The Official Story~ La Historia Oficial

Maman

I curse the poetry

of those who do not take sides

Daniel Zelaya

Dear Gentle Reader,

All apologies! Let me begin with many thanks to Penelope Featherington for her style with her sweet way of greeting, and after so long a hiatus I am indeed all apologies for this extended absence. It has been way too long since I told you these stories about Maman’s journeys, recounting the family’s adventures, and the vicissitudes of life in Argentina. Maybe you recall how this memoir follows Maman, her new husband, my brother Carlos, my sister Violet, our beloved nanny Flora Maria Eugenia, three nervous Norwich terriers, one quiet canary named Ella Fitzgerald, and yours truly, as we travel by cargo ship from New York City to Argentina.

We arrived in Buenos Aires in July, on the Moore McCormack freighter at the docks of the Rio de La Plata, having sailed down the coast for 22 days, past the Equator, past Bahia de Todos Santos and Rio de Janeiro, on to our new home, when Argentina was on the cusp of oppression leading to The Dirty War, or La Guerra Sucia. We landed in time to take up living in a country beset by political unrest and about to coin the sadly ubiquitous noun kept in Spanish and never translated in the international press ~ desaparecidos ~ forever associated with Argentina as she introduced the term into the common nomenclature.

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“During the 1970s Argentina was torn by terror from both the extreme right and the far left.”

~Ernesto Sabato

“But Audrey my dear, said Maman’s guest at tea one afternoon, “you must get the children out of the country as soon as you can!”

We hadn’t been in Argentina for very long at all really when one afternoon as Maman was having Signora dell’ Acqua to tea at the house on Juncal in the Barrio Norte section of Buenos Aires, my best friend’s mother became adamant on the subject, and raised her voice to be heard, even interrupting Maman mid-sentence, as she was gushing about shopping on Avenida Santa Fe and how she had ordered for me two exquisite handmade saddles just that morning, one for equitation and one for puissance jumping.

Nadie Olvide Nada, Guillermo Kuitca , 1982

I would spend five years in Argentina at The Northlands School in Olivos and witness the military coup and live through the beginning of the years of military rule, as well as the years leading up to it. All foreign press was absent of reports of human rights abuses and other events taking place even years before the Junta seized power, and one never knew they would see the light of day , not the disappeared, not the detained , not the activists, not the students, the lawyers, the judges, the artists, the social workers, the psychologists, the priests, the nuns, and in terms of escape from a horrifying place, certainly not I. The day in December at the end of school term would arrive, I would collect my prizes at Assembly, take two days to pack, say my goodbyes, and escape to England finally.

I had already missed the Michaelmas term and would be starting in the Trinity term behind the other students, having to make up for the past term and keep up with the current work. I was far too young to go that distance from my family in the days before mobile phones and zelle. After I left the country no matter where I would go in the world, it would be to remain in exile, as I have never returned to Argentina.

~The first time I passed through the country (Switzerland) I had the impression it was swept down with a broom from one end to the other every morning by housewives who dumped all the dirt in Italy.

~Ernesto Sabato

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When our beloved family friend the US Consul John Patrick Egan was kidnapped and killed by a rogue terrorist cell of Montoneros in Cordoba in 1975, Maman aided Cyrilla Egan his widow, and Ambassador Hill with most of the arrangements for funeral services in Buenos Aires and in Villa Allende Cordoba. After that Maman made the decision to leave Argentina and return to her home country, where her friends rejoiced at her imminent arrival knowing she would be safer here, as we all knew that this is the land of the free and the brave and that’s not just lip service! True north was the north and Europe where there was freedom of speech for those who had something to say and those who had nothing to say alike. Maman just like Arabella’s mother the Signora dell’ Acqua, longed to return to a country where government respected and followed the Rule of Law and people might trust the authorities. I write about the events leading up to and surrounding the kidnapping and assassination of John Patrick Egan in another essay, and of the involvement of Maman’s husband in the tragic debacle.

~Para ser humilde se necesita grandeza. To be humble requires greatness,

Ernesto Sabato, Author of Nunca Mas

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After I went to study in England Maman bought a house in Rhinebeck NY, a former carriage house on the Astor Estate, and departed the villa in the hills of Cordoba that had once been a tuberculosis sanitarium, and she left Argentina for good, carrying the cash from the sale of the house out of the country and past Customs in the false compartment of her Hermes trunk. Maman took us to Argentina during the time of The Dirty War and I dreamed of my way out and worked hard in school towards it. All I know is that after twenty-two hours of flying from Argentina we landed in England when I was sixteen, and in England it was raining, and we had to wait a while on the runway at Heathrow to disembark. It was pitch black out, and pouring at three in the afternoon, and the steel stairs were treacherous. It was raining heavily. I got down on my knees and kissed the tarmac and said in English and Spanish:

~ I Am in the Land of Habeus Corpus!

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thunderstruck9: Guillermo Kuitca

There is also talk of disappeared persons who are still held under arrest by the Argentine government in unknown places of our country. All of this is nothing, but a falsehood stated with political purposes, since there are neither secret detention places in the Republic nor persons in clandestine detention in any penal institution.”

Excerpt from the Final Document of the Military Junta on the War Against Subversion and Terrorism, April 1983

When the Abuelas or Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo came to the United States in 2000 as part of their escort cohort I accompanied them while in Boston at the invitation of Professor Clark Taylor at UMass. These fierce women are a testament to the fact that Argentina was saved in the end by the matriarchy, by women who were searching for their children and grandchildren.

“The worst was the children. What they did when they picked up any young women and some of them were pregnant and if they were pregnant, they allowed them to have their children in the most appalling conditions. Then when the child was born, they killed the mother the young mother…this was how The Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo were formed. They were these women who were looking for their grandchildren~ that I think is the most horrific side of it.”

Robert Cox, Journalist and Editor at The Buenos Aires Herald

These days I work in the US immigration court as an interpreter for the DOJ. I have heard thousands of hours of accounts of torture and unimaginable human rights violations while interpreting asylum merits hearings and credible fear reviews for the past two years. These nationwide hearings take place in federal courthouses, in immigration detention centers, and in federal prisons. They make you proud to see the judges, lawyers, attorneys and advocates upholding the law and doing their jobs against impossible numbers, with dignity, fairness and compassion every day.

But the other thing is the Nazis~ these people were in a way Nazis. I was lucky when I went into one of the legal jails and the not the clandestine prisons and when you went in there after being stripped you see in front of you covering a huge wall and an enormous wall a huge swastika and underneath it said Nazi Nacionalismo. They used to play Hitler’s speeches to cover the sounds of people being tortured.

As I got to know the military they boasted, they thought that they were leading the 3rd world war against international communism. They also had plans to invade Chile, and eventually Brazil~ I mean, lunacy.

They hadn't had a war for 100 years until then, and the war that they did fight this dirty war gave them delusions of grandeur for a while.

Robert Cox, Journalist and Editor at The BA Herald

Disappearing had been going on for some years and it was after the Military ratified the Statute for the Process of National Reorganization that the mythical dirty war really began. The government now the Junta had issued its own license to kill while masking their crimes with the fictive war on the state by terrorists.
People--not only and generally young people-- began to disappear off the streets, from their way to their jobs and from their homes at night. Disappearances were carried out by squads of men in plain clothes as they cruised the streets of Buenos Aires in the night and early dawn stalking their designated prey and taking into their net anyone who might have the bad luck to be caught. Sometimes, bored junior officers said years later, they just looked for young attractive women they might take back to The Naval School to rape, torture and kill. These gangs drove green Ford Falcons without license plates, into which the victim was placed hooded into the trunk usually having been beaten first. The citizens of Buenos Aires began to disappear in great numbers. Most of them were never seen again.

I remember having said:

“One day all this will change,”

And I do not know whether that was

an invocation or an imprecation

or both…

Evita

My school friend Arabella and I remained silent while the adults talked. Luckily my mother’s husband was not in the house and present at tea, drinking his neat whiskey in a Baccarat glass, primping in his tailored Hong Kong silk suit, handmade Italian loafers, and fussing with his shirtsleeves to show off the Bulgari blue emerald and diamond pave cufflinks, a gift from Maman for their first wedding anniversary. These came accompanied by a gold chain necklace and tennis bracelet he had wanted from H. Stern in Rio de Janeiro which she ordered for him as a surprise, saying when she presented him with these gifts, This was just an I love you present.

We were in the great room with the dark somber boiserie walls and the thick carpet that absorbed sound unlike the empty music room next to it with its high ceilings, parquet floors and enhanced sound quality for playing , and where the porteño guitars, products of a Bonarense luthier stood about on little Parisian Louis the XIV th chairs that were as brittle and fragile as the ego of the malignant narcissist and scoundrel my mother had married in New York City, and on hope and a promise had moved the entire household from Park Avenue to Buenos Aires in 1970 before Peron’s return to power that would lead to the 1976 military golpe or coup.

Buenos Aires

As Maman’s husband was out and about in the city that afternoon, the Signora did not have to speak too cautiously, instead taking advantage of his absence, as everyone did, to speak their mind on any subject as is customary in conversation, without being brutalized by his verbal infliction of narcissism and grandiosity, and his blatant devaluation of Maman in front of company. She went on stating emphatically, while holding the cup and saucer deftly the way people do and waving her subtly bejeweled right hand about in the air, and as she was British married to an Italian industrialist and quite fluent in both languages, the hand gestures carried over into English, as they tend to. Arabella’s mother spoke French Italian and English easily, and she refused to learn Spanish as she declared she had no use for it. It was a devil’s country~ she wasn’t going to adopt its tongue for any reason.

~I am getting the children out of this awful country as soon as I can, and you should do the same! Arabella will go to Sherborne next term, Angus will start at Oxford, and Will is going to be a soldier though not the navy, so his father is upset. I don’t want them to stay here much longer, or they will think this is the way things ought to be! They’ll think this insanity is normal and this is the way things are done in the world.

Maman said More tea? Biscuits? A slice of honey cake? Another media luna? Do try some of Ada’s homemade alfajores…”

Arabella and I kept our eyes down and I continued to eat as much honey cake as I could possibly while Arabella tied and untied her shoelaces, pulled up the green school uniform socks and while saying nothing looked off in the distance. I believe I wanted to be her sister at that moment so I could flee to England with them on the spot, and I wished Maman would come to her senses and leave Argentina as she adored England, and there was really no reason for us not to go.

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“When in desperation parents or relatives sought information as to the whereabouts of the victims they were told by the police and the military that the authorities had no knowledge of who had taken the victim or where the victim was. When lawyers were retained to go forward and to bring habeus corpus actions these motions and cases were usually dismissed out of hand by the courts and by military appointed judges. Many judges feared the military regime and had no authority to question…” The Paris Match

Later I asked Arabella

~I had no idea… you are going so soon?

~ Yes, at the end of term, maybe even sooner. I’m sorry. I hadn’t told you.

~I won’t go until after my exams, my mother won’t agree to any school in England before then because he won’t agree, you know, her husband.

~Maybe she would let you come to Sherborne next term? I believe Mother is going to ask her. We won’t be having any classes together from now on. She says I’m to be tutored privately to make sure I can keep up when I get to Sherborne as they’re sure to be way ahead of us now.

Arabella and I had been thick as thieves ever since my arrival at school in Buenos Aires yet now barely saw each other, and once in a while we’d meet as I was on my way to somewhere or other, and she was dashing down one path or another with a pile of books clutched to herself, her socks about her ankles, her uniform and tie askew, no blazer as was the rule, on her way to her private A~ Level piano lessons.

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