always at the head, my mother to his right, but opposite her, to his left, in the spot where ancient custom would place the firstborn, none of us ever managed to establish ourselves. For years, my brother seemed to accept this as his natural place, fitting into an unsuspected hierarchy that nobody needed to articulate. My sister and I would choose from the other chairs according to some private logic – following the gender distinction already in place, as far as I can guess, her aligned with my mother, me with my brother. It was only later that he started hanging around in his room for longer, ignoring the insistent calls that we took it in turn to yell, ever more vehement calls that only ended up spoiling his mood. We couldn’t even hear his voice when he finally surrendered to dinner, his eyes then were a sad curtain of eyelids, but so comprehensive was his withdrawal, so resonant his silence, that he seemed to occupy the whole space and compel us to fall silent, too. I think it was just to avoid this small daily battle that we started to occupy his chair, my sister or I, whoever was first troubled by the emptiness that opened up between us, whoever first dared to break with tradition. In the years that followed, the firstborn was no longer whoever had arrived first into the world, but whoever arrived first at the table and dared to establish themselves there.
He would leave before dessert, I think he always left before dessert, and I’m not referring here to the usual meagre fruit that we never tired of, whatever Argentinian fruit could be found in São Paulo, or to the measured-out portions of chocolate that would grow progressively as our bodies grew. I’m referring to dessert as it’s conceived of in the Spanish-speaking world, the time spent at the table after all hunger has been sated, a time for retrieving in words a past that refuses to recede into the distance, a chance to scrutinise life in its many banal details. Why was there such attachment to the past, why did we keep trotting out the old days in all those aimless stories, it was a question that none of us asked, one of the many inquiries we failed to make. Tonight I think I understand why my parents never found an answer. If I sit at the table at nine o’clock, without any dinner, not hungry, if tonight my solitude takes the shape of those four vacant chairs, it’s because I wish I could, just one more time, hear those stories.
10.
It was always assumed that the story began in Germany, but if the family was Jewish, and even if it wasn’t, if the family existed since times unimaginable just like every family exists, all deriving from the same distant absolute forefather, then it’s obvious that this beginning was arbitrarily defined and that it could have come at any time, in any ancient place inhabited by human beings. It was assumed that the story began in Germany because that’s where our name came from, and also because there, in a still-mythical genealogy, one of our ancestors had been the father of botany – earning himself a flower and a colour that make reference to his name, a flower and a colour that we have also inherited. But these were incidental and somewhat irrelevant details. The true story of that half of the family started much later, among those who headed for Romania, buying land in Transylvania and adapting their writing to their new language. In some unrecorded village, then, the grandfather I never knew was born, an Abraham of legend, not very far from where my grandmother was born, one Ileana, whose name seemed strange to me even if my father spoke it with immeasurable fondness. Both of them Jews, both worried at the start of a century which from its beginnings promised to be gruesome, both scared by the growing antisemitism threatening those close to them, at a given moment in the 1920s they emigrated together to Buenos Aires. There, in 1940, as news of the war that had broken out became grimmer and grimmer, and when the letters from the many relatives sent to the camps were already becoming scarce, there, in 1940, they conceived my father.
As for the other half of the family, the plot-line is less precise, perhaps because of my mother’s narrative style, which is summary and diffuse, the evolution of worn-down stories that once bored her, perhaps because of the lack of a climax or a single central tension. Those origins took us back to an unknown region in Italy, but it was only later that I realised the name didn’t actually support this, implying Spanish origins instead. From Spain, I believe, they set off for Peru with their aristocratic privileges, to make up a Catholic elite in Lima which some senile governor thought necessary. There followed generations of relative wealth, in material and anecdotal terms, highlights of which included the case of a great-great-grandmother or a great-great-great-grandmother who wasted away, starving herself out of love for a man, an episode my mother considered romantic. It must have been my grandmother Leonor, whom I remember only for her aura of solemnity when she was already living out her days in a wheelchair, who’d provided her with these potted biographies. She must also have summarised, in a tedious narrative, how she met Miguel, the Argentinian businessman who carried her off from the metropolis and took her with him to a hacienda in the pampas. My mother spent her childhood on that hacienda, in the almost exclusive company of her siblings, and, as she kept saying, constantly assailed by the dream that one day a plane would drop out of the sky to save her, and take her someplace interesting. She created her own salvation by moving to Buenos Aires, losing herself in the throng of every street corner, in the densely populated hallways of the university.
But I don’t know why I’m going back over these trajectories, why I’m spreading myself so thinly among all these unnecessary details, which are as distant from our own lives as any novel. I think I always found it strange, whenever I heard these winding stories, when I learned about these faraway journeys, about this incessant displacement, about these many provisional dwellings, I think I always found it strange how attached my parents were to this city, this city they considered their own. If many of those who came before them seemed inveterate migrants, if many had made their homes mere outlines in the distant landscape, at the risk of forgetting their loved ones’ old faces, their childhood hiding-places, why had they been so resistant to leaving the country that frightened them, and why should the pain they felt now be any different? I know it was an exile, a flight, an act forced upon them, but isn’t all migration forced by some discomfort or other, some kind of flight, an incurable failure to adapt to the land you inhabited? Or might I, in these foolish musings, these inconvenient enquiries, be devaluing their struggles, belittling their paths, slandering the institution of exile that for years has demanded such seriousness from us?
11.
I see the young couple in a bleached-out image, a black and white photograph that time has faded more than it should have done. Something about their appearance makes them look strange, adding to the sense of anachronism – maybe the volume of their hair, the conspicuous pleats of a shirt, the solid stone bench where they sit, and something else I can’t identify and yet which somehow immortalises them. Because they are my parents, and because they are not alone, because my father has a little girl on his lap, I know this is a record of the early 1980s, and yet it seems far more distant than that. These people I’m looking at are historical beings. Their singular appearance in the photograph is a culmination of former paths, one of many culminations of these complex lives that tangle around one another and are permeated by a collective past, by the march of an era, by cracks winding across time. I’m not sure how well I know them. I can’t decipher their happy smiles. I don’t fully understand the intricate arrangement of actions and chances that brought them together, but I know that I owe my existence, and the incautious words I’m writing here, to that union.
A child will never be the best person to appraise his parents’ relationship, to understand what attracted one to the other, to unravel their feelings. He can’t even wonder at the strange confluence that brought together a young Catholic girl of conservative origins and a Jew from a bohemian neighbourhood who was a follower of Marxism, because that would be to reduce them to watertight identities, to rigid types. Doubtless some drama was inevitable, but it would suffice to say that both graduated in medicine, that both attended the same psych residency, that they would soon both be psychoanalysts, for any mystery to be quickly dissolved. Another fiction, then, comes into being: they were not opposites at all, but two people alike, united in their criticism of the brutal and archaic psychiatric treatment perpetuated in hospitals across the world, and in their militating for a therapy that was more humane, more understanding, more comprehensive, less damaging. It’s between one lie and the other that the drama of this narrative moves: no longer the petty dogmas of one family among many families, but the ideals of two young Argentinians at the tense apex of their political activity.
If those two young people were