week.
On the morning I was scheduled to say my farewells on air, I felt overwhelmed by doubt. I announced that this was my last program, but I had to force out the words, as if they refused to be spoken; I had to push them, like pushing a child into the dentist’s chair. I availed myself of a musical interlude to leave the studio and lock myself in a stall in the washrooms on the fifth floor to ask myself, bluntly, my eyes damp, if it was really worth leaving the radio station, the wonderful people I worked with, the regular paycheque, the public recognition, the provincial fame, in exchange for a dubious novel – a novel that might be of interest to no one but myself, a novel that would cause trouble with my family, that would lead to accusations of ingratitude, injustice or betrayal. Perhaps, I thought, the moment had come to leave my father be, to admit that my determination to narrate his past and his death was futile.
I returned to the studio ready to retract. I wasn’t going anywhere. Even though I had trumpeted my departure mere minutes before, now I would declare my resolve to carry on, and I would beg forgiveness for my outburst from our thousands of listeners. I would say something like ‘I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I said I was resigning because I needed to write a novel; there’s no damn novel.’ Yes, that’s what I’d say. After all, the radio was real, the other thing wasn’t; the other thing was a pipe dream that would never become reality. I only had to wait for the red light to come on again; for Cindy Lauper to finish singing ‘Time After Time’; for the operator to give me the nod to shout out that, in a flash of insight, I had decided that everything was going to carry on as before. There would be canned applause, a silly sound effect and that would be that. It would be like nothing had happened at all.
At that moment I noticed an alert on my mobile: a new email pinged into my inbox. As I opened it, Cindy was singing her last lines: If you’re lost you can look and you will find me, time after time. If you fall I will catch you I’ll be waiting, time after time...
Hello. This is Ema Abdulá, sister of Beatriz, your father’s girlfriend. I’m writing to you simply because I learned that you called Celia Etcheberría’s home looking for clues about my dear sister. Let me tell you something. I met your father. She missed him very much when he went back to Peru. She wanted to marry him. My sister argued a lot with our mother about the marriage, but there was nothing to be done. She told me a lot of things and I cried with her too. But those were different times, you couldn’t just do what you liked.
About twenty-five years later, your father came to visit Beatriz in Buenos Aires. They met and went out to dinner, and your father, as smitten as ever, gave my sister his military baton. They spoke of the possibility of seeing each other again, but it never happened. When we learned of the Gaucho’s death we were deeply saddened. And look what a coincidence: I am writing to you now to tell you that my sister, my dear Beatriz, died of cancer one month ago. I wish you all the best in your search. If I can help you with anything further, please don’t hesitate to write.
Warm wishes,
Ema
‘We’re live on air!’ The console operator, whose nickname was ‘Pechito’ because of his highly-developed pectorals, started to wave at me through the thick pane of glass that separated his cabin from mine.
His voice reached me distantly through the headphones. I understood what his gestures meant, but I found myself unable to respond. Ema’s email was still open on the screen of my mobile phone.
‘…’
‘We’re on air! Talk!
‘…’
‘Come on, man, what’s up? Are you ok?’ Now he was sounding worried.
‘…’
‘Can’t you talk? What do I do?’
‘…’
‘Play a song, damn it, play a song!’
‘…’
‘Play “Creep” by Radiohead! I’ve got it here! Quick! Play it.’
‘…’
That same night I got in touch with Ema. Her voice sounded so warm: it was like talking to someone I had known for years. Through Ema I contacted Gabriela, Beatriz’s oldest daughter, whose first email was another shock to my system. She told me that just a few days earlier, emptying her dead mother’s drawers, she had found some photographs of the reencounter between Betty and the Gaucho in 1979, which my father had inscribed on the reverse. She had been there, had seen with her own eyes something I could barely imagine: my father – he was already my father in 1979 – visiting the woman who could have been his first wife, the woman he may have never forgotten, from whom he separated against his will, who nevertheless he learned to mention as if she were a minor player in his biography, keeping to himself the tremors that undoubtedly overwhelmed him every time her name crossed his lips. Gabriela had also found among Beatriz’s belongings the military baton that my father had given her at the same reunion; it had hung on her living room wall right up until the end, a sentimental relic that awakened the curiosity of guests. For two weeks I exchanged intense emails and phone calls with them both, and I understood how deeply the recent death of Beatriz had influenced this sudden escalation in affection, trust and companionship. It was because she had just died that Ema and Gabriela allowed me to get so close to the delicate territory of her private life, displaying a generous availability that may not have been possible under other circumstances. They found it implausible but also magical that the son of the Gaucho, a man she had once loved, should appear right on the heels of Betty’s death, quite literally out of nowhere, like a friendly ghost anxious for details of a shared history that represented a sacred heritage. They assured me that I was a miracle for them. They were wrong. They were a miracle for me.
A few weeks later, I arranged a trip – this trip – to see them in Argentina, to meet them and interview them. And now that I’m finally here, that I’m getting off the bus at the Mar del Plata bus station, taking a taxi to Ema’s house and checking that the batteries of my voice recorder are working properly, right now, I sense a strange power, a force that makes me aware of the anxious enthusiasm I’m giving off. For some reason I spend several seconds watching a flock of birds gliding past, setting a course over the vast dominion of the Atlantic waters. And while the taxi wends its way along the coastal boulevard of Playa Chica before turning into the tree-lined streets of Los Troncos and finally slowing down and coming to a halt towards the end of Rodríguez Peña St., I feel proud of having come this far, of having picked the locks of a chapter in my father’s life that was crying out to be recounted. Whatever the eighty-year-old woman waiting inside ultimately tells me, I know it will forever alter the Gaucho I have known up to now, and I know that I’m seeking out this story so I can put an end to my father once and for all: so I can tear him from my spinal cord, from the centre of the visceral anguish that hounds me, and relocate him to some immaterial place where I can learn to love him again.
* * *
What Ema told me that day, added to what Gabriela told me two days later in Buenos Aires – in a café on Libertad St. whose side windows offered a perfect view of the wrought iron canopy of the Colón Theatre – helped me fill in the gaps in the story. As they spoke of their sister and mother, Ema and Gabriela came to realise that they too needed to find a name for certain circumstances that had been silenced out of shame, fear or respect for Beatriz. They realised the importance of unblocking the sealed valves and sluice gates to irrigate a long-abandoned memory, dried up and covered with thorns and weeds. These talks gave way to sudden monologues that they continued insofar as they judged them useful, and it was during these minutes that the story I’d been seeking began to take shape before my eyes like a complete image,
