MAMAN
HOUSE OF CARDS ~ LA CASA DE PAPEL
We were all baffled when Maman called a meeting in the breakfast room at the house on Juncal in the Barrio Norte the day the removers arrived with the long freight container from New York. There was espresso and cappuccino for tea that afternoon, and there were medias lunas from the panadería on Arenales. There were boxes tied with ribbon containing masitas, the little cakes and pastries the confiterías in Buenos Aires are famous for. Ada had bought both kinds of pastries, the medias lunas and the flake pastry ones, that are more like the French croissants for our tea that afternoon, for us to discuss what was to be done with the boxes now that all our belongings had been deposited in the downstairs great room and there were pyramids of packing cases and cardboard boxes to be undone.
I loved the house as it had stood almost empty. I loved its huge vacant rooms, the matte parquet wood floors with intricate patterns, all the double doors with the little delicate handles, the high ceilings, tall windows and pretty chandeliers. The rooms echoed and when no one was about I sang. My room contained a cedar closet floor to ceiling with drawers made of the same wood. There was an ornate wallpaper and French doors divided the room so that I could study and practice music apart from where I slept. I had never seen such luxury, and I had certainly never lived in such surroundings. I liked the sparseness of my room with only my bed, a suitcase, a desk, and a chair.
The drawing rooms seemed to echo like the Sistine Chapel, and the acoustic in the future music room made my heart leap. Now the things from grandmother’s apartment and Maman’s residences would be imposed, only to remind me how far we were from that world, and how I might plot my return somehow. The absence of too many familiar things brought about radical acceptance, and I noticed everything in my new context with intense curiosity and a sense of distant possibility so that I didn’t think about New York or about making my way back. I was after all, only eleven years old.
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~ I think I know how to unpack a box, my brother said raising an eyebrow the way Maman did. He peered at her through the long curls that always were in front of his face. He was relishing the days before the military haircut that would herald his first term at school at St George’s in Quilmes.
~Yes, you know how to do that. It’s not about unpacking. It’s about the boxes and not damaging them to get them open. Then you are to fold them neatly and Raul will come to take them down.
~Well what’s the big deal? With the boxes? They’re just cardboard only, my brother asked.
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Photo: Villa 31, Buenos Aires, the neighborhood adjacent to Retiro station.
Not far from this seeming paradise of Barrio Norte and her exquisite gray stone petit hotels with beautiful doors and iron grille balconies, is the villa miseria Villa 31 close to Retiro and only a stone's throw from the fine houses and streets of this part of the city. The Barrio Norte is the neighborhood centered around Avenida Santa Fé and its elegant shops, and Recoleta cemetery where Eva Peron and Carlos Gardel are buried along with all the finest families of Buenos Aires. When you walk in the early morning along the neat clean, uneven sidewalks, you will see the women, housekeepers and shopkeepers alike, washing the sidewalks in front of their places with buckets of soap and water plus scrubbing with brushes before rinsing with clear water. Not far from the modern buildings sometimes incongruent with the old French architecture in Barrio Norte and Recoleta, not far in a matter of minutes if it weren’t for the traffic and twenty minutes on foot is Villa 31. These are the houses built on discarded land with any materials the residents can procure, and they date back to the urban transformation of Buenos Aires in the late 1880s when the city became the capital of the Argentine Republic.
Every morning the Three Marias as we called them, Maria Magdalena, Maria José and Maria Valencia, who worked in the house except for Ada de Lenci who lived there with her husband Oscar on Juncal with us, would take the colectivo from Villa 31 the villa miseria in the neighborhood of the Retiro bus and railway station or they would walk to the elegant Barrio Norte along Avenida Santa Fe. Where they came from there was mostly no running water or electricity, no heat in winter, no access to health care, no equal opportunity for employment, no telephones, no place for children to play, no rule of law, and no chance for a second chance if you did make a mistake.
The streets here were unpaved and haphazard mud lanes between the houses. Sewage ran in the streets when it rained and rabid dogs ran about in packs the way they do in Rome, and if you had any shoes they were probably the alpargatas the cotton and string flat shoes that got soaked when the water level came up and the houses might well have dirt floors since the house was a confection of a precarious jumble of discarded scraps and materials with a wall or a roof to exposed to the open air. The wind wouldn’t protect you from all the illnesses and infectious diseases you would encounter constantly ~ malaria, dengue fever, West Nile Virus, all sorts of mosquito born fevers, encephalitis, typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, chicken pox, yellow fever, rabies to name the most prominent.
Bernardo Verbitsky’s 1957 novel Villa Miseria Tambien es America established the phrase villa miseria and it means shantytown, also known by the euphemism settlements or asentamientos and emergency villages or villas de emergencia. In Argentina we say villas miserias and this would translate literally as towns of misery. Villa 31 has been home to more than 40,000 residents in its time, a shamble of brick, wood, tin, and cardboard residences on the outskirts of the federal capital, Buenos Aires. Villas miserias then, are what you would call the shantytowns surrounding Buenos Aires and cities like her, and there are more than 700,000 Argentine inhabitants of these, as well as more than 600 miserable towns of misery across the nation.
Far be it from anyone to be able to trace Argentina's magnificent economic decline in decades in anything less than a long epistle, so let me just say things went from riches to rags in decades, and thanks to thieves and scoundrels at the helm, it has long been no country for old men.
Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European— or later United States— capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources ~Eduardo Galeano
Whatever Maman thought about her inherited wealth and privilege having been born into a family at the height of Park Avenue society, and into a family with an old name dating back to the Gordons of Scotland including the poet George Anderson Gordon Byron, the 6th Lord Byron, the soldier General Charles George Gordon of Khartoum, and the US Minister George Anderson Gordon plus the oil barons on her mother’s side, the Vandergrifts like JJ, who founded Standard Oil of California along with a Rockefeller, and Samuel his son, who were early New York settlers in the 1900s,in all my life I never heard her look down on anyone who wasn't as fortunate as she was.
I never heard her say anything disrespectful of anyone’s class, profession or work or express superiority to anyone who worked in her household. To the contrary she was aware of her privilege and that she was rich, and she unwittingly followed in the footsteps of her ancestor General Charles Gordon of Khartoum in that she had a dedication to alleviating human suffering.
She was kind and generous to people unless they crossed her, and then she could be cold and ruthless in dealing with them. Or having someone else deal with them as she hated confrontation and all forms of unpleasantness. There was no occasion on which to fear Maman’s anger more than when she learned of any bragging boasting or lording it over any of our friends we perceived as not as well off as we were in one way or another. It seemed the flipside of Maman’s displeasure with any expression of pride one made of oneself was countered only by her ecstatic descriptions of my academic and equestrian accomplishments, and when it suited her my little career as an actor model and singer in Buenos Aires.
Maman was more than fond of the women who worked for her in the house under the strict supervision and hawk eye of Ada de Lenci, the housekeeper or Ama de Llaves at the house on Juncal in the Barrio Norte. These women were her family now, and in particular Ada was of great assistance and comfort to her, and she was heartbroken when Maman moved to the country house in Cordoba.
It was an unusual request and a heartbreaking one on the arrival of our belongings from New York that Maman made, and it made us sit in sober silence for a time.
~ Be careful and open the boxes so they can be saved. Maria Magdalena Maria Valencia and Maria José want to take them home. They will line the walls of their houses with the thick high-quality cardboard, and it will be warm for this winter. Imagine ~ they say it’s a blessing that we moved here and brought them these boxes they’ve not seen the likes of lately, just to keep warm let alone their jobs. Imagine! The way they live in these awful places. Just think about that when Ada asks you to pick up your room or put your plate up yourself, or take part in entertaining our guests gracefully, and you are thinking how hard you have it.
~So you are telling us their houses are made of paper? That the Tres Marias go on in this cold while it's so damp, and constant rain since we got here, go on home to what they call a villa miseria it’s like a slum, and that they and their families live in paper houses? Like, their house is made of paper?
~More or less, Mignon, she said. Not everyone lives like we do, you'll see my dear, once you get started at school.
When I did start school entering in Primer Año the first year of high school in Argentina, we struggled to memorize huge amounts for our bimestrales in Historia, and the razor slim pieces of paper we used to cheat on tests were called machetes. These were long infinitesimal paper ribbons on which the needed 411 was written in miniscule handwriting. The penalties for getting caught either using or manufacturing and selling machetes were quite severe however, as you can imagine, this didn’t hamper the trade.
Our heads when it came to Historia were full of facts and folklore of Argentina’s fascinating labyrinthine long lists of long names of generals and gentry and the glorious stories were only moving when they came from the pen of the subject and not the historian, as our textbooks were dry and didactic. There is much more to say about Argentina and her history as well as pay attention to some of the presidents like Hipolito Yrigoyen. For now, I hope you will have enjoyed reading about Maman and about her new home Buenos Aires nearly as much as I have enjoyed telling you these stories about her life, and I close with these words by Borges ~Reality is not always probable or likely.
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Cafe San Telmo, Buenos Aires
Photograph from the book Buenos Aires, Coppola y Zuviria, Ediciones Lariviere
So fascinating, this interweaving of the personal and the public, all packed into high quality cardboard boxes. Right to the end, I expected to learn that Maman wished to salvage the boxes so as to be ready for the next stage of your family’s migration. But no. The boxes were for insulating the shanties of the three Marys.
Bravo Pandora!
In reading this new Mamam, I felt as if I had experienced your Argentina, in all of its nuances and textures.
Thank you for sharing this vivid, engaging and beautifully told story.
Paul