of action being taken. He would do so repeatedly throughout his career, and even after it was officially over. He spent many nights of his retirement from the military in his study with generals who were as retired as he was, or more so, with their furrowed faces and some disease or other eating away at them, seriously conspiring against the governments of Alan García or Alberto Fujimori. Entire nights spent in that room, which ended up stinking of tobacco and strong liquor, distilling the dream of overthrowing the president of the day, taking the Palace of Government and setting the country on the right course: one final but necessary phase of the already extinct military revolution. Long nights in which they shuffled tentative cabinets, dealt out the ministries among themselves, filled out dozens of A4 pages with a master plan for government. For my father, nothing was more thrilling.
He had no qualms about mutinying before a superior or upsetting hierarchies whenever his ideas so demanded, and maintained the dark conviction that he was destined to be the leader of a political cycle in history, the all-powerful military man, the omnipotent caudillo, the uniformed head honcho of the republic, able to impose order where it was lacking and of sending the regime’s traitors and the disloyal to prison, silencing them, or exiling them.
This deep-rooted theory of justice, however, clashed with his domestic tyranny. He was capable of defending his ideas before any audience, but he wouldn’t allow me to express mine, or to argue with his categorical decisions. He disregarded my reasoning and continually forced me to acknowledge him as the highest authority, developing a sophisticated series of exemplary punishments. The thing that most confused or angered or depressed me was seeing and feeling how his implacable severity was directed solely at me, and not at my siblings. Valentina, his favourite, was never rebuked with the heavy-handedness, coercion and psychological manoeuvring that sometimes bordered on aggression; and Facundo, the youngest, born when my father was already 56 years old, was treated in the amiable and benevolent manner of a grandson. Nor did my older siblings from his first marriage – Melania, Estrella and Fermín – have to brave the snare of his authority when they were younger. Though their situation had been different. The father they had was a thirty-something Army captain who was progressively promoted to major, lieutenant colonel and then colonel. A man who armed himself with ideas, knowledge and self-composure in order to shake off his core insecurities. That man was a soldier whose uniform acquired new badges year after year; a good military cadre who hadn’t yet come to know his limitations and who lived on a salary that could best be described as lean. A Gaucho who was not like the Gaucho I had for a father: a man in his fifties, set in his ways, hard, impenetrable. An unvarnished man who was not only at the peak of his career, but firmly believed he was better prepared to lead than any other and represented a particular type of power in a country that, in his view, needed people like him. It’s not the same to be raised by a lieutenant colonel as by a lieutenant general. It’s not the same to have as a father a middle-ranking official with justified professional aspirations, as a Minister of State with clear political ambitions. The father of my older siblings was not my father. He just shared the same name. But even if the young Lieutenant Colonel Cisneros Vizquerra had been just as severe and dominating with Melania, Estrella and Fermín as he was with me, he wouldn’t have won the respect of his first children. And if he had done, he ended up losing it altogether the day he left the house he shared with them and Lucila Mendiola: chalet 69 in Villa de Chorrillos. They were aged 17, 16 and 13 at the time. At that age – at any age – how can you respect a father who goes off with another woman with whom he will later, not much later, build another family? How can you respect this other family that has been imposed on you? How were my older siblings supposed to understand this behaviour as anything other than a moral shadow-play that would soon be undone by the events that followed?
Perhaps, I think now, my father’s obsession with moulding my character – by shouting so loud that my mother sometimes felt obliged to snap back at him things like ‘We’re not in your barracks here’ or ‘My son is not your whipping boy’ – perhaps this obsession arose from a need to test himself and to show others that he could set boundaries for at least one of his six children, and could inspire respect in one of the younger ones, having failed with the older set. I was the male child who held the winning ticket in this dubious lottery. And though my father did win my respect – or fear – in the long run, his need to dominate me left a deep fissure in our relationship.
My reaction to this was hardly intelligent either: I withdrew into myself, refused to communicate and blamed my sense of insignificance on the rest of my family. As for my father, my foolish way of punishing him was to filch his military campaign caps: I would wear them back-to-front, put on my oldest, baggiest and most frayed jeans, which he hated, and head out like that, transformed into a scruffy soldier. This was a time when I was writing my father letters filled with furious questions that would lie unanswered in a drawer, letters I rediscovered during the first house move after his death, and which I tore to pieces in tears, crushed by a terrible urge to stuff them down my throat and choke myself on them.
* * *
When he was a cadet, my father suffered a horse-riding accident. It happened on a training ground, near the city of El Palomar, where Argentina’s National Military College stands to this day. After forcing a manoeuver, he slipped from the saddle. As he fell, one of his boots became trapped in the stirrup. The horse took fright at the jolt, reared up and set off at a canter, whinnying, dragging my father along a rocky path for several minutes, causing him injuries that would afflict him for the rest of his life.
He spent just over a month in the college infirmary with a fractured hip and all his teeth broken. As I write this I can’t stop thinking about the incessant aches in his waist that would draw muffled groans of pain, or about his false teeth at the bottom of a glass of water in the bathroom. When he stretched his lips to smile, he didn’t reveal his teeth, just a thin white line. The only way to see the shape, size and colour of his teeth was when the prosthesis was floating in the glass at night. From within this glass receptacle, my father always grinned.
As a consequence of the dramatic fall, it became very difficult for him to qualify as a horse-riding instructor. In a dispatch of July 1947, the head of the Cavalry School at the National Military College states: ‘Due to a riding accident that kept him away from instruction for most of the year, the progress in this activity by Cadet Cisneros has been practically nil. As a result, his performance as an instructor is barely satisfactory.’ And an academic report from 1953, when he was already a lieutenant, contains the following observation: ‘He needs to dedicate more time to sports, above all horse-riding, for he is a hopeless rider.’
To be labelled mediocre must have triggered a wave of frustration together with an obsessive desire to come back stronger. That’s what setbacks did to my father. He fed on them, redoubling his energy. Instead of knocking him down, they motivated him to carry on, to persist in his objective with unwavering determination. It was not something he’d been born with: he had learned to be that way, to transform the enemy projectile into a boomerang, to return the sword swipes of his opponent with a single thrust. That was his thing: the most refined fencing match, the cerebral counterattack.
Thanks to the horses, he acquired the brutal elegance that allowed him to always come out on top, and his air of constant silent reflection. ‘We cavalrymen are accustomed to battling the monotony of long rides, and since we have adventure in our blood our thoughts are constantly roaming far afield. For each sorrow there is a residue of joy in us; for each grudge, cordiality; for each betrayal, affection. The horse prevents you being confused with the foolish mass of people around you.’ That’s how my father talked about riding. He wrote it in a magazine article. Despite adoring horses, and owning two foals in a sunny paddock somewhere whose names were Valour and Tetchy, which I only remember seeing in photographs, he never took an interest in teaching his children to ride regularly. Only my sister Valentina, behind his back and with my mother’s complicity, became a serious rider, reaching a level at which she could enter competitions with jumps of up to a metre in height. When my father found out, he was furious. Perhaps he didn’t want to be reminded that he’d done the same thing to his father when he was a boy: deceiving him to take ballet
