YANKEE REDUX — HOW I NEVER MET SORIANO

 

This year is the 26^th anniversary of the death of Osvaldo Soriano, one of Argentina’s most celebrated contemporary writers. This is a rewrite of something I wrote about him in 2008, when I first created this blog. Actually, it’s the re-edited story of how, oddly enough, our paths never crossed in the exciting and violent Buenos Aires of the 1970s or later on when democracy returned. But it’s also about how, through his work and reputation, I got to know him all the same.

 

Funny thing, I’ve often thought, how I never met Osvaldo Soriano. We were colleagues, contemporaries pretty much (he was born six years before me), and we haunted some of the same environments in the bad old days leading up to the 1976 military coup in Argentina. Our turf back then were streets where hookers, sailors, printers and newsmen were about the only people stirring long into the wee hours of the night. And we started hanging out in those places in the same era, he having come to Buenos Aires from the Argentine interior and I from abroad.

I suspect we both got into journalism for the same reason, as a way of writing every day and earning a living at it. He did it all his life, despite his fame as a novelist, becoming one of the original founders of the controversial daily, Página 12, when he returned to Buenos Aires from European exile. There—there being Paris—he had written for such noted publications as Le Monde, Libération and Il Manifesto.

Some people go into journalism because they have a passion for the news. Others because they like telling people’s stories. These others are the ones people talk about when they say they never met a journalist who wasn’t writing a novel. In Soriano’s case it paid off big-time. From what I know about him—I became a huge fan of his from the very outset—I figure his enormous popularity surprised no one as much as himself. His novels have sold into the millions of copies (you can even buy them at Walmart!) and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. And still the more asinine among critics are wont to discuss whether he was, in fact, a “good writer”. What was it Hemingway said? Something like, “Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.” Soriano probably would have agreed.

Argentine journalist and author Osvaldo Soriano

Anyway, at about the time that Soriano was writing for owner/editor Jacobo Timerman at La Opinión, I was sub-editing and reporting for editor Robert Cox at the Buenos Aires Herald. Our editorial departments were more or less around the corner from each other in the then-red light district, in the vicinity of 25 de Mayo and Tucumán. Both of our papers printed at Alemann & Compañía, which was handy and one of the biggest printers of the day. It was a location that was a stone’s throw from the SAFICO Building on Corrientes and San Martín, where major international news agencies and correspondents had their offices, a few short blocks from the local agency Noticias Argentinas, and walking distance from the press offices of all major municipal and federal government departments and ministries.

Back then, it was hard to go into any of the bars or cafés in that district without meeting up with a colleague or two. So you would have thought that Soriano and I would have been almost bound to run into each other. But, as fate would have it, we didn’t. It was hard not to run into novelist, journalist, one-time radical Peronist and later fat-cat diplomat Jorge Asís, for instance. Asís was a sort of politically aggressive omnipresence on that circuit. But Soriano was, from what I hear, a somewhat retiring if friendly sort, and I was never really much of a joiner myself. I suppose we both spent a lot more time in front of a typewriter than some, even in the days before computers made it easier still to become a functional hermit.

Dan Newland, circa 1977, Buenos Aires Herald
reporter/editor and correspondent for the London
Daily Telegraph, World Environment Report and
ABC Radio News, New York.
Photo:John Claude Fernandes

I stayed on at the Herald while working as a stringer for papers and magazines in the United States and Britain, and thus started building a career of sorts. It wasn’t on purpose. I mean, the ultimate goal was to become a novelist. It was just that, in the meantime, I was limited to the Herald if I wanted to write in my own language, and besides, once the military junta shut down La Opinión and locked up Timerman, there was basically no other place but the Herald to write a semblance of truth about what was happening in Argentina. The times grew frighteningly interesting and one year just kind of led to the next.

Soriano, for his part, graced the pages of not only La Opinión, but also of Primera Plana, Noticias, Confirmado and Panorama with his inimitable prose. But his leftist bent and his uncompromising objectivity made it dangerous for him to remain in Argentina after the 1976 coup d’état, and he made a decision to live in exile until the military returned to their barracks in 1983. He was off to Belgium and would later gravitate to Paris, where he would co-found Sin Censura with venerated Argentine exile and author Julio Cortázar.

At the Herald, our news editor and my immediate boss, Andrew Graham-Yooll, made a similar decision at about that same time and was off to London practically overnight. I got bumped up the ladder to the news editor’s post and former McLean’s Magazine journalist James Neilson was brought in as associate editor under Cox.

It was in this editorial management post that I started to get a chance to write regularly under a by-line and thus to become mildly well-known in certain circles. So it was too that I got to know Soriano for the first time, without ever actually meeting him.

It happened one midnight (dreary) in 1978, as I was sitting at my desk, struggling with the first lines of an op-ed piece while waiting for the press to roll in our new installations on Calle Azopardo. Momentarily stymied, I decided to procrastinate by going through the day’s mail that was still piled untouched on the corner of my desk. I found the usual readers’ letters (which I dutifully separated and filed for future publication), some magazines, a few brochures (from merchants who wanted some free hype and which I put in the out tray for the advertising department), a couple of formal invitations to lunches and cocktails and, finally, a small rectangular package, the size of a book. It was addressed to my name in black marker, postmarked from Spain, had no return address and was wrapped in plain brown paper, as if to conceal some pornographic content.

Justifiably paranoid as I was in those days, given the constant threats the newspaper received, I sniffed the package, flexed it, shook it, picked at it, and tweaked it a bit, before finally deciding it was probably harmless. When I opened it, what I found was a rather thin little paperback book with a title as Argentine as tango itself: No habrá más penas ni olvido. So Argentine is that phrase from the classic tango, Mi Buenos Aires querido, that it is almost impossible to translate it correctly. I mean, one could try, say, No More Sorrow or Forgetfulness, or No More Sorrow or Oblivion, but what the devil does that mean in English. It is only within the context of porteño lore—of immigrants far from home, of families separated by destiny and longing to be together once more, of perennial hope against a backdrop of barely veiled despair, of terminal melancholy turned outwardly to false cheer, of romantic abandon and unrequited love, of vengeance and remorse, of arrivals and departures, of European Americans with heartstrings stretched taut between continents—that those words make sense, even in Spanish. They would probably make sense in Italian…if they were spoken in America (especially South America). But in English, it’s like: Huh? Anyway, as a title for what was to be an incredibly succinct and immortal synthesis of something as Argentine as the phenomenon of Peronism in the 1970s, it could not have been more fitting.

I scanned the first few paragraphs and was immediately, irretrievably hooked. I kept telling myself, “One more page and back to the op-ed piece…One more page and I’ll go down to put the paper to bed…One more page and I’ll put this thing down! But it was impossible. It wasn’t until I felt the rotary press shaking the floor of my office like a small, benign earth tremor that I tore myself away from the plot and characters that peopled the story to go down and do my duty, plucking a copy of the latest edition of the Herald from the downstream end of the press and having a quick general look to make sure everything was okay before bidding the press crew good night over the din of the machinery.

Arriving home in our tiny mid-town condo at nearly two-thirty in the morning, I took up where I’d left off in the book while I ate the supper my wife had left out on the kitchen counter for me and had a glass of wine. But when I’d eaten my meal, I poured myself some more wine and kept right on reading. By the time I fell into bed around dawn, I’d read half of the book, and before I went in to work the next afternoon, I had finished it.

I was spellbound. Political analysts of all colors and nationalities were straining their intellects to the point of mental hernia to try and paint a clear if complex picture of the Argentine phenomenon. They were seeking some even vaguely objective definition of Peronism, attempting to explain in some feasible way what had gone so horrendously wrong that the country had stumbled headlong into total chaos, only to fall into the gnashing jaws of unbridled repression and ironclad authoritarianism. And by and large, they had failed miserably.

But here was Osvaldo Soriano, high school drop-out, street-beat newsman and natural genius, who created the perfect allegory. He didn’t try to tell the story from the standpoint of the big picture, where cloak and dagger political intrigue made it next to impossible to get to the core of truth. Instead he took the demise of Peronism as Perón had defined it to a tiny town in Buenos Aires Province, where everybody knew everybody else. Into that microcosm, he injected the poison of political avarice, added the catalyst of petty jealousy, sowed the seeds of gossip and doubt, and fanned the flames of a witch-hunt that would turn a quaint and even comic village into a tragic nightmare of civil strife, torture, revolt and murder.

Thanks to this incredible portrait of the Peronist phenomenon following the death of populist strongman General Juan Domingo Perón, the question of what happened in Argentina in the nineteen-seventies becomes graphically crystal-clear, with never a mention of any of the major players, except, of course, for the all-pervading, omnipresent name of Perón.

But even though the story could not have been more Argentine in every sense, it was, I realized, also brilliantly universal. As universal, say, as Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Huxley’s Brave New World, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was an allegory on politics gone awry, a regime’s running rampant, movements placing themselves above the people in whose name they acted and above systems that sought to guarantee the rule of law. It was about an ideal turned caricature, a political thought gone psychotic. It was about human foible—complacence playing into the hands of dictatorial design, rebellion providing an excuse for free-wheeling repression and about what happens when two extremes come full circle and see each other in near mirror image. It was about how no one wins, but how power is retained, at least for a time, by whomever swings the biggest club. But it was also about how moral victory can only belong to those who maintain their principles at all costs, even at the cost of their very lives.

The next day I told a guy I knew in the shop about the book. He was what one might call a closet Peronist revolutionary. He had been, rumor had it, a leftist activist before the 1976 coup. He and I often discussed politics while putting the paper to bed. He had read a lot and I asked if he had ever read anything by Soriano, since this was my first encounter with the author. He said he didn’t think so. Would I lend him the book to read?

“Sure,” I said, “but I want it back.”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’m a fast reader.”

The next night when I went down to the shop and said hello to him, he grunted, glanced over both shoulders to see if anybody was watching, reached into a dark little cupboard, where he also hid his little brown bottle of Bols Ginebra and retrieved the book from the darkest recesses. I couldn’t help laughing aloud when I saw that he had very carefully covered it in heavy black plastic sheeting, obviously to keep the title from showing through.

“Here, jefe,” he said. “Get it out of here.”

“You didn’t like it?” I laughed.

“It was great,” he whispered, “but not worth dying for.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

“You know the security guy at the front desk? He said that if I didn’t want the milicos to "give me a ride in their truck", I’d better get that subversive book under wraps, because the author was a terrorist and the book was banned.”

I lost that copy of No habrá más penas ni olvido in a move some time back, but for all of the years that it remained in my library, right up to the beginning of the nineties, it wore that black shroud. That cover, like the book itself, was a symbol of those times and of the exile from which Soriano so aptly described them.

I recently came across a picture of me when I was a news editor and foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires in the seventies and one of Soriano when he was exiled in Paris. I couldn’t help but reflect that the historical phenomenon that had forced him to flee for his life from the country he loved was the exact same one that had inspired me to remain in the Buenos Aires that he had left behind. We had both chosen to become expats because of the same thing, but for opposite reasons. Just one of the ironies of dangerous times.  

Soriano in Paris

In the early nineteen-nineties, several years after I quit my post as managing editor of the Herald and went free-lance, I had the honor and pleasure of sharing an office in Buenos Aires with a brilliant journalist and writer by the name of Claudio Iván Remeseira. We did a lot of talking, mostly about fiction and writing, when we should have been working for a living, and in the course of those conversations, Soriano’s name came up. I ended up telling Claudio the story about how Soriano’s work first came into my hands. He thought it was a great story and that a guy like Soriano would probably like to hear it. I said that chasing after a big name like Soriano (he was indeed big by then) seemed so sophomoric and unprofessional. He would surely think I was a jerk.

Years later, when I had already moved from Buenos Aires to Patagonia, and when Remeseira was about to pursue his own brand of self-imposed exile in New York, he again approached me on the subject, saying he had told my story to a guy who sort of knew Soriano and the fellow had said he was sure Osvaldo would be delighted to hear it. I said I’d think about it, because to me, hermit that I tend to be, it just seemed like a too extroverted, off-the-wall thing to do. But Remeseira managed to get me Soriano’s home phone number and made me promise that the next time I was in Buenos Aires I would give the best-selling author a call.

And I did, repeatedly, always getting an answering machine with the voice of Soriano’s French-born wife on it. Some time later, I met up with Remeseira in Buenos Aires and casually mentioned over drinks that I’d tried Soriano on numerous occasions but none of my calls had been returned.

“Haven’t you heard?” he asked. “Soriano’s got lung cancer. He’s only seeing a few close friends. They don’t think he’s going to make it.”

Even this seemed like another of his universal images, a passage from his last book, Piratas, fantasmas y dinosaurios (Pirates, Ghosts and Dinosaurs), the book’s first image, in fact, where he writes: “Every New Year’s Eve, I remember, if only for an instant, the last one my father was alive. He was wrapped up in a threadbare robe, on the doorstep of the house he rented in Santo Tomé. There was still a butt between his lips, but by now it was killing him. He raised his arm to wave good-bye to me as firecrackers and colorful roman candles burst around him. We had quarreled, I think, because I hated the holiday season as much as he did and couldn’t figure out what stupid custom made us get together to toast one another and wish each other things in which neither of us believed...”

It seemed to me a universal portrait. His father’s. My own father’s, some years later when he was dying of that same disease and I couldn’t help hating myself for having quarreled with him so often. Perhaps it is, in a way, a scene from the lives of nearly every father and son. And, in the end, a self-portrait as well.

That, I realized, was the universal genius of this author, whose life had run parallel to mine for a time, and whom I would never know.

 

PADRE ARGENTINO — PART 3: PERSECUTION AND RESURRECTION

Please click on the links below to read Parts 1 and 2

http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2016/08/padreargentino-part-1the-handwriting.html

http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2016/08/padre-argentino-part-2-school-of-love.html

I wrote two lengthy articles about Padre Argentino’s “school of love” for the Buenos Aires Herald. The popularity of the first one took me completely by surprise. I was young and had little idea about the power of human interest stories. I liked them and liked writing them, but was convinced that “hard news” was what sold newspapers. My predilection for stories that were about the unique lives of people no one knew I considered a personal weakness, a kind of dirty little secret that I tried to mask with the cynical self-image of a hard-nosed reporter. So, I was astonished when the priest’s story brought a batch of letters to the editor with people expressing admiration for the padre’s work, or sadness for the children’s plight, or asking how they could help. I suddenly found myself acting as a go-between, putting people in contact with Padre Argentino and his project.

“School of Love Revisited” expressed gratitude for the reaction to the first story and told more about the school, its students, the neighborhood and the padre. That one even started bringing in money, checks made out to my name or to “cash”, at a time when my wife and I pretty much lived one month to the next and didn’t even own a bank account. I realized I had to get something organized quickly—especially after receiving a letter from a suspicious donor who said he wanted to get a letter of receipt from “Padre Argentino, not Dan Newland” as proof the money he had sent in (about 20 dollars if I remember correctly) had been received in full.

I had recently become a member of a US expatriate charity group in Buenos Aires called The American Society of the River Plate and decided to go talk to them. They didn’t want to get involved themselves, but pointed me toward some influential friends who did. Suddenly, Padre Argentino wasn’t completely alone. There was a small group of volunteers to receive aid when it came in, to make some improvements in the impoverished little school and to organize some community aid—food donations, used clothing, school supplies, etc. They even found an assistant for the padre, a young teacher with some special education experience who was willing to donate her time and expertise. And she, in turn, got a physical therapist friend to go to the school occasionally and work with the youngsters who were physically disabled.

It wasn’t a solution to every challenge facing Padre Argentino’s Escuelita de Asís. Not by a long shot. But it was, indeed, a start. As for myself, I was hard at work on my budding career as a journalist at the time, working pretty much round the clock both at the paper and as a free-lance stringer for US and British publications, so I was glad to be off the hook. I told the people who were helping out that I’d be glad to meet with them from time to time and publish updates as things progressed, but that I would leave the day-to-day in their capable hands.

“Done!” I thought.

But then, I got a call from an Army colonel attached to the US Embassy. He was an athletic, boyish-looking Steve McQueen sort of guy of about forty with an easy-going manner, whom I’d gotten to know and like in my dealings with him in the American Society of the River Plate and at a few embassy functions I’d been invited to. You almost never heard anyone address him as “Colonel”. Everybody called him “Skip”.

Skip said he had “something he wanted to run by me” and asked if I’d meet him for a cup of coffee. I said sure.

“What’s up, Skip?” I asked over a cup of espresso in a downtown café.

“The ambassador’s been following your Padre Argentino story.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He was moved.”

“I’m flattered.”

“He wants to get involved.”

“Wow, cool!”

Skip smiled but held up a staying hand. “Just one thing, Dan,” he said. “If the ambassador’s getting involved, we have to as well.”

“Have to what?”

“Get involved.”

“How do you mean?” I asked suspiciously.

“We’re going to have to run a background check on the padre.”

I mulled this over a second and said, “Why?”

“Well, because we’re not talking about just anybody. He’s the US ambassador! I mean, what do you know about this priest, Dan? Like, what’s his real name? Do you even know? Padre Argentino doesn’t cut it, if you see what I mean.”

I could see the colonel’s point. Indeed, I knew precious little about Padre Argentino’s life. In fact, as Skip had surmised, I didn’t even know his real name. I had asked and he’d said, “I’ve been Padre Argentino so long my other identity is no longer part of my life. Let Padre Argentino suffice.”

He had told me a few anecdotes, like when, because of one instance of his serial disobedience, he’d been made the chaplain of a remote provincial girls’ school where he and the mother superior were at odds throughout his stay: “She’d bring a group of girls into the chapel and if I was there she’d say, ‘Come girls, come, we’re leaving. We’ll come back later. Right now there’s a smell of man in here!’ And I’d shout out from wherever I was, ‘Ask her how she knows what a man smells like, girls!’”

The parish priest at San José de Flores had

wanted to charge Padre Argentino for his

mother's funeral. "The deceased is my 

mother and I'm the priest!" he protested. 

He had also told me about what he saw as the corrupt practices of major parish priests, like one, years before, at the busy San José de Flores parish, who, when Padre Argentino’s mother passed away, had wanted to charge him for the use of the sanctuary to hold her funeral there. “Charge for what, you crook?” Padre Argentino had shouted. “I’m the officiating priest and the deceased is my mother! It’s the house of God, you cretin, not yours.”

Other than these and other stories of his younger years that the padre had told me, however, I was really at a loss to respond to Skip’s queries about anything but the Salesian father’s current mission. But in those dangerous days of bloody military rule, in which so-called “third world priests” (those who formed their missions around the poorest segments of society and were outspoken about repression and inequality) were nearly as vulnerable as armed leftwing extremists were, I didn’t want US intelligence stirring up things with the local Armed Forces’ intelligence groups, which were precisely the sources from which “dirty war” hit squads were getting their orders—especially the 601^st Intelligence Battalion under the orders of General Guillermo Suárez Mason, which was known to operate numerous clandestine detention and torture centers throughout the country.

I tried to politely dissuade the colonel. I offered to set up a meeting between Padre Argentino and him, or with the ambassador himself. But it was no use.

Finally, I said, “Look, Skip, I appreciate the embassy’s wanting to help but if this is the only way to do it, thanks but no thanks.”

“Yeah, Dan, but the ambassador’s mind’s made up.”

“So tell him to just help and not poke the beehive! Let him do it off the record.”

Skip grinned and said, “I’m afraid ambassadors don’t do that sort of thing off the record, my friend.”

“Then tell him to forget it! Tell him to just butt out!”

With the military government in charge it was a dangerous

time for so-called "third world priests".

“Not your call, I’m afraid, Dan,” he said. “I’m just letting you know. The wheels are already turning.”

And indeed they were. Probably long before the colonel ever invited me to meet him so he could “run it by me.”

Before I ever had a chance to get hold of Padre Argentino to warn him of what was going on, he called me.

“We need to talk,” he said. “But not over the phone. Meet me tomorrow morning at the little coffee place at the far end of Plaza Flores, at Artigas and Yerbal.”

The place was tiny, owned by an old friend of the padre’s. It was basically a counter and four tables with a back-bar bearing, perhaps, a dozen bottles and an espresso machine. We ordered coffee and sat at the table nearest the wall, away from the door and windows.

Right away, Padre Argentino launched into one of his anecdotes.

“When Perón came back from exile in seventy-three,” he said, “here in the capital there was a huge influx of people from the interior, mostly negritos of very humble means, desperate people who for a couple of decades had been hearing about the golden days of Peronism and came to Buenos Aires like pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem. When they got here, what they found was more poverty and more inequality and they didn’t have the means to return to their provinces. It was like they were shipwrecked in the capital.

“Seeing so many of them washed up here with nothing and no one to help them, I managed to find a place in midtown, Barrio Once, to start a soup kitchen. I got some people to put up the food and went doorbelling for the rest, and pretty soon we were serving a couple of meals a day to people who didn’t have enough money to eat. And I put in a little chapel there as well to tend to their spiritual needs.” He paused to drink his demitasse of espresso. I asked if he wanted another one. He considered it, nodded, and I motioned to the owner to make us another round.

Paramilitary hits squads: Standard operating procedure

under the last populist government of General Juan Domingo 

Perón and the military regime that replaced it.  

“One day,” he went on, “just after I’d celebrated Mass and was getting ready to go oversee the preparation of lunch, the door to the sanctuary burst open and a group of armed men came in. I found myself standing face to face with the one leading them. When he saw me, his face suddenly changed and softened. Without turning, he told the others to wait outside and to close the door behind them. He was still holding a pistol trained on me and I knew he and his men had been sent there to kill me. When they came in, I hadn’t said anything but ‘Señores, how can I help you?’ before I crossed myself and started making my peace with God.

“But as I stood there facing that young man, his face crumpled up and he fell to his knees weeping. He stuck his pistol into his waistband, took my hand in both of his and kissed it. Then he stood up, took me by the shoulders and said, ‘Padre, God forgive me, I came here to kill you. You must leave right now and not come back. If you stay, you won’t live a week.’

“I asked him why he was doing this. He said he knew I wouldn’t remember him, but that when he was a boy, living in the slums, he’d been all alone with just his mother. He said that she had fallen deathly ill and that they hadn’t been able to find her the help she needed. He said that I had intervened, used my contacts to get her proper medical attention and had visited her while she was in the hospital. He had never been able to thank me, he said, and this was his chance to square it with me. I’d saved his mother’s life. Now he was saving mine.

“I left immediately, went to Bolivia, and I only just came back a couple of years ago, when I started the escuelita. I was warned not to, but I missed Argentina, mi gente.”

The owner brought us the two coffees and left. There were tears in the padre’s eyes as he picked up his cup and sipped, and when he swallowed, it went down hard.

“That’s quite a story, Padre,” I said.

“It doesn’t end there,” he said. “Son,” he went on, “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for us...”

“I’ve done nothing, really, Padre...”

He held up a hand to silence me, and continued, “But all of the publicity and the people you’ve gotten involved...”

I shook my head sadly. “I know, I know, Padre, I thought I’d have time to warn you about the embassy...”

“Your intentions were noble, m’ijo,” he said kindly, “but now I’m in trouble again. This friend, the one I told you about who’s in military intelligence, warned me that a new investigation has been opened because of the embassy probe. I need to leave right now...today...as soon as we’re done here.”

I felt a horrific sense of guilt and my voice cracked when I asked him, “Where will you go? What will you do?”

He shrugged. “I’ll be fine, m’ijo. I still have some friends, a bishop up north who’s said he’d hide me as long as I promise to respect and obey him.

“And what about the school?” I asked.

He sat up straight and stared into my eyes with steely conviction. “That’s where you come in, son,” he said. “I’m placing the escuelita, my mission, in your hands.”

Suddenly, it was as if I’d just been hit in the face with a bucket of ice-water. “Whoa! Wait a second, Padre! Back up!” I said. “I’m not prepared for anything like this. I’m not a teacher...”

“You’ll be fine...”

“Not a Catholic...”

“It’ll all work out...”

“Not even sure what I am...a hopeful agnostic at best...”

“Everything will be fine, m’ijo. God will guide you...”

“No! I’m sorry, but, no! I can’t...No way!”

“He’ll show you the path...” Now the padre was standing up and buttoning his coat.

“No, Padre, sit back down here! You can’t leave...”

“Time to go, my son. I’m counting on you...and so are the children. Their mothers already know you’ll be taking charge.”

“Padre! Padre, come back here!” I called to the back of his head as he was leaving. At the door he stopped, turned, made the sign of the cross in my direction, then wheeled about and was out the door.

It was the last time I would see him for the next several years.

Now, my world was thrown into an uproar. I had trouble working. I couldn’t sleep. I was irritable and distracted. Why on earth had I ever gotten involved with this damnable priest and his school?

But now knowing about it, having written about it, having made it part of me, how could I just abandon it and the kids. Ignorance was bliss. Knowing came with accountability.

Then again, what did it have to do with me? Why should I feel duty-bound? Well, fool, I told myself, because it’s all your fault that the padre had to once again go into exile. If I’d kept my big nose out of his business, he could have kept on running his school forever and no one would have been the wiser, because, in the end, the powers that be always care more about crushing any rebellious unifying force than about projects that promote the greater good.

No question about it. I was stuck. I decided, however, to give myself a week or so to think about it, to study my next move. But the week hadn’t passed before a delegation of mothers from the Escuelita de Asís showed up at the newspaper to talk to me. The padre had told them that I was in charge from now on. What, they wanted to know, was I prepared to do?

First, I called the little group of volunteers who had been helping out and made them aware of the situation. The said that, of course, they would pitch in and do everything that they could, but that, without the padre, it wasn’t going to be easy. He was the heart and soul of the school and still the one who raised the most aid with his persistent cold-calling. Couldn’t I take a more leading role?

I suggested we try to find some permanent benefactors to pay the teacher an actual salary so she could take over. They suggested she was a great teacher but not the organizational type. They needed somebody who could really take charge and who knew what he or she was doing.

I started calling everybody I knew in the social action field. They were all sympathetic and had liked my articles but said, to a man and woman, that they already had too much on their plates. Growing more and more anxious, I cursed the priest under my breath. God would show me the way. God would be my guide. God would provide. “Yeah right,” I thought. “My ass He will!” I suddenly realized that I was at a complete loss, out of ideas, out of my depth, and truly unable to take it on myself.

Then it happened. In fact, it happened the day after I’d almost decided there was nothing more I could do. Sitting at my desk in the editorial department at the newspaper I got a call from Reception. A young woman was there to see me.

“I’m pretty busy right now,” I said. “Did she say what she wants?”

“She said a mutual friend said she should come see you,” the receptionist said. She told me the friend’s name and I knew I couldn’t say no.

The young woman in question was tall and slim with paper-white skin and shiny black hair. She said her name was Martha. She was Canadian.

“And what are you doing in Buenos Aires,” I asked.

“My boyfriend’s from here. We decided to come live here for a while. He got a good job offer. I’m kind of at loose ends right now. I’m looking for something to do.”

“Well,” I said, “we don’t have any staff openings right now, but you could do some free-lance work for us. I’m afraid it doesn’t pay much though.”

“Like I say,” she answered, “for the moment, we’re okay with my boyfriend’s job. Maybe I could do some work for you on social issues. I have a lot of experience in that field.”

“In Canada?”

“No. India.”

“Really?”

“Yes, that’s where I met my boyfriend. We were doing volunteer work there. But I came down with TB and we had to leave. I’m all better now and want to jump back into something. I’m hoping to do some kind of similar social work here.”

Suddenly, I could feel myself getting excited.

“Really? What exactly were you doing there?”

“We were working in Calcutta, with Mother Teresa, in the organization of her children’s missions.”

“Lady,” I said, “have I ever got a job for you!”     

PADRE ARGENTINO PART 1—THE HANDWRITING SPECIALIST

“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