style="font-size:15px;"> A toast to peace, Nené said, feigning intellectuality. And then she told the story of how her failed marriage weighed on her because of the guilt she owed to her lack of sexual education and sometimes she missed Sancho, which was the name of her ex.
She sat waiting for a question but no one asked her one so turning red she told how she spent the first night with her ravenous husband chasing her around the house and the marriage wasn’t consummated and he left. It freaked him out.
She filled a second glass with champagne and her listeners’ ears with the clarification that she was a married virgin, neither miss nor mistress or anything else and that was the reason she’d taken shelter in the art of painting.
The way my Aunt Nené was
She lived glued to her mother’s skirts, who was my mom’s mother too and also my grandmother and Betina’s. Our grandmother’s skirts were like a priest’s habit and her shoes were like a man’s and she wore her hair in a black bun because she didn’t have any gray hair because her mother had been a native and the natives never went gray probably because they didn’t think. My mom didn’t have any gray hair just like grandmother but she did think.
Nené could play the guitar by ear and when she did she wore a white headband and she hated gringos. So many ideas spill out when I try to describe her, so many and so stupid but I have to remember I’m talking about a character.
She liked to go dating and would kiss boys nibbling on their lips, she had about eight hundred boyfriends but she kept her virginity to the point of fleeing her marriage bed from the court house and the white church.
In the early thirties an Italian carpenter fell for Nené. I remember what a good guy the carpenter was—tall, blonde, always scrubbed, and perfumed with scented water. He came courting to the door of grandmother’s house which because it was just a neighborhood house wasn’t much. But since no one in the family worked they had to get by with what Uncle Tito who worked in the papers sent them.
Aunt Nené let him kiss her however he wanted. But they didn’t go any further because if she ever got married she wanted to be in a virgin state, which I didn’t understand. By wearing a medallion of the Virgin I thought I’d be saved from anything very sinful you got from pregnancy. Maybe when she got married she’d have to take off the medallion so that the Virgin wouldn’t see her, I don’t know what kinds of things the Mother of God shouldn’t be seeing. My head was full of enormous troubles that I poured out onto the boards which was how I painted a very thin delicate neck from which hung a chain for the Virgin of Luján, and coming from the shadows that I created by rubbing my finger over thick black strokes a huge man like the Basque milkman who brought the milk and always complained “arrauia” or something like that and from his bulk poured liquids that drowned the delicate little neck and the Virgin wept. To simulate tears I painted red splashes of damage that pained the lily-white necked creature.
The Italian boyfriend finished the bedroom with good woods, the bed, and the night stands. Then he finished the furniture in the living room and other knickknacks required of a decent house. I knew because I listened at the door that Aunt Nené laughed at the gringo: does that wop think I’m going to marry him for his pasta? Once I told her: better pasta than drinking café con leche all day.
She told me I had to help her throw the Italian off and I answered that no, that wasn’t right, no. She told me that my dad who was another gringo abandoned my mom. I asked her why she wasn’t ashamed to be lying that way to a good man and she said that wop lowlifes weren’t men and that night she left for Chascomús where one of her brothers lived, my uncle and my mom’s brother.
I didn’t hear anything else about that situation but Nené spent a year away from her maternal home out of fear that she’d bump into the Italian but I was happy to find out that he’d been disillusioned with Nené and had contracted marriage with a Genovese and that the woman was already pregnant and I thought that she wouldn’t be able to keep wearing her medallion for the Virgin because of the contact with her husband that the Virgin wasn’t supposed to see.
Soon after that Aunt Nené took up with an Argentine boyfriend from Córdoba. I liked hearing the lilt of his talk and I painted something along those lines.
With this boyfriend they sang and she played the guitar while a friend brewed the mate. It didn’t last. This man didn’t build furniture or anything. One afternoon in June when it darkens early he pressed her against a wall and she screamed like a morning rooster and the watchman came around the corner and pulled off the scoundrel—he had to peel him off because he was stuck to my aunt—and took him prisoner to the station.
It was a brief and scandalous romance. I think there were others, but from a distance, until Don Sancho showed up and conquered her.
I loved Don Sancho the Spanish republican because he looked like Don Quixote de la Mancha.
I had a hardcover book with an image of the Knight of Rocinante the horse and Sancho Panza, but my aunt’s boyfriend didn’t have a paunch, he was skinny as a rail and so well-spoken that I wanted them to come to our house, both of them, for tea and the cakes that the boyfriend brought. But I wasn’t interested in the tea but in hearing the voice of Don Sancho. He told stories of his distant country which inspired me to paint and my ears overflowed with names of places like Paseo de la Infanta, Río Manzanares, and I imagined a girl in white holding a crown of flowers between her arms and the waters of the apple orchards loaded with dancing apples in the waves like the heads of cherubs which I painted.
Don Sancho gave me a fine porcelain doll that I was supposed to call Nené, the name of my aunt and his beloved girlfriend. My mom suggested that I was turning fourteen soon and that dolls wouldn’t suit me anymore. I put her on my bed and at night we embraced.
I understood that my fate hung over a sad cloudscape of melancholy rain when my mom launched my doll Nené while shaking out the bed sheets, shattering her charms and leaving me with a fever that took a long time to subside. I grew after that illness. Something ruptured inside me hurt. Pieces of porcelain from my doll Nené stuck to my liver and caused a nervous hepatitis and on top of that I learned to cry.
And I cried when Nené left her husband Don Sancho. One day I asked her why she didn’t fulfill her marriage vows. She answered that it wasn’t right to discuss intimate matters with me because since I was her niece I owed her some respect that there’d be time later on for spicy and dirty things.
I said that her sister, my other aunt, did spicy and revolting things with her husband and she told me to keep my mouth shut.
Translated by Steve Dolph
WORK
1942, Versos al recuerdo, Talleres Gráficos Olivieri & Domínquez (poetry).
1948, El anticuario, Ediciones del Bosque (poetry).
1948, Adiós desde la muerte, Ediciones del Bosque (poetry).
1951, El solitario, Moreno (poetry).
1953, Peregrino del aliento, Moreno (poetry).
1955, Lamentación mayor, Colombo (poetry).
1959, El ángel del espejo, Municipalidad de La Plata (poetry).
1959, Laúd, Colombo (poetry).
1962, La trova, Colombo (poetry).
1962,
