and not your sternness that seeks this end. If the autumn of my days is to be a happy time, we must all make an effort to save this child, while remembering that his difficulties are simply a matter of timidity and confusion. You probably think that his violent reactions are far from timid. But they are, my dear. By virtue of his timidity, he says nothing, and so he explodes, without knowing why. Write to me, my dear, and don’t fall silent, for life far from you is painful. Kiss my children and keep hold of my heart.
When I uncovered this letter my grandfather Fernán sent to my grandmother Esperanza about my father, he, my father, the Gaucho, had already been in his grave fourteen years. But in 1940 he was fourteen years of age and displayed personality traits that would never have fitted the man I knew.
It was a great surprise for me to learn, for example, that as a child my father had suffered from a nervous illness. My siblings and my mother knew nothing about it either. Curiously enough, my teenage years were marked by nervous attacks, allergies and acute asthma attacks that ended in exhausting nebulisation sessions in a cold room at the military hospital. No one knew where I could have inherited such weaknesses. The family history was there, but nobody was able to establish the link.
My grandfather believed that this illness left my father feeling insecure. Reading this was like discovering a new continent. From my point of view, my father was the most impenetrable person on the planet. A wall. A fortress. A bunker. His whole life expressed certainty: his words, his actions, his morals, his identity, his decisions. Everything about him expressed his certainty of never being wrong. Fear and doubt were faint shadows that flitted by in the distance.
Nevertheless, in the X-ray analysis of the Gaucho that Fernán conducted over the course of this letter, he is a confused, timid and violent child with an inferiority complex. The extraordinary thing about this description is that it matches that of the fourteen-year-old boy I was or believed myself to be: the boy who feared family mealtimes, who felt abandoned and powerless due to his inability to communicate with his father.
In the text, my grandfather refers to the need for everyone to join forces to ‘save that child’ that my father was. I wonder if my father ever read this letter. But more importantly, I wonder if he ever felt entirely safe from the childhood torments, so similar to mine, that we never managed to talk about.
Another letter from my grandfather, addressed to my father in the same year, reveals the conflicted sense of love that underlay their relationship, and the affectionate but subtly manipulative tone Fernán employed to try and win over his son:
You must tell me everything you want, everything you feel, everything you think with the frankness of good men and with the hope that your father will come up with what you need: help, encouragement, remedy or reward. I carry you in my heart like a sweet burden, my son, and I want this burden to become joy as soon as it can. I kiss you dearly.
A sweet burden. This is what my father was to his father. Was I too a sweet burden for him? If this was the case, he never said so. Or did he, and I failed to pay attention? Why have I lost the letters my father wrote to me? How could they possibly have got lost? I remember two in which he addressed me with a tenderness and emotion so out of character that I had to check several times if it was really he who had signed them, if the signature was authentic. I think about these letters – his neat handwriting, the texture on the reverse of the page from the pressure of the pen – and I realise that this was the only way my father was able to communicate with me.
There are people who can only express their feelings in writing. My father was one such person: for him, written words were the site of emotion, the region where the feelings denied in everyday life emerged and took shape. In these letters he could be himself, or at least that was how I saw it. He wrote what he didn’t say, what he couldn’t say to me in front of the others, in the dining room or the living room. In the privacy of these letters he was my friend; in public, less so. Almost like an imaginary friend who appeared from time to time, not in the real world, but in the world of writing. Outside of it, he imposed his firm will and his icy authoritarianism. I’m not even sure whether he was aware of who he was in his letters, but what I do know is that I came to love the man who wrote them far more than the man he was outside of them. In these letters – even if they only amounted to two or three – he stopped being the Gaucho Cisneros and again became the lad whose cracks and deficiencies so worried my grandfather. Outside of his letters, his love was silent and therefore confused, painful; a repetition of the love his father deposited in him, an arid love in which it was necessary to dig deep to find the diamond of those few words that could be studied on the surface.
Nor did I know that my father had been sent to a military boarding school. What I had always understood to be his natural vocation turned out to have been imposed. He was forced into it. He wasn’t allowed to choose because he was an errant child – when he was little, my grandmother tied him to a leg of the bed if she had to leave the house alone – and because he skipped school. Instead of attending classes in the British school where he was enrolled, he would head for the Buenos Aires docks to watch the ships and steamboats loading and unloading.
Indeed, it was a prank he played at the age of eleven that earned him the nickname he bore until the end of his days. One morning he assembled his siblings and friends in the large courtyard of the house at 3104 Avellaneda Street. At the time he was a devoted magic fan, and dreamed of becoming a magician.
‘Silence!’ he commanded the tame group of kids, spreading an aura of false mystery around him. ‘You have been called here to witness the final and most astonishing trick of Mandrake the Magician.’ ‘What’s the trick called?’ asked a shrill, dubious voice. ‘The dead hand!’ my father replied, and with his left hand he pulled out a sharp kitchen knife with a wooden handle that he had concealed in his belt, and slowly moved it closer to the palm of his right hand. He held it there for a few seconds, creating tension among his audience with their shorts, socks around their ankles, and dirty shoes, before emitting a theatrical howl and slashing up and down at his hand, to the horror of the children, who began to scream at the sight of the blood flowing ornamentally from the hand – which remained where it was, evidently neither false nor a prop, but all too real. My father, his eyes wide, the bloodied knife still held firm, smiled with pain. My grandmother Esperanza rushed out from the house like someone possessed. When she saw the damage he’d done, she dragged him by his hair to the nearest emergency clinic so they could patch him up. The doctor was struck by the behaviour of my father, who kept that morbid smile on his face and didn’t wince as he received, without anaesthetic, the fifteen stitches needed to sew up the wound in his hand, leaving the long scar I always confused with a lifeline.
‘Madame, your son is a real gaucho,’ pronounced the doctor upon completing his work, unaware that he was not only imposing an unforgettable sobriquet on the boy, but also naming a character trait that was starting to emerge. The gaucho – the cowboy forged on the southern pampas in the 19th century – meant the robust man who tolerated the cold of Patagonia, the horseman who grew in strength in the solitude of the barren plains, the nomad who took refuge on remote ranches and was used to living in the border lands. In that last sense, my father was indisputably a gaucho. He always got used to borders. He got used to his father’s exile, which forced the family to move on multiple occasions, and also to his own, when he had to leave Argentina and start over in a country he didn’t know but had been assured was his. And, of course, he got used to the inflexible environment of the military college, where he learned rigor and slowly accustomed himself to being something that others had chosen for him.
I think that perhaps, if it had depended on him alone, he would have decided to be something else. Something more artistic – why not? Perhaps a magician, like Mandrake. Or perhaps a dancer. Didn’t Aunt Carlota, his older sister, say that my father accompanied her to ballet classes? First to protect her from a suitor who would harass her as she left the school; later, to seduce Mirtha, the daughter of actress Libertad Lamarque; and finally, behind his father’s back, to dance, having become fascinated with those
