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