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