The Distance Between Us. Renato Cisneros

‘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.