find out if you really knew your father or only glimpsed him in passing. To find out just how inexact or distorted your scattered memories – your family around the table, chatting after lunch – really are. To find out what is concealed in those oft-repeated anecdotes, recounted as smooth parabolas precisely charting the surface of a life, but never revealing its intimate workings. What sawn-off truth is hidden behind these domestic tales whose sole purpose is to forge a tired mythology that no longer serves its purpose, because it can’t keep countering those stark, stifled and colossal questions that now torment your mind.
Where are the authentic stories and photographs of the traumatic, aberrant passages that don’t belong to your father’s official history, but are just as important – if not more so – to the construction of his identity as the moments of glory or triumph? Where is the album of negatives, of the veiled, shameful or unspeakable acts that also took place, but which no one bothers to recount? As a child, your family lies to you to shelter you from disappointment. As an adult, you no longer care to ask, accustomed as you are to the family’s version of events. You yourself circulate, repeat and defend events in your father’s life that you never witnessed, studied or verified. Death alone – inflaming your restlessness, multiplying your doubts – helps to correct the lies you’ve always heard. It allows you to swap them, not for truths but for other lies, lies that are more truly your own, more personal, more portable. As sorrowful as death may be, it can provide glimpses of a wisdom that, in the right minds, proves illuminating, fearful, anarchic. Death is more alive than your own life because it penetrates it, invades it, occupies it, eclipses it, suppresses it and studies it, calling your life into question, ridiculing it. There are questions death provokes that cannot be answered in life. Life lacks the words to talk about death because death has consumed them all. And while death knows a great deal about life, life knows absolutely nothing about death.
* * *
I know that I’ll never find peace if I don’t write this novel. How can I be sure that what my father passed on to me wasn’t first passed on to him? Were his surliness and reserve all his own, or were they implanted in him before birth? Did his melancholy belong entirely to him, or was it the trace left by something bigger, something that preceded him? What ancestral wellspring fed his rage? What was the root of his arrogance? We often blame our parents for defects we believe are theirs alone, without considering that they might be geological faults, constitutional failures: ulcers that have persisted for centuries or generations without anyone trying to extirpate or to cure them; the ghosts of long-dead starfish that have clung to a rocky undersea outcrop for aeons, and remain there, invisible, demanding our touch.
If I wish to understand my father, I must identify where we overlap, shed light on the areas of darkness, search for contrast, solve the riddles I had once set aside. If I succeed in understanding who he was before I was born, perhaps I’ll be able to understand who I am now that he’s dead. These two vast questions underpin the enigma that obsesses me. Who he was before me. Who I am after him. This, in short, is my goal: to bring together these two half-men.
At the same time, I must also explore his relationship with his own father, whom he rarely mentioned and only through tears. What peculiar electricity moved between them that atrophied his affection and stunted his spontaneity? I’ll have to travel up that blind, muddy ravine until I find something that starts to make sense. How hard have generations of Cisneros children struggled to discover something, anything real, about the father they had? How much did they undergo as children that they never forgave as adults? How much did they see as sons that they never fully metabolised and then suppressed when it was their turn to be fathers? How many of them have gone to their graves still harbouring bitter suspicions without ever confirming or untangling them, without attributing them to anyone or anything in particular?
I must exhume these piled-up corpses, bring them out into the light, dissect them, perform a general autopsy. Not to know what killed them, but to understand what the hell had animated them.
* * *
Monday 9 July 2007 was marked by a frenzy of events that seemed to have been arranged or rigged by some sort of cosmic plan. I was a few days into my first visit to Buenos Aires, as part of my incipient family research. I had travelled there with a friend, Rafael Palacios, who was also new to the city. Over the previous week all Argentina had experienced a dramatic drop in temperature. According to the National Meteorological Service, the cold – which was also affecting parts of Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil – was reaching polar extremes. That Monday, which was also Argentina’s Independence Day, was no exception: we were at zero degrees Celsius. Bundled up as if heading into the foothills of the Himalayas, we left the hostel on Maipú St., guided by a folding pocket map, and went looking for the address I’d written down in my notebook: Flat 20, 865 Esmeralda Street. The flat where my father was born.
We followed Sarmiento until we reached Esmeralda and then headed north, crossing Corrientes, Tucumán, Viamonte and Córdoba at the brisk pace maintained by the locals even on public holidays. If we spoke, we did so through our scarves, not looking at each other, focused on dodging the crowds walking in the opposite direction. Suddenly the eighth block of Esmeralda opened up before us like a rift valley. We drank a coffee in Saint Moritz, the patisserie on the corner. It was a quarter past three.
We walked down to number 865. To my surprise, the mansion house where my father was born over eighty years earlier remained unaltered. I had seen the façade in photographs, so I recognised it straight away; when I peered inside, though, it looked more like an ordinary apartment building than a converted mansion. It was the only building of any age on this street bristling with office blocks, restaurants, bookshops and general goods stores, a wedge of the past that pertained to me amid an irrelevant modernity. Hearing the doorman’s voice on the interphone, I began to stammer. He must have got bored of listening to me because the buzzer sounded and the outer gate opened while I was still trying to explain the reason for my visit.
Walking into the entrance hall felt like plunging into a tunnel in time. Everything was sepia-toned, humid, peeling: the faded floor tiles, the relief of the majolica wall tiles rubbed down by repeated passage, the skylights, the jerry-rigged pipes, the water valves, the precarious electrical fittings, the rusting apartment windows, the frames of doors you didn’t have to open to know that they creaked like coffin lids. The high ceilings of the corridors were hung with wrought iron lamps that swayed like decapitated heads. The apartments were distributed over two four-storey buildings. Each building had a courtyard and each courtyard a palm tree. The bark of both trees bore a few traces of incisions that could have been carved there years ago by long-dead occupants. Everything felt old. Even the tricycle parked on a landing. Who did it belong to?
As I observed the scene, I progressively unwound my scarf and removed the layers of warm clothing: the woolly hat, glasses, gloves, cravat, and the first of the two jackets I was wearing. Rafael was photographing everything from all possible angles, as if he was planning to recreate the building in model form.
Soon we heard slow footsteps. A very old man appeared and raised his cap to us in greeting. I approached him to ask how long he had lived there. ‘All my life,’ he replied. His breath smelled of stale oats. I asked him if by any chance he recalled a large family from Peru who had lived there some eight decades ago. The Cisneros Vizquerra. The parents were Fernán and Esperanza, and their children were Juvenal, Carlota, the Gaucho, Gustavo, Pepe, Reynaldo and Adrián. His face remained blank for a few seconds, as if trying to fit these names to the countless faces that ran through his memory, before he said yes, he remembered them well, but he couldn’t say more because he had to hurry so as not to miss his four o’clock train. ‘Could I take your telephone number, sir?’ I asked. ‘I don’t have one,’ were his last words before he faded into the cold air.
I then decided to look for the stair that led to flat number 20. I climbed the same sixty marble steps that my father must have tired of ascending and descending as a child. I put my ear to the white door as I rang the bell, encouraged by the sounds of dishes and
