““To cry aloud” his father told Martín Sivak when, due to excessive sensitivity, fury or sorrow made him cry. In “La Llorería,” his latest book, the phrase inevitably returns to memory, because the events narrated are bathed in tears. An autofiction novel or literary memoir, in it Sivak cries when he wakes up and when he falls asleep, while he hits the boxing bag in the gym or while running through the most diverse cities. Pain is the theme and unites the three stories that make up the book.. Imbricated throughout the text, the first tells of the tear at the end of a relationship. The second is the story of a trip through Latin America, together with the English documentary filmmaker Sean Langan. and the relationship that they maintained throughout their lives from then on. The most painful point in this story is Langan’s kidnapping on the Afghan border and the terrible consequences of having lived for months on the brink of death.
The third narrative is a memoir about Nora, his mother, who suffered the agony of a serious illness while Sivak was traveling with Langan. When he returned to Argentina, he found her already on the verge of death.
“The Crying” is the second book in which Sivak addresses his personal story. The previous one, “Daddy’s Jump” had an impact with the story of his father’s suicide and the events that occurred around the kidnapping of his uncle, Osvaldo Sivak, in 1985.. It was made into a film with the title “El rapto”, directed by Daniela Coggi.
A long-time journalist, Sivak published important investigations on figures such as Evo Morales, Héctor Magnetto and Mariano Grodonain his books “The Doctor” (2005), “Jefazo. Intimate portrait of Evo Morales”, “Clarín. Una historia” and “Clarín. La era Magnetto”. He currently writes for the newspaper El País and the North American magazine “Tablet Magazine” and is a university professor.
Below is the talk he had with NOTICIAS.
News: How was this book put together? How did these very different stories come together?
Martin Sivak: In all the books I wrote, I was pretty clear about the topic or the person I was going to write about before I started writing them. This book was a very different experience. And I started writing a diary, which was the impetus for writing. In the way I organized the book I respected that initial impulse. I wrote it in a state of desperation that I didn’t know and that forced me to write. I had never been through anything like this. It was a diary of routines of nothing, a way of organizing desperation. Find rituals, start boxing, stop drinking alcohol.
News: Really, has something like this never happened to you before?
Sivak: We all live with different types of anguish, pain, and grief, but this format was unprecedented to me. Writing that diary did not bring me peace of mind, but it did bring me a new ritual. Then a topic appeared that I did want to write about first: a trip with Sean Langan. I think it was the best job I ever had in my life. I was 25 years old when I started working with him. I always really liked traveling through Latin America. I did a master’s degree in Latin American politics. And Sean became someone very important to me. Not only because of his professional and sentimental education, but because of the drifts of his life. After this documentary in Latin America, he went to the Middle East and was kidnapped there by the Taliban. His life was cut short by that kidnapping. His return to the Western world was very traumatic. He wrote very beautiful and very heartbreaking things about what it means to be locked up. Obviously because of my family history and my uncle’s kidnapping there was a resonance with him. I was interested in that kind of decomposition of a man, his decline and at the same time his dignity in that decline. A very important moment of that trip was Caracas. It was 2002, the year of the coup against Chávez, at the beginning of Chavismo in Venezuela. There was an interval due to the birth of Sean’s first child. I returned to Argentina during that interruption without knowing how seriously ill my mother was, who had lung cancer. And nine days after he arrived, he died. Counting the trip, mom’s death appeared. So, the book has these three unconnected themes.
News: The chapters that correspond to the diary narrate a love story. And they are surprising considering that you are an author who has written other types of books. Although it is a story in which many people can recognize themselves.
Sivak: When you are in such a desperate situation, you believe that no one in the history of humanity suffered so much. But it is a universal sensation, like grief. Many of the readers who write to me connect with that situation. People of 20 or 70 years old. It’s one of the nicest things that happens to you when you publish a book, that feedback from readers. One of the few ideas I have about the books I wrote is that the themes always mattered a lot to me. And they are totally different topics. What does Evo Morales have to do with this newspaper? Nothing to see. Why did I become obsessed with Mariano Grondona and dedicate so much time to his biography? Because he was someone who fascinated me. The same with Clarín. And in this case, all three stories were very important. Obviously talking about these topics is uncomfortable. And because of the practice of my craft, it is always easier to talk about the lives of others.
News: The limit with these topics is always problematic.
Sivak: I didn’t want it to be a reckoning or a caricature. I wouldn’t have forgiven myself for that. At the same time, I claim that in “Daddy’s Jump” there was a personal, family, pending reckoning. And it was a good exercise, starting from this diary, to return to relationships from the past, from childhood. But this book has nothing self-help nor does it indicate how to get through that situation. He just wants to tell it knowing that it is going through.
News: In addition to the feeling of pain at the loss, you also describe the surprise of feeling that pain.
Sivak: There is the question: why is this happening to me? What is it? That question haunted me a lot. Then it was translated to the theme of crying. In general, I am a very crybaby. I cry for anything. “Cry your eyes out” was something my dad said. Here is someone who cannot go to the “lloreria” to cry. He has to cry in public places because the situation overwhelms him. And it is crying because it hurts, but then laughing at that cry. That helped lighten the burden of the book.
News: And how did the pain for your mother appear?
Sivak: The book had no end until I found Mom’s letters to my father. They were letters that could not be read. My mother had very bad handwriting. I had seen them for the first time when I was writing “Daddy’s Leap,” but I discarded them because of that difficulty. They reappeared during a move and I began to read them compulsively. At almost 49 years old, an older man deciphering his mother’s handwriting. I was able to read them and made a file. At the time my mother wrote the letters she was the same age as I was when she died. That’s also a coincidence. I was curious and at the same time strange to know more about the intimacy of parents. My dad was in jail for political reasons. And between them there was a contrast. Dad was dedicated to social change and Mom thought of a more traditional idea of the family, children, the first apartment, the honeymoon, in a context of Argentina at the end of the ’60s. There is something very loving about my mother that she sustained the rest of her life until my father died. Everything that those letters provoked made me able to finish the book.
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