snap back at him things like ‘We’re not in your barracks here’ or ‘My son is not your whipping boy’ – perhaps this obsession arose from a need to test himself and to show others that he could set boundaries for at least one of his six children, and could inspire respect in one of the younger ones, having failed with the older set. I was the male child who held the winning ticket in this dubious lottery. And though my father did win my respect – or fear – in the long run, his need to dominate me left a deep fissure in our relationship.
My reaction to this was hardly intelligent either: I withdrew into myself, refused to communicate and blamed my sense of insignificance on the rest of my family. As for my father, my foolish way of punishing him was to filch his military campaign caps: I would wear them back-to-front, put on my oldest, baggiest and most frayed jeans, which he hated, and head out like that, transformed into a scruffy soldier. This was a time when I was writing my father letters filled with furious questions that would lie unanswered in a drawer, letters I rediscovered during the first house move after his death, and which I tore to pieces in tears, crushed by a terrible urge to stuff them down my throat and choke myself on them.
* * *
When he was a cadet, my father suffered a horse-riding accident. It happened on a training ground, near the city of El Palomar, where Argentina’s National Military College stands to this day. After forcing a manoeuver, he slipped from the saddle. As he fell, one of his boots became trapped in the stirrup. The horse took fright at the jolt, reared up and set off at a canter, whinnying, dragging my father along a rocky path for several minutes, causing him injuries that would afflict him for the rest of his life.
He spent just over a month in the college infirmary with a fractured hip and all his teeth broken. As I write this I can’t stop thinking about the incessant aches in his waist that would draw muffled groans of pain, or about his false teeth at the bottom of a glass of water in the bathroom. When he stretched his lips to smile, he didn’t reveal his teeth, just a thin white line. The only way to see the shape, size and colour of his teeth was when the prosthesis was floating in the glass at night. From within this glass receptacle, my father always grinned.
As a consequence of the dramatic fall, it became very difficult for him to qualify as a horse-riding instructor. In a dispatch of July 1947, the head of the Cavalry School at the National Military College states: ‘Due to a riding accident that kept him away from instruction for most of the year, the progress in this activity by Cadet Cisneros has been practically nil. As a result, his performance as an instructor is barely satisfactory.’ And an academic report from 1953, when he was already a lieutenant, contains the following observation: ‘He needs to dedicate more time to sports, above all horse-riding, for he is a hopeless rider.’
To be labelled mediocre must have triggered a wave of frustration together with an obsessive desire to come back stronger. That’s what setbacks did to my father. He fed on them, redoubling his energy. Instead of knocking him down, they motivated him to carry on, to persist in his objective with unwavering determination. It was not something he’d been born with: he had learned to be that way, to transform the enemy projectile into a boomerang, to return the sword swipes of his opponent with a single thrust. That was his thing: the most refined fencing match, the cerebral counterattack.
Thanks to the horses, he acquired the brutal elegance that allowed him to always come out on top, and his air of constant silent reflection. ‘We cavalrymen are accustomed to battling the monotony of long rides, and since we have adventure in our blood our thoughts are constantly roaming far afield. For each sorrow there is a residue of joy in us; for each grudge, cordiality; for each betrayal, affection. The horse prevents you being confused with the foolish mass of people around you.’ That’s how my father talked about riding. He wrote it in a magazine article. Despite adoring horses, and owning two foals in a sunny paddock somewhere whose names were Valour and Tetchy, which I only remember seeing in photographs, he never took an interest in teaching his children to ride regularly. Only my sister Valentina, behind his back and with my mother’s complicity, became a serious rider, reaching a level at which she could enter competitions with jumps of up to a metre in height. When my father found out, he was furious. Perhaps he didn’t want to be reminded that he’d done the same thing to his father when he was a boy: deceiving him to take ballet classes with the connivance of his mother. In the end he resigned himself to the idea that Valentina was a kind of Amazon, and even accompanied and encouraged her in tournaments at the Military Riding Club or the Huachipa Club. Once he himself approached the winners’ podium to present her with the first prize pennant in a newcomers’ contest. That day, without knowing it, the two, or rather, the three of them – my father, Valentina and the sorrel horse she rode – avenged that toothless horseman who would wander the house at night with his shattered hip, bow-legged, the startled whinnies ringing in his ears.
* * *
Yet that morning in the Little Pentagon it wasn’t my father’s report cards or the remarks from his military superiors that most disconcerted me, but a letter he wrote on 30 October 1947, a month and a half after his arrival in Peru. When I finished reading I had to sit back in the chair in order to breathe easily again. It was a letter with an Army insignia at the top left corner, yellow around the edges from damp, typewritten and addressed to Brigadier General José del Carmen Marín, Minister of War at the time, requesting permission to travel to Buenos Aires to marry Beatriz Abdulá.
‘What’s wrong?’ deputy official Pazos asked me, seeing my white face and my tense neck, my eyes moving from the letter to the ceiling and back again to reread the lines that triggered a mental image of my father over sixty years earlier, a cigarette in his mouth, striking alternately with hope and anticipated disappointment the heavy black keys of a borrowed typewriter.
‘I just discovered something.’
‘About your old man?’
‘Yeah. He wanted to marry his Argentinian girlfriend soon after he came to Peru,’ I said, my voice a slender thread that vanished in the air.
‘Seriously? And you didn’t know.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘It sure is.’
‘And why didn’t he marry the girl?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. The answer from the ministry must be here somewhere.’
‘Wait ‘til you find out you’ve got a long-lost brother somewhere.’
Deputy official Pazos then embarked on a lengthy soliloquy about the bitter stories of sad old widows who, when they came to collect the pension of their deceased husbands, suddenly discovered that they had other children, other women, other families, other homes, sometimes even other names. They would go crazy and cause grotesque scenes, uttering howls of rage that echoed down the halls of the military headquarters. Pazos carried on talking, but my ears no longer heard him; his words blurred into a monotonous symphony. My senses were focused only on the name that flashed in my head like a film title on the marquee of an abandoned cinema, still announcing one final show. Beatriz. Beatriz. Beatriz. Beatriz Susana Abdulá. It was now clear that she was not, as I had believed, just a youthful girlfriend now lost in the mists of time, but the woman he had promised to marry, to whom he pledged ‘the prestige of his honour’ and his ‘good name’, as he had written in the letter. What exactly had occurred? Why hadn’t the marriage come to pass? The file would provide an answer a few minutes later.
* * *
There is a photograph that shows that the Gaucho and Beatriz had met as children at a birthday party in Buenos Aires, but neither of them remembered this on the summer morning in 1945 when they became aware of each other for the first time. They were at the beach in the resort city of Mar del Plata. He was 19, she was 15. That morning the sun reverberated over the seashore like a great fiery bell.
The Gaucho was dragging his feet in the coarse sand alongside two friends, Tito Arenas and El Chino Falsía. Three bodies with neither cares nor muscles, wearing diminutive swimming trunks, with pencil-thin legs, fresh out of the sea, traces of foam still glistening on their shoulders, stomachs, knees.