“You really ought to try it,”
my brother-in-law was saying.
“Why?”
“Because the guy’s an amazing
graphologist. One look at your handwriting and he tells you everything there is
to know about yourself.”
It was the end of autumn and
the seventies were also quickly drawing to a close—1978, hard to believe Argentina’s
dictatorship was already more than two years old. In ways it seemed like only
yesterday that, in stunned yet hardly surprised expectation, we had witnessed Argentina’s
March ’76 coup, the start of the Proceso,
as it was called and wondered, “What next?” Like I say, it seemed like only
yesterday…unless you counted the bodies in the Proceso’s wake, which were already into the thousands, and many
more people “missing”. Just about anybody you talked to knew of someone who had
either been killed or whisked off the street or out of their bed and spirited
away in the night.
And still we wondered, “What
next?” We wondered even while knowing the answer: More of the same, more
killing, more dying, more hardship, suspicion, torture and fear. More abuse of
power and contempt for the civilian population. In fact, more of what had come
before, under a supposedly democratic government, ostensibly run by a warlock who
wore a presidential widow as a hand-puppet, and who got a pusillanimous Senate
President to declare a State of Siege, thinking they could use the milicos and the cops to fight their
internal political wars but ending up being the deserving victims of their own
dictatorial designs. The only ones undeserving of their ultimate fate were, as per
historically usual, the common citizens, whose only choice was to stoically
take whatever came next and deal with it on a day to day basis or leave and
live in exile.
But ironically, it was
precisely there, in the day-to-day, that life went on. Back home in Ohio, when
we’d heard of dictatorships elsewhere in the world, we’d thought of hopeless
people cowering in dark corners as tyrants invaded their every reality. But
that wasn’t the case. Life indeed went on—a little sadder, a little more
desperate, perhaps, but with a semblance of normality. If living under a
dictatorship was frequently stifling, politics, at least, was not a preoccupation.
It was a given, something taken care of by an “external” force, something
imposed, not chosen, a case of “Them and Us”.
It was drizzling and the
aluminum awning over the patio was cranked shut. It wasn’t raining hard enough
to make a constant drum roll on the slats of the awning, but we could, nevertheless,
hear the syncopated drip of droplets that formed on and fell from the branches
of the paraiso tree that hung over
the terrace from the street. It had rained hard a few days before and then
turned cold. Before that it had been unseasonably muggy and sultry. Now,
however, it felt good to be inside out of the dampness and I was off work
today.
Miguel and I had transferred
our mate-drinking from the patio to
the kitchen, closed the door, opened the transom above it for ventilation and
had the four burners on the gas range lit to keep us warm and to drive out the
humidity. The single-bulb light over the counter was on, but we’d left the one
over the kitchen table in the adjoining comedor
diario turned off, so that, with the patio awning closed, we were sitting
in a kind of twilight, even though it wasn’t quite noon yet. My sister-in-law was
at work and my wife and mother-in-law were off on I-don’t-know-what errand, so
Miguel and I had the house to ourselves. He tilted the little stainless steel
teakettle and gently poured another thin stream of water over the grass green yerba in the gourd, taking care not to
“burn” the tea and end up with a tasteless mate
full of tiny floating sticks. Miguel was a mate
veteran who consumed several kettles a day. With him, getting the temperature
right was essential—not too cold, not too hot, about to boil but not quite
boiling, and if he should leave the water on too long and hear the first murmur
of ebullition, his remedy would be decisive. The entire contents of the pot
would be tossed unceremoniously down the drain and he would start over from
scratch, placing a kettle of cold water on the stove.
I took the frothy-collared
gourd from him and sipped the warm, bitter green tea through the metal bombilla. “Mmm, good mate,” I said.
“Nah,” he said, “I think the
damn water’s gone cold.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Look at
it steam. Look how frothy!” I held it out for him to see.
He frowned, made a face and put
the kettle back on one of the flaming burners. “Here,” he said, taking the lid
off of a cookie tin and holding it out to me, “have a bizcochito while this warms up.” I reached into the tin and grabbed
one of the deliciously greasy, salty biscuits and took a bite, before having
another sip of mate.
“So, are you listening or
what?” Miguel asked.
“Yes, yes, this grapho…whatever-he-is
reads your handwriting and tells you…your fortune, is it?”
“What a jerk you are. No. Pay
attention, boludo! He looks at a
sample of your handwriting and tells you
everything about yourself.”
“And he’s called a
graphowhosis?”
“Graph-o-lo-gist!”
“And that’s like a, what then?”
“It’s not like anything, ¡carajo! He’s
a handwriting analyst.”
“Why do I need him to tell me
all about myself? I’m me, after all. I already
know all about myself!”
“Yeah, right, or you think you
do until he reads your handwriting and makes you realize all the things you’ve
never realized about yourself.”
I rolled my eyes and then,
glancing at the stove, I said, “Hey, the water’s about to boil.”
“Shit!” He jumped up, grabbed
the kettle and set it on a hot pad on the counter. He lifted the lid, stuck his
index finger in, promptly scalded it, said, “Shit!” again and then dumped the
contents of the kettle into the sink, refilling the pot with cold water and
putting it back on the stove.
“You could have just put a
little cold water in it,” I said irritably.
“No, if it boils, it’s flat. It’ll
only take a minute,” he said. “Here, have another bizcochito.” I accepted the biscuit and handed him back the
sucked-dry gourd.
“So this guy, what? Charges for
this?”
“No, he does it for his
health,” he said sarcastically. “Of course he charges for it. He needs the
money for his school.”
“He has a school?”
“Yes. He’s a priest and has a
school. Did I tell you he was a priest?”
“No.”
“Yes, a priest…but one of those
the Church isn’t altogether happy to claim. One of those who actually do something for people.”
“Ooooooh, one of the usual
suspects!”
“So, what? Are you going to?”
“What?”
“Let him analyze your damned
handwriting!”
“Oh, uh…I don’t know. What’s he
charge?”
“Whatever the hell you want to
give him. Get the damn crocodile out of your wallet and just do it!”
“Okay. What the hell…”
So I took a sheet of loose leaf
notebook paper and a pen and wrote a couple of paragraphs telling this priest cum graphologist who I was without
really telling him anything, as I had been forewarned to do, placed the paper
in an envelope—which my brother-in-law provided—accompanied by a few peso
notes, and said, “Whom should I address it to?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Miguel
said, “I’ll take it to him.”
“Okay, but what name do I put
on the envelope?”
“Padre Argentino.” Miguel said.
By ten days later or so, I had
completely forgotten about the note I’d sent off with Miguel to the
graphologist, Padre Argentino. But when I went to supper at my mother-in-law’s
house one evening Miguel excitedly handed me my resealed envelope and said that
Padre Argentino had just finished his analysis and delivered it the day before.
“Well, don’t just stand there,”
Miguel said, “open it up and let’s see what he says!”
“Here,” I said, handing the
envelope back to him, “you read it.”
The obvious things were there
first: left-handed, probably a large-handed or very strong man by the pressure of
the stroke, young to middle-aged, etc. But then he talked about my character: foreign,
creative, temperamental, highly-strung, stubborn, full of anger, often
self-righteous and highly idealistic, contemptuous of authority but with a
strong sense of prudence and survival, mixed feelings of both superiority and
inadequacy...and, “Oh, you naughty boy! The sordid thoughts and fantasies you
have!”
I had to admit, I was
impressed. “I’d like to meet him,” I told my brother-in-law, “maybe write
something about him.”
“Well...mmmmm...I don’t know,”
said Miguel doubtfully. “He keeps a pretty low profile. I’ll have to talk to
him first and see what he thinks.”
So Miguel did talk to the
priest and, somewhat to my brother-in-law’s surprise, Padre Argentino said that
he wanted to meet me. We arranged to meet in a little coffee shop off of Plaza
Flores, near which, I would later find out, the padre lived in the covered
patio of the apartment of an older woman and her teen-aged daughter.
In the course of our
conversation, I became even more interested in his story. It was apparent just
by looking at him that he was a man of the cloth who took his vows of poverty
seriously. The ladies he lived with obviously kept his clothes properly washed
and pressed but his blue-gray rabat had been washed pale sky blue and his clerical
collar was threadbare and frayed, as were the elbows of his black jacket. His
utilitarian rubber-soled black oxfords were carefully shined but worn thin and
down-at-heel. He told me that he was of the Salesian Order—followers of the
nineteenth-century Italian saint, Giovanni Bosco (better known as “Don Bosco”, himself
an admirer of the humility and service of Saint Francis of Assisi), known for their
work as missionaries and, especially, as youth pastors.
When I asked right away about
the graphology gimmick, he shrugged it off and said, “That’s just one of the
things I do to raise money for my mission, an evening hobby that serves my
work. But most of the funds come from ‘doorbelling’.”
 |
| He was a follower of Don Bosco |
“Doorbelling?”
He made a gesture as if ringing
a doorbell. “I spend every morning ringing doorbells and begging for money.
Sometimes I find a good soul who pledges a regular donation, like a baker who
provides us with bread, or some ladies who gather old clothes for us. But
mostly, my daily rounds of different neighborhoods are what allow us to
continue to operate.”
I pressed him on the
handwriting analysis again, saying I’d found it pretty accurate in my case and
also pretty amazing considering that he had never even seen me in person. But
again he shrugged it off. “Listen, if you want to write about my mission, I’ll
be more than happy to accommodate you, my son, but not if you plan to write
about me personally.”
“Well, Padre,” I said, “what
I’ve usually found is that the man and his mission are seldom separable in
writing a human interest story.”
But the priest shook his head
stubbornly and said, “No, my son, that’s the deal. You can write about my
mission and mention me as its architect, but you can’t write about my life, are
we clear.”
“Well, okay. Let’s start with
your mission and see where the story leads,” I said.
To be
continued
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