Midnight Mass
Maman~ Nochebuena~ La misa de gallo, además pan dulce y sidra...🥂✨💋🤍
Midnight Mass
“Though I am not naturally honest I am sometimes so by chance.” The Winter’s Tale
~Well, no one in this house is going to Midnight Mass this year. That’s for sure!
My mother’s husband announced this just as breakfast was served in the red Chinese wallpapered dining room with the french doors that looked out into the garden at the back of the house on the Calle Juncal in the Barrio Norte of Buenos Aires. The late December summer morning was already suffocatingly hot. Though the overnight rain had stopped , the wind moved the jacarandah trees and the cypresses, so that the large silver drops fell as the branches swayed.
Everyone stopped talking, put down their coffee and croissant and stared at Rocco.
My mother’s husband made himself clear:
~ Not this year they’re not! No one from this house is going out to Midnight Mass tonight, understood?!
~ But what about Ada and Oscar , the de Lencis, and Raúl and the girls? Maman asked about the staff in the petit~ hotel on Juncal she depended on, and who were so fond of La Señora as well as loyal to her.
~ Well, we can’t stop them! he said.They can do as they please~ they are anyway more used to these things than we are.
~ I will go warn them of the news! and he stomped off in his long riding boots to the kitchen to give his advisals to the butler, the cook, the housekeeping maids , and the driver, as well as the bodyguards who often sat in the kitchen on and off duty, that under no circumstances was anyone to attend Midnight Mass on this Nochebuena except at their own peril.
“ Exit , pursued by a bear.” Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
By the year 1971 the country known as La República Argentina had seen a year of ascent in political chaos, while the military government became more fragile , the left-wing insurgency intensified, and the early right-wing terror sparked ~all this led towards the intense repression that would later be known by historians as la guerra sucia ~The Dirty War.
While full state terror began with the 1976 coup, in 1971 there was escalated violence, and secret negotiations between President Lanusse and the new less dangerous Perón took place, along with the return of Perón’s hapless new wife, the former nightclub dancer Isabelita, so that the stage was set for impending conflict.
Conversation erupted at table immediately following my mother’s husband’s exit from the dining room . My brother Carlos and my sister Violet both exclaimed their same protests.
~ But what about everyone? Our friends? What now?
~ Papá says it’s not safe , dear, probably because of the terrorists or something.
~ There are demonstrations and strikes planned~ there will be riots!
My brother Carlos supplied us always with the most up- to- the -minute information in circulation, which he seemed to acquire from acquaintances in cafés, bars and tobacco shops , as well as from his schoolmates, although this intel was not nearly as reliable as his glib translations of everyday street Spanish of the lunfardo as porteño spanish is known, porteño refering to the particular spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, and he often confused his terms. No one knew how he had so many local social connections in the city given that his British school St George’s , was in the far off town of Quilmes , and his Spanish was rudimentary.
~ When your friends get here we’ll all have tea, and later will have our supper as usual and we will open our presents at midnight instead … and it will all be fine, darling.
There was hardly any doubt at all that the rising tensions in the city known as the capital federal were manifesting every day in ever more violent forms, and that Christmas Eve with the Argentine tradition of attending midnight mass might be a night of contention. Police and activists were clashing in mortal combat in the streets of the city. Fires were set at barricades during marches and massive demonstrations that blocked streets at every turn and a driver had to be swift and savvy not to get caught in that net.
School was canceled frequently much to my dismay, and often due to bomb threats, and I fretted that I would not have access to my books when I most needed them to prepare for sitting the overseas Ordinary Level exams that represented my ticket to freedom and to my future, and the rite of passage to the life I knew I wanted to live abroad.
In those days the right-wing death squads, including the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance or the Triple A , began targeting leftists, labor leaders, and perceived subversives, which tactics were used later on by the state. You could see the unmarked Ford Falcons stalking their prey in the streets , and the armed men in plain clothes , brutes and thugs carrying out orders to do no good to their victims.
Entire quarters and whole neighborhoods would be cordoned off in darkness by electricity blackouts when a victim was taken away , beaten and hooded, and the men looted all of his belongings, and these nightly events that happened before dawn were more prevalent in 1971 than ever before in Buenos Aires.
Widespread strikes and riots, in the cities of Cordoba and Buenos Aires challenged the weakened military rule, and pointed up severe economic problems like rocketing inflation.
Urban and rural guerrilla groups, notably the Montoneros who were the Peronists, and the ERP , the Marxists, gained strength and launched attacks against the wealth class and against foreigners , while there were more attempted and successfully completed kidnappings of foreign executives and their family members , of diplomats , and there was a pervasive ethos of entrenched extortion .
The chaotic political violence affected Argentine small and enterprise~ size businessowners, and all working people, as it tore the social contract into shreds, even to the point of making it dangerous to go to midnight mass on the night of Christmas Eve, as was the custom of the country.
On the years when we attended the midnight mass or the misa de gallo as it is called, as the bells ring at midnight throughout the city, and the fireworks explode across the city, my friends and I would totter up the cathedral steps and into church in our impossibly high heels all dressed up yet in jeans ,having spent due effort on styling hair, manicure, makeup, jewelry ~ check! We would immerse ourselves in the spirit of being together and being present for the candlelit service. We said the prayers and chanted together the comforting rosaries along with the congregation while I believe we were filled with somber euphoria for the magical midnight mass, even though I was only recently becoming a Catholic , and that will be a story for another day or night , not this one.
When we returned home we would have dinner and sidra, the wonderful sparkling cider Argentina produces so expertly, and pan dulce, a sweet bread like a panettone , and then we would open presents, everyone including Ada and Mr Lenci, Adela the cook, Raúl the butler, Nunno the driver and the three Marias, as the maids all took part and stood drinking sidra and opening their presents all chosen by Maman , each with an envelope with a wad of pesos stuffed inside one of Maman’s handwritten cards and a personal note to each one.
After President Levinston’s ousting by Lanusse the state of Argentina’s social political economic and military health deteriorated at an even faster rate, and there did seem to be no end to decline and fall.
One knew that Maman and all her friends wondered how much longer it would be safe to stay in Argentina.
~ We must get out of this godforsaken country ! As soon as possible! Maman’s good friend the Signora dell’Acqua used to say emphatically to us at every opportunity when there were no Argentines in the room.
Tea that Christmas Eve afternoon on Nochebuena at the house on Juncal was no exception to the Signora dell’Acqua using the occasion to bellow this insight at the tea table with Carlos and Violet and our friends there who were all boarders at school with no family to go to in the country and would stay the week with us in the Barrio Norte. They came from Chile , Bolivia and the Argentine campo~ Patagonia~ from far off provinces like Chubut and Santiago del Estero where my family namesake Margot Garrett de Zuberbühler met her fate in a plane crash, along with her husband Mariano Zuberbühler, but that story for another day now.
Maman enjoyed the company of these friends immensely , and having been a lonely boarder at school herself at the Chalet Marie Josée in Gstaad and at Le Rosey when she was a child, Maman believed she was doing them and us a good turn by having them to stay on holidays, and their parents were thrilled.
~ Darling , she would say to friends of ours whether a friend of Carlos , or of Violet , or of mine, when they looked at all sad or pensive during her questioning them about school or home.
~ But darling! I know exactly how you feel!
My friends all loved Maman , and I was often eager to bring them home to her , to the house on Juncal in Buenos Aires, and to the Villa Milagros in the tiny mountain village in Còrdoba, to the old tuberculosis sanatorium it had been with no heat or hot water , where she and her husband would retreat the following year because of the unrest, and we would celebrate Nochebuena there in the foothills of the Cordobés mountains , and the house on Juncal would stay empty but for Ada the Ama de Llaves , and the three Marias the maids, as Nunno the driver and Andrés and the other bodyguards would not be needed for the summer months in the city.
“The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D.Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names take at random from the R's - told a story of exile, disillusion and anxiety behind lace curtains.”
~ Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
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