MAMAN
A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
Maman had been sent to Chalet Marie Josée under the care of the nuns at the age of six because her father wanted her out of Holland safe from the German invasion. Eventually he would send her back to the United States on the Queen Mary sailing from Cherbourg accompanied by her governess. She would tell stories of the last train out of Belgium before Hitler closed the border, and of the overcrowded ship with not enough cabins for everyone leaving Europe. She said that the ship’s swimming pool was emptied and filled with cots though she did have a cabin. She didn’t think it odd therefore, that I wanted to be a boarder at school, and not have to travel the long journey by bus or with Maman’s driver Nuno out to the school in the suburb of Olivos from El Centro, as Buenos Aires is called.
I wanted to be with my friends having fun, and I imagined anywhere was better than having to spend one minute more than needed around my Maman’s new husband. Since landing on Argentine soil this man had gone to town on the idea that he was the Bishote in the family to say the very least of his bullying intimidating character given to fits of violence, and he was insufferable in so many ways that I could see it was already beginning to wear on Maman.
Two of my closest friends Gillian and Alex were boarders at school, and it was after some of the violence in the streets of Buenos Aires that Maman put her foot down and said she would send me to England straight away, or I wouldn’t go to school at all if he didn’t agree to let me board at school. Finally, he agreed.
As fate would have it, the boarders were to be turned out the next term, as it was too dangerous for them to remain at the school, and it was decided that there wasn’t enough security there for the daughters of foreign nationals whose fathers were diplomats and captains of industry and for them to be safeguarded day and night on the premises. They would be better off in their homes or at their embassies.
Only if I didn't manage to get up on time because I was too tired from being up the night before doing hours of homework in Spanish and in English until dawn would Maman allow Nuno her driver to take me out to Olivos to school so that I wouldn’t be late for Assembly. I loved these trips out to school with Nuno, and in particular the drive through the beautiful neighborhood of Palermo.
Otherwise, I rode the orange and white Mercedes bus from which the Señora Lopez would descend in her elegant sheath dress and high heeled stiletto shoes, and totter down the uneven block to collect each girl. To save time the bus turned down some streets in Barrio Norte and in the area of Recoleta, not others, and the Sra. would bring the students to another corner to wait for her son Oliver to bring the bus round. This route was changed after the morning when as I was daydreaming at the corner of Rodriguez Pena and Juncal at 5 30 am with the Sra waiting for the bus to come round, we saw the men in the green Ford Torino parked in front of us were strapping themselves up and putting together their guns. They wore gray raincoats and dark clothes. Suddenly one of them saw us and the men looked directly at me and the Sra grabbed my hand and whisked me across the street, so that I thought she was angry with me.
~Ay Madonna Santa ~ Santa Madonna Bendita! she said, crossing herself profusely and clasping her hands. She was agitated and pushed me up the stairs to the bus when Oliver arrived. She told him all in a heated rush what we had seen all the while crossing herself and asking for divine intercessions telling him how the men had seen us, and they had stayed in the car. We saw them now getting out of the car as we went past them, the guns now mostly concealed, though not entirely, and later I understood this was a death squad or a kidnappers’ crew.
There were plenty such teams stemming now from the influence of Lopez Rega the main advisor during the reign of Peron’s widow Isabelita who had no power and no position and sent to disappear someone in the early hours of the dawn. This was the preferred time of day if not at the height of the night. Then I didn’t know because we didn’t want to know. No one did really, and you couldn’t escape the conditions of the country, and the actual war that was taking place in the streets of Buenos Aires. For the first few years people might have said
~Well, they must have done something….
This when someone’s child was taken by the military or by the police in plainclothes like these clandestine squads riding about in unmarked Ford Falcons.
After some time though this illusion was busted when the people of the city began to realize this was all smoke and mirrors that the people being taken were dissidents because they were teachers students artists lawyers, former union leaders or members, painters, plumbers, bakers, and dogwalkers and people from every walk of life, and the government was pretending to fight a war on terrorism whereas the military leaders were in fact the terrorists. It would take some years and then the women of the city would rise up. The matriarchal energy would save the country eventually~ the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo would begin circling the plaza in their white kerchiefs holding up the pictures of their disappeared children and grandchildren that had been given as gifts to the military families and slowly if not, reluctantly the world turned its gaze to Argentina.
It took some time before most of the population of Buenos Aires stopped saying about anyone taken
~ Por algo sera ~ they must have done something.
Meanwhile Argentina coined the phrase Los Desaparecidos and was disgraced when she introduced the noun Disappeared into the common nomenclature.
Maman had made a list of questions to ask me about boarding school and living in the pension where I would go to determine whether I was ready to go. She was satisfied with my answers. She was not happy that I would be gone all week, and come home only on the weekends, and that only when I wasn’t visiting my friends staying at their houses for the weekends.
She would ask things like
~What have I told you about borrowing and lending your friends your clothes?
~Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
~Yes well, I know you won’t follow that, but just don’t come home on a weekend wearing your friends’ clothes and let Papa see you. He gets very upset, and after all I buy you such nice clothes, I don’t see how you can lend them out the way you do. How much allowance do you think you need?
She did not keep up with the exchange rate or understand how to calculate it really, and therefore I had always an abundance of pocket money as I would tell her what I asked for in pesos and she would give me the amount no matter how high I went with that number. She would hand me a stack of battered notes 100 peso, 1000 peso, 10,000 peso notes in different colors and sizes the way foreign currency is, and I would take my friends and teachers at school out to dinners in the city and bought all the foreign language books and records I wanted, leaving me plenty to save for when I would go to England.
More anxious and uncertain about life in Buenos Aires once the disruption to daily routine and the general heightened anxiety around her took effect, Maman stopped leaving the house except for certain social events. She continued studying Spanish, and her tutor Nora, a member of the working class and Jewish in an increasingly anti-Semitic country and an activist, brought her the news of the street and of politics. They spent long hours discussing the state of affairs of the country in Spanish during her lessons. She became more solitary and spent hours writing endless epistles to her friends in the US, all very worried about her, though there was no news of Argentina to speak of in the international press. She began reading giant history books and biographies she ordered from The Book of The Month Club though she waited months for them to arrive and paid import tax on them. She spent hours writing out menus for Ada for the week, as Ada went to market only once a week. She listed the meals in a leather book along with how many people there would be, if there were guests coming, she had notes about their preferences and dislikes, and the pages were filled with items crossed out and substitutes penciled in as she learned of the precise shortages that week.
She cried for a few minutes when I got into the car on the day Nuno drove me out to the pension near school where I would stay with the other displaced boarders. I had to comfort her and promise I would come home often. I didn’t cry though I was upset. She would remain in the huge house on Juncal in the Barrio Norte with her husband, my little sister, the housekeeper and her husband, Ada and Oscar de Lenci who occupied the top floor of the house.
Sr. De Lenci was a shoemaker and owned a small factory or workshop and made the most beautiful shoes and in the softest leather you have ever seen in your life. He made beautiful street shoes for Maman which she hardly wore, and he made a beautiful pair of silver t-strap tango shoes for her which she had ever fewer occasions to wear. She went out to parties less and less, and she could see the Argentina she had imagined for herself in New York City fading away like a beautiful dream you forget on waking up in the morning.
At that time her husband added two bodyguards to the household staff and these were relieved by another two off duty local policemen every 12 hours. Maman also ordered the first pair of Great Danes from Denmark, and they would go on to start the kennel in Cordoba the following year. Buenos Aires would become too much for her and as other people fled to their quintas and estancias in the provincias of Santa Fe, Mendoza, Rio Negro, Corrientes, Chubut, she grew restless. In Cordoba they settled into a villa on a hill in the mountains, where she would withdraw to the provinces to try to maintain some semblance of a normal life amid all the chaos.
Maman was excited to leave the city and the growing tension in the streets of the political environment, the demonstrations, strikes, marches, shortages, inflation, poverty, hovering threat of kidnapping, hostility toward the American and at the Argentine upper classes, and awareness at the advancement of the beyond poverty and of the growing immenseness of the Villas Miserias surrounding the city, and that Argentine society’s problems were spinning out of control.
~ Don’t worry, you kids and your friends will love the house! It’s only a twelve hour train ride from Constitucion Station or ten hours in the car the way Papa drives, Mignon. Our friends will visit all the time. Look, I’ll show you the list of who’s already coming to stay for Christmas!
***
Photographs from the book Buenos Aires Coppola and Zuviria, Ediciones Lariviere
Above: Calle Corrientes 3060, 1931, Horacio Coppola
Below: Calle Suipacha Esquina Diagonal Norte, 1936, Horacio Coppola
Tight, suspenseful, fascinating. Such a life you’ve led!
I am glad you enjoy reading about this life I've led mostly thanks to my peripatetic Maman!