The Distance Between Us. Renato Cisneros

Luis Federico Cisneros Vizquerra, of the Chorrillos Military School, is dismissed. Pass this document to the cavalry office to be appended to the personal file of the abovementioned officer.

      That day in the Little Pentagon sixty years later, the missive’s curtness remained intact. Its harshness hadn’t aged. The revelation led to a storm of speculation on my part. Did my father renounce Betty, given the impossibility of abandoning his military education? Or was it she who ended the engagement, upon learning of the Army’s response? Did they try to carry on? Did they make any promises to each other? Where might those letters be? Did the family get involved? How long did they remain in touch? Did they ever see each other again? Which of the two was the first to embark on a new life?

      I felt that I was peering into a ravine at night, blindfolded. I took a few further pictures of the file, swapped numbers with deputy official Pazos and left the headquarters building as fast as I could. I decided to walk home. I suppose there must have been cars and people on the streets, but I remember nothing. I can just about picture myself advancing down the narrow, tree-lined streets that run parallel to Angamos Ave., then crossing under the Primavera bridge, turning the corner onto El Polo Ave., thinking about the randomness of this story, of the direct repercussion its conclusion had on my existence. What would have happened if the Inspector General had woken up in a better mood that day in 1947 and, persuaded by the Director of the Officers’ School, given my father the green light to marry? Would the plan with Beatriz have come together? Would they have married? Would they have had as many children as they ended up having with other people? Who would I be? In which of these imaginary children would I have been incarnated? Would they have divorced, or grown old together, looking at those photos of their summer in Mar del Plata from time to time? Were there even photos of their summer in Mar del Plata?

      As these questions piled up in my head, I was suddenly moved by a sense of sadness at this frustrated marriage, as well as shame or anger at discovering like this – snooping – the reasons why it had never taken place. I also felt I was betraying someone with all this digging around, though I wasn’t sure who. From the moment I left the military headquarters I was obsessed with Beatriz Abdulá. Before I rang the doorbell at my mother Cecilia Zaldívar’s house, where she was waiting for me to have lunch, I had enough energy left to fire off another burst of internal questions. Is Betty still alive? Is she in Buenos Aires? Perhaps in Villa Devoto? What if I were to look for her? What if I were to write to her? What if she were to reply to me?

      Chapter 4

      Twenty years can pass since you buried your father without asking yourself anything specific about the ravages caused by his absence. But just when you think you’ve grown used to it, just when you’re certain that you’ve got over his disappearance, an ache begins to eat away at you. The ache awakens your curiosity. The curiosity leads you to ask questions, to seek out information. Little by little you come to realise that you’re no longer convinced by what you’ve been told for so many years about your father’s life. Or worse: you realise that what your own father said about his life no longer seems trustworthy. The accounts that always sounded accurate and sufficient become confused and contradictory, no longer add up, collide noisily with the questions that have been amassing inside you since he died. Once these emerge and rise to the surface, they eventually form a solid islet on which you find yourself washed up, a sole survivor of the wreck.

      The thing that gets to you is not knowing. Not being certain and yet suspecting so much. Not knowing means you lack refuge, and a lack of refuge leaves you exposed to the elements: which is why it troubles you, slows you down, leaves you cold. So you start digging things up. To find out if you really knew your father or only glimpsed him in passing. To find out just how inexact or distorted your scattered memories – your family around the table, chatting after lunch – really are. To find out what is concealed in those oft-repeated anecdotes, recounted as smooth parabolas precisely charting the surface of a life, but never revealing its intimate workings. What sawn-off truth is hidden behind these domestic tales whose sole purpose is to forge a tired mythology that no longer serves its purpose, because it can’t keep countering those stark, stifled and colossal questions that now torment your mind.

      Where are the authentic stories and photographs of the traumatic, aberrant passages that don’t belong to your father’s official history, but are just as important – if not more so – to the construction of his identity as the moments of glory or triumph? Where is the album of negatives, of the veiled, shameful or unspeakable acts that also took place, but which no one bothers to recount? As a child, your family lies to you to shelter you from disappointment. As an adult, you no longer care to ask, accustomed as you are to the family’s version of events. You yourself circulate, repeat and defend events in your father’s life that you never witnessed, studied or verified. Death alone – inflaming your restlessness, multiplying your doubts – helps to correct the lies you’ve always heard. It allows you to swap them, not for truths but for other lies, lies that are more truly your own, more personal, more portable. As sorrowful as death may be, it can provide glimpses of a wisdom that, in the right minds, proves illuminating, fearful, anarchic. Death is more alive than your own life because it penetrates it, invades it, occupies it, eclipses it, suppresses it and studies it, calling your life into question, ridiculing it. There are questions death provokes that cannot be answered in life. Life lacks the words to talk about death because death has consumed them all. And while death knows a great deal about life, life knows absolutely nothing about death.

      * * *

      I know that I’ll never find peace if I don’t write this novel. How can I be sure that what my father passed on to me wasn’t first passed on to him? Were his surliness and reserve all his own, or were they implanted in him before birth? Did his melancholy belong entirely to him, or was it the trace left by something bigger, something that preceded him? What ancestral wellspring fed his rage? What was the root of his arrogance? We often blame our parents for defects we believe are theirs alone, without considering that they might be geological faults, constitutional failures: ulcers that have persisted for centuries or generations without anyone trying to extirpate or to cure them; the ghosts of long-dead starfish that have clung to a rocky undersea outcrop for aeons, and remain there, invisible, demanding our touch.

      If I wish to understand my father, I must identify where we overlap, shed light on the areas of darkness, search for contrast, solve the riddles I had once set aside. If I succeed in understanding who he was before I was born, perhaps I’ll be able to understand who I am now that he’s dead. These two vast questions underpin the enigma that obsesses me. Who he was before me. Who I am after him. This, in short, is my goal: to bring together these two half-men.

      At the same time, I must also explore his relationship with his own father, whom he rarely mentioned and only through tears. What peculiar electricity moved between them that atrophied his affection and stunted his spontaneity? I’ll have to travel up that blind, muddy ravine until I find something that starts to make sense. How hard have generations of Cisneros children struggled to discover something, anything real, about the father they had? How much did they undergo as children that they never forgave as adults? How much did they see as sons that they never fully metabolised and then suppressed when it was their turn to be fathers? How many of them have gone to their graves still harbouring bitter suspicions without ever confirming or untangling them, without attributing them to anyone or anything in particular?

      I must exhume these piled-up corpses, bring them out into the light, dissect them, perform a general autopsy. Not to know what killed them, but to understand what the hell had animated them.

      * * *

      Monday 9 July 2007 was marked by a frenzy of events that seemed to have been arranged or rigged by some sort of cosmic plan. I was a few days into my first visit to Buenos Aires, as part of my incipient family research. I had travelled there with a friend, Rafael Palacios, who was also new to the city. Over the previous week all Argentina had experienced a dramatic drop in temperature. According to the National Meteorological Service, the cold – which was also affecting parts of Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil – was reaching polar extremes. That Monday, which was also Argentina’s Independence Day, was no exception: we were at zero degrees Celsius. Bundled up as if heading into the foothills of the Himalayas,