The Call

A clear-eyed, haunting story of an ordinary woman struggling to survive captivity, and its aftermath, in the volatile world of 1970s Argentina

“Infused with the intensity of a thriller and with such poetic force, The Call is a masterclass. A hundred years from now, we’ll still be talking about this tour de force.” —Samanta Schweblin, National Book Award-winning author of Good & Evil and Other Stories

In 1976, twenty-year-old Silvia Labayru, five months pregnant, was kidnapped by paramilitary soldiers and taken to a clandestine Buenos Aires prison called ESMA, where thousands of people were tortured and murdered. Labayru was a Montonera, part of a far-left offshoot of the Peronists resisting the military junta. At ESMA, she gave birth in captivity without the aid of a doctor and was tortured, forced into slave labor, and repeatedly raped. When she was finally freed in 1978, she fled with her daughter, Vera, to Madrid, where she thought the agony was over—but the Argentine expat community condemned her, accusing her of colluding with her captors and willingly aiding them in covert missions. “Those who are dead were all heroes, and those who are alive are alive because they collaborated,” one activist said. Shunned by her former fellow militants but supported by a few loyal friends also in exile abroad, Labayru built a life in Spain, until decades later, when she received a phone call from an ex-lover, with whom she returned to Argentina, her beloved homeland and the site of her indescribable trauma.

Over the course of two years, Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero sat down to interview Labayru and her family, friends, children, lovers, and ex-militant comrades. With The Call, she has woven their voices into a polyphonic picture of a woman, a family, and a nation wading through memories distorted by trauma, warped by time, and edited by fear, shame, denial, and hubris. Like Janet Malcolm’s work, The Call is a story about a journalist, her subject, and the mutual manipulation involved in the near-futile exercise of understanding another. Portraitist and investigator, archaeologist and witness, Guerriero seamlessly excavates facts while simultaneously wringing from them a propulsive tale of redemption, memory, and profound interior depths.