Читать книгу The Distance Between Us - Renato Cisneros - Страница 10
ОглавлениеChapter 4
Twenty years can pass since you buried your father without asking yourself anything specific about the ravages caused by his absence. But just when you think you’ve grown used to it, just when you’re certain that you’ve got over his disappearance, an ache begins to eat away at you. The ache awakens your curiosity. The curiosity leads you to ask questions, to seek out information. Little by little you come to realise that you’re no longer convinced by what you’ve been told for so many years about your father’s life. Or worse: you realise that what your own father said about his life no longer seems trustworthy. The accounts that always sounded accurate and sufficient become confused and contradictory, no longer add up, collide noisily with the questions that have been amassing inside you since he died. Once these emerge and rise to the surface, they eventually form a solid islet on which you find yourself washed up, a sole survivor of the wreck.
The thing that gets to you is not knowing. Not being certain and yet suspecting so much. Not knowing means you lack refuge, and a lack of refuge leaves you exposed to the elements: which is why it troubles you, slows you down, leaves you cold. So you start digging things up. To find out if you really knew your father or only glimpsed him in passing. To find out just how inexact or distorted your scattered memories – your family around the table, chatting after lunch – really are. To find out what is concealed in those oft-repeated anecdotes, recounted as smooth parabolas precisely charting the surface of a life, but never revealing its intimate workings. What sawn-off truth is hidden behind these domestic tales whose sole purpose is to forge a tired mythology that no longer serves its purpose, because it can’t keep countering those stark, stifled and colossal questions that now torment your mind.
Where are the authentic stories and photographs of the traumatic, aberrant passages that don’t belong to your father’s official history, but are just as important – if not more so – to the construction of his identity as the moments of glory or triumph? Where is the album of negatives, of the veiled, shameful or unspeakable acts that also took place, but which no one bothers to recount? As a child, your family lies to you to shelter you from disappointment. As an adult, you no longer care to ask, accustomed as you are to the family’s version of events. You yourself circulate, repeat and defend events in your father’s life that you never witnessed, studied or verified. Death alone – inflaming your restlessness, multiplying your doubts – helps to correct the lies you’ve always heard. It allows you to swap them, not for truths but for other lies, lies that are more truly your own, more personal, more portable. As sorrowful as death may be, it can provide glimpses of a wisdom that, in the right minds, proves illuminating, fearful, anarchic. Death is more alive than your own life because it penetrates it, invades it, occupies it, eclipses it, suppresses it and studies it, calling your life into question, ridiculing it. There are questions death provokes that cannot be answered in life. Life lacks the words to talk about death because death has consumed them all. And while death knows a great deal about life, life knows absolutely nothing about death.
* * *
I know that I’ll never find peace if I don’t write this novel. How can I be sure that what my father passed on to me wasn’t first passed on to him? Were his surliness and reserve all his own, or were they implanted in him before birth? Did his melancholy belong entirely to him, or was it the trace left by something bigger, something that preceded him? What ancestral wellspring fed his rage? What was the root of his arrogance? We often blame our parents for defects we believe are theirs alone, without considering that they might be geological faults, constitutional failures: ulcers that have persisted for centuries or generations without anyone trying to extirpate or to cure them; the ghosts of long-dead starfish that have clung to a rocky undersea outcrop for aeons, and remain there, invisible, demanding our touch.
If I wish to understand my father, I must identify where we overlap, shed light on the areas of darkness, search for contrast, solve the riddles I had once set aside. If I succeed in understanding who he was before I was born, perhaps I’ll be able to understand who I am now that he’s dead. These two vast questions underpin the enigma that obsesses me. Who he was before me. Who I am after him. This, in short, is my goal: to bring together these two half-men.
At the same time, I must also explore his relationship with his own father, whom he rarely mentioned and only through tears. What peculiar electricity moved between them that atrophied his affection and stunted his spontaneity? I’ll have to travel up that blind, muddy ravine until I find something that starts to make sense. How hard have generations of Cisneros children struggled to discover something, anything real, about the father they had? How much did they undergo as children that they never forgave as adults? How much did they see as sons that they never fully metabolised and then suppressed when it was their turn to be fathers? How many of them have gone to their graves still harbouring bitter suspicions without ever confirming or untangling them, without attributing them to anyone or anything in particular?
I must exhume these piled-up corpses, bring them out into the light, dissect them, perform a general autopsy. Not to know what killed them, but to understand what the hell had animated them.
* * *
Monday 9 July 2007 was marked by a frenzy of events that seemed to have been arranged or rigged by some sort of cosmic plan. I was a few days into my first visit to Buenos Aires, as part of my incipient family research. I had travelled there with a friend, Rafael Palacios, who was also new to the city. Over the previous week all Argentina had experienced a dramatic drop in temperature. According to the National Meteorological Service, the cold – which was also affecting parts of Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil – was reaching polar extremes. That Monday, which was also Argentina’s Independence Day, was no exception: we were at zero degrees Celsius. Bundled up as if heading into the foothills of the Himalayas, we left the hostel on Maipú St., guided by a folding pocket map, and went looking for the address I’d written down in my notebook: Flat 20, 865 Esmeralda Street. The flat where my father was born.
We followed Sarmiento until we reached Esmeralda and then headed north, crossing Corrientes, Tucumán, Viamonte and Córdoba at the brisk pace maintained by the locals even on public holidays. If we spoke, we did so through our scarves, not looking at each other, focused on dodging the crowds walking in the opposite direction. Suddenly the eighth block of Esmeralda opened up before us like a rift valley. We drank a coffee in Saint Moritz, the patisserie on the corner. It was a quarter past three.
We walked down to number 865. To my surprise, the mansion house where my father was born over eighty years earlier remained unaltered. I had seen the façade in photographs, so I recognised it straight away; when I peered inside, though, it looked more like an ordinary apartment building than a converted mansion. It was the only building of any age on this street bristling with office blocks, restaurants, bookshops and general goods stores, a wedge of the past that pertained to me amid an irrelevant modernity. Hearing the doorman’s voice on the interphone, I began to stammer. He must have got bored of listening to me because the buzzer sounded and the outer gate opened while I was still trying to explain the reason for my visit.
Walking into the entrance hall felt like plunging into a tunnel in time. Everything was sepia-toned, humid, peeling: the faded floor tiles, the relief of the majolica wall tiles rubbed down by repeated passage, the skylights, the jerry-rigged pipes, the water valves, the precarious electrical fittings, the rusting apartment windows, the frames of doors you didn’t have to open to know that they creaked like coffin lids. The high ceilings of the corridors were hung with wrought iron lamps that swayed like decapitated heads. The apartments were distributed over two four-storey buildings. Each building had a courtyard and each courtyard a palm tree. The bark of both trees bore a few traces of incisions that could have been carved there years ago by long-dead occupants. Everything felt old. Even the tricycle parked on a landing. Who did it belong to?
As I observed the scene, I progressively unwound my scarf and removed the layers of warm clothing: the woolly hat, glasses, gloves, cravat, and the first of the two jackets I was wearing. Rafael was photographing everything from all possible angles, as if he was planning to recreate the building in model form.
Soon we heard slow footsteps. A very old man appeared and raised his cap to us in greeting. I approached him to ask how long he had lived there. ‘All my life,’ he replied. His breath smelled of stale oats. I asked him if by any chance he recalled a large family from Peru who had lived there some eight decades ago. The Cisneros Vizquerra. The parents were Fernán and Esperanza, and their children were Juvenal, Carlota, the Gaucho, Gustavo, Pepe, Reynaldo and Adrián. His face remained blank for a few seconds, as if trying to fit these names to the countless faces that ran through his memory, before he said yes, he remembered them well, but he couldn’t say more because he had to hurry so as not to miss his four o’clock train. ‘Could I take your telephone number, sir?’ I asked. ‘I don’t have one,’ were his last words before he faded into the cold air.
I then decided to look for the stair that led to flat number 20. I climbed the same sixty marble steps that my father must have tired of ascending and descending as a child. I put my ear to the white door as I rang the bell, encouraged by the sounds of dishes and cutlery from inside. No one came. The clattering continued, accompanied now by a clacking of adult voices I couldn’t quite make out. I rapped on the door with my knuckles and spent a few seconds admiring the elegant two numerals of the number 20 inscribed in black ink to one side of the great window that dominated the landing between the third and fourth floors. The box for the fire extinguisher was empty. No one answered the door. I was about to knock one more time when I was struck by how implausible the speech I was planning to give would probably seem, how absurd my intention was going to sound. What exactly did I hope to achieve? To go inside and search a surely refurbished flat for the hardships into which my father had been born and raised? Breathe in the thin air of my grandfather’s years of exile? See the kitchen and imagine my grandmother Esperanza preparing dinner for her children – and also for her husband’s legal family? I felt a sudden unease that caught in my throat like a stuck walnut. I understood that I was forcing the experience in order to make it, I don’t know, more literary somehow, more worthy of consideration, when it was obvious that this place no longer represented anything at all. It was just an old flat in a crumbling tenement house. There was nothing romantic, quixotic or worthy about bursting in like this. The ghosts that once inhabited the building had long fled.
I told Rafael it was time for us to go. After closing the front gate and stepping back onto the street, we entered the adjacent second-hand bookshop. It was called Poema 20. Rafael wanted to buy a present for his brother. I left Rafael talking to the man at the counter and stretched out an instinctive hand to take a book at random from the first shelf I stopped in front of. I don’t want to suggest that the book I picked up was a sign, but in some sense it must have been. Or at least, that’s how I want to remember it: a subliminal synchrony. The book, with its distinctive white and red cover, published by Escorpio, was by Andrés M. Carretero and its title was The Gaucho: Distorted Myth and Symbol. I held it up to show Rafael, and he crossed the length of the bookshop to embrace me. This scene must have been disconcerting for the bookseller, to whom I handed a banknote in lieu of an explanation. A few minutes later, at four o’clock precisely, with one foot back on the pavement – perhaps the left – I felt a light, cold brushstroke against my cheek as if a substance somewhere between cotton and spittle were falling from above. I then saw that the black asphalt of the street was gradually being covered by a kind of white foam. It took me several seconds to realise that these soft, wind-blown icy blades were splinters of a miraculous snowfall over the city. We mingled with the crowd of people running towards the Obelisk to marvel and celebrate no longer just Argentina’s independence but also this natural phenomenon that – as the evening news would confirm – had not occurred in the capital for eighty-nine years. The survivors of that ancient snowfall watched the spectacle from behind the windows of their homes. The rest, conscious of how rare an event this was, left their buildings to wander the broad, frozen avenues that gradually began to resemble Siberian steppes. Euphoric pedestrians tried to catch snowflakes in the air. The older men, clumsier, rubbed them into their faces or swallowed them as if they were a manna or an elixir. The women caught them delicately in their hands, improvising songs of delight. A few younger folk filmed the experience on their mobile phones while others leapt around half-naked, their football strips clinging to their backs. The children, meanwhile, forgot the cold to solemnly build plump, once-in-a-lifetime snowmen. Rafael stayed by the Obelisk shooting photos until the early hours of the morning.
By that time I had abandoned the snow party to go and meet the poet Fabián Casas, whom I had emailed before leaving Lima. The poet welcomed me with a Cossack hat on his head and a neat whisky in his hand. We swapped books, talking about who we were and what we liked to do, and I allowed his dog Rita to mount my leg beneath the kitchen table. Night had fallen when we said farewell three hours later, but it was still snowing in the street. A few minutes later, huddled beneath a bus shelter waiting for a taxi, I felt like a writer. More like a writer than ever. As if the drinks and the talk with Fabián, combined with the snow that was blanketing Buenos Aires for the first time in a century, had yielded a poetic circumstance I deserved to belong to, I already belonged to, even though at this hour of the night there was not a single damn passer-by in the avenue to witness this fact. So I leaned against the illuminated sign on the bus shelter to read the book of poems Fabián had gifted me. I opened a page at random and read:
Not all of us can escape the agony of our time
and so, in this moment,
at the foot of my old man’s bed
I too prefer to die before I grow old.
Thick flakes of slantwise-falling snow were covering my shoes. I felt a desire to let myself be buried by the snow right there, to greet the dawn transformed into one of those expressionless figures the children had been building around the Obelisk. Perhaps from this new compartment, I thought, I could better understand something of what had happened on this fabulous day that was already dying, already thrashing like a fish on the damp ground. So I thought about the verse by Fabián Casas, about the distorted man my father was, about how there never was and never would be a way of getting free of him, though the years passed as swiftly as the snow fell, became a crust, and melted away. And just as I was starting to sink into the hole of this sorrow that resurges in me even now, deliverance appeared in the form of the lights of a yellow taxi, its windscreen wipers tirelessly battling the murky layer of slush, the driver’s sleepy face barely visible behind the glass.
* * *
Now it’s 2014 and I’m on a bus heading for Mar del Plata to meet Ema Abdulá, Beatriz’s younger sister.
The strange memories of my last trip to Buenos Aires, seven years earlier, project themselves like a short film on the black screen of the bus window. On the other side of the glass I don’t know if there are shacks, fields of crops or cliffs. Only at daybreak do I realise that the highway is lined by trees of different sizes. In the sky I distinguish a constellation of compact clouds that roll along like tumbleweeds in Western movies.
Two months ago I set about tracing Beatriz, my father’s first girlfriend. I had no idea where to start, so I wrote to at least forty people with the surname Abdulá on Facebook. Not one replied. I asked for recommendations on websites dedicated to searching for people and spent whole mornings browsing the ones that appeared most serious or professional. In the end they always asked for money to complete the investigation, with no guarantee of success and no promise of a refund if the search was fruitless. I even got in touch with an Argentinian friend, a well-known journalist by the name of Cristina Wargon, to start a local campaign to find Beatriz Abdulá.
One afternoon, during lunch, my uncle Reynaldo claimed he’d once heard my father say that Betty had got married in Buenos Aires to a man with a Basque surname, a difficult name he couldn’t recall just then. A few days later it came to him. ‘Etcheberría! Etcheberría! That’s what Betty’s husband was called,’ he told me triumphantly over the phone before spelling out the name, which sounded more like a sneeze than anything else.
The next day, I asked a Buenos Aires-based friend to send me a list of the full names and telephone numbers of all the Etcheberrías living in the capital city who appeared in the phone book. It didn’t take him long: there were only sixteen. I started to make long-distance phone calls. One of them must be able to provide a clue about Beatriz, I thought. After two weeks I had contacted Ana, María, Tadeo, Alfredo, Mariana, Celia, Fernanda, Corina, Carlos, Máximo, Nélida, Alberto, Mercedes, Teresa, Carmen and Bernardo Etcheberría. Not one could give me any precise information about Betty. A few had heard tell of the Abdulá family in the past, but they didn’t think any remained in Argentina. Others said they had a more or less distant relative in Córdoba or Santa Fe who knew a woman of Arabic origin who, if they remembered rightly, might be named Beatriz. None of the answers were encouraging. One of the women I contacted, Celia, was an ailing old lady who could barely speak anymore. As she struggled to tell me something, her young carer took the phone off her and said she couldn’t help me, offering only to note down my details, or to say that she would.
I had just resigned from the morning radio program I’d been hosting. It was no easy decision, because I enjoyed the work, but I needed the four extra hours to write. After arranging my departure with my boss, I carried on for one more week.
On the morning I was scheduled to say my farewells on air, I felt overwhelmed by doubt. I announced that this was my last program, but I had to force out the words, as if they refused to be spoken; I had to push them, like pushing a child into the dentist’s chair. I availed myself of a musical interlude to leave the studio and lock myself in a stall in the washrooms on the fifth floor to ask myself, bluntly, my eyes damp, if it was really worth leaving the radio station, the wonderful people I worked with, the regular paycheque, the public recognition, the provincial fame, in exchange for a dubious novel – a novel that might be of interest to no one but myself, a novel that would cause trouble with my family, that would lead to accusations of ingratitude, injustice or betrayal. Perhaps, I thought, the moment had come to leave my father be, to admit that my determination to narrate his past and his death was futile.
I returned to the studio ready to retract. I wasn’t going anywhere. Even though I had trumpeted my departure mere minutes before, now I would declare my resolve to carry on, and I would beg forgiveness for my outburst from our thousands of listeners. I would say something like ‘I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I said I was resigning because I needed to write a novel; there’s no damn novel.’ Yes, that’s what I’d say. After all, the radio was real, the other thing wasn’t; the other thing was a pipe dream that would never become reality. I only had to wait for the red light to come on again; for Cindy Lauper to finish singing ‘Time After Time’; for the operator to give me the nod to shout out that, in a flash of insight, I had decided that everything was going to carry on as before. There would be canned applause, a silly sound effect and that would be that. It would be like nothing had happened at all.
At that moment I noticed an alert on my mobile: a new email pinged into my inbox. As I opened it, Cindy was singing her last lines: If you’re lost you can look and you will find me, time after time. If you fall I will catch you I’ll be waiting, time after time...
Hello. This is Ema Abdulá, sister of Beatriz, your father’s girlfriend. I’m writing to you simply because I learned that you called Celia Etcheberría’s home looking for clues about my dear sister. Let me tell you something. I met your father. She missed him very much when he went back to Peru. She wanted to marry him. My sister argued a lot with our mother about the marriage, but there was nothing to be done. She told me a lot of things and I cried with her too. But those were different times, you couldn’t just do what you liked.
About twenty-five years later, your father came to visit Beatriz in Buenos Aires. They met and went out to dinner, and your father, as smitten as ever, gave my sister his military baton. They spoke of the possibility of seeing each other again, but it never happened. When we learned of the Gaucho’s death we were deeply saddened. And look what a coincidence: I am writing to you now to tell you that my sister, my dear Beatriz, died of cancer one month ago. I wish you all the best in your search. If I can help you with anything further, please don’t hesitate to write.
Warm wishes,
Ema
‘We’re live on air!’ The console operator, whose nickname was ‘Pechito’ because of his highly-developed pectorals, started to wave at me through the thick pane of glass that separated his cabin from mine.
His voice reached me distantly through the headphones. I understood what his gestures meant, but I found myself unable to respond. Ema’s email was still open on the screen of my mobile phone.
‘…’
‘We’re on air! Talk!
‘…’
‘Come on, man, what’s up? Are you ok?’ Now he was sounding worried.
‘…’
‘Can’t you talk? What do I do?’
‘…’
‘Play a song, damn it, play a song!’
‘…’
‘Play “Creep” by Radiohead! I’ve got it here! Quick! Play it.’
‘…’
That same night I got in touch with Ema. Her voice sounded so warm: it was like talking to someone I had known for years. Through Ema I contacted Gabriela, Beatriz’s oldest daughter, whose first email was another shock to my system. She told me that just a few days earlier, emptying her dead mother’s drawers, she had found some photographs of the reencounter between Betty and the Gaucho in 1979, which my father had inscribed on the reverse. She had been there, had seen with her own eyes something I could barely imagine: my father – he was already my father in 1979 – visiting the woman who could have been his first wife, the woman he may have never forgotten, from whom he separated against his will, who nevertheless he learned to mention as if she were a minor player in his biography, keeping to himself the tremors that undoubtedly overwhelmed him every time her name crossed his lips. Gabriela had also found among Beatriz’s belongings the military baton that my father had given her at the same reunion; it had hung on her living room wall right up until the end, a sentimental relic that awakened the curiosity of guests. For two weeks I exchanged intense emails and phone calls with them both, and I understood how deeply the recent death of Beatriz had influenced this sudden escalation in affection, trust and companionship. It was because she had just died that Ema and Gabriela allowed me to get so close to the delicate territory of her private life, displaying a generous availability that may not have been possible under other circumstances. They found it implausible but also magical that the son of the Gaucho, a man she had once loved, should appear right on the heels of Betty’s death, quite literally out of nowhere, like a friendly ghost anxious for details of a shared history that represented a sacred heritage. They assured me that I was a miracle for them. They were wrong. They were a miracle for me.
A few weeks later, I arranged a trip – this trip – to see them in Argentina, to meet them and interview them. And now that I’m finally here, that I’m getting off the bus at the Mar del Plata bus station, taking a taxi to Ema’s house and checking that the batteries of my voice recorder are working properly, right now, I sense a strange power, a force that makes me aware of the anxious enthusiasm I’m giving off. For some reason I spend several seconds watching a flock of birds gliding past, setting a course over the vast dominion of the Atlantic waters. And while the taxi wends its way along the coastal boulevard of Playa Chica before turning into the tree-lined streets of Los Troncos and finally slowing down and coming to a halt towards the end of Rodríguez Peña St., I feel proud of having come this far, of having picked the locks of a chapter in my father’s life that was crying out to be recounted. Whatever the eighty-year-old woman waiting inside ultimately tells me, I know it will forever alter the Gaucho I have known up to now, and I know that I’m seeking out this story so I can put an end to my father once and for all: so I can tear him from my spinal cord, from the centre of the visceral anguish that hounds me, and relocate him to some immaterial place where I can learn to love him again.
* * *
What Ema told me that day, added to what Gabriela told me two days later in Buenos Aires – in a café on Libertad St. whose side windows offered a perfect view of the wrought iron canopy of the Colón Theatre – helped me fill in the gaps in the story. As they spoke of their sister and mother, Ema and Gabriela came to realise that they too needed to find a name for certain circumstances that had been silenced out of shame, fear or respect for Beatriz. They realised the importance of unblocking the sealed valves and sluice gates to irrigate a long-abandoned memory, dried up and covered with thorns and weeds. These talks gave way to sudden monologues that they continued insofar as they judged them useful, and it was during these minutes that the story I’d been seeking began to take shape before my eyes like a complete image, with no more blanks.
* * *
One day in 1947 Beatriz arrived home, sat down in front of her parents and swallowed hard before telling them that she had got engaged to the Gaucho. After the wedding, we’ll make arrangements so that we can go and live together in Peru, she continued. Beatriz, who never spoke, who was used to hiding both her feelings and the events that motivated them, suddenly opened her mouth to present this ultimatum.
From her room, Ema heard their voices and noted how her sister’s resolve slowly opened up an abyss of silence. Within seconds the house seemed to be collapsing around them. Stunned, Mrs Abdulá buried her face in her hands, weeping as if the imaginary aeroplane on which Beatriz would travel to Peru was already waiting on the tarmac. Mr Abdulá, terrified by the determination in his daughter’s voice, stood up to counterattack and refuse permission – not only because she was too young to marry, but because it was madness to leave for a country they had no connection to. The fighting and weeping continued for days. According to Ema, her father’s refusal, rather than disheartening Beatriz, merely granted her lunacy a thicker layer of poetic vindication.
The couple’s plans evolved. Before returning to Peru, the Gaucho entrusted Ema with a series of cards he asked her to hide under her older sister’s pillow. One per night. ‘Your father wrote pure poetry. For one hundred nights I had to place those romantic cards under Beatriz’s pillow. They smelled of him,’ Ema now tells me, as she sips a spoonful of soup under the thin Mar del Plata sunlight. Listening to her, I’m convinced that my father appropriated the poems written by his own father or grandfather to fill these cards. Traveling back in time, I think of how ironic it is that in 1869 the parents of Cristina Bustamante gladly gave up their fourteen-year-old daughter’s hand in marriage to my great-grandfather Luis Benjamín, who was not only much older than her but also father to three illegitimate girls – while almost eighty years later the parents of Beatriz Abdulá would reject my father, despite his impeccable military education. Luis Benjamín broke all the rules, but still won approval. My father had no such luck. The moral transgressions of a distinguished diplomat who has lived in Europe are forgiven in any century. Not so the feelings of an unworldly young soldier without money or prestige.
Beatriz kept her hopes alive even after learning that the Army refused the Gaucho permission to return to Buenos Aires and marry her. She compensated for her fiancé’s absence by gazing at the photographs they had taken together, realising only then that they were very few: just three, in fact. One taken at a New Year’s party alongside two other couples, all kids dressed as grown-ups, beside a table with an ice bucket and uncorked bottle of champagne in the centre. A second at a reception of some kind, Beatriz swathed in a fur coat, her eyes bright, with her beaver-toothed smile; the Gaucho wearing his gala uniform, lips tightly pressed together. The third photo is the one that looks most like a movie still: the two of them are seated on a rocky outcrop above a beach one afternoon, their backs to the waves as they break over the rocks, their hair tousled by the sea breeze; Betty wears a pullover and trousers that reveal her skinny calves, while the Gaucho sports a summer shirt and those striking, prominent ears, outlined against the white foam running up the shore.
Now they were no longer inside but outside the photos, very far outside them, far enough away for the couple to wonder whether these images showed a life that now belonged to the past. For a month and a half their correspondence flowed punctually back and forth, sustained almost entirely on the hope that the situation would take a sudden turn for the better.
But it didn’t. Their communication was met with obstacles and disruptions, and the missives began to dwindle. Abruptly, Betty stopped writing altogether. Her exhaustion in the face of what to all eyes seemed a fruitless wait was exacerbated by a smear campaign against the Gaucho, orchestrated by none other than his old Buenos Aires friend José Breide – Pepe – who had long held a candle for Beatriz. He set about filling her head with untruths, seeking to persuade her that the Gaucho would never return from Lima, denouncing him as a traitor, claiming that his ingratitude and neglect were such that he had already set up with another woman.
‘Pepe started to turn up at the house not long after your father left. My sister didn’t love him, but she felt lonely. Breide was very persistent: he followed Beatriz from Buenos Aires to Mar del Plata every summer. He offered her everything under the sun, and because he was well-off and from the same Arabic community, our mother supported his suit. In the end she was the one who arranged their engagement,’ Ema revealed to me in a choked voice, fulfilling my request not to keep any details to herself, however painful they may be.
The final letter the Gaucho received from Betty was the letter breaking off the engagement. Three handwritten pages on slippery paper that end with a bolero, ‘Nosotros’, a hymn to devastated love whose lyrics well describe the arduous battle that must have been waged inside Beatriz throughout 1947.
Listen, I want to tell you something
that perhaps you don’t expect,
something that may hurt.
Hear me, for though my soul aches
I need to speak to you
and so I shall.
The two of us,
who have been so sincere,
who since we first met
have been in love.
The two of us,
who made of love
a wondrous sun,
a romance so divine.
The two of us,
who love each other so much,
and yet must part;
ask me no more.
It is not for lack of feeling,
I love you with my soul;
I swear that I adore you
and in the name of this love
and for your own good I bid you farewell.
This letter tore the Gaucho apart. A tear that would reopen every time this bolero came on the radio or record player, whether in the voice of Los Panchos, Sarita Montiel or Daniel Santos. With the first few notes, my father would trail off mid-conversation and stare at the ceiling, smoking one cigarette after another, lost in painful memories.
He didn’t deal well with the break up. He abandoned himself, got drunk, lost control. Even though he didn’t drink at the time, one afternoon he shut himself up for hours in a bar on the road down to Baños de Chorrillos. Once all the other customers had left, the owner told him he was about to close, if he would be so kind as to pay up and be on his way. My father gave no reply. Ten minutes later the man repeated his request. My father ignored him once more. From behind the bar there emerged a huge figure who approached the Gaucho and urged him to settle up and leave. One more whisky, my father ordered, without looking at him. The figure refused with his hand and warned him forcefully that he had to go, now. I can visualise the scene. My father, his voice distorted, his tone defiant, his face fixed on the wall in front of him, informs the man that he is a second lieutenant in the Army, that they’re inviting disaster if they refuse to serve him. The other – taller, larger, more lucid – picks him up by the scruff of his neck and drags him out of the establishment. My father, hanging in the air like a doll, waves his arms and legs uselessly in protest. Once in the street, on his knees on the pavement, the sound of the bolts being locked sends him completely out of control. He pulls the hidden pistol from his belt and unleashes the promised disaster. Four bullets riddle the door, which then opens by itself like in a haunted house. The owner, shaking, emerges with his hands in the air. Now he is all acquiescence. The bruiser stands by nervously, an iron bar in his hand. One more whisky, dammit! my father stammers, his eyes full of tears of rage.
A few weeks after this event, which undoubtedly cost him more than one warning back in the barracks, my father learns that Beatriz has a new suitor. He doesn’t yet know that he has been betrayed. The news leaves him so low that he asks his superiors for immediate transfer to any province in the country. I don’t care where, he replies dejectedly when they ask him if he has any preference. The only thing the Gaucho wants is to leave Lima, where his desolation leaves him exposed every day to the intrusive questions of family and friends. He can’t deal with their pestering any longer.
He needs a change of air, to grapple with himself. He needs hard work, retreat, countryside, distance, solitude. They send him to northern Peru, to the heat and light of Sullana, as platoon commander of the 7th cavalry regiment. During the more than fifteen hours the journey north takes – alternating his thoughts with the views of the flat, leaden outlines of coastal cities like Chimbote, Chiclayo, Piura – the Gaucho decides to erase Beatriz, to remove her memory as if it were an enormous mound of earth that obstructed the sole window of his house, preventing the light from entering. The indignation of knowing she was with another man somewhat helps in this task. He takes up the challenge, without melodrama, a question of pure mental effort, like when he confronted mathematical problems deftly at school. But since he also suffers from pride and arrogance, he sets himself an additional feat: to find a substitute, someone to cover the hole left by Betty. Hadn’t she done the same? It wouldn’t be too hard, not when there were always so many women around soldiers, excited by the boots and the epaulettes of the uniform – and even more so in the provinces, thought the Gaucho. It was during the final leg of the journey to Sullana that he persuaded himself of this: he had to find another woman. He never imagined he would find her so quickly.
* * *
Lucila Mendiola fulfilled the fundamental characteristic that my father sought in women: she was difficult to win over. An aristocratic and pious young woman, she was the daughter of Ildefonso Mendiola, twice mayor of the city of Sullana. A girl who wouldn’t go out with just anyone. As soon as he caught a glimpse of her on his first stroll around the city plaza, he was disarmed: her eyes the colour of every shade of the sea, the gypsy skirt, the heavy necklaces that hung against her bony chest. If my father had read the poetry of Federico García Lorca, he would have felt that this woman had escaped from his verses.
‘Who’s that skinny lass with the green eyes?’ he asked the man walking beside him, Captain Miranda.
‘Don’t even look at her,’ Miranda replied curtly. ‘She’s the mayor’s daughter.’
‘So?’
‘She won’t pay you any attention. In any case, she’s engaged.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since two weeks ago.’
‘In two weeks’ time, she’ll be mine.’
In the end it took not two but seven weeks for him to execute his boast. The last thing the Gaucho needed was a woman who was already engaged, but he stubbornly pursued Lucila Mendiola and did everything he could for her to break off her engagement to an estate owner from a neighbouring town. He even deceitfully seduced a friend of the betrothed couple, little Brígida Garrido, so little that from afar she resembled a sparrow.
Faking an interest in Brígida secured him direct access to Lucila’s inner circle. That was how he managed to start talking to the young Mendiola, to beguile her with his Buenos Aires accent, to flatter her with the poetry he borrowed from the books penned by his own father. When he finally won Lucila’s full attention and began to promenade beside her around the central plaza, poor Brígida Garrido understood the wretched role she had played and shut herself up in a convent, never to leave again.
As the months passed, once his obsession with finding a mate had been satisfied, the Gaucho learned to love Lucila and her family. The Mendiola family received him in Sullana as the Abdulá family had never done in Buenos Aires. They made him feel welcome, appreciated, and even took care to make his convalescence more comfortable following an operation for appendicitis.
All this despite the fact that Don Ildefonso Mendiola, the mayor, had hated the military ever since a lieutenant by the name of Lizárraga had left his eldest daughter Norma stranded at the altar. With second lieutenant Cisneros, this prejudice faded. Such esteem, such domestic affection amid that pastoral setting, served to deepen and strengthen the Gaucho’s initially uncertain sentiments towards Lucila.
I still have in my possession a series of little cards from my father on which he wrote messages to Lucila, all infused with florid rhetoric.
May we commemorate together many thirtieths of the month, my love. Yours, Lucho. 30 July 1948.
God willing, I may come to be worth something in this life, if only that I may lay it at your feet as the greatest proof of my adoration and idolatry. Yours, Lucho. September 1948.
All I ask of you, my love, is that you never take from me the blessing of adoring you for the rest of my life. October 1948.
For my adored Lucila, my love, my life, my hope, my world, my obsession. You are everything to me, but above all you are mine. February 1949.
In those same days, however, the immaculate name of Beatriz still sent shivers up his spine.
* * *
There is a photograph someone took of us in Piura in 1980. A while back I removed it from a family album. I like to look at it. You’re standing at the end of the swimming pool in the enormous house we lived in that year. You’re wearing a bathing costume patterned in blue and white squares (I still remember the texture of the damp suit hanging in the garden). The hairless legs, the wet hair, the blurred moustache, the blurred nipples. The sun throws slashes of light across your milky skin. Your muscles still evoke the robust horse rider you once were. Poised on your shoulders like a child acrobat on a giant, I’m just about to dive into the still waters of the swimming pool. My arms are outstretched, my eyes fixed on the tiles. Our shadow appears against the faded green background, and it trembles where it crosses the water. I’m five or six years old. My blue swimming costume has a red waistband and a fish embroidered on the left hand side in the same colour. The elaborate dive is about to take place. After my body pierces the water, causing the minimum disturbance to its calm surface, you’ll dive after me, producing a thrilling tsunami; without resurfacing, advancing like a slow submarine or tame shark, you’ll swim the length of the pool. We loved putting on this show for an audience. I felt so good up there, so essential, so brave, a leading player. That was our ritual, perhaps the only one we shared in those years. I’d climb up your back like a steep stairway of vertebrae, and once at the top, on the broad platform of your shoulders, holding onto your hands, your wet hair between my ankles, I’d prepare myself for the dive straight into the pool. Click! You’d follow straight after. We’d hear the distorted echo of the applause from under the water.
That year, the Army sent you on a tour of several northern cities as General Commander of the First Military Region. We moved to Piura. Your office was adjacent to the house, so you were your own neighbour. Your daily commute took ten steps. If I were to return to that house I might find it had shrunk, but at the time it seemed huge. It had two floors connected by a wooden staircase with a banister and very broad bottom steps. There was always a bustle of people around: drivers, butlers, staff. The photograph shows the sliding glass doors that led from the terrace inside, where the chairs of the informal dining room can be glimpsed, and its mosquito-screened windows. Everything exudes the tarnished hue of the 80s. Behind us is a large pot with plants, undoubtedly placed there by my mother, Cecilia Zaldívar. I think I already said how much I like this photo. It’s an X-ray of our complicity. My body looks like a prolongation of yours. An appendage emerging from it. Your half-naked body is an autonomous engine, the machine that assembles me, supports me and then thrusts me into the world. The parabolic leap is only made possible by the strength and determination of your grip on me. It’s hard to say whether you’re the one who lets go of me or if I’m the one who breaks free of the organism we comprise together. However it may be, there’s harmony in the structure and beauty in the manoeuvre. For years this photograph has stood on a shelf of my bookcase, leaning against the spines. It’s like a postcard freezing a moment that has the duty to remain unforgettable.
One afternoon in 2006, as I was reading Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, I glanced at the photo. There it was, within the sphere of my gaze. In two separate passages in the novel – parts seven and eight of ‘The Book of Memory’ – Auster narrates the marine exploits of two characters who are engaged in a search for their respective fathers: Jonah and Pinocchio. One biblical and one literary figure. I’d always felt sympathy for both, for their rebellion against their nature, for aspiring to become more than they were born to be. Jonah didn’t want to become just any old prophet. For Pinocchio it wasn’t enough to be a living marionette. Jonah refuses the mission God entrusts to him – preaching to the pagans of Nineveh – and flees from Him by boarding a ship. During the crossing a great storm is unleashed. Jonah knows it is the work of God and asks the sailors to cast him into the sea in order to calm the waters. They do as he asks. The storm ceases and Jonah sinks beneath the waves, until he finds himself in the stomach of a whale, where he remains for three days. Amid the resounding echoes of this solitude, Jonah prays for his life. God hears his prayers, forgives his disobedience and orders the great beast to vomit him up onto the shore. He is saved. Something similar occurs with Pinocchio. In Carlo Collodi’s novel, Geppetto’s boat is overturned by a huge wave. Half-drowned, the old carpenter is dragged by the current towards a great asthmatic shark that swallows him ‘like a piece of pasta’. The brave Pinocchio searches for Geppetto unflaggingly. Once he finds him, he lifts him up on his shoulders and waits for the shark to open its mouth so he can swim to safety in the darkness of the night. Jonah is rescued from the waters by his father. Pinocchio rescues his father from the waters. Auster asks himself, or I ask myself: is it true that you have to dive into the depths and save your father in order to become a real man? Since I read The Invention of Solitude the photograph of Piura is no longer just the photograph of Piura. It has become a talisman, the kind of photo that’s taken at a certain moment in time, but whose significance isn’t revealed until much later. Now I understand far better the watery ritual enacted by that child of five or six. Every time I look at the photograph, that child charges me with the same inescapable mission: dive into the water. Find your father.
Sullana, 26 April 1949
My dear brothers and sister,
This time I am the one to write, given your silence. Though I take up my pen only rarely to scribble a few lines and send proof of my fondness for you, this time I am doing so to offer you a more detailed account of my life.
I was released from Piura hospital two days ago, having left my appendix in a glass jar. If one day, in the not too distant future, I become president of Peru, this diminutive organ might be exhibited like a museum piece. It was something so swift and violent that I’ve still not got used to the idea that it’s been taken out of me. The first sign something was wrong was in the early morning of the 18th, the first and final such attack in my whole damn life, and six hours later I was marching to the gallows of the operating theatre, where a murderous hand awaited me. I fell asleep in an instant. After the operation, performed by Commander Núñez, I slept for eighteen hours straight.
All of this happened and I’m now back in the barracks with thirty days of sick leave. Fortunately I had my savings, which have now been drained. Apart from this, life continues with the same monotony as usual. Colonel Gómez wrote to me and I have answered him. I also received a letter from our mother. I frequently correspond with El Chino Falsía and we have promised to keep in touch.
As for my Betty, she has replied to me, but in such different terms than I had hoped. She tells me that I am wrong to blame her mother for losing my letters, that it is true there is another man in her life, though she does not dare to tell me who he is. She also asks me to return all her letters. I, meanwhile, still as enamoured of her as I was four years ago, have answered her with a letter that I fear leaves me playing the wretched role of the fool. I don’t know what to do. So many things can happen before the year’s end…
The leather jacket and the shirt have still not reached me. When you send them, please also send some bed sheets, and nothing else.
Remember me to the rest of the family. If I start to mention everyone, I’ll need four more sheets of paper and that would be a sacrilege. A big, big hug to you all. My heart remains with you.
Disillusioned, the Gaucho pushes forward his proposal of marriage to Lucila. Suddenly, he wants to be married as soon as possible, and furiously embraces an illusion marred by silent contradictions. On 28 January 1950, the day of his engagement, he writes to Lucila:
Today one of my greatest desires has started to become a reality. I want you to know, my sweet maiden, that I shall spare no effort until my utmost dream comes true.
The first to congratulate him on his engagement are friends from Sullana, the captains Miranda and Ritz, both of whom are married to cousins of Lucila. They would go riding at weekends and share the small successes and anxieties of a military career constantly subject to the sway of political events.
The Gaucho’s brother and sister Juvenal and Carlota travel to Sullana to meet their future sister-in-law and establish relations with the new family.
From Rio de Janeiro, where he remained as ambassador, Fernán Cisneros exchanges cables with the Mendiola family to formally request the hand of their daughter Lucila in his son’s name. A few days later he writes to the Gaucho to tell him: ‘My son, the lines written by your fiancée have convinced us that she is a good girl, conscientious and serious, and ready to share in your destiny.’ My grandfather added a few further solemn thoughts on married life – which sound rather ridiculous, coming from a man who secretly maintained two parallel households over a period of two decades.
The religious marriage between the Gaucho and Lucila takes place at eleven o’clock in the morning of Saturday 21 June 1952 in the church of Our Lady of the Pillar of San Isidro, in Lima. There is a photo album containing at least fifty photographs of this day. My father boasts his military gala uniform and Lucila a pearl-coloured dress. They look happy as they emerge from the tunnel formed by the crossed swords.
I had heard that on the morning of his wedding my father was sombre, downcast, and that my grandfather Fernán had said ‘My son is not marrying happily’ after seeing him tying his shoelaces with an air of sadness that ill-suited the union about to be celebrated. However, the photographs of the day speak for themselves, radiating a bliss that promises to endure. The Cisneros and Mendiola families appear united, surrounded by friends from Sullana and from the Army. Like multi-coloured birds, the guests’ faces shine with a happiness both delicate and bold.
Only one person seems to remain apart from the general atmosphere of celebration. A slim, elegant, frowning woman. A woman wearing a hat with a large, up-turned brim in a shade of grey that matches her necklace and earrings. It is my grandma Esperanza, who deigns to arrange her haughty face into courteous expressions, though they fail to mask her annoyance and discomfort. If there is anyone who doesn’t bless this marriage, it is she.
A few months before Lucila and the Gaucho’s wedding, Beatriz Abdulá had become engaged to José Breide in Buenos Aires. Did my father learn of this? Did the decisions taken by Beatriz in Argentina come to influence those taken by my father in Peru? Or perhaps she was the one who found a way to stay apprised of the love life of her Peruvian former fiancé, taking steps in accordance with the information she gathered? Could there have been a long-distance tussle of pride between them? A contest of egos? A silent challenge that intimated, if you can get married over there, then I can here too; if you can be happy with someone else, then why can’t I?
* * *
What Gabriela tells me in that hot café on Libertad St. is that her mother left Breide shortly before their wedding date, breaking off the engagement and sending tremors through the conservative Syrian-Lebanese community in Buenos Aires. Virtually overnight, she married a man by the name of Federico Etcheberría, Gabriela’s father.
Betty had never much liked Breide, her daughter recalls. She wasn’t enthusiastic about her engagement to him. ‘She let herself be carried along by the current, but it was no great love story, I’ve no doubt about that. She met Federico, my father, and broke off with Breide, even though they were engaged.’
While Gabriela untangles details on the voice recorder, I sip my cappuccino and ponder Beatriz’s actions over time. I suddenly feel or want to feel that everything she did after my father left for Argentina was in reaction to his departure, and that she tried to remain close to the Gaucho however she could. Perhaps, I consider, getting engaged to one of his best friends was, however perversely or misguidedly, an allegorical way of staying close to him or to the space imbued with his presence while he lived in Buenos Aires. Leaving Breide to marry this Federico – my father’s second name – may have been another act of unconscious nostalgia, an irrational desire to appropriate a name that had once meant so much to her. And when this second Federico died years later in a car accident, what did Beatriz do? She secretly married the brother of her dead husband. Was this reflex action not an exact repetition of what she had done years earlier with Breide? Letting yourself be loved by the friend of the boyfriend who has left – wasn’t that the same as letting yourself be loved by the brother of the husband who has died? Is it a coincidence that, in both situations, faced with an abrupt abandonment, Beatriz rushed into the arms of the most inconvenient character on the scene? As if betraying the absent person was the only possible way to pay homage to them.
Many years later, the Gaucho and Beatriz would see each other’s faces again. The encounter took place in Buenos Aires in October of 1979. He was fifty-three years old, a Lieutenant General and Chief of Staff of the Joint Command of the Armed Forces. He was no longer married to Lucila Mendiola. He maintained an affectionate distance with his older children, and for almost a decade had lived with Cecilia Zaldívar, with whom he had two children by then.
He travelled to Buenos Aires to attend a ceremony for the anniversary of the creation of the Argentinian Army, to take part in a series of military conferences and to receive a tribute from his former classmates in El Palomar. He stayed for eleven days altogether.
Beatriz was forty-eight and had been a widow for just a few months. One morning she received the most unexpected phone call of all. It was the Gaucho, her Gaucho, who only after a few minutes of exchanging greetings and nervous laughter told her he was in the city. Before they hung up, they agreed to meet at the Plaza Hotel where he was staying, adjacent to the Military Club and looking over Plaza San Martín.
Gabriela tells me that her mother was happy at the thought of meeting my father again. Her desire to see him, however, was neutralised by the self-control with which certain women protect themselves from the past. She was the only one of the two who accepted the reality of their new roles. Beneath his military attire, the Gaucho, by contrast, was the same excitable little boy who had kissed her eagerly at the door to her house in Villa Devoto thirty years earlier, in 1947, before leaving for the airport on his way to discover Peru.
After his marriage to Lucila Mendiola had fallen apart, the Gaucho had fallen in love with Cecilia Zaldívar, a young woman of twenty-two in whom he believed he had found the physical and spiritual twin of Beatriz. To his eyes, Cecilia was Beatriz reincarnated. If the latter’s subsequent relationships were a kind of distorted refraction of her love for the Gaucho, his had been formed with Beatriz firmly in the centre of his gaze, whether in order to bury her or to resuscitate her. He had been very fond of Lucila Mendiola and he loved Cecilia Zaldívar – ‘two good women who don’t deserve to come to any harm’, he would say once – but for Beatriz, or for what she had been and still represented, he maintained a love whose purity, weight and endurance were directly proportional to its degree of mythification.
As soon as he saw her enter the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, my father regressed to adolescence. His actions were all out of synch, as if he was unable to understand that he had grown old, had five children, that he was no longer a cadet engaged to this girl – who, by contrast, treated him solely with affection, a melancholy affection at best, continuously marking the boundaries that destiny had laid down between their lives. My father refused to acknowledge that gap. He acted just like his great-grandfather, the priest Gregorio Cartagena, who in contravention of his Church vows had loved Nicolasa so many years earlier; or like his grandfather Luis Benjamín, who had taken off with the mistress of President Castilla; or like Fernán, his own father, who had seduced Esperanza on afternoons in the centre of Lima, overlooking his legitimate wife. It was centuries-old behaviour. Imprudent, egotistical, but doubtless enchanting behaviour. My father, like three generations before him, didn’t care about the consequences. He had abandoned Brígida Garrido to court Lucila Mendiola. He had abandoned Lucila Mendiola to court Cecilia Zaldívar. And now he was abandoning Cecilia Zaldívar to court Betty all over again. His heart was a vicious circle. His impulsive romantic conscience was inhabited by a macho predator: once the target was identified and the field of operations drawn up, there was no space for moral doubt. It was a matter of acting, nothing more.
Gabriela pauses the conversation to pull an envelope from her handbag. It contains photographs from that October of 1979. As she delicately slips the contents from the package, I realise that I feel torn. Torn between my desire to see them and my desire not to. Then the photos begin to move from her hands to mine and each one of them is an explosion that only I can hear. Four bombs. Three were taken in Beatriz’s house, the fourth at a Susana Rinaldi tango show in San Telmo. Gabriela was present on both occasions. ‘On the night of the show’, she recounts in her neat, meticulous manner, ‘your father’s body language expressed how captivated he was by my mother. I was struck by the way his tears flowed. He was deeply moved, as if he had been frozen in the past.’
The first thing that hits me is my father’s face: his usual hardened features have been replaced by two small, melancholy eyes, a limp, placid expression and a smile so broad it creases his face: two or three lines expand like sound waves between the corners of his mouth and his ears. His teeth, which were rarely on show, are prominent in the image.
I had never seen photos in which my father appeared so devoted and vulnerable, so engrossed and happy. I stare at them again and again, then pause for a few seconds to look up at the couples seated around the café, and wonder if they might be confessing secrets to each other that could compete with Gabriela’s revelations. I feel both satisfaction and emptiness, the same sensation of pride and shame that assaulted me on visiting Ema in Mar del Plata, the feeling that I’m killing that man who was my father with each new story and photograph I obtain – and composing, in his place, a version of him in which I can see myself for the first time. And before I can even reach a single conclusion about the old images that burn in my hands like deadly weapons, Gabriela speaks again: ‘Turn them over, they’re inscribed.’
And then it’s no longer just the Gaucho smiling in this new, effusive way, but also his handwriting, his perfect left-handed calligraphy I tried to copy as a boy so that something in me would resemble him, the writing that forms phrases perhaps even more eloquent than the photos themselves. On one he writes: ‘For Gabriela, with sincere life-long affection.’ Another reads: ‘With the nostalgia for a family portrait that will travel with me always.’ The third: ‘For my Beatriz of yesterday, today and always.’ And on the final one, which shows just the two of them at the San Telmo tango show, my father simply wrote on the back: ‘No words.’
It is these words, the ones he couldn’t find to describe what he was feeling that night, that now pour onto my computer screen; all the language that slipped away from my father in his attempt to name that specific circumstance now washes over me, fragmented but abundant. And here are these words, this language, to say what he avoided saying, perhaps because it was so obvious or inappropriate or timeless: that Beatriz Abdulá was the great love of his life; a love whose roots determined how he would behave with all the other women he loved or tried to love in the future; a historic, truncated love that he sought desperately to reproduce in other bodies, other names, other identities.
If they had married and lived together, perhaps the dream would have faded, but this is something we will never know, Gabriela is saying now, aware that if this had come to pass, neither of us would be here today. After all, seen from one perspective, Gabriela and I are both the fruit of a thwarted story. We are the children that the Gaucho and Beatriz would have wanted to have together and ended up having with other people whom they also loved, but who now get in the way of the story we are trying to reconstruct. The two of us, her and I – not her siblings or mine, but the two of us – by the mere fact of being here in this café, implicated in this situation brought about by me and accepted by her, in a scene both symbolic and thrilling, in asking each other these questions, have the right – by this mere fact – to speculate that our parents have channelled themselves through us, and our mission is to recount all of this to each other because it’s the last encounter that they would have wanted to have. I am certain that Gabriela is terrified by the same thought now flitting through my head: that our parents would have been very happy together, perhaps happier than they subsequently were with her father and my mother respectively. This hypothetical happiness, as I can confirm in Gabriela’s blue, deep-set eyes, gives us joy just as it wounds us. We are who we are because they stopped being what they were. Their separation was our vital breath. We are rendered siblings by absence, by failure, by what never came to pass. We are the proud dead children of a marriage that never was.
