The story that Laura Ramos tells in “My KGB nanny”his latest book, has several entry points. On the one hand it is the biography of one of the most famous spies of Soviet intelligence. It is about Africa of the Heras although he adopted many other names throughout his life. Was “Homeland” for KGB chiefs and with that alias she is buried in Russia, and “María Luisa” for the group of Uruguayans with whom he interacted in Montevideo, for around 20 years.
And there opens the second entry of this story, more personal. Because Laura Ramos met María Luisa in her childhood, when she seemed to be nothing more than a Spanish dressmaker, affectionate and attentive, who helped her acquaintances by taking care of the children when they needed it. For Laura and her brother Víctor, living in Uruguay with their mother, she was the friend who acted as babysitter when she couldn’t go pick them up from school. María Luisa was waiting for them, she prepared their snack, she gave them gifts, she sheltered them.
The third door of this story shows us the path of an investigation that took the writer and journalist through several countries, from the spy’s native Ceuta, to consulting archives in Cambridge and recording testimonies in Cubatrying to reconstruct a profile designed to confuse. A personality made of fiction, lies, secrets and hidden purposes.
unexpected mystery
That the same woman who took care of the Ramos brothers, children of Abelardo, the Trotskyist intellectual and politician who created the National Left and author of fundamental books such as “History of the Latin American Nation”; had participated in the preparations for the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico, is one of the great paradoxes of this story.
“My mother, Faby Carvallo, had been in Montevideo in the early 1950s and there she met María Luisa – says Laura Ramos -. Then she went to Buenos Aires where she met my father and we were born. When her relationship with him falls into a thousand pieces, they do not separate publicly. They deceive us. My mother decides to go to Montevideo to recover her old friends. And she gives us a happy, beautiful childhood; in the Malvín neighborhood. We arrived in 1961 and we lived there for about 8 years. My father told us that he was in Buenos Aires doing the revolution, that was why they did not live together. And he came with the books that he published and my mother sold Trotskyist books in Montevideo that Faby brought to the house of María Luisa, Trotsky’s almost murderer. The publishing house was called Coyoacán, the name of Trotsky’s neighborhood in Mexico.. “María Luisa had entered the circle of Trotskyism in Uruguay.”
It was a difficult blow for the group of friends from Montevideo to accept the revelation that María Luisa, the loving and attentive woman, present in each of their stories for more than 20 years; She was actually a KGB spy, who trained other spies, obtained false documentation and was at the head of an information network on the United States in the middle of the Cold War.
For Ramos, this discovery was the beginning of a search that culminated in the writing of “My KGB Nanny,” very far from the settings of his previous books: “The young ladies” about the teachers that Sarmiento “imported” to Argentina and “Infernales. The Brontë brotherhood”, about the family of English writers who marked their childhood readings. “The 20th century was too close to me and I like literature to take me outside the real world. When I realized that I could place the 20th century in a ‘vintage’ category and write about it from the 21st, I was able to insert myself into the friendly decade of the 60s. I was able to add a touch of romanticism and emotion to it,” he summarizes.
Research and discoveries
His research trip began in Ceuta, the city where África de las Heras was born. “Ceuta is a Spanish protectorate in North Africa. María Luisa was born there in 1909 – the author narrates -. My trip was amazing, through very rough border areas. And I was there with my little suitcase, my documents. Crazy, but I did it. I spoke with her great-niece, Afri. María Luisa married a young soldier and had a baby. I discovered this. The book has many discoveries about this character.”
Africa left Ceuta to go to Barcelona. There she participated in the Civil War and was co-opted by Caridad Mercader, mother of Ramón, Trotsky’s murderer.; to be part of Soviet intelligence. His next station was Mexico, infiltrated into Trotsky’s entourage. She later settled in the Soviet Union, where she became a heroine of the Second War.
“This guerrilla who had been crawling through the swamps of Ukraine, then dresses as a bourgeois lady to live in Montevideo,” says Ramos.
He arrives in Uruguay as wife of the writer Felisberto Hernándezwhom he meets in Paris. “She gets married, obtains citizenship and sends him away. Felisberto may have known something about who she really was, but María Luisa continued to protect him financially and thanks to that he never opened his mouth. He divorces, he gets fully involved in the group of friends and that’s where my mother comes into the story,” he explains.
Two murders occur in Montevideo related to the spy. One is that of the historian Arbelio Ramírezwho was assassinated the same day that Che Guevara visited the Uruguayan capital, in 1961. The official version is that the bullet that killed him was aimed at Che. But his widow accuses María Luisa of his death, because of the ties that Ramírez had with the United States embassy.
The other death is that of the man who married María Luisa during those years and lived with her in Montevideo. “He was an Italian, KGB agent. He had been secretary of Palmiro Togliattihead of the Italian Communist Party. When Stalinism falls, María Luisa is not imprisoned but they send her a boss who was this one, Giovanni Antonio Bertoni. He suddenly died. Bertoni had begun to have different positions from those of the Soviet Union, this could have triggered his death ordered by the KGB. Or they could have just not gotten along and she killed him. He then deceived the KGB by declaring that he had died of a heart attack.”
María Luisa or Africa or Homeland ended her days in the Soviet Union. “Until the era of Putinwas an award-winning spy. But later she was raised as a hero, because Putin wants (it’s my guess) to establish spies as heroes. And the tomb that was destroyed was modified. Now it says ‘Homeland’ with a great legend.”
Still moved by the consequences of a story that was so intertwined with that of her family, Ramos promises other stories close in time for her next books. “I’m already staying in the XX. Looking for other women’s stories.”
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