Maud Daverio met Robert Cox in Buenos Aires at a party, she, a 29-year-old girl who spent her time studying to enter Medicine, he, a young English journalist who was taking his first steps in journalism. He asked her for her phone number at midnight, when she was leaving the party, and soon after, she started dating. Thus began the love story between two brave men who, for more than 60 years, accompanied and supported each other in the hardest moments of Argentine history, such as the last military dictatorship that began in 1976.
Perhaps one of those most difficult days was in November 1979, when his son Peter received a threatening letter with a lot of information about the family’s movements and, confirming that they were being targeted by the military for the publications of the Buenos Aires Herald —the first outlet to openly denounce the human rights violations that were occurring in the country— which was directed by Robert Cox, they went into exile, first to Europe and then to the United States. Some time later he found out that it was a son of his cousin, who is now deceased, who leaked that information.
45 years after the dictatorship, Maud reissued “saved” (Voria Stefanovcky Editores), the book she published in 2001, but which she wrote little by little, bringing together vivid memories of the horror of those years, from the perspective of a middle-class woman who did not look the other way when many others did. they did.
News: Why did you want to republish the book?
Maud Daverio: It was the idea of Pen Argentina, an organization that started in England, to help international writers, Gabriel Seis Dedos approached me to republish it. I have been asked many times. He told me that this book is very important as a document. It is important to know how someone lived that time. This is the time for the youngest to know how people experienced it.
Maud, who obtained her doctorate in comparative literature from the University of South Carolina and was a professor of French literature at the University of Charleston, always had concerns about what was happening in the country, since she was a girl she listened carefully to her uncle, who worked closely with Peron. When she met Bob, she continued to closely feel the reality of Argentina and a few days after the military coup they began to be aware of the barbarism.
News: Why did you feel the need to write the book in the first place?
Daverio: When we went into exile we went to a different life, with five children, I needed something intellectual, first I started studying music, which was already my passion, while I was at university my head was a filming machine to which the tragedies returned, the images of horror and I couldn’t stand it. I started writing just like that. I talked a lot about what I had experienced. One day I was telling some friends everything and they told me: “How is all that possible? We didn’t know everything that was happening, you have to write.” I told her that she wasn’t a writer but they told me that it didn’t matter, that she tell what she had lived through.
News: Do you think that people were not prepared for such a crude testimony of what had really happened in those years?
Daverio: No. People really didn’t know what was going on, nor did they want to know.. In those years, our friends respected us, but they believed that we did not understand the country, many others did not love us at all.
News: When your husband came to your house and told you the terrible stories of what was happening, how did you protect your children from all this?
Daverio: I was aware that my children did not have to know. I lived a very bourgeois life, I am bourgeois. I acted like a mother who took the children to the square every day, they had a completely normal life. When Bob came home at night, he would prepare something to eat, cook to take his mind off of him, come to the bedroom and tell me what was going on, but with the boys I tried to go on with my life.
News: Why didn’t they return to live in Argentina?
Daverio: For the boys, they were already in different conditions, the newspaper did not want Bob at that time, my son wanted to continue there with Human Rights in the newspaper and they fired him. The Herald at the time wanted to change, to do something else. We were fine, the United States gave me the opportunity to study for free, I did my entire doctorate, they opened doors for me, I never felt excluded, in that sense it was fantastic. The boys went to school by bicycle. But Bob wanted to go back at all costs.
News: How did he take it?
Daverio: Bob was very dedicated to helping the boys, to entertaining them, that helped him a lot to get out of all that. But surely the past never goes away. To this day we follow the Argentine media, we listen to Radio Miter, we read Page 12, we watch Telenoche, our link with Argentina has never been broken. But coming back was difficult. I thought we were going to stay for 10 years until everything settled down, I had my father in Argentina.
News: Why do you think they were saved?
Daverio: They didn’t know who Bob was, some believed that he had connections with the Americans, they were a little scared at first, when they took him prisoner, Carter wrote a letter, even though we didn’t know him. That was one of the things. We found out that there was a plan was to release some Montoneros who were imprisoned, that there would be a shootout and kill Bob and the prisoners. I was crossed by a car near my house.
News: What do you feel with the reissue of the book and remembering all that time?
Daverio: It’s a ghost that comes all the time, it’s a past that doesn’t go away.
News: What do you hope the new generations will receive from the book?
Daverio: Let them learn what happened, let them know that many people suffered. It is a book that can give a person a sense of what was going on. It aims to show what Argentina was like.
News: How is your life together today?
Daverio: We are very good, It’s very nice to be together at this age, we’ve been through a lot, not just politics. There’s a whole life we can talk about. In my house there is no silence, we are interested in the same things, there is a lot of conversation, at night we watch movies. It is very cute.
