to Gustavo Verástegui’s schoolbag to take the exam paper from his folder. He was the best student, a real swot, plus our handwriting was similar, or at least I copied his, I don’t remember. Verástegui always got 20. He must be fed up of getting 20s, I thought. I tried to make something noble of the crime; I wanted to believe that this 20 would do more for me than for him. That afternoon, at home, I carefully erased Gustavo’s name, put mine in its place, and ran to my dad to wave the paper in his face. Without even looking at the score, he received me with a rap on my forehead. ‘But why did you hit me if I got a 20?’ I complained. ‘My children don’t get 20, they get 21,’ he growled, grim-faced.
* * *
Nor did my father make concessions when he disciplined us. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, he would punish me by giving me lines to copy. I remember two in particular: ‘I must not answer back to my mother’ and ‘I must not fight with my brother and sister’. Each phrase three hundred times on lined sheets of paper. I could only go out to play with my friends if I completed this forced labour, the purpose of which, according to him, was to make sure I thought twice next time I was tempted to engage in these domestic misdemeanours. But instead of reforming, I was left with a desire to get my own back, to relapse just to see him get angry again. As soon as my father would issue the punishment, I’d shut myself up furiously in my room to write the line over and over, like Jack Torrance in The Shining. I almost always completed the task but on a few occasions I left it half-done, whether because my hand went numb or because my self-esteem rebelled. On these occasions I went to seek out my father to humble myself and ask for a pardon, but I never succeeded in moving him. ‘If you want to go out, it’s up to you,’ he would say, deceptively, without looking up from the newspaper he was reading, and I’d shut myself up again, my eyes red with impotence, resigned to continue covering the paper with my handwriting, filling pages and pages with promises I would inevitably break. That may have been when I felt the first stirrings of a conviction that has stuck with me ever since, and which I indirectly owe to him: that my freedom depends on writing. The more I write, the closer to freedom I will be.
I was never able to confront my father. I didn’t have the balls. His shouting, his stare (Christ, his stare!) immediately left me undone. I can only recall one occasion that I was stubborn enough to answer back to him. It happened in the house on La Paz St. in Miraflores. I can’t have been more than eight years old at the time. I’d said something he didn’t like and he started after me to give me a walloping. He chased me through my room, the living room, the dining room. With nowhere left to run, I dodged into the kitchen and saw the best place to hide was the larder, but I failed to notice that the latch was missing. From inside, sweating, I grabbed the door handle with both hands. He did the same from outside and we started to wrestle with the door. I pulled with every muscle in my body. I pulled to save myself. But he was pulling too. I began to sob, knowing that there was no way out, that there was no way to beat him. If I strain my memory, I can still feel my screaming forearms, my burning wrists, my shoes scrabbling on the floor tiles. Then my father said something that’s still engraved on my subconscious. A phrase both approving and wounding. Or just wounding. ‘The little cockroach has muscles.’ That’s what he said. And it broke me.
The ironic or unfair thing was that he punished my misdemeanours without looking in the shattered mirror of his own unruly youth. He not only bunked off school to watch the boats come and go in the port of Buenos Aires, but skipped classes to watch the daughter of Libertad Lamarque dance in the theatre, until my grandmother Esperanza was obliged to go and drag him back to college. He was rebellious and even seditious. On the morning I spent looking through his file in the Little Pentagon, I came across a memo from 1946 addressed to my grandmother by the head of Argentina’s National Military College:
I write to inform you that according to Directive No. 229 of the eighteenth day of October this year, this office has imposed on your son, cadet LUIS FEDERICO CISNEROS, a disciplinary sanction of 45 days of suspension of duties for: holding a meeting to propose disobeying the orders of a senior cadet because these were believed to be arbitrary, without – as he should and could have done – seeking recourse to regulatory procedures; and deciding at this meeting to collectively disobey and subsequently fail to comply with these orders, with the mitigation that the order involved a non-regulatory punishment.
Yours sincerely,
Juan Carlos Ruda
Director
This was not to be the last time – by any means – that my father would rise up to conspire against a superior because he objected to the course of action being taken. He would do so repeatedly throughout his career, and even after it was officially over. He spent many nights of his retirement from the military in his study with generals who were as retired as he was, or more so, with their furrowed faces and some disease or other eating away at them, seriously conspiring against the governments of Alan García or Alberto Fujimori. Entire nights spent in that room, which ended up stinking of tobacco and strong liquor, distilling the dream of overthrowing the president of the day, taking the Palace of Government and setting the country on the right course: one final but necessary phase of the already extinct military revolution. Long nights in which they shuffled tentative cabinets, dealt out the ministries among themselves, filled out dozens of A4 pages with a master plan for government. For my father, nothing was more thrilling.
He had no qualms about mutinying before a superior or upsetting hierarchies whenever his ideas so demanded, and maintained the dark conviction that he was destined to be the leader of a political cycle in history, the all-powerful military man, the omnipotent caudillo, the uniformed head honcho of the republic, able to impose order where it was lacking and of sending the regime’s traitors and the disloyal to prison, silencing them, or exiling them.
This deep-rooted theory of justice, however, clashed with his domestic tyranny. He was capable of defending his ideas before any audience, but he wouldn’t allow me to express mine, or to argue with his categorical decisions. He disregarded my reasoning and continually forced me to acknowledge him as the highest authority, developing a sophisticated series of exemplary punishments. The thing that most confused or angered or depressed me was seeing and feeling how his implacable severity was directed solely at me, and not at my siblings. Valentina, his favourite, was never rebuked with the heavy-handedness, coercion and psychological manoeuvring that sometimes bordered on aggression; and Facundo, the youngest, born when my father was already 56 years old, was treated in the amiable and benevolent manner of a grandson. Nor did my older siblings from his first marriage – Melania, Estrella and Fermín – have to brave the snare of his authority when they were younger. Though their situation had been different. The father they had was a thirty-something Army captain who was progressively promoted to major, lieutenant colonel and then colonel. A man who armed himself with ideas, knowledge and self-composure in order to shake off his core insecurities. That man was a soldier whose uniform acquired new badges year after year; a good military cadre who hadn’t yet come to know his limitations and who lived on a salary that could best be described as lean. A Gaucho who was not like the Gaucho I had for a father: a man in his fifties, set in his ways, hard, impenetrable. An unvarnished man who was not only at the peak of his career, but firmly believed he was better prepared to lead than any other and represented a particular type of power in a country that, in his view, needed people like him. It’s not the same to be raised by a lieutenant colonel as by a lieutenant general. It’s not the same to have as a father a middle-ranking official with justified professional aspirations, as a Minister of State with clear political ambitions. The father of my older siblings was not my father. He just shared the same name. But even if the young Lieutenant Colonel Cisneros Vizquerra had been just as severe and dominating with Melania, Estrella and Fermín as he was with me, he wouldn’t have won the respect of his first children. And if he had done, he ended up losing it altogether the day he left the house he shared with them and Lucila Mendiola: chalet 69 in Villa de Chorrillos. They were aged 17, 16 and 13 at the time. At that age – at any age – how can you respect a father who goes off with another woman with whom he will later, not much later, build another family? How can you respect this other family that has been imposed on you? How were my older siblings supposed to understand this behaviour as anything other than a moral shadow-play that would soon be undone by the events that followed?
Perhaps,