found a way to stay apprised of the love life of her Peruvian former fiancé, taking steps in accordance with the information she gathered? Could there have been a long-distance tussle of pride between them? A contest of egos? A silent challenge that intimated, if you can get married over there, then I can here too; if you can be happy with someone else, then why can’t I?
* * *
What Gabriela tells me in that hot café on Libertad St. is that her mother left Breide shortly before their wedding date, breaking off the engagement and sending tremors through the conservative Syrian-Lebanese community in Buenos Aires. Virtually overnight, she married a man by the name of Federico Etcheberría, Gabriela’s father.
Betty had never much liked Breide, her daughter recalls. She wasn’t enthusiastic about her engagement to him. ‘She let herself be carried along by the current, but it was no great love story, I’ve no doubt about that. She met Federico, my father, and broke off with Breide, even though they were engaged.’
While Gabriela untangles details on the voice recorder, I sip my cappuccino and ponder Beatriz’s actions over time. I suddenly feel or want to feel that everything she did after my father left for Argentina was in reaction to his departure, and that she tried to remain close to the Gaucho however she could. Perhaps, I consider, getting engaged to one of his best friends was, however perversely or misguidedly, an allegorical way of staying close to him or to the space imbued with his presence while he lived in Buenos Aires. Leaving Breide to marry this Federico – my father’s second name – may have been another act of unconscious nostalgia, an irrational desire to appropriate a name that had once meant so much to her. And when this second Federico died years later in a car accident, what did Beatriz do? She secretly married the brother of her dead husband. Was this reflex action not an exact repetition of what she had done years earlier with Breide? Letting yourself be loved by the friend of the boyfriend who has left – wasn’t that the same as letting yourself be loved by the brother of the husband who has died? Is it a coincidence that, in both situations, faced with an abrupt abandonment, Beatriz rushed into the arms of the most inconvenient character on the scene? As if betraying the absent person was the only possible way to pay homage to them.
Many years later, the Gaucho and Beatriz would see each other’s faces again. The encounter took place in Buenos Aires in October of 1979. He was fifty-three years old, a Lieutenant General and Chief of Staff of the Joint Command of the Armed Forces. He was no longer married to Lucila Mendiola. He maintained an affectionate distance with his older children, and for almost a decade had lived with Cecilia Zaldívar, with whom he had two children by then.
He travelled to Buenos Aires to attend a ceremony for the anniversary of the creation of the Argentinian Army, to take part in a series of military conferences and to receive a tribute from his former classmates in El Palomar. He stayed for eleven days altogether.
Beatriz was forty-eight and had been a widow for just a few months. One morning she received the most unexpected phone call of all. It was the Gaucho, her Gaucho, who only after a few minutes of exchanging greetings and nervous laughter told her he was in the city. Before they hung up, they agreed to meet at the Plaza Hotel where he was staying, adjacent to the Military Club and looking over Plaza San Martín.
Gabriela tells me that her mother was happy at the thought of meeting my father again. Her desire to see him, however, was neutralised by the self-control with which certain women protect themselves from the past. She was the only one of the two who accepted the reality of their new roles. Beneath his military attire, the Gaucho, by contrast, was the same excitable little boy who had kissed her eagerly at the door to her house in Villa Devoto thirty years earlier, in 1947, before leaving for the airport on his way to discover Peru.
After his marriage to Lucila Mendiola had fallen apart, the Gaucho had fallen in love with Cecilia Zaldívar, a young woman of twenty-two in whom he believed he had found the physical and spiritual twin of Beatriz. To his eyes, Cecilia was Beatriz reincarnated. If the latter’s subsequent relationships were a kind of distorted refraction of her love for the Gaucho, his had been formed with Beatriz firmly in the centre of his gaze, whether in order to bury her or to resuscitate her. He had been very fond of Lucila Mendiola and he loved Cecilia Zaldívar – ‘two good women who don’t deserve to come to any harm’, he would say once – but for Beatriz, or for what she had been and still represented, he maintained a love whose purity, weight and endurance were directly proportional to its degree of mythification.
As soon as he saw her enter the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, my father regressed to adolescence. His actions were all out of synch, as if he was unable to understand that he had grown old, had five children, that he was no longer a cadet engaged to this girl – who, by contrast, treated him solely with affection, a melancholy affection at best, continuously marking the boundaries that destiny had laid down between their lives. My father refused to acknowledge that gap. He acted just like his great-grandfather, the priest Gregorio Cartagena, who in contravention of his Church vows had loved Nicolasa so many years earlier; or like his grandfather Luis Benjamín, who had taken off with the mistress of President Castilla; or like Fernán, his own father, who had seduced Esperanza on afternoons in the centre of Lima, overlooking his legitimate wife. It was centuries-old behaviour. Imprudent, egotistical, but doubtless enchanting behaviour. My father, like three generations before him, didn’t care about the consequences. He had abandoned Brígida Garrido to court Lucila Mendiola. He had abandoned Lucila Mendiola to court Cecilia Zaldívar. And now he was abandoning Cecilia Zaldívar to court Betty all over again. His heart was a vicious circle. His impulsive romantic conscience was inhabited by a macho predator: once the target was identified and the field of operations drawn up, there was no space for moral doubt. It was a matter of acting, nothing more.
Gabriela pauses the conversation to pull an envelope from her handbag. It contains photographs from that October of 1979. As she delicately slips the contents from the package, I realise that I feel torn. Torn between my desire to see them and my desire not to. Then the photos begin to move from her hands to mine and each one of them is an explosion that only I can hear. Four bombs. Three were taken in Beatriz’s house, the fourth at a Susana Rinaldi tango show in San Telmo. Gabriela was present on both occasions. ‘On the night of the show’, she recounts in her neat, meticulous manner, ‘your father’s body language expressed how captivated he was by my mother. I was struck by the way his tears flowed. He was deeply moved, as if he had been frozen in the past.’
The first thing that hits me is my father’s face: his usual hardened features have been replaced by two small, melancholy eyes, a limp, placid expression and a smile so broad it creases his face: two or three lines expand like sound waves between the corners of his mouth and his ears. His teeth, which were rarely on show, are prominent in the image.
I had never seen photos in which my father appeared so devoted and vulnerable, so engrossed and happy. I stare at them again and again, then pause for a few seconds to look up at the couples seated around the café, and wonder if they might be confessing secrets to each other that could compete with Gabriela’s revelations. I feel both satisfaction and emptiness, the same sensation of pride and shame that assaulted me on visiting Ema in Mar del Plata, the feeling that I’m killing that man who was my father with each new story and photograph I obtain – and composing, in his place, a version of him in which I can see myself for the first time. And before I can even reach a single conclusion about the old images that burn in my hands like deadly weapons, Gabriela speaks again: ‘Turn them over, they’re inscribed.’
And then it’s no longer just the Gaucho smiling in this new, effusive way, but also his handwriting, his perfect left-handed calligraphy I tried to copy as a boy so that something in me would resemble him, the writing that forms phrases perhaps even more eloquent than the photos themselves. On one he writes: ‘For Gabriela, with sincere life-long affection.’ Another reads: ‘With the nostalgia for a family portrait that will travel with me always.’ The third: ‘For my Beatriz of yesterday, today and always.’ And on the final one, which
