* *
One day in 1947 Beatriz arrived home, sat down in front of her parents and swallowed hard before telling them that she had got engaged to the Gaucho. After the wedding, we’ll make arrangements so that we can go and live together in Peru, she continued. Beatriz, who never spoke, who was used to hiding both her feelings and the events that motivated them, suddenly opened her mouth to present this ultimatum.
From her room, Ema heard their voices and noted how her sister’s resolve slowly opened up an abyss of silence. Within seconds the house seemed to be collapsing around them. Stunned, Mrs Abdulá buried her face in her hands, weeping as if the imaginary aeroplane on which Beatriz would travel to Peru was already waiting on the tarmac. Mr Abdulá, terrified by the determination in his daughter’s voice, stood up to counterattack and refuse permission – not only because she was too young to marry, but because it was madness to leave for a country they had no connection to. The fighting and weeping continued for days. According to Ema, her father’s refusal, rather than disheartening Beatriz, merely granted her lunacy a thicker layer of poetic vindication.
The couple’s plans evolved. Before returning to Peru, the Gaucho entrusted Ema with a series of cards he asked her to hide under her older sister’s pillow. One per night. ‘Your father wrote pure poetry. For one hundred nights I had to place those romantic cards under Beatriz’s pillow. They smelled of him,’ Ema now tells me, as she sips a spoonful of soup under the thin Mar del Plata sunlight. Listening to her, I’m convinced that my father appropriated the poems written by his own father or grandfather to fill these cards. Traveling back in time, I think of how ironic it is that in 1869 the parents of Cristina Bustamante gladly gave up their fourteen-year-old daughter’s hand in marriage to my great-grandfather Luis Benjamín, who was not only much older than her but also father to three illegitimate girls – while almost eighty years later the parents of Beatriz Abdulá would reject my father, despite his impeccable military education. Luis Benjamín broke all the rules, but still won approval. My father had no such luck. The moral transgressions of a distinguished diplomat who has lived in Europe are forgiven in any century. Not so the feelings of an unworldly young soldier without money or prestige.
Beatriz kept her hopes alive even after learning that the Army refused the Gaucho permission to return to Buenos Aires and marry her. She compensated for her fiancé’s absence by gazing at the photographs they had taken together, realising only then that they were very few: just three, in fact. One taken at a New Year’s party alongside two other couples, all kids dressed as grown-ups, beside a table with an ice bucket and uncorked bottle of champagne in the centre. A second at a reception of some kind, Beatriz swathed in a fur coat, her eyes bright, with her beaver-toothed smile; the Gaucho wearing his gala uniform, lips tightly pressed together. The third photo is the one that looks most like a movie still: the two of them are seated on a rocky outcrop above a beach one afternoon, their backs to the waves as they break over the rocks, their hair tousled by the sea breeze; Betty wears a pullover and trousers that reveal her skinny calves, while the Gaucho sports a summer shirt and those striking, prominent ears, outlined against the white foam running up the shore.
Now they were no longer inside but outside the photos, very far outside them, far enough away for the couple to wonder whether these images showed a life that now belonged to the past. For a month and a half their correspondence flowed punctually back and forth, sustained almost entirely on the hope that the situation would take a sudden turn for the better.
But it didn’t. Their communication was met with obstacles and disruptions, and the missives began to dwindle. Abruptly, Betty stopped writing altogether. Her exhaustion in the face of what to all eyes seemed a fruitless wait was exacerbated by a smear campaign against the Gaucho, orchestrated by none other than his old Buenos Aires friend José Breide – Pepe – who had long held a candle for Beatriz. He set about filling her head with untruths, seeking to persuade her that the Gaucho would never return from Lima, denouncing him as a traitor, claiming that his ingratitude and neglect were such that he had already set up with another woman.
‘Pepe started to turn up at the house not long after your father left. My sister didn’t love him, but she felt lonely. Breide was very persistent: he followed Beatriz from Buenos Aires to Mar del Plata every summer. He offered her everything under the sun, and because he was well-off and from the same Arabic community, our mother supported his suit. In the end she was the one who arranged their engagement,’ Ema revealed to me in a choked voice, fulfilling my request not to keep any details to herself, however painful they may be.
The final letter the Gaucho received from Betty was the letter breaking off the engagement. Three handwritten pages on slippery paper that end with a bolero, ‘Nosotros’, a hymn to devastated love whose lyrics well describe the arduous battle that must have been waged inside Beatriz throughout 1947.
Listen, I want to tell you something
that perhaps you don’t expect,
something that may hurt.
Hear me, for though my soul aches
I need to speak to you
and so I shall.
The two of us,
who have been so sincere,
who since we first met
have been in love.
The two of us,
who made of love
a wondrous sun,
a romance so divine.
The two of us,
who love each other so much,
and yet must part;
ask me no more.
It is not for lack of feeling,
I love you with my soul;
I swear that I adore you
and in the name of this love
and for your own good I bid you farewell.
This letter tore the Gaucho apart. A tear that would reopen every time this bolero came on the radio or record player, whether in the voice of Los Panchos, Sarita Montiel or Daniel Santos. With the first few notes, my father would trail off mid-conversation and stare at the ceiling, smoking one cigarette after another, lost in painful memories.
He didn’t deal well with the break up. He abandoned himself, got drunk, lost control. Even though he didn’t drink at the time, one afternoon he shut himself up for hours in a bar on the road down to Baños de Chorrillos. Once all the other customers had left, the owner told him he was about to close, if he would be so kind as to pay up and be on his way. My father gave no reply. Ten minutes later the man repeated his request. My father ignored him once more. From behind the bar there emerged a huge figure who approached the Gaucho and urged him to settle up and leave. One more whisky, my father ordered, without looking at him. The figure refused with his hand and warned him forcefully that he had to go, now. I can visualise the scene. My father, his voice distorted, his tone defiant, his face fixed on the wall in front of him, informs the man that he is a second lieutenant in the Army, that they’re inviting disaster if they refuse to serve him. The other – taller, larger, more lucid – picks him up by the scruff of his neck and drags him out of the establishment. My father, hanging in the air like a doll, waves his arms and legs uselessly in protest. Once in the street, on his knees on the pavement, the sound of the bolts being locked sends him completely out of control.
