Dialogues of Love against the Silence Memories of Prison, Dreams of Freedom

nWith wit and courage, the women held as political prisoners during the military dictatorship faced a relentless force based on isolation and punishment. They resisted with ingenuity and solidarity, with letters to love which allowed them to dialogue with freedom and hope, with messages to that word: tomorrow. The popular phrase mortal silence refers to an interregnum, a moment in which everything becomes void. María del Carmen Sillato, who gave birth while handcuffed in that place of darkness, with this book offers an answer to the question of whether it is possible to live inside that muted space filled with confusion and humiliation. She, who was first kidnapped and disappeared, eventually becoming a legal prisoner, was that dismembered doll being sniffed by the beasts and was also the woman who was able to join her fragments through dialogue with the son who was growing up outside of those walls. She knows that the so-called mortal silence is a loaded gun without a target and that, in the worst of cases, could aim anywhere. Against that silence-the silence from fear-hope and dreams are constructed, like those gnomes that hurriedly walk to her son Gabriel, who communicates with her in that deep, moving, sweet diary written by his Aunt Chary. Sillato, who has written books and articles as an academic in Canada, employs her memory and narrates her story in this book that is also a tale, a diary in captivity, an epistolary, a chronicle, and, above all, a touching and overwhelming testimony. Jorge Boccaneran