moment.
In the adjacent room, on a small table set up for the purpose, a thick file was waiting for me containing a series of classified documents relating to my father’s career. Standing beside the table, a deputy intelligence official, Paulo Pazos, was waiting to greet me. He had been given the task of keeping an eye on me to make sure I complied with the colonel’s instructions and I didn’t exceed the permitted time. ‘You have two hours,’ Pazos informed me. Shit, I thought, two hours to go through the documents that summarise the thirty-two years, four months and twenty-four days my old man was part of the Army.
The room was humid and cold, like a kitchen in the early morning. There was no one but the deputy official and me. To my good fortune, he was sensitive to the needs of journalism – as a kid he’d wanted to be a reporter, but his family didn’t have the money to send him to university or the journalism college – so when I told him I could get hold of a press pass from the newspaper I worked for that would help him pursue his undercover intelligence missions, he whispered: ‘You can’t use the photocopier but you can take photos of the papers with your mobile. I saw nothing.’
I set about leafing through and taking pictures of the hitherto unseen documents for many long minutes. There, for example, were my father’s report cards from Argentina, both the San Martín military high school and the National Military College, where he studied between 1942 and 1947. He got top marks in Maths and Spanish, average in History, poor in Geography, and a fail in Languages. I was surprised to see he scored highly in Music, Drawing and Singing. I can’t recall ever having seen him draw anything. Nor hear a complete song emerge from his mouth. He would mumble boleros, tangos, ranchera songs, a few waltzes, but didn’t sing them, or only sang them when accompanied by his brothers or old Army friends. He did like whistling. He was always whistling. In the house, the car, the office, walking along the pavement. I remember how the sound of his whistle traversed the windows like a flying insect, penetrating our bedrooms on weekend mornings. We could tell from his whistle if he was in a good or bad mood. My mother and he had a special tune they would whistle to call and acknowledge each other, borrowed from The Song of Forgetting, one of my grandfather’s favourite operettas.
His average score in exams was 6.35 out of 10. A normal score, slightly above the median. In all his school workbooks, however, there were exercises marked as fails. Two or three in each, the score written in red. I wished I could have had these reports in hand years later to compare them with mine, to gather strength in the face of the punishments he imposed on me, demanding the outstanding performance he’d never delivered himself. When I would bring home a marked exam for him to sign, he would immediately clench his fist and box me round the ears the same number of times as the number of points by which I’d fallen short of the maximum, 20. Regardless of the subject. If I got a 13 in Chemistry or in English, he’d thwack me on the head seven times with his knuckles. If I got 15 in Literature or in Sciences, that was five thumps. If I’d failed an exam in History or Civics, as well as the beating, I was grounded for a month. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d dole out tasks to complete at home, from washing the cars to polishing his twenty pairs of shoes.
Thinking about how he might react caused me such anguish that I once stole the exam paper of a kid in my class who had got 20 in chemistry. I’d failed it, with a score of 7. When I was handed my paper, I started to shake. I didn’t think twice: the bell rang for break, I waited until the classroom had emptied, pretending to make a start on an exercise. I made sure I was alone and then crept over to Gustavo Verástegui’s schoolbag to take the exam paper from his folder. He was the best student, a real swot, plus our handwriting was similar, or at least I copied his, I don’t remember. Verástegui always got 20. He must be fed up of getting 20s, I thought. I tried to make something noble of the crime; I wanted to believe that this 20 would do more for me than for him. That afternoon, at home, I carefully erased Gustavo’s name, put mine in its place, and ran to my dad to wave the paper in his face. Without even looking at the score, he received me with a rap on my forehead. ‘But why did you hit me if I got a 20?’ I complained. ‘My children don’t get 20, they get 21,’ he growled, grim-faced.
* * *
Nor did my father make concessions when he disciplined us. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, he would punish me by giving me lines to copy. I remember two in particular: ‘I must not answer back to my mother’ and ‘I must not fight with my brother and sister’. Each phrase three hundred times on lined sheets of paper. I could only go out to play with my friends if I completed this forced labour, the purpose of which, according to him, was to make sure I thought twice next time I was tempted to engage in these domestic misdemeanours. But instead of reforming, I was left with a desire to get my own back, to relapse just to see him get angry again. As soon as my father would issue the punishment, I’d shut myself up furiously in my room to write the line over and over, like Jack Torrance in The Shining. I almost always completed the task but on a few occasions I left it half-done, whether because my hand went numb or because my self-esteem rebelled. On these occasions I went to seek out my father to humble myself and ask for a pardon, but I never succeeded in moving him. ‘If you want to go out, it’s up to you,’ he would say, deceptively, without looking up from the newspaper he was reading, and I’d shut myself up again, my eyes red with impotence, resigned to continue covering the paper with my handwriting, filling pages and pages with promises I would inevitably break. That may have been when I felt the first stirrings of a conviction that has stuck with me ever since, and which I indirectly owe to him: that my freedom depends on writing. The more I write, the closer to freedom I will be.
I was never able to confront my father. I didn’t have the balls. His shouting, his stare (Christ, his stare!) immediately left me undone. I can only recall one occasion that I was stubborn enough to answer back to him. It happened in the house on La Paz St. in Miraflores. I can’t have been more than eight years old at the time. I’d said something he didn’t like and he started after me to give me a walloping. He chased me through my room, the living room, the dining room. With nowhere left to run, I dodged into the kitchen and saw the best place to hide was the larder, but I failed to notice that the latch was missing. From inside, sweating, I grabbed the door handle with both hands. He did the same from outside and we started to wrestle with the door. I pulled with every muscle in my body. I pulled to save myself. But he was pulling too. I began to sob, knowing that there was no way out, that there was no way to beat him. If I strain my memory, I can still feel my screaming forearms, my burning wrists, my shoes scrabbling on the floor tiles. Then my father said something that’s still engraved on my subconscious. A phrase both approving and wounding. Or just wounding. ‘The little cockroach has muscles.’ That’s what he said. And it broke me.
The ironic or unfair thing was that he punished my misdemeanours without looking in the shattered mirror of his own unruly youth. He not only bunked off school to watch the boats come and go in the port of Buenos Aires, but skipped classes to watch the daughter of Libertad Lamarque dance in the theatre, until my grandmother Esperanza was obliged to go and drag him back to college. He was rebellious and even seditious. On the morning I spent looking through his file in the Little Pentagon, I came across a memo from 1946 addressed to my grandmother by the head of Argentina’s National Military College:
I write to inform you that according to Directive No. 229 of the eighteenth day of October this year, this office has imposed on your son, cadet LUIS FEDERICO CISNEROS, a disciplinary sanction of 45 days of suspension of duties for: holding a meeting to propose disobeying the orders of a senior cadet because these were believed to be arbitrary, without – as he should and could have done – seeking recourse to regulatory procedures; and deciding at this meeting to collectively disobey and subsequently fail to comply with these orders, with the mitigation that the order involved a non-regulatory punishment.
Yours sincerely,
Juan Carlos Ruda
Director
This was not to be the last time – by any means – that my father would
