You, Hector – you are my father now, my noble mother a brother too, and you are my husband, young and warm and strong!
Pity me, please! Take your stand on the rampart here, before you orphan your son and make your wife a widow.35
San Miguel del Monte
The horizon always undefined…1
– Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
At last I spied my old friend Benjamín Ortega squinting through the gloom from the far side of the bar.
‘Ben!’ I flagged him down.
‘¡Australiano! It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and you’re already drinking?’
‘We’re here for the game.’
The Puerta Roja was full of Buenos Aires hipsters and foreign backpackers drinking craft beer, watching the football on a giant projection screen. The superclásico, Boca versus River, is the biggest rivalry in Argentine football. It’s something like Collingwood–Carlton with a genuine risk of fans killing each other. Ben embraced R, kissed both cheeks.
‘The famous Mexicana.’
‘The famous Argentino.’
‘You’ve cut off all your hair,’ he said, turning back to me. ‘You look like a bank manager.’
‘We’re getting older.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
Ben has 10 or 15 years on me, I think, but I’ll never know for sure.
‘You can’t ask a middle-aged woman her age,’ he scolded when I once discreetly inquired. He was overdressed for the grungy bar in a navy-blue turtleneck, cream-coloured slacks and expensive-looking brown leather shoes. His hair was streaked with grey, he had salt-and-pepper stubble on his cheeks, and he was a little heavier around the chops than nine years back. His cheeky smile retained the ability to make rudeness charming.
‘What’s this slop you’re eating?’
‘Quesadillas.’
‘In Buenos Aires? Ay, Australiano. This Mexican girl’s ruined you.’
We ordered a round of drinks to ease the flow of memories: beers for R and me, soda water for Ben.
‘These Australians are barbarians with their drinking in the afternoon,’ he said to her. ‘I see you’ve fallen under his bad influence.’
‘We’re on holidays.’ She smiled.
The match was tense, defensive. Just before half-time, one of the Boca strikers tumbled dramatically to the grass in the penalty area. When he slotted home his kick, the crowd in the bar erupted.
‘How on earth did you end up with such a responsible job, Ben?’ I shouted over the din. ‘I can’t believe they let you organise anything.’
It had taken at least a dozen attempts via email, social media and text message to arrange our meeting. Yet he was obviously highly capable in his professional life. A high-school history teacher when last I saw him, he was now a senior public servant with the municipal government in San Miguel del Monte, two hours south of the capital.
‘Ah, you’re still busting my balls about 2007.’
Ben reads English perfectly well but prefers to limit his spoken language to ‘fuck you’ and ‘you’re busting my balls’, insults he hurled at me daily, smiling cheerfully, when I was teaching for him at the agricultural college in Monte. I’d agreed to work for free on the understanding the school would provide meals and a homestay with a local family. But for the first six weeks he had me sharing a dormitory with a dozen smelly teenage boys.
‘You should have heard how this First World princess complained,’ he said, appealing to R.
‘I didn’t expect the Buenos Aires Hilton, I just wanted him to organise what the contract promised. I had to stage a protest in his classroom.’
‘A protest! It was an illegal occupation,’ complained Ben. ‘One day I arrived to teach my morning class and all the kids were laughing. He’d dragged his mattress into the room and was lying there snoring.’
‘I was inspired by you Argentines, with all your blockades and sit-ins. Anyway, you persuaded Camila to let me have her spare room pretty quickly after that.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Your husband’s a real ballbuster.’
The moment R disappeared to the bathroom he filled me in on an old girlfriend. ‘She married the Fernández boy: the chubby one who plays the accordion. They had a baby girl last year.’
‘I’m glad she’s well. What about old Leonard Barton? I wrote him a couple of letters, but he never replied. Probably got lost in the post.’
‘They sold the house by the lake when the señora died. Last I heard he was living with his daughter. His health was very bad.’
When Ben left briefly to make a call, R asked if he had a partner.
‘I don’t know nowadays. He used to have a thing with the chemistry teacher. I forget his name.’
‘His name?’
‘Yes, a few of the other teachers knew, but not the principal. Monte’s a small town. They’d catch separate buses to and from BA on weekends to be together in secret.’
I remembered Ben telling me he’d run for local council in his thirties. It looked like he had a real chance early in the campaign. Handsome and articulate, he had the backing of all his students’ parents and his thoughtful columns for the local newspaper were winning supporters around town. An anonymous phone call put an end to it.
‘They threatened to tell his boss if he didn’t withdraw,’ I told R. ‘Silvia was very Catholic, so were a lot of the parents.’
‘I wonder if he’s still with the chemistry teacher?’ R whispered as Ben reappeared.
We didn’t get a chance to ask.
‘Did I tell you Mamá died?’ he said, sitting down again. We still occasionally emailed or chatted, but this news hadn’t reached me.
‘No. I’m sorry, Ben.’
‘Late last year. She was ninety-two.’
I remembered a stooped woman at a backyard asado, who’d kissed me on both cheeks, making the sign of the cross in the smoky air. Ben had lived with her all his life.
‘I’m with my sister’s family now – I’m the tío solterón.’
We kept to the surface after that, reminiscing and teasing each other. The second half of the superclásico fizzled to a one-all draw and the bar emptied out.
‘So, you’ll come see us next weekend and stay with Camila?’ Ben asked as we walked him to the bus stop.
‘I think we’ll just come for the day. We don’t want to be an inconvenience.’
‘Fuck you, Australiano,’ he said, patting me on the cheek. ‘Three visits in nine years and you won’t even stay the night? You have to stay.’
At the end of my question mark–shaped loop around South America in 2007, I found peace in Monte for six months. Camila and her 16-year-old son, Carlos, took me into their home and made me feel part of the family, the school paying a small stipend for my upkeep.
It was good to be working again. Ben had me teaching small-group remedial workshops to students who’d failed English multiple times. Most were teenage boys, the sons of farmers and abattoir workers. They were great guitar players and folk dancers, but didn’t see any value in learning a language beyond impressing girls with a few English pop songs.
‘Why should I speak English?’ said Santiago. ‘The English blew my Dad’s hand off in the Malvinas.’ I bet Santiago and his friends that I could get them to speak English for a whole hour, without reverting to Spanish, by the end of term.
‘Let’s put a hundred pesos on it,’ he said.
‘You’re on.’
In spring, I fell hard for a local girl, the mechanic’s daughter. Every weekend I would stay with her in her tiny flat in the university city of La Plata, two hours away. She was studying to be a psychoanalyst. Wherever I went in the world, I was surrounded by psychologists. In La Plata, the avocado tree dropped its fruit on the roof in the evenings. I’d climb the drainpipe next morning and collect one for our breakfast. From the rooftop, I imagined the clouds were maps of countries we might visit together.
Those plains again, treeless and unrippling, scrolling by the bus window.
The pampa in the purple dusk quietens the mind; it has the flatness of the sea on a still day.
‘Tell me we’re not going all the way out here to see your ex-girlfriend,’ said R in the mini-van to Monte. All day she’d been complaining of an upset stomach.
‘No, we’re going to see Ben and Camila.’
‘And if we run into her in the street?’
‘We’ll say hello and move on.’
Camila flagged the van down on the main road into town. She was in her fifties now, but had the same long black fringe, bright-red lipstick and hoop earings.
‘Shames!’ She kissed me on both cheeks, did the same for R. ‘I stopped the bus because I thought you probably wouldn’t remember how to find the house from the centre of town. Do you still get lost?’
‘Not as often as I used to.’
‘All the time,’ said R.
Camila led us past the funeral parlour and the florist, important reference points as few of the streets have names.
‘People in Monte gossiped when he came to stay with us because he bought me flowers,’ Camila told R. ‘In small towns, people have big mouths. They said, “Camila Sorrentino is living with a man twenty years younger than her, he must be a gigolo.” ’
‘And what did you say, señora?’
‘I told them he was my per-so-nal tr-ainer.’ She said it in English, smacking her lips, strutting a little for effect.
They’d paved the Sorrentinos’ nameless street since my last visit. Camila’s three-bedroom brick house was identical out front, but in the backyard they’d converted her ex-husband’s furniture workshop into a massage parlour. Her daughter Paola worked there part-time while Camila took the baby.
Paola wore dark eyeliner and a nose ring; she had a skull tattooed on one shoulder, a rose on the other.
‘This is Rodrigo,’ she said, passing me her pink-cheeked 18-month-old for a cuddle.
‘Hola, pequeñín.’
‘Don’t ask about his papá. His papá is an arsehole.’
‘Not the Patagonian heavy metal drummer?’
‘No, a different arsehole. A later one.’
Camila showed R a photograph of me outside the house nine years earlier with her son Carlos. Her living room cabinet was mostly filled with his motorcross trophies and school medallions, but she pointed out a shelf set aside for the Christmas presents I sent every few years to maintain the link. I was embarrassed to see so many tea towels adorned with kitsch Australiana.
‘It’s a shame Carlos isn’t here,’ she said. ‘He’s in Brazil with his girlfriend now. They run a hostel at the beach. Somebody gave him the idea of being a traveller right as he was finishing high school.’
‘Sorry about that.’
In the evening, Ben came by with pizzas and empanadas and we talked until late. He teased us relentlessly about our Mexican accents, dropping in and out of his Speedy Gonzales impersonation:
‘Say ahorita, say andale.’
‘At least I don’t use pretentious words like vertiginosamente in every article I write.’
‘But isn’t it true, Australiano? Don’t you think that time passes vertiginously?’
‘Yes, it’s true.’
One thing that hadn’t changed was the instability of the Argentine economy: groceries were up 30 or 40 per cent on last year. I asked Paola and Camila how the most recent round of inflation had affected them.
‘We’re lucky,’ Paola said. ‘The water comes up to our neck sometimes, but it always goes down again. A lot of people are under water.’
Camila grilled R about upcoming plot twists in her favourite Mexican soap opera, which she watched daily as she cared for her grandson.
‘He’s the dearest little thing. Do you think you’ll have kids soon?’
‘We’re not sure,’ said R.
‘Not sure if you want to?’
‘Not sure if we can,’ I replied. ‘The specialist said there’s a less than five per cent chance.’
We eventually relented to Ben’s bullying and agreed to spend the night in Carlos’s old room. Camila hadn’t changed anything since he left. The walls were plastered with Ramones posters and the bookshelf was full of dirt-bike magazines.
‘She really misses him,’ said R from the darkness beside me in the cramped single bed.
‘She does.’
‘I’m glad we came in the end. I’m glad I got to meet your old friends.’
‘They’re special people.’
‘They’re great. They’re so different to people in the city.’ ‘It’s a different country out here.’ I held her tightly. ‘You don’t feel sick anymore?’
‘No, I feel better.’
As we drifted off to sleep in the little brick house on the pampa, I felt the earth tilt and shudder. It could have been a distant tremor out west in the Andes, or just a faint vibration passing from her body into mine.
One clear, warm morning in November 2007, I flicked all the way to page 52 of La Nación to find the results of the Australian federal election: ‘Gana el partido laborista en Australia.’ The Labor Party had finally won government. Not long afterwards, my mother called to tell me Al had suffered a series of small strokes.
‘I don’t think he should be living on his own anymore,’ she said on the phone.
I told the school I was leaving for good and the mechanic’s daughter that I’d be back. It was my fault the romance dragged on for months by phone, delaying the inevitable and causing unnecessary pain. Eventually, on her analyst’s advice, she took the iniative and ended things, and I set out for outback Queensland trying to forget her.
The big box of Spanish books that I shipped home from Monte contained the beginnings of my library of Latin American literature, which I have added to with each subsequent journey, so that ten years of my life are now chronicled there: language textbooks and Argentine classics; everything ever written about the Australian Utopians in Paraguay; the dark green spine of Gabo’s opus; and finally an unbroken run of Mexican authors.
During my final month in Monte, my old travel buddy Valentina emailed out of the blue to ask if she could visit. We sat in the soft grass by the lagoon at midday on a Saturday, drinking mate, watching a pair of teenage fisherman haul in carp and hurl them back. Poor Valentina. By now her hair was a tangled mess like mine. Her clothes were filthy, and she was as thin as Corina.
‘Sorry to land on you like this,’ she said. ‘I’m broke.’
After Bolivia, she’d hitchhiked through the Chaco swamplands in the north of Paraguay. She told me she’d run out of cash between towns and needed to beg food from villagers who barely had enough for themselves. She was struck down by a stomach bug and nursed back to health by a campesino family. When she was strong enough to hitch to Asunción and see a doctor, she discovered her travel insurance had lapsed, and she couldn’t afford the treatment.
Her parents, of course, had bailed her out.
‘What will you do now?’
‘I was wondering if you could lend me some money to tide me over?’
‘You’ve got to be joking, Valentina.’
‘I’m sorry to ask.’
‘I can get you free accommodation for a week. That’s the best I can do. And you’ll have to earn it by doing some teaching.’
Ben agreed to let her pitch her tent in his classroom overnight so long as she was out of the way by first period and stayed no longer than a week. She stayed a fortnight in the end, but earned her keep, teaching five hours a day. At first she was shy, but soon her posture improved and her voice became audible from the back row. Santiago and the other Argentine boys, to my astonishment, were smitten with Valentina. They obsessed over her huge green eyes and French accent, calling her the ‘profe belga’.
‘If you want to ask her out, you’ll have to speak English,’ I lied, ‘because she doesn’t know any Spanish at all.’
On her final day, they all clambered to sign her shirt in the language they’d sworn never to learn: ‘Marry me… Here’s my num
ber…I’ll never forget you.’
I never claimed my 100 pesos.
‘Where to next?’ I asked Valentina at the bus station. ‘Easter Island? Antarctica?’
‘Brussels,’ she said. ‘It’s definitely time.’
The Lakeside House
You will come here all your life for renewal.1
– Judith Wright
The pale oval of R’s face turns to me in darkness.
‘Look, she’s dreaming.’
The baby’s cheek settles into my chest and her lashes flutter against my skin. Her breathing slows to match mine. Soon, it has the soft insistence of faraway surf. I whisper so as not to wake her.
‘Did you dream?’
‘We were in Mexico,’ says R. ‘All my aunts and uncles came to meet Vera. But it was our Brisbane house.’
My mouth is parched, my water bottle empty at the bedside. February heat broods behind the closed curtains; morning surges and builds. Wind-stirred branches, trilling birds, shore-break lapping the lake’s edge. My father’s voice (which is my voice) carries from across the water. He’s taken my in-laws out in the canoe. We hear laughter, splashing oars, a confused medley of Spanish and English. The two sides of our lives commingle in the sultry air.
‘I don’t remember if I dreamed.’
‘You never remember.’
The three of us doze until lunchtime, until sweat pools between Vera’s beating heart and mine. I wake to find R has parted the curtains a crack, returned to bed. Her hands, folded over the still-raw caesarean scar, rise and fall with her breathing. By reflected light that ripples the ceiling, I drift back to sleep reading a collection of Judith Wright’s letters and poems to her husband Jack McKinney: ‘So, perilously joined / lighted in one small room, / we have made all things true.’2
This little town was a place of peaceful repose for Judith, Jack and their daughter Meredith, as it’s been for my parents since I was a boy. In my dreams, I show Vera through its streets.
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Page 17