A tribute to Dr. Rita De Grandis, Professor Emerita of Spanish who passed away on April 28, 2024, written by her former PhD student, Dr. Fabricio Tocco.
“Rita changed my life forever, as she believed I had a future in academia when no one else did. I know for a fact that she did the same for many other people who crossed her path.”
Me faltan las palabras. Those were some of the last words that Rita De Grandis told me before I last saw her. Because of the strange Spanish verb «faltar», it is hard to translate this sentence. A similar English expression could be «words fail me», but it doesn’t fully convey what she meant. Rita was trying to tell me that she was lacking words, that she didn’t have enough of them anymore. Words were not failing, but escaping from her. By then, I already knew that she was no longer going to be my PhD supervisor. She and anyone who was taking classes with her knew that something was wrong. Her speech grew more and more disjointed, but she decided to fight against it until the end, to see if those slippery words would eventually decide to come back.
That day, Rita bequeathed me several of her books. All of her Juan José Saer’s collection are here, in my Australian office, from where I write this now. Even though Rita was from Patagonia, I believe that she spent most of her youth in the Argentine Province of Santa Fé, much like Saer, who, for many, is the most important Argentine writer after Borges. Rita shared with Saer the proud memory of that landscape, which in Argentina we often call el litoral, a coastal region that leads to no sea, but to important rivers—like the Paraná or the Uruguay—rivers filled with musical and literary traditions. Saer used to call this region «the zone», a place that is almost like a loved one to whom we can never be unfaithful, no matter how much we try. After all, as Tomás Eloy Martínez writes in Santa Evita, «no one can ever get rid of what they have lost».
Such was Rita’s relationship with words. Even though they were constantly escaping her, as she was diagnosed with the illness that would eventually take her from us years later, Rita was still devoted to finishing her article about Leopoldo Lugones, another writer she admired. Back then, we didn’t talk much about it with my PhD colleagues or with other FHIS professors, but surely more than one must have thought about the sinister irony of her fate: perhaps many of her UBC students and colleagues over the years were unaware of this, but Rita was, among many other things, a literature professor exiled in Canada since the 1970s, after having escaped from dictatorial state-sponsored violence. That she would have had to retire, precisely because she was losing her memory and language, was difficult to bear. Especially because memory and language were hers and her generation’s only tools to help them cope with and survive the dictatorship in Argentina and beyond.
Every time someone passes away, something in those surviving them dies, too. Perhaps this is why I cannot help but mention that Rita changed my life forever, as she believed I had a future in academia when no one else did. I know for a fact that she did the same for many other people who crossed her path. Sometimes I think I was able to thank her in time, in those years when her elusive words still did not escape her so quickly. Sometimes I think that such gratitude cannot be said or written, only remembered. As such, I will remember her for the rest of my life (and I encourage anyone reading this to do the same) by thinking about her with the admiration and respect she deserves. And we should do this always in silence (because words, after all, are never truly enough), but with our memory still intact.
Written by Fabricio Tocco, PhD
Assistant Professor of Spanish & Convenor of Portuguese, Australian National University
President, Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia
