behaviors appears to be thoroughly substantiated by multiple Argentine intellectuals. Via his protagonist’s musings, Kohan extends to his readers a literary reflection of a people who are apparently nonreactive and desensitized to the negative stimulus of unethical or egregiously immoral actions. In addition, these distinct phenomenas so definitively correlated with Proceso era provide more evidence of the “social traumas” or “defeated present” of post-dictatorship Argentina read in the NNA.

Giménez’s frequent dogmatic comminations of that which he deems as moral profligacy found in various spheres of Argentine society is noted anew at another juncture in the text. In the passage that follows readers are subjected to said fact, as well as to more evidence of the obvious irony in the novel, which is that he himself is not exempt from participating in the immorality he so forcefully condemns, conceivably evoking the protagonist from Ernesto Sábato’s classic El túnel.^[8] The above points are evinced via an episode where Giménez employs the services of an adolescent prostitute of a short stature and very slender build. “Arrodillada frente a él, como una devota en un templo, está Lorena: la puta más cara que haya pagado en su vida, la que se va a quedar con el sobre engrosado de billetes que él cosechó hace unos días. Con un poco de criterio se le pueden dar dieciocho años, y con un poco de imaginación, once” (79). A few moments prior to this interesting assessment he also notes: “No tiene tetas: el pecho es plano, una lisura total, una llanura despejada con redondez, pero sin turgencia” (75). Upon likening the prostitute’s petite physique to that of a typical eleven-year-old girl, Giménez proceeds to make another comparative evaluation between the two that examines the issue of shifting moral standards in modern Argentine society:

En otra época, cuando los valores de la sociedad se mantenían firmes, cuando había lo que ahora no hay, educación y respeto, una nena de once años jugaba a las muñecas en su casa o aprendía bordado con su madre, se cobijaba en la inocencia. Pero Giménez sabe bien que las cosas ya no son así, que si hay algo que por doquier existe es lo promiscuo, y que las nenas de once años hoy en día fuman cigarrillos, toman cerveza, se besan con sus noviecitos metiendo la lengua y todo. Siendo así, como en efecto es, ¿en razón de qué va él a renunciar a tan estimulante comparación? ¿Por qué no va a dejar librado su instinto de asociación, que en otros tiempos implicaba un profanar, si en este mundo corrupto del presente no queda cosa alguna que no haya sido previamente profanada? (76-77)

Thus, from an intriguing transgenerational perspective through the senescent Giménez, Cuentas pendientes poses profound questions relative to the moral state of the Argentine populace by a threefold focus. In the passages above Kohan’s protagonist not only highlights sexual promiscuity and prostitution among Argentina’s youth as well as the issue of substance abuse by minors, but we also can perceive a broadscale objurgation of the overall moral and ethical atmosphere of the nation and even humanity worldwide. Regarding Giménez’s allegation of promiscuous sexual behavior, this appears to be verified by Mario Marguilis as he writes in Familia, hábitat y sexualidad en Buenos Aires (2007): “Nuestra sociedad ha experimentado, sobre todo en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, grandes cambios en las pautas que rigen los comportamientos afectivos y la sexualidad” (11). Further, as he elaborates:

La vida familiar ha cambiado: son habituales las relaciones sexuales prematrimoniales y las uniones consensuales, no son estigmatizadas las madres solteras, los divorcios son muy frecuentes, muchas personas viven solas y son comunes las unidades domésticas en las que sólo habita, con sus hijos, uno de los cónyuges. La iniciación sexual es más temprana y muchas veces menos problématica. Asimismo es común, sobre todo en los sectores populares, el embarazo de muchachas muy jóvenes, sin pareja, que viven con sus padres o con alguno de ellos. (12)

Binstock and Cerrutti also point to a marked increase in licentious sexual activity by Argentine youth in recent years (52-53). More evidence of said activity can be ascertained via teenage pregnancy rates in recent years. Five years prior to the publication of Cuentas pendientes it is notable that one out of every six births in Argentina was to a minor between 15 and 19 years of age (Informe de Naciones Unidas 2005). In respect to said statistic Reina and Castela-Branco affirm this patently obvious dilemma: “Adolescent pregnancy as a problem is not an illusion, but a cruel reality” (174). Lovera makes known some sobering data, having written in 2010: “La maternidad adolescente no es una fantasía de chicas de colegio sino una realidad: de los 700.000 bebés que nacen anualmente en la Argentina, alrededor de 100.000 son hijos de madres menores de 20 años. Estos 100.000 bebés no son todos primogénitos. El 30 por ciento de esas madres está teniendo a su segundo o tercer hijo” (Lovera par. 3). On a supportive note, to Giménez’s charge of sexual promiscuity, it is interesting to consider how earlier in the narrative Kohan seems to preemptively make the same assertion by indirect intimation. This is achieved as he narrates how each morning upon rising Giménez surveys the patio of his apartment complex and notices an enormously large quantity of used condoms on the respective ground.

No hay día que no comience con este afligente inventario: puchos a granel, chicles mascados y escupidos, tapitas plásticas (cuando no botellas) de gaseosas o de agua mineral, papeles varios, bolsas vacías de supermercado; y sobre todo, en gran cantidad, preservativos. Eso sobre todo: preservativos. Preservativos ya usados que caen, a veces envueltos en sus sobrecitos y a veces no, en las baldosas planas del patiecito de Giménez. (26)

Worthy of mention also is how on Sunday mornings Giménez regularly observes that, regarding the discarded condoms in question, “son tantos que semejan hongos crecidos por la humedad” (26). Therefore, in his own way and via a clever usage of literary wit and insinuation, Kohan suggests a high degree of sexual promiscuity among the nation’s populace, by reasonable assumption to include its young people, thus reinforcing Gimenez’s prior claim of such. As for the widespread phenomenon of commercial sexual exploitation of minors, this heinous reality has been unremittingly documented, analyzed, and rebuked. Its existence in modern-day Argentina and around the world is irrefutable.^[9] Cacho maintains: “Cada año, 1.39 millones de personas en todo el mundo, en su gran mayoría mujeres y niñas, son sometidas a la esclavitud sexual. Son compradas, vendidas y revendidas como materia prima de una industria, como residuos sociales, como trofeos y ofrendas” (15). Silletta makes a similar avowal while explicitly including Argentina in this repugnant genus: “La venta de niños, la prostitución infantil, la explotación laboral y la utilización de niños en la pornografía no son cuestiones que corresponden a países lejanos de Oriente, son flagelos que ocurren en todos los países, aunque pueden variar en tipos y grados. La Argentina no está exenta” (16).

At a subsequent point on the narrative timeline, Kohan once again appears to compare Gimenez’s (or those akin to him) condemnatory moralizations with their own reprehensible conduct. In contrast to Gimenez’s broad-brush denunciations of the moral climate in Argentina and beyond, we perceive anew how he and others like him handily disregard the blatant immorality they partook in and even endeavor to justify it. In the passage that follows it is appreciably interesting to note that Kohan employs another sexually pertinent issue, that of abortion, as the artistic and rhetorical vehicle to achieve his ends. In a bitter and rancorous diatribe, Vilanova not only seems to obliquely further Gimenez’s previous assertion of sexual promiscuity circa turn of the century Argentina but also proceeds to reveal the preposterous ideology of the military Junta for its original crime of the seizure of infants and their placement with supporters of the dictatorship.

Ahora, ¿qué? ¡Los bebitos! Qué ironía, masculla el coronel, aunque ninguna expresión de ironía le suaviza el rostro. El aborto les importa tres reverendos carajos, pero resulta que se preocupan como locas por los pobres bebitos. Que ya no son ningunos bebitos, por otra parte; ya son unos tremendos huevones. Fijate, Lito, qué cosa, le dice Vilanova a Giménez, descubriéndolo de pronto del otro lado de la mesa, las ironías del mundo. El aborto les parece bien: asesinar a bebitos indefensos. Pero salvar a otros bebitos, rescatarlos y ponerlos en manos de alguna buena familia que los cuide y que los quiera, ¡todo eso les parece mal! De los fetos asfixiados y tirados a la basura no dicen ni mu. Y en cambio no paran de romper los quinotos con los bebitos que dicen son suyos. Bebitos cuidados y educados por tantas familias de bien. (109-110)

The pretentiousness and fallacy crucial to Vilanova’s arguments for the dictatorship to “save” and “rescue” infants from their biological mothers and place them in the custody of “some good family who will take care of and love them” is manifestly obvious. What’s more, his rhetoric for the abduction of infants contains a very subtly insinuated Christian dogmatic element that parallels the historicity of the dictatorship’s discourse and rationalization for their crimes. The usage of Catholic ideology by the Junta during the Proceso era is widely documented and in fact appears in numerous literary narratives dealing with this epoch.^[10] Just one such instance is seen in Federico Moreyra’s testimonial novel El desangradero: “los militares se habían alquilado la espada de Dios padre, y la inmunda capucha de la Inquisición” (103). However, perhaps most conspicuous in the cited excerpt is Vilanova’s manufactured and fraudulent application of the issue of abortion to endeavor to disgrace and shame the Madres/Abuelas de la plaza de Mayo seeking after their lost progeny, now young adults, referred to despectively as huevones. Vilanova attempts to characterize the illegal actions of the Junta compared with the pro-abortion movements of early 21^st century Argentina^[11] as “ironies of the world;” even so, he fails to recognize the blatant contradiction of his concern for the right to life of the unborn with the appalling criminality of the dictatorship, up to and including crimes involving newborns. As for Vilanova’s absurdly hypocritical discourse on abortion Valeria Isabel Garza Escalante rightly points out: “Su pensamiento, como el de Giménez, expone el carácter inmoral e hipócrita que caracteriza a los seres abyectos” (189).

Notwithstanding, more may be said regarding the deceitful use of this matter by Kohan’s character. First, it serves to effectively belie his profanity-laced apologia for the crimes he himself participated in; this is self-evident. But of greater consequence is how Vilanova seeks to malign the Madres/Abuelas de la plaza de Mayo over the question of (pro) abortion. Considering this, perceptive readers abreast of the issue of reproductive rights in 21^st century Argentina may discern a very plausible, even inevitable symbolic correlation between Vilanova’s ranting allusions to the Madres/Abuelas de la plaza de Mayo with their customary white scarves and the green bandanas worn by participants in the feminist pro-abortion undertaking in Argentina since 2005. The characteristic intergenerational link between the grass roots campaign to legalize abortion (prior to its decriminalization in 2021)^[12] and the last military dictatorship has existed in Argentina before and after said legalization. Carin Zissis et al write:

Starting in 2005, Argentina’s National Campaign for the Right to Abortion adopted the use of a green bandana—representing health—in a move that harkened back to the use of white kerchiefs used by mothers of those disappeared by the country’s military dictatorship. . .In 2018, hundreds of thousands of Argentines took to the streets in support of decriminalizing abortion, setting off the Marea Verde, or green wave.

Keertana Kannabiran Tella provides insight on the significant nexus under discussion: “The Green Scarf, while borrowing from the symbol of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, is rooted in connotations of motherhood, albeit in different and almost contradictory ways, though the Mothers are supportive of the campaign” (61). She goes on to explain the salient commonality as it relates to human rights, or the defense of life: “The common area lies in the fact that both periods of activism stemmed from the need to defend ‘life,’ whether it be that the disappeared return alive or aimed at women who risk their lives in accessing illegal abortions” (61). H.I.J.O.S (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio), the association that was formed in 1995 to fight for justice and accountability for genocide,^[13] not only affirms their solidarity with the victims of Argentina’s last dictatorship but also openly expresses their support for the feminist and pro-abortion women wearing green bandanas or scarves.

Somos las hijas de mujeres luchadoras, de mujeres víctimas de los genocidas, de mujeres asesinadas y desaparecidas por el Estado, de mujeres secuestradas embarazadas, cuyos bebés fueron apropiados por el terrorismo de Estado, de mujeres violadas por genocidas en los centros clandestinos, de mujeres presas políticas por el terrorismo de Estado, de mujeres forzadas al exilio. Somos hijas de los pañuelos blancos. Hoy nos ponemos también el pañuelo verde. El Estado no puede robarnos derechos: no voten contra las mujeres.

In view of the special transgenerational and emblematic linkage established between the mothers and grandmothers of victims of the Junta and pro-abortion exponents in contemporary Argentina, and this considered speculatively via the cited episode from Kohan’s text, the relevance to Drucaroff’s assertions respecting: “las obras, deseos o traumas sociales; leer este tiempo y este país” (20) in post-dictatorship literature becomes transparent once again. As for the historical significance of Vilanova’s crimes in express conjunction with his invocation of abortion to undertake to discredit the Madres/Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, one theory emerges. Does Kohan integrate into his narrative an exceedingly tacit and subtle, yet deliberate esthetic nod of approval for the very visible campaigns to legalize abortion before President Alberto Fernández signed it into law on January 14, 2021? This hypothesis is amply conjectural, however, considering the explicitly hypocritical ironies of Vilanova’s discourse together with its pertinence to nonfictional events and groups in Argentina, the respective passage very conceivably points to my supposition. Moreover, as Aguinis has contended: “En toda novela existen elementos autobiográficos, y quien lo niega, miente. Pero no corresponden a la vida concreta del autor, sino a todo aquello que ingresó en su mente, sea porque le gustó o disgustó, porque quiso y no pudo, porque lo escuchó, vio, intuyó, amó o despreció” (Incendio de ideas 221). Additionally, the late Adelberto Ortiz has affirmed: “Every person who writes makes a confession, and that confession can relate to his experience or to his thinking. All literature, everything that one writes is, in a way, an autobiographical statement” (qtd. in Jackson 122). Of note, Cuentas pendientes obviously cannot be specified as confessional literature nor is it an autobiography. But in strict regards to my suggestion of a subtly implied endorsement for contemporary pro-abortion movements by its author, this premise appears to be consistent with what Aguinis and Ortiz have asserted.

By way of conclusion, Cuentas pendientes typifies several of the salient and essential characteristics of the select corpus of literary works released after 1990 that Elsa Drucaroff designates the nueva narrativa argentina. Due to its unique triad of direct references to Argentina’s last dictatorship, its several implicit and connotative allusions to said era, and its narration of an assortment of controversial non-fictional themes in post-dictatorship Argentine society, Kohan’s novel constitutes an optimal addition to the mentioned group of narratives. With respect to his graphically realistic portrayal of polemical social phenomena that postdates the Proceso era, Kohan shows himself to be, in Drucaroffian terms, “particularmente sensible a su [his] tiempo histórico,” (169) as he attempts to "protagonizarlo en algún aspecto, en este caso, el de la producción literaria (169). Thus, Cuentas pendientes vividly represents and particularizes some of the most troublesome issues of a social and moralistic nature that undoubtedly correspond to Drucaroff’s perceptions of a “trauma” and “defeated present” found in postdictatorship Argentine literature. And, as has been substantiated by a diverse body of Argentine historians, theorists, and activists, many of these thorny societal issues can be distinctively linked to the repressive military government of 1976-1983. Furthermore, Kohan masterfully utilizes his novel to draw specialized attention to one of the most abhorrent crimes of the military Junta in question, or that of the abductions of countless infants of murdered young women. As for the unsettled account related to the actual ongoing quest for justice and answerability for the crimes of the abductions mentioned above, this struggle continues in present-day Argentina.