Читать книгу The Distance Between Us - Renato Cisneros - Страница 9
ОглавлениеChapter 3
Mexico City, 14 July 1940
My darling Esperanza,
I’ll begin by asking once again for a letter from our little Gaucho, in case that helps persuade him. And tell him I don’t want any old letter, but an account of everything he thinks, wants, and does. I think it’s time for a father to understand his son’s mind.
As a result of the nervous condition he suffered in his early years, our dear son has an understandable and painful inferiority complex that must be eradicated from his spirit. My impression is that he has often held clear intentions to return to formal study, but he is troubled and embarrassed by the belief that he has no knack for it. It’s a common situation. He is proud, so he doesn’t admit it, and since he won’t admit it, his spiritual confusion discourages him. He doesn’t study because he doesn’t like it, and he doesn’t like it because he doesn’t think he’s up to it. So he doesn’t attend school and deceives us all. Now, skipping school might be innocent enough today, but tomorrow it could lead him down the road to ruin. Therefore, I believe that you should return him to a boarding school, on my orders – but darling, allow him to choose which one. Or at least let him believe that he is choosing it. Talk up the virtues of the military college, for example. Don’t let him suspect that it is about punishing him or putting him on the right path. That way, he can enter the school with his head held high. Of course, this is my preferred choice of college because it will teach him love for discipline, for structure and for work. But may God guide your decision, my dear, and may it be your heart and not your sternness that seeks this end. If the autumn of my days is to be a happy time, we must all make an effort to save this child, while remembering that his difficulties are simply a matter of timidity and confusion. You probably think that his violent reactions are far from timid. But they are, my dear. By virtue of his timidity, he says nothing, and so he explodes, without knowing why. Write to me, my dear, and don’t fall silent, for life far from you is painful. Kiss my children and keep hold of my heart.
When I uncovered this letter my grandfather Fernán sent to my grandmother Esperanza about my father, he, my father, the Gaucho, had already been in his grave fourteen years. But in 1940 he was fourteen years of age and displayed personality traits that would never have fitted the man I knew.
It was a great surprise for me to learn, for example, that as a child my father had suffered from a nervous illness. My siblings and my mother knew nothing about it either. Curiously enough, my teenage years were marked by nervous attacks, allergies and acute asthma attacks that ended in exhausting nebulisation sessions in a cold room at the military hospital. No one knew where I could have inherited such weaknesses. The family history was there, but nobody was able to establish the link.
My grandfather believed that this illness left my father feeling insecure. Reading this was like discovering a new continent. From my point of view, my father was the most impenetrable person on the planet. A wall. A fortress. A bunker. His whole life expressed certainty: his words, his actions, his morals, his identity, his decisions. Everything about him expressed his certainty of never being wrong. Fear and doubt were faint shadows that flitted by in the distance.
Nevertheless, in the X-ray analysis of the Gaucho that Fernán conducted over the course of this letter, he is a confused, timid and violent child with an inferiority complex. The extraordinary thing about this description is that it matches that of the fourteen-year-old boy I was or believed myself to be: the boy who feared family mealtimes, who felt abandoned and powerless due to his inability to communicate with his father.
In the text, my grandfather refers to the need for everyone to join forces to ‘save that child’ that my father was. I wonder if my father ever read this letter. But more importantly, I wonder if he ever felt entirely safe from the childhood torments, so similar to mine, that we never managed to talk about.
Another letter from my grandfather, addressed to my father in the same year, reveals the conflicted sense of love that underlay their relationship, and the affectionate but subtly manipulative tone Fernán employed to try and win over his son:
You must tell me everything you want, everything you feel, everything you think with the frankness of good men and with the hope that your father will come up with what you need: help, encouragement, remedy or reward. I carry you in my heart like a sweet burden, my son, and I want this burden to become joy as soon as it can. I kiss you dearly.
A sweet burden. This is what my father was to his father. Was I too a sweet burden for him? If this was the case, he never said so. Or did he, and I failed to pay attention? Why have I lost the letters my father wrote to me? How could they possibly have got lost? I remember two in which he addressed me with a tenderness and emotion so out of character that I had to check several times if it was really he who had signed them, if the signature was authentic. I think about these letters – his neat handwriting, the texture on the reverse of the page from the pressure of the pen – and I realise that this was the only way my father was able to communicate with me.
There are people who can only express their feelings in writing. My father was one such person: for him, written words were the site of emotion, the region where the feelings denied in everyday life emerged and took shape. In these letters he could be himself, or at least that was how I saw it. He wrote what he didn’t say, what he couldn’t say to me in front of the others, in the dining room or the living room. In the privacy of these letters he was my friend; in public, less so. Almost like an imaginary friend who appeared from time to time, not in the real world, but in the world of writing. Outside of it, he imposed his firm will and his icy authoritarianism. I’m not even sure whether he was aware of who he was in his letters, but what I do know is that I came to love the man who wrote them far more than the man he was outside of them. In these letters – even if they only amounted to two or three – he stopped being the Gaucho Cisneros and again became the lad whose cracks and deficiencies so worried my grandfather. Outside of his letters, his love was silent and therefore confused, painful; a repetition of the love his father deposited in him, an arid love in which it was necessary to dig deep to find the diamond of those few words that could be studied on the surface.
Nor did I know that my father had been sent to a military boarding school. What I had always understood to be his natural vocation turned out to have been imposed. He was forced into it. He wasn’t allowed to choose because he was an errant child – when he was little, my grandmother tied him to a leg of the bed if she had to leave the house alone – and because he skipped school. Instead of attending classes in the British school where he was enrolled, he would head for the Buenos Aires docks to watch the ships and steamboats loading and unloading.
Indeed, it was a prank he played at the age of eleven that earned him the nickname he bore until the end of his days. One morning he assembled his siblings and friends in the large courtyard of the house at 3104 Avellaneda Street. At the time he was a devoted magic fan, and dreamed of becoming a magician.
‘Silence!’ he commanded the tame group of kids, spreading an aura of false mystery around him. ‘You have been called here to witness the final and most astonishing trick of Mandrake the Magician.’ ‘What’s the trick called?’ asked a shrill, dubious voice. ‘The dead hand!’ my father replied, and with his left hand he pulled out a sharp kitchen knife with a wooden handle that he had concealed in his belt, and slowly moved it closer to the palm of his right hand. He held it there for a few seconds, creating tension among his audience with their shorts, socks around their ankles, and dirty shoes, before emitting a theatrical howl and slashing up and down at his hand, to the horror of the children, who began to scream at the sight of the blood flowing ornamentally from the hand – which remained where it was, evidently neither false nor a prop, but all too real. My father, his eyes wide, the bloodied knife still held firm, smiled with pain. My grandmother Esperanza rushed out from the house like someone possessed. When she saw the damage he’d done, she dragged him by his hair to the nearest emergency clinic so they could patch him up. The doctor was struck by the behaviour of my father, who kept that morbid smile on his face and didn’t wince as he received, without anaesthetic, the fifteen stitches needed to sew up the wound in his hand, leaving the long scar I always confused with a lifeline.
‘Madame, your son is a real gaucho,’ pronounced the doctor upon completing his work, unaware that he was not only imposing an unforgettable sobriquet on the boy, but also naming a character trait that was starting to emerge. The gaucho – the cowboy forged on the southern pampas in the 19th century – meant the robust man who tolerated the cold of Patagonia, the horseman who grew in strength in the solitude of the barren plains, the nomad who took refuge on remote ranches and was used to living in the border lands. In that last sense, my father was indisputably a gaucho. He always got used to borders. He got used to his father’s exile, which forced the family to move on multiple occasions, and also to his own, when he had to leave Argentina and start over in a country he didn’t know but had been assured was his. And, of course, he got used to the inflexible environment of the military college, where he learned rigor and slowly accustomed himself to being something that others had chosen for him.
I think that perhaps, if it had depended on him alone, he would have decided to be something else. Something more artistic – why not? Perhaps a magician, like Mandrake. Or perhaps a dancer. Didn’t Aunt Carlota, his older sister, say that my father accompanied her to ballet classes? First to protect her from a suitor who would harass her as she left the school; later, to seduce Mirtha, the daughter of actress Libertad Lamarque; and finally, behind his father’s back, to dance, having become fascinated with those elastic, tip-toe steps, those tight Axel turns, the bodily harmony that demands such concentration and power in the legs. Was he not after all an amateur tango dancer, one capable of the most complex choreography I ever saw: dancing with Carlota, foreheads pressed together, hands on each others’ backs, switching their legs back and forth like swords in a forest? Perhaps he doubted or repressed his own abilities, not wanting to risk giving them full rein. Or perhaps someone persuaded him it was too feminine, and he ended up a soldier out of sheer stubbornness, so that no one could look down at him, obstinately proving to anyone who doubted his skills that he was perfectly capable of mastering even things that didn’t interest him in the least. If his parents believed that his lack of discipline had no remedy and that he would refuse to enter the military college, then he would show them just how wrong they were. When in April 1941 his father learned that he had enrolled, he wrote from Mexico: ‘However happy you may feel, your absent father is even happier.’
My father did not choose to become a soldier, but once he joined the Army he found the lifestyle to be compatible with something he’d always sought from the domestic sphere during the exile of my grandfather Fernán: order. An order that would quell the chaos. An order that would restore authority. He embraced the Army with an unfaltering dedication because he needed something to order his head and his life. Nevertheless, in the barracks he found a way not to entirely abandon the artist he carried within, to open up a tiny source of sustenance: joining the cavalry. It made sense. After all, the horse demands of its rider the same as ballet does of dancers: correct posture, strong calves, balance, a sense of space and serenity. A serene dancer never loses the rhythm. A serene horseman controls not just the steed he mounts, but also the wild animal he carries inside. And that’s what my father was: a wild animal. His character drove him to escape, flee and disappear into the plains, like a dispossessed gaucho who rides off until he is no more than a trembling point of light in the distance.
* * *
After his third year at the National Military College, in September 1942 he received another letter from his father in Mexico, the final one I uncovered in my Uncle Gustavo’s files.
Serene and strong, you have embarked on a course determined by fate, and I will always follow your steps closely in my heart, as I accompany you now from afar with a deep emotion that is both born of my affection for you and mindful of my responsibility. I am certain that we will continue loving and understanding each other in life not only as father and son, but also as best friends, with a shared interest in maintaining the tradition of integrity, seriousness and patriotism that marks our family name.
The father declares to his son his responsible affection and promises his friendship. But it’s a friendship based on our most well-tested family tradition: that is to say, a rhetorical friendship defined by geographical distance. The letter confirms as much with the expression: ‘You have embarked on a course determined by fate.’
In 1943, only four years remained before my father left Argentina to pursue this course. Ever since they were little, he and his siblings had all adopted a mandate: to return to the country where their parents were born and from which their father had been exiled. And that was the word they used: to return, even though they were talking about returning to a country they had never visited. How do you return to a place you have never been? They never felt the weight of this contradiction because they accepted that they lived in a kind of imaginary Peru, a bubble made of the countless references provided by their parents; of their grandfather Luis Benjamín’s lines of poetry; of the pages of the history books that reached their hands; of the postcards sent from Lima by relatives they had never met; of the voices of cousins, uncles and aunts who visited Buenos Aires and told them about everything they’d see in Peru.
Soon these mental pictures of the country would come to an end: in 1947, one by one, the Cisneros Vizquerra siblings returned to Peru. Once they had settled in Lima, while maintaining the family fraternity and solidarity, they began to dedicate themselves to their own very different fields: Juvenal studied Medicine and Linguistics; Carlota, Psychology; my father continued his career in the Army; Gustavo became an industrial engineer; Adrián a civil engineer and Reynaldo – oh Reynaldo! – uncle Reynaldo, the wildcard uncle, the one who studied Tourism, who became the king of public relations, a frustrated designer, and ended up a bon vivant always ready to live large, even if he didn’t have a penny in his pocket. Everything they’d seemed to share during their childhood in Argentina changed during their adulthood in Peru. While they lived in Buenos Aires, they were bound together by the future. Peru was a shared goal. Once they had reached it, their greatest similarity would be their past.
* * *
The Gaucho was twenty-one when he had to leave Argentina. How hard it was to put Buenos Aires behind him. Not only because he was leaving behind his childhood friends – Pepe Breide, Tito Arenas, ‘El Chino’ Falsía – or because he was interrupting his Army training, but because it meant he would be dangerously far from Beatriz. Beatriz Abdulá.
This is a name that I heard around the house since I was very young. An almost mythical name, even though it only belonged to – my father claimed – ‘a lass I knew in Argentina’, an account my uncles and aunts echoed in chorus when I asked them, overcome with curiosity at the idea of my father in love for the first time. Even my mother spoke of Beatriz without jealousy, almost fondly. But no one offered many details. Instead of placating my desire to know, this laconic response made it more acute. What was this Beatriz like? What kind of relationship did they have? Why did it end? Who broke up with who? The Gaucho said she was just a lass he’d known, but the emptiness in his eyes when he spoke contradicted his words. I didn’t trust his story, like with everything he said about the feelings that marked his childhood and adolescence. He was always editing events, cutting and pasting them so that his children wouldn’t see what he concealed behind the montage. He didn’t like losing, either in life or in the account he presented of his life, and so during his lifetime Beatriz Abdulá was just that: a childhood crush, a girlfriend of no real importance, a scant memory that it wasn’t worth turning over or digging into.
A year ago I went to the Peruvian Army’s Permanent General Archive, located in a pavilion of the general headquarters known as the ‘Pentagonito’ (or Little Pentagon) of San Borja. There I was received by a tall, brown-skinned, heavily moustachioed colonel who pulverised the bones in my hand with his greeting, asked me a series of irrelevant questions and told me just how much he admired the wonderful, exemplary man General Cisneros Vizquerra had been. He then allowed me to examine my father’s personal file. Sitting behind his desk in his office with its tinted windows, he warned me that I must maintain total secrecy with regard to the confidential material I was about to see.
‘This is the intellectual property of the Armed Forces. If anyone finds out you’ve been here, I’m the one with his neck on the line.’
‘Don’t worry, colonel. I won’t say a word,’ and I pulled an imaginary zip closed over my lips.
‘That’s what journalists always say, and then they screw us.’ Now the colonel was laughing.
‘Take it easy, I’m not here as a journalist.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I’m very grateful for the opportunity.’
‘One more thing, Cisneros. Since your father was a Minister of State and Chief of Staff of the Joint Command, his file is kept on a special shelf and it’s not supposed to be moved without orders from higher up. I’m turning a blind eye to this, you understand?’
‘I understand. I just want to see the papers, perhaps make a few copies.’
‘Copies? Impossible! They told me you just wanted to take a look.’
‘Alright, alright, forget it. I’ll just read the file, that’s all.’
‘Don’t try and pull the wool over my eyes, Cisneros,’ he warned. His nose flared and the tips of his moustache stood erect for a moment.
In the adjacent room, on a small table set up for the purpose, a thick file was waiting for me containing a series of classified documents relating to my father’s career. Standing beside the table, a deputy intelligence official, Paulo Pazos, was waiting to greet me. He had been given the task of keeping an eye on me to make sure I complied with the colonel’s instructions and I didn’t exceed the permitted time. ‘You have two hours,’ Pazos informed me. Shit, I thought, two hours to go through the documents that summarise the thirty-two years, four months and twenty-four days my old man was part of the Army.
The room was humid and cold, like a kitchen in the early morning. There was no one but the deputy official and me. To my good fortune, he was sensitive to the needs of journalism – as a kid he’d wanted to be a reporter, but his family didn’t have the money to send him to university or the journalism college – so when I told him I could get hold of a press pass from the newspaper I worked for that would help him pursue his undercover intelligence missions, he whispered: ‘You can’t use the photocopier but you can take photos of the papers with your mobile. I saw nothing.’
I set about leafing through and taking pictures of the hitherto unseen documents for many long minutes. There, for example, were my father’s report cards from Argentina, both the San Martín military high school and the National Military College, where he studied between 1942 and 1947. He got top marks in Maths and Spanish, average in History, poor in Geography, and a fail in Languages. I was surprised to see he scored highly in Music, Drawing and Singing. I can’t recall ever having seen him draw anything. Nor hear a complete song emerge from his mouth. He would mumble boleros, tangos, ranchera songs, a few waltzes, but didn’t sing them, or only sang them when accompanied by his brothers or old Army friends. He did like whistling. He was always whistling. In the house, the car, the office, walking along the pavement. I remember how the sound of his whistle traversed the windows like a flying insect, penetrating our bedrooms on weekend mornings. We could tell from his whistle if he was in a good or bad mood. My mother and he had a special tune they would whistle to call and acknowledge each other, borrowed from The Song of Forgetting, one of my grandfather’s favourite operettas.
His average score in exams was 6.35 out of 10. A normal score, slightly above the median. In all his school workbooks, however, there were exercises marked as fails. Two or three in each, the score written in red. I wished I could have had these reports in hand years later to compare them with mine, to gather strength in the face of the punishments he imposed on me, demanding the outstanding performance he’d never delivered himself. When I would bring home a marked exam for him to sign, he would immediately clench his fist and box me round the ears the same number of times as the number of points by which I’d fallen short of the maximum, 20. Regardless of the subject. If I got a 13 in Chemistry or in English, he’d thwack me on the head seven times with his knuckles. If I got 15 in Literature or in Sciences, that was five thumps. If I’d failed an exam in History or Civics, as well as the beating, I was grounded for a month. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d dole out tasks to complete at home, from washing the cars to polishing his twenty pairs of shoes.
Thinking about how he might react caused me such anguish that I once stole the exam paper of a kid in my class who had got 20 in chemistry. I’d failed it, with a score of 7. When I was handed my paper, I started to shake. I didn’t think twice: the bell rang for break, I waited until the classroom had emptied, pretending to make a start on an exercise. I made sure I was alone and then crept over to Gustavo Verástegui’s schoolbag to take the exam paper from his folder. He was the best student, a real swot, plus our handwriting was similar, or at least I copied his, I don’t remember. Verástegui always got 20. He must be fed up of getting 20s, I thought. I tried to make something noble of the crime; I wanted to believe that this 20 would do more for me than for him. That afternoon, at home, I carefully erased Gustavo’s name, put mine in its place, and ran to my dad to wave the paper in his face. Without even looking at the score, he received me with a rap on my forehead. ‘But why did you hit me if I got a 20?’ I complained. ‘My children don’t get 20, they get 21,’ he growled, grim-faced.
* * *
Nor did my father make concessions when he disciplined us. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, he would punish me by giving me lines to copy. I remember two in particular: ‘I must not answer back to my mother’ and ‘I must not fight with my brother and sister’. Each phrase three hundred times on lined sheets of paper. I could only go out to play with my friends if I completed this forced labour, the purpose of which, according to him, was to make sure I thought twice next time I was tempted to engage in these domestic misdemeanours. But instead of reforming, I was left with a desire to get my own back, to relapse just to see him get angry again. As soon as my father would issue the punishment, I’d shut myself up furiously in my room to write the line over and over, like Jack Torrance in The Shining. I almost always completed the task but on a few occasions I left it half-done, whether because my hand went numb or because my self-esteem rebelled. On these occasions I went to seek out my father to humble myself and ask for a pardon, but I never succeeded in moving him. ‘If you want to go out, it’s up to you,’ he would say, deceptively, without looking up from the newspaper he was reading, and I’d shut myself up again, my eyes red with impotence, resigned to continue covering the paper with my handwriting, filling pages and pages with promises I would inevitably break. That may have been when I felt the first stirrings of a conviction that has stuck with me ever since, and which I indirectly owe to him: that my freedom depends on writing. The more I write, the closer to freedom I will be.
I was never able to confront my father. I didn’t have the balls. His shouting, his stare (Christ, his stare!) immediately left me undone. I can only recall one occasion that I was stubborn enough to answer back to him. It happened in the house on La Paz St. in Miraflores. I can’t have been more than eight years old at the time. I’d said something he didn’t like and he started after me to give me a walloping. He chased me through my room, the living room, the dining room. With nowhere left to run, I dodged into the kitchen and saw the best place to hide was the larder, but I failed to notice that the latch was missing. From inside, sweating, I grabbed the door handle with both hands. He did the same from outside and we started to wrestle with the door. I pulled with every muscle in my body. I pulled to save myself. But he was pulling too. I began to sob, knowing that there was no way out, that there was no way to beat him. If I strain my memory, I can still feel my screaming forearms, my burning wrists, my shoes scrabbling on the floor tiles. Then my father said something that’s still engraved on my subconscious. A phrase both approving and wounding. Or just wounding. ‘The little cockroach has muscles.’ That’s what he said. And it broke me.
The ironic or unfair thing was that he punished my misdemeanours without looking in the shattered mirror of his own unruly youth. He not only bunked off school to watch the boats come and go in the port of Buenos Aires, but skipped classes to watch the daughter of Libertad Lamarque dance in the theatre, until my grandmother Esperanza was obliged to go and drag him back to college. He was rebellious and even seditious. On the morning I spent looking through his file in the Little Pentagon, I came across a memo from 1946 addressed to my grandmother by the head of Argentina’s National Military College:
I write to inform you that according to Directive No. 229 of the eighteenth day of October this year, this office has imposed on your son, cadet LUIS FEDERICO CISNEROS, a disciplinary sanction of 45 days of suspension of duties for: holding a meeting to propose disobeying the orders of a senior cadet because these were believed to be arbitrary, without – as he should and could have done – seeking recourse to regulatory procedures; and deciding at this meeting to collectively disobey and subsequently fail to comply with these orders, with the mitigation that the order involved a non-regulatory punishment.
Yours sincerely,
Juan Carlos Ruda
Director
This was not to be the last time – by any means – that my father would rise up to conspire against a superior because he objected to the course of action being taken. He would do so repeatedly throughout his career, and even after it was officially over. He spent many nights of his retirement from the military in his study with generals who were as retired as he was, or more so, with their furrowed faces and some disease or other eating away at them, seriously conspiring against the governments of Alan García or Alberto Fujimori. Entire nights spent in that room, which ended up stinking of tobacco and strong liquor, distilling the dream of overthrowing the president of the day, taking the Palace of Government and setting the country on the right course: one final but necessary phase of the already extinct military revolution. Long nights in which they shuffled tentative cabinets, dealt out the ministries among themselves, filled out dozens of A4 pages with a master plan for government. For my father, nothing was more thrilling.
He had no qualms about mutinying before a superior or upsetting hierarchies whenever his ideas so demanded, and maintained the dark conviction that he was destined to be the leader of a political cycle in history, the all-powerful military man, the omnipotent caudillo, the uniformed head honcho of the republic, able to impose order where it was lacking and of sending the regime’s traitors and the disloyal to prison, silencing them, or exiling them.
This deep-rooted theory of justice, however, clashed with his domestic tyranny. He was capable of defending his ideas before any audience, but he wouldn’t allow me to express mine, or to argue with his categorical decisions. He disregarded my reasoning and continually forced me to acknowledge him as the highest authority, developing a sophisticated series of exemplary punishments. The thing that most confused or angered or depressed me was seeing and feeling how his implacable severity was directed solely at me, and not at my siblings. Valentina, his favourite, was never rebuked with the heavy-handedness, coercion and psychological manoeuvring that sometimes bordered on aggression; and Facundo, the youngest, born when my father was already 56 years old, was treated in the amiable and benevolent manner of a grandson. Nor did my older siblings from his first marriage – Melania, Estrella and Fermín – have to brave the snare of his authority when they were younger. Though their situation had been different. The father they had was a thirty-something Army captain who was progressively promoted to major, lieutenant colonel and then colonel. A man who armed himself with ideas, knowledge and self-composure in order to shake off his core insecurities. That man was a soldier whose uniform acquired new badges year after year; a good military cadre who hadn’t yet come to know his limitations and who lived on a salary that could best be described as lean. A Gaucho who was not like the Gaucho I had for a father: a man in his fifties, set in his ways, hard, impenetrable. An unvarnished man who was not only at the peak of his career, but firmly believed he was better prepared to lead than any other and represented a particular type of power in a country that, in his view, needed people like him. It’s not the same to be raised by a lieutenant colonel as by a lieutenant general. It’s not the same to have as a father a middle-ranking official with justified professional aspirations, as a Minister of State with clear political ambitions. The father of my older siblings was not my father. He just shared the same name. But even if the young Lieutenant Colonel Cisneros Vizquerra had been just as severe and dominating with Melania, Estrella and Fermín as he was with me, he wouldn’t have won the respect of his first children. And if he had done, he ended up losing it altogether the day he left the house he shared with them and Lucila Mendiola: chalet 69 in Villa de Chorrillos. They were aged 17, 16 and 13 at the time. At that age – at any age – how can you respect a father who goes off with another woman with whom he will later, not much later, build another family? How can you respect this other family that has been imposed on you? How were my older siblings supposed to understand this behaviour as anything other than a moral shadow-play that would soon be undone by the events that followed?
Perhaps, I think now, my father’s obsession with moulding my character – by shouting so loud that my mother sometimes felt obliged to snap back at him things like ‘We’re not in your barracks here’ or ‘My son is not your whipping boy’ – perhaps this obsession arose from a need to test himself and to show others that he could set boundaries for at least one of his six children, and could inspire respect in one of the younger ones, having failed with the older set. I was the male child who held the winning ticket in this dubious lottery. And though my father did win my respect – or fear – in the long run, his need to dominate me left a deep fissure in our relationship.
My reaction to this was hardly intelligent either: I withdrew into myself, refused to communicate and blamed my sense of insignificance on the rest of my family. As for my father, my foolish way of punishing him was to filch his military campaign caps: I would wear them back-to-front, put on my oldest, baggiest and most frayed jeans, which he hated, and head out like that, transformed into a scruffy soldier. This was a time when I was writing my father letters filled with furious questions that would lie unanswered in a drawer, letters I rediscovered during the first house move after his death, and which I tore to pieces in tears, crushed by a terrible urge to stuff them down my throat and choke myself on them.
* * *
When he was a cadet, my father suffered a horse-riding accident. It happened on a training ground, near the city of El Palomar, where Argentina’s National Military College stands to this day. After forcing a manoeuver, he slipped from the saddle. As he fell, one of his boots became trapped in the stirrup. The horse took fright at the jolt, reared up and set off at a canter, whinnying, dragging my father along a rocky path for several minutes, causing him injuries that would afflict him for the rest of his life.
He spent just over a month in the college infirmary with a fractured hip and all his teeth broken. As I write this I can’t stop thinking about the incessant aches in his waist that would draw muffled groans of pain, or about his false teeth at the bottom of a glass of water in the bathroom. When he stretched his lips to smile, he didn’t reveal his teeth, just a thin white line. The only way to see the shape, size and colour of his teeth was when the prosthesis was floating in the glass at night. From within this glass receptacle, my father always grinned.
As a consequence of the dramatic fall, it became very difficult for him to qualify as a horse-riding instructor. In a dispatch of July 1947, the head of the Cavalry School at the National Military College states: ‘Due to a riding accident that kept him away from instruction for most of the year, the progress in this activity by Cadet Cisneros has been practically nil. As a result, his performance as an instructor is barely satisfactory.’ And an academic report from 1953, when he was already a lieutenant, contains the following observation: ‘He needs to dedicate more time to sports, above all horse-riding, for he is a hopeless rider.’
To be labelled mediocre must have triggered a wave of frustration together with an obsessive desire to come back stronger. That’s what setbacks did to my father. He fed on them, redoubling his energy. Instead of knocking him down, they motivated him to carry on, to persist in his objective with unwavering determination. It was not something he’d been born with: he had learned to be that way, to transform the enemy projectile into a boomerang, to return the sword swipes of his opponent with a single thrust. That was his thing: the most refined fencing match, the cerebral counterattack.
Thanks to the horses, he acquired the brutal elegance that allowed him to always come out on top, and his air of constant silent reflection. ‘We cavalrymen are accustomed to battling the monotony of long rides, and since we have adventure in our blood our thoughts are constantly roaming far afield. For each sorrow there is a residue of joy in us; for each grudge, cordiality; for each betrayal, affection. The horse prevents you being confused with the foolish mass of people around you.’ That’s how my father talked about riding. He wrote it in a magazine article. Despite adoring horses, and owning two foals in a sunny paddock somewhere whose names were Valour and Tetchy, which I only remember seeing in photographs, he never took an interest in teaching his children to ride regularly. Only my sister Valentina, behind his back and with my mother’s complicity, became a serious rider, reaching a level at which she could enter competitions with jumps of up to a metre in height. When my father found out, he was furious. Perhaps he didn’t want to be reminded that he’d done the same thing to his father when he was a boy: deceiving him to take ballet classes with the connivance of his mother. In the end he resigned himself to the idea that Valentina was a kind of Amazon, and even accompanied and encouraged her in tournaments at the Military Riding Club or the Huachipa Club. Once he himself approached the winners’ podium to present her with the first prize pennant in a newcomers’ contest. That day, without knowing it, the two, or rather, the three of them – my father, Valentina and the sorrel horse she rode – avenged that toothless horseman who would wander the house at night with his shattered hip, bow-legged, the startled whinnies ringing in his ears.
* * *
Yet that morning in the Little Pentagon it wasn’t my father’s report cards or the remarks from his military superiors that most disconcerted me, but a letter he wrote on 30 October 1947, a month and a half after his arrival in Peru. When I finished reading I had to sit back in the chair in order to breathe easily again. It was a letter with an Army insignia at the top left corner, yellow around the edges from damp, typewritten and addressed to Brigadier General José del Carmen Marín, Minister of War at the time, requesting permission to travel to Buenos Aires to marry Beatriz Abdulá.
‘What’s wrong?’ deputy official Pazos asked me, seeing my white face and my tense neck, my eyes moving from the letter to the ceiling and back again to reread the lines that triggered a mental image of my father over sixty years earlier, a cigarette in his mouth, striking alternately with hope and anticipated disappointment the heavy black keys of a borrowed typewriter.
‘I just discovered something.’
‘About your old man?’
‘Yeah. He wanted to marry his Argentinian girlfriend soon after he came to Peru,’ I said, my voice a slender thread that vanished in the air.
‘Seriously? And you didn’t know.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘It sure is.’
‘And why didn’t he marry the girl?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. The answer from the ministry must be here somewhere.’
‘Wait ‘til you find out you’ve got a long-lost brother somewhere.’
Deputy official Pazos then embarked on a lengthy soliloquy about the bitter stories of sad old widows who, when they came to collect the pension of their deceased husbands, suddenly discovered that they had other children, other women, other families, other homes, sometimes even other names. They would go crazy and cause grotesque scenes, uttering howls of rage that echoed down the halls of the military headquarters. Pazos carried on talking, but my ears no longer heard him; his words blurred into a monotonous symphony. My senses were focused only on the name that flashed in my head like a film title on the marquee of an abandoned cinema, still announcing one final show. Beatriz. Beatriz. Beatriz. Beatriz Susana Abdulá. It was now clear that she was not, as I had believed, just a youthful girlfriend now lost in the mists of time, but the woman he had promised to marry, to whom he pledged ‘the prestige of his honour’ and his ‘good name’, as he had written in the letter. What exactly had occurred? Why hadn’t the marriage come to pass? The file would provide an answer a few minutes later.
* * *
There is a photograph that shows that the Gaucho and Beatriz had met as children at a birthday party in Buenos Aires, but neither of them remembered this on the summer morning in 1945 when they became aware of each other for the first time. They were at the beach in the resort city of Mar del Plata. He was 19, she was 15. That morning the sun reverberated over the seashore like a great fiery bell.
The Gaucho was dragging his feet in the coarse sand alongside two friends, Tito Arenas and El Chino Falsía. Three bodies with neither cares nor muscles, wearing diminutive swimming trunks, with pencil-thin legs, fresh out of the sea, traces of foam still glistening on their shoulders, stomachs, knees. A couple of hundred yards away, under a two-toned parasol, Beatriz was arguing with her sister Ema about exactly where to lay out a huge red towel that resembled the flag of Morocco. The boys approached. Who knows which of them spoke first. Most likely it was El Chino Falsía, who never lost a second when it came to girls, unlike with his schoolwork. Or perhaps it was Tito Arenas, whose smile – more roguish than sensual – awoke a tenderness in girls that he found hateful and depressing. The last to open his mouth was undoubtedly the Gaucho, but all it took was a glimpse of Beatriz’ eyes for him to fall in love as if struck by a hammer blow. He would never recover from the vision of those two pupils, dark as grottoes, their depths pierced by the incipient beam of an unblinking lighthouse. The gaze, the perfect arcs of the eyebrows, the pointy, mouse-like nose. There the cadet Cisneros Vizquerra stood, paralysed, shredded by this girl wrapped in the clarity of daylight, who was now saying her name was Betty, addressing them with gracious gestures from the centre of that African flag. He found her so expansive, so fragile and so proud that he immediately longed to adore her to the end of his days.
Over that summer the three of them would pay regular visits to Beatriz’s parasol. The three boys would take her to dance at the Casino dance hall, to eat ice cream in cafés on the seafront promenade, to watch boat races from the top of the stands at the nautical club, to walk to the far ends of the resort’s less popular beaches, where the sea broke against the shore with greater power, to watch the latest films at the Ambassador or Sacoa cinemas, from which Beatriz always emerged teary-eyed and upset, sure that she would have played the leading role better than the actress in question. On one such afternoon the Gaucho must at last have opened his mouth to seduce her, to make her his girlfriend and kiss her against the walls, the rocky outcrops, the revolving doors, the trees, the boats pulled up on the shore, and to tell her that he wanted life to stop right there, because what would come later, however good it might be for both of them, would always be inferior, as it would lack the sparkle of that summer. To Beatriz – who at the age of fifteen had never lacked for male attention – this primitive and unconditional emotion was something new and different. Used to her beauty attracting a different kind of approach and endless frivolities – which she had been known to cultivate – she had never imagined that she could inspire a kind of love that was tinged with religious adoration. The Gaucho told her: ‘A woman like you shouldn’t sleep in a bedroom, but in a sanctuary.’ And some nights, in the darkness of the bedroom she shared with her sister Ema, Beatriz would smile as she imagined that her little room was actually a jewel case or a music box, and she would quickly fall asleep to the thought of herself as a miniature dancer who stood up tall, stretched her arms, took hold of one calf and raised her leg into the air, revolving before the bejewelled sea of the mirror.
The relationship between the Gaucho and Betty continued after they returned to Buenos Aires. The Abdulá family lived in Villa Devoto, a neighbourhood close to El Palomar, the headquarters of the military college. The Gaucho would visit her there on weekends when he had leave. He’d take the first tram on Saturday morning and after forty minutes – passing through the stations of Caseros, Santos Lugares and Sáenz Peña – he’d reach Villa Devoto, where he’d remain until evening fell at about seven. Juvenal and Gustavo, the only brothers who knew about the existence of Beatriz, covered for him whenever their mother, Esperanza, asked out loud where the devil the Gaucho had got to. Their father, Fernán – at that point the Peruvian Ambassador to Mexico and shortly afterwards to Brazil, appointed by President Bustamante y Rivero, fully occupied by the organisation of a conference at which the countries of Latin America would establish a continent-wide position in response to Germany and Italy’s defeat in the Second World War – remained wholly oblivious to the small events that marked the inner lives of his children in Buenos Aires.
The Gaucho would speak to his friends in the Army not only of Betty, but of the Abdulá family; above all her father, a Syrian-Lebanese man who was very strict or at least pretended to be in order to frighten off his eldest daughter’s suitors. Any allusion to Arab culture or symbols made in the classrooms of the military college provided an excuse for the cadets to tease the Peruvian about his girlfriend. ‘He’s got Peruvian blood, a criollo soul and wears the local garb, but he has the heart of a Turk,’ they ragged him. The school’s annual magazine, Centauro, published a profile in its 1947 issue:
The Peruvian’s favourite dance is Arabian Boogie and he has found his love in the land where God is God and Mohammed is his prophet. We are told that the first time he went to tea, his future father-in-law asked: ‘What’ll you have, Luis?’ Seeking to find favour, he replied: ‘Croissants, please, sir, croissants.’
According to the first account I heard of the break-up between the Gaucho and Beatriz, Abdulá senior opposed his daughter pursuing a romantic relationship with a young soldier, one who – worse still – was the son of a couple of exiled Peruvians. It was her family’s disapproval and the agony of not being able to carry on with Betty that had brought about the Gaucho’s journey to Peru.
Now I know that this version distorted the facts. After two and a half years, the Gaucho and Beatriz had decided to marry. They took it very seriously, aware that if they lacked determination, if they wavered even a little, everyone else would try to convince them they were crazy. And perhaps they were, but they were set on upholding their right to be crazy.
The plan was as follows: the Gaucho would go to Peru and wait for a month or two before informing his family of the decision. Then he would ask for permission from his superiors, return to Buenos Aires to speak to Betty’s parents, and following a religious ceremony they would travel to Lima to set up home. The plan, however, failed to reckon with one detail. Not long after arriving in Peru, the Gaucho became aware of an Army regulation that prohibited officers from changing their marital status during their first five years of service. Five long years. Sixty months. Two hundred and sixty weeks. One thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days. Let’s not even go into the hours or the minutes. Regardless of how in love Betty and he were, it would prove too long a wait. The distance, or the physical absence of the other, or the parental pressure to abandon the engagement would cause them to falter sooner or later. That’s why the Gaucho wrote the following to the Ministry of War:
I, Luis Federico Cisneros Vizquerra, second cavalry lieutenant, having graduated from the Argentinian National Military College on 22 July this year, an institute I joined as a cadet on 25 February 1944, having travelled to Peru on 2 September this year and currently being deployed as a deputy officer at the Chorrillos Military School, address myself to you with due respect on account of the following:
That having formalised my engagement to be married on 30 August this year in the Republic of Argentina, not having been notified before this date by any of the Senior Officers who held the position of military attachés at our Embassy of the law prohibiting marriage for officers of the Armed Forces during the first five years of service, I entreat you to consent to have the necessary authorization granted to me in order to contract this marriage, in the understanding that only in this way will I uphold the prestige of my honour and my good name. In the hope that my request meets with a just response from your dignified office,
Second Lieutenant Luis Federico Cisneros V.
Beneath its veil of solemnity, this letter concealed a cry for help. My father needed to return quickly to Buenos Aires, marry and put an end to this oppression that prevented him from studying or sleeping. Requests such as his, however, were not resolved directly by the Minister of War, but by the subordinate body, the Inspectorate. Upon learning this, he hastened to seek the intervention of the Director of the Officers’ School, who promised to call the Inspector General and ask him to give special consideration to his request. Meanwhile, letters travelled back and forth between Lima and Buenos Aires: they left the house on Paseo Colón where the Gaucho was staying with an aunt and uncle, and six or seven days later arrived at the door of the Abdulá family in verdant Villa Devoto, before beginning the return journey a short time later.
The Gaucho also wrote to his brothers Juvenal and Gustavo, whom he begged to take care of Beatriz in Buenos Aires, to keep her occupied, to invite her to lunch or to take her to hear Leo Marini sing their favourite bolero, ‘Dos almas’, and to talk to her about him while everything got sorted out. But there was to be no solution. The response of the Army took a month and arrived in the form of a circular, almost a telegram, in which the Inspector General communicated the following:
The request presented by second lieutenant Luis Federico Cisneros Vizquerra, of the Chorrillos Military School, is dismissed. Pass this document to the cavalry office to be appended to the personal file of the abovementioned officer.
That day in the Little Pentagon sixty years later, the missive’s curtness remained intact. Its harshness hadn’t aged. The revelation led to a storm of speculation on my part. Did my father renounce Betty, given the impossibility of abandoning his military education? Or was it she who ended the engagement, upon learning of the Army’s response? Did they try to carry on? Did they make any promises to each other? Where might those letters be? Did the family get involved? How long did they remain in touch? Did they ever see each other again? Which of the two was the first to embark on a new life?
I felt that I was peering into a ravine at night, blindfolded. I took a few further pictures of the file, swapped numbers with deputy official Pazos and left the headquarters building as fast as I could. I decided to walk home. I suppose there must have been cars and people on the streets, but I remember nothing. I can just about picture myself advancing down the narrow, tree-lined streets that run parallel to Angamos Ave., then crossing under the Primavera bridge, turning the corner onto El Polo Ave., thinking about the randomness of this story, of the direct repercussion its conclusion had on my existence. What would have happened if the Inspector General had woken up in a better mood that day in 1947 and, persuaded by the Director of the Officers’ School, given my father the green light to marry? Would the plan with Beatriz have come together? Would they have married? Would they have had as many children as they ended up having with other people? Who would I be? In which of these imaginary children would I have been incarnated? Would they have divorced, or grown old together, looking at those photos of their summer in Mar del Plata from time to time? Were there even photos of their summer in Mar del Plata?
As these questions piled up in my head, I was suddenly moved by a sense of sadness at this frustrated marriage, as well as shame or anger at discovering like this – snooping – the reasons why it had never taken place. I also felt I was betraying someone with all this digging around, though I wasn’t sure who. From the moment I left the military headquarters I was obsessed with Beatriz Abdulá. Before I rang the doorbell at my mother Cecilia Zaldívar’s house, where she was waiting for me to have lunch, I had enough energy left to fire off another burst of internal questions. Is Betty still alive? Is she in Buenos Aires? Perhaps in Villa Devoto? What if I were to look for her? What if I were to write to her? What if she were to reply to me?
