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