Calle Bolivar, San Telmo 1999 ~ Photograph: Facundo de Zuviría
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My Mother, Maman as she liked to be called, was born on New Year's Day in Berlin in 1932 where her father was Chargé d'Affaires at the US Embassy. During her childhood she would go on to live wherever they were posted~ Tijuca, Brazil, Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, and The Hague in Holland. She would be sent at a young age to the Chalet Marie Josée and Le Rosey in Switzerland as her father was as prescient as any European diplomat about the German invasion of Holland and was recalled to Washington from his post of acting US Minister at The Hague as the war advanced.
By the time she was six my mother was fluent in English French and German. She would have a tougher time learning Spanish at the age of forty when she decamped with the entire family to Buenos Aires after she married an Argentine Porteño, a citizen of Buenos Aires, and she set off to start a new life along with a cadre of children, nannies, assistants, governesses, tutors, cooks, dogs and a canary in tow.
I have written about this madcap life in Argentina in my unpublished novel Winter in July, and also in The Winter of Our Discontent and while the publication dates remain quite vague, I have taken to writing short stories about Maman.
Recently an accomplished respected and highly esteemed author suggested publishing these pieces in the meantime, as I talk about her often. I'm grateful for the advice and for this way to remember and honor her.
Maman was an avid reader in three languages ~English French and Spanish~ and enjoyed discussing literature though she never attended college. She had me read Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan when I was barely eleven, and she read enormous volumes on the Civil War as well as Gabriel García Marquez and laughed at Mafalda.
As I have no family to speak of, and was not with her when she journeyed on, and as her husband barred me from all services, I have not even considered the true weight of her permanent absence. We talked for hours every Sunday for fifteen years until her husband kept her even from phone calls.
My deep connection with her was watermarked by absence and distance throughout our lives. When I left for school in England she remained in Argentina and even after she moved back to New York we were separated for years by her husband.
I have no photographs of Maman except when she was already very old, and I treasure those, and having lost my belongings entirely over and over again during a nomadic life, I see her only in memories. I aim to capture the haphazard hilarious and happy moments in a series of short stories set in the turbulent Argentina of the 1970s in these Frivolous Short Stories, and in Spanish~ Ficciones frívolas.
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