by a clacking of adult voices I couldn’t quite make out. I rapped on the door with my knuckles and spent a few seconds admiring the elegant two numerals of the number 20 inscribed in black ink to one side of the great window that dominated the landing between the third and fourth floors. The box for the fire extinguisher was empty. No one answered the door. I was about to knock one more time when I was struck by how implausible the speech I was planning to give would probably seem, how absurd my intention was going to sound. What exactly did I hope to achieve? To go inside and search a surely refurbished flat for the hardships into which my father had been born and raised? Breathe in the thin air of my grandfather’s years of exile? See the kitchen and imagine my grandmother Esperanza preparing dinner for her children – and also for her husband’s legal family? I felt a sudden unease that caught in my throat like a stuck walnut. I understood that I was forcing the experience in order to make it, I don’t know, more literary somehow, more worthy of consideration, when it was obvious that this place no longer represented anything at all. It was just an old flat in a crumbling tenement house. There was nothing romantic, quixotic or worthy about bursting in like this. The ghosts that once inhabited the building had long fled.
I told Rafael it was time for us to go. After closing the front gate and stepping back onto the street, we entered the adjacent second-hand bookshop. It was called Poema 20. Rafael wanted to buy a present for his brother. I left Rafael talking to the man at the counter and stretched out an instinctive hand to take a book at random from the first shelf I stopped in front of. I don’t want to suggest that the book I picked up was a sign, but in some sense it must have been. Or at least, that’s how I want to remember it: a subliminal synchrony. The book, with its distinctive white and red cover, published by Escorpio, was by Andrés M. Carretero and its title was The Gaucho: Distorted Myth and Symbol. I held it up to show Rafael, and he crossed the length of the bookshop to embrace me. This scene must have been disconcerting for the bookseller, to whom I handed a banknote in lieu of an explanation. A few minutes later, at four o’clock precisely, with one foot back on the pavement – perhaps the left – I felt a light, cold brushstroke against my cheek as if a substance somewhere between cotton and spittle were falling from above. I then saw that the black asphalt of the street was gradually being covered by a kind of white foam. It took me several seconds to realise that these soft, wind-blown icy blades were splinters of a miraculous snowfall over the city. We mingled with the crowd of people running towards the Obelisk to marvel and celebrate no longer just Argentina’s independence but also this natural phenomenon that – as the evening news would confirm – had not occurred in the capital for eighty-nine years. The survivors of that ancient snowfall watched the spectacle from behind the windows of their homes. The rest, conscious of how rare an event this was, left their buildings to wander the broad, frozen avenues that gradually began to resemble Siberian steppes. Euphoric pedestrians tried to catch snowflakes in the air. The older men, clumsier, rubbed them into their faces or swallowed them as if they were a manna or an elixir. The women caught them delicately in their hands, improvising songs of delight. A few younger folk filmed the experience on their mobile phones while others leapt around half-naked, their football strips clinging to their backs. The children, meanwhile, forgot the cold to solemnly build plump, once-in-a-lifetime snowmen. Rafael stayed by the Obelisk shooting photos until the early hours of the morning.
By that time I had abandoned the snow party to go and meet the poet Fabián Casas, whom I had emailed before leaving Lima. The poet welcomed me with a Cossack hat on his head and a neat whisky in his hand. We swapped books, talking about who we were and what we liked to do, and I allowed his dog Rita to mount my leg beneath the kitchen table. Night had fallen when we said farewell three hours later, but it was still snowing in the street. A few minutes later, huddled beneath a bus shelter waiting for a taxi, I felt like a writer. More like a writer than ever. As if the drinks and the talk with Fabián, combined with the snow that was blanketing Buenos Aires for the first time in a century, had yielded a poetic circumstance I deserved to belong to, I already belonged to, even though at this hour of the night there was not a single damn passer-by in the avenue to witness this fact. So I leaned against the illuminated sign on the bus shelter to read the book of poems Fabián had gifted me. I opened a page at random and read:
Not all of us can escape the agony of our time
and so, in this moment,
at the foot of my old man’s bed
I too prefer to die before I grow old.
Thick flakes of slantwise-falling snow were covering my shoes. I felt a desire to let myself be buried by the snow right there, to greet the dawn transformed into one of those expressionless figures the children had been building around the Obelisk. Perhaps from this new compartment, I thought, I could better understand something of what had happened on this fabulous day that was already dying, already thrashing like a fish on the damp ground. So I thought about the verse by Fabián Casas, about the distorted man my father was, about how there never was and never would be a way of getting free of him, though the years passed as swiftly as the snow fell, became a crust, and melted away. And just as I was starting to sink into the hole of this sorrow that resurges in me even now, deliverance appeared in the form of the lights of a yellow taxi, its windscreen wipers tirelessly battling the murky layer of slush, the driver’s sleepy face barely visible behind the glass.
* * *
Now it’s 2014 and I’m on a bus heading for Mar del Plata to meet Ema Abdulá, Beatriz’s younger sister.
The strange memories of my last trip to Buenos Aires, seven years earlier, project themselves like a short film on the black screen of the bus window. On the other side of the glass I don’t know if there are shacks, fields of crops or cliffs. Only at daybreak do I realise that the highway is lined by trees of different sizes. In the sky I distinguish a constellation of compact clouds that roll along like tumbleweeds in Western movies.
Two months ago I set about tracing Beatriz, my father’s first girlfriend. I had no idea where to start, so I wrote to at least forty people with the surname Abdulá on Facebook. Not one replied. I asked for recommendations on websites dedicated to searching for people and spent whole mornings browsing the ones that appeared most serious or professional. In the end they always asked for money to complete the investigation, with no guarantee of success and no promise of a refund if the search was fruitless. I even got in touch with an Argentinian friend, a well-known journalist by the name of Cristina Wargon, to start a local campaign to find Beatriz Abdulá.
One afternoon, during lunch, my uncle Reynaldo claimed he’d once heard my father say that Betty had got married in Buenos Aires to a man with a Basque surname, a difficult name he couldn’t recall just then. A few days later it came to him. ‘Etcheberría! Etcheberría! That’s what Betty’s husband was called,’ he told me triumphantly over the phone before spelling out the name, which sounded more like a sneeze than anything else.
The next day, I asked a Buenos Aires-based friend to send me a list of the full names and telephone numbers of all the Etcheberrías living in the capital city who appeared in the phone book. It didn’t take him long: there were only sixteen. I started to make long-distance phone calls. One of them must be able to provide a clue about Beatriz, I thought. After two weeks I had contacted Ana, María, Tadeo, Alfredo, Mariana, Celia, Fernanda, Corina, Carlos, Máximo, Nélida, Alberto, Mercedes, Teresa, Carmen and Bernardo Etcheberría. Not one could give me any precise information about Betty. A few had heard tell of the Abdulá family in the past, but they didn’t think any remained in Argentina. Others said they had a more or less distant relative in Córdoba or Santa Fe who knew a woman of Arabic origin who, if they remembered rightly, might be named Beatriz. None of the answers were encouraging. One of the women I contacted, Celia, was an ailing old lady who could barely speak anymore. As she struggled to tell me something, her young carer took the phone off her and said she couldn’t help me, offering only to note down my details, or to say that she would.
I had just resigned from the morning radio program I’d been hosting. It was
