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. A couple of hundred yards away, under a two-toned parasol, Beatriz was arguing with her sister Ema about exactly where to lay out a huge red towel that resembled the flag of Morocco. The boys approached. Who knows which of them spoke first. Most likely it was El Chino Falsía, who never lost a second when it came to girls, unlike with his schoolwork. Or perhaps it was Tito Arenas, whose smile – more roguish than sensual – awoke a tenderness in girls that he found hateful and depressing. The last to open his mouth was undoubtedly the Gaucho, but all it took was a glimpse of Beatriz’ eyes for him to fall in love as if struck by a hammer blow. He would never recover from the vision of those two pupils, dark as grottoes, their depths pierced by the incipient beam of an unblinking lighthouse. The gaze, the perfect arcs of the eyebrows, the pointy, mouse-like nose. There the cadet Cisneros Vizquerra stood, paralysed, shredded by this girl wrapped in the clarity of daylight, who was now saying her name was Betty, addressing them with gracious gestures from the centre of that African flag. He found her so expansive, so fragile and so proud that he immediately longed to adore her to the end of his days.
Over that summer the three of them would pay regular visits to Beatriz’s parasol. The three boys would take her to dance at the Casino dance hall, to eat ice cream in cafés on the seafront promenade, to watch boat races from the top of the stands at the nautical club, to walk to the far ends of the resort’s less popular beaches, where the sea broke against the shore with greater power, to watch the latest films at the Ambassador or Sacoa cinemas, from which Beatriz always emerged teary-eyed and upset, sure that she would have played the leading role better than the actress in question. On one such afternoon the Gaucho must at last have opened his mouth to seduce her, to make her his girlfriend and kiss her against the walls, the rocky outcrops, the revolving doors, the trees, the boats pulled up on the shore, and to tell her that he wanted life to stop right there, because what would come later, however good it might be for both of them, would always be inferior, as it would lack the sparkle of that summer. To Beatriz – who at the age of fifteen had never lacked for male attention – this primitive and unconditional emotion was something new and different. Used to her beauty attracting a different kind of approach and endless frivolities – which she had been known to cultivate – she had never imagined that she could inspire a kind of love that was tinged with religious adoration. The Gaucho told her: ‘A woman like you shouldn’t sleep in a bedroom, but in a sanctuary.’ And some nights, in the darkness of the bedroom she shared with her sister Ema, Beatriz would smile as she imagined that her little room was actually a jewel case or a music box, and she would quickly fall asleep to the thought of herself as a miniature dancer who stood up tall, stretched her arms, took hold of one calf and raised her leg into the air, revolving before the bejewelled sea of the mirror.
The relationship between the Gaucho and Betty continued after they returned to Buenos Aires. The Abdulá family lived in Villa Devoto, a neighbourhood close to El Palomar, the headquarters of the military college. The Gaucho would visit her there on weekends when he had leave. He’d take the first tram on Saturday morning and after forty minutes – passing through the stations of Caseros, Santos Lugares and Sáenz Peña – he’d reach Villa Devoto, where he’d remain until evening fell at about seven. Juvenal and Gustavo, the only brothers who knew about the existence of Beatriz, covered for him whenever their mother, Esperanza, asked out loud where the devil the Gaucho had got to. Their father, Fernán – at that point the Peruvian Ambassador to Mexico and shortly afterwards to Brazil, appointed by President Bustamante y Rivero, fully occupied by the organisation of a conference at which the countries of Latin America would establish a continent-wide position in response to Germany and Italy’s defeat in the Second World War – remained wholly oblivious to the small events that marked the inner lives of his children in Buenos Aires.
The Gaucho would speak to his friends in the Army not only of Betty, but of the Abdulá family; above all her father, a Syrian-Lebanese man who was very strict or at least pretended to be in order to frighten off his eldest daughter’s suitors. Any allusion to Arab culture or symbols made in the classrooms of the military
