Añoro
Flags waving in a winter breeze. Photo by Deborah Stokol, Argentina, 2010.
Based on the memories of my uncle, “Tio,” Alberto (or my reimagination of the inherited narrative of a reimagination)
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
-Jorge Luis Borges
We were young. It was the Buenos Aires of 1950. The Spanish Civil War was so recent all the Argentinean Spaniards (of which there were many) still divided themselves into those two requisite–passionate–camps of “Nationalist” and “Republican.” Hemingway and Orwell weren’t yet part of the canon; the things they described were more news than they were fictional responses to history.
His family, of course, belonged to the Republican camp. They were sophisticates. It could not have been any other way.
The San Telmo of then had more character. But then, poorer neighborhoods tend to have “character” before they become trendy, expensive—gentrified. So it was with San Telmo—that bastion of tenement living, those conventillos that piled bedroom onto squalid bedroom, human onto yet foreign human, til they surrounded the gritty central courtyard. But I loved it.
Now, “artists” fight for lofts there, and the flea market is as legendary as it is overpriced. Each dulce de leche-filled crepe costs $6 pesos. I can’t even imagine what that would have bought us. People were more careful with their money. But that was a different time, and things were different then.
American folks and saucer-eyed students flock there in droves. “I love Buenos!” they proclaim with enthusiasm, christening the city with a name no native would call its worn streets. They bandy their scarves and silver earrings, their new love for the bandoneon and the exchange rate. But we’re grateful they visit.
I don’t miss the past. But “lo añoro.” That is to say, I’m wistful; I yearn. Those years were grand—those years of adolescence and idealistic intellectualism. He and I had been such good friends, and we were young.
His name was Eduardo Luz-Stratford*—the ‘Luz’ a product of his father’s Spanish heritage, the ‘Stratford’ a badge of English pride. Like me, he was 16. But unlike me, he expressed his indolence with fervor, practically sounding his cultured yet Barbaric yawp from the rooftops of San Telmo.
His house lay but four blocks from my parents’ apartment, but it seemed to inhabit a distant country. A palacette it was—at least at first glance. Small when compared to Xanadu, it was a palace nevertheless. His parents, Francophiles like most, had built it in the modern “French” style, and it offered a staircase I thought of as ‘ambitious.’ I peered at its infinity with wonder. But the wonder I sustained for that staircase was nothing when compared to the one I held for the house’s shocking interior.
It was a disaster. I couldn’t reconcile the building’s outside with the raucous chaos taking place within its otherwise majestic- seeming walls. These folks ran a publishing house and clearly had money.
But from the looks of it, they had disavowed their material goods or just could not recognize their heads from their asses (or the manner in which the first had found itself lodged so deeply within the second).
The sofas looked like they’d been clawed by a thousand feral cats. The Argentinean penchant for exaggeration even fails me here. But allow me to convince you that torn wallpapers, dirt-covered floors, bric-a-brac tossed indeterminately and clearly without care across the entirety of floor are simply the commencement of a long list of human messes riddling the interior of the Luz-Stratford home.
The house had four, no five, floors. I’d never before seen the like and have never since seen it. Eduardo took it all as a matter of course. The only “course” to which he paid any heed.
“Come on!” I’d shout from outside. “We’ll be late for school!” But his father, bedraggled and amused, a permissive robe-wearer, would simply seek his son and ask whether he wanted in on that whole high school thing, shrugging to me as if to say “no dice; que se joda.”
The pair would invite me in, and I, responsible young man that I was, would refuse, guarding my dignity while pronouncing the importance of an institutional education.
And I stuck to my guns for a few days, but before long, I’d entered that house, that sanctuary of sloth, ascended those imposing stairs. Climbing my way to the highest reaches, I found a sort of paradise.
Eduardo ushered me into a world of philosophy and depth, a world of auto-dictaticism and “who needs school, anyway?” There was cigarette smoke, and through its prophetic clouds, I could see that these were the happiest days of my life.
I was larger than life; I was invincible. I was 16.
And the basement of that house would have left Aladdin slack-jawed and mute. Piles of dusty novels filled the large room. In the center of this treasure lay a ping-pong table, and we alternated between edification and competition. Late at night, the sound of the paddle hitting the ball would echo in my head as the words of the books I’d read would swim before my closed eyes and lull me to sleep.
We smoked and played chess. We’d engage in these games all day, fancying ourselves young Zweigs or Jack Londons. We’d play for hours. Sometimes I’d play white, others, black. The game would absorb us.
I’ve never played again, cannot. The association’s too fixed, the game too central to a time gone. It exists only in my memory now.
Eduardo would read, and he’d lead me through his maze of books. We were leftists; we were idealists. Peron was in power—the first time. We hated him.
I became intimately acquainted with Hesse and with Maugham, and with their love of Eastern philosophy. Eduardo and I attempted to lose our corporeal shells, tried to free our souls to visit the stars as their protagonists had. And with a pang, we felt our hopes crash down, dead or disappointed, as our souls went nowhere our bodies could not.
I stopped going to school.
Eduardo, his father, another friend and I would sequester ourselves in the house, surrendering our minds to the life lessons taught by these masters. We blew smoke rings like the men we thought we were and transcended materialism in the arms of literature. We were thinkers; we were wonderers; we were young.
And then one day, my head cleared.
I emerged from the palace to choose university. I studied civil engineering, made new friends, read the new—exciting!—words of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, serialized each week in the magazines I eagerly tore off the racks and raced home to read.
But even at school, I worshipped at the altar of my recent memory, every day yearning for that golden time with Luz-Stratford, my philosopher friend. I itched for vacation time, for the moment I would come home to “Baires,” as we called it.
And that moment finally came. I traveled home during a school break, eager to meet him and to return to the life I’d left behind.
But things were different now. The boys had changed, seemed immature, stagnating in a mire of their own making. Their goals seemed childish, their dreams, irrelevant.
Maybe, I thought, it wasn’t they who’d changed, but I. I heard their talk, found it irritating, the ceaseless chatter of the aimless. I had different dreams and new goals now.
I have a wife, three children, five grandchildren and a father-in-law. My old friends lived a certain dream but refused to awaken from its pall. I likened them to those dwelling in opium dens. Their ways intoxicated me like the drug, but I found them too heavy, superfluous, unhealthy.
Eduardo’s since written many books. I’ve long since stopped poring over fiction, and I stopped smoking after my second heart attack. I am still an engineer.
But that time—-that time to me is still golden. Eduardo may have changed. Or perhaps I did. Yet those moments, filled with chess and books, smokes and invincibility, remain preserved in the mausoleum of my memory, enthroned like the mummies in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where one daughter once lived and my son still does. I find those bandaged recollections beautiful. Because we were young.
*This name has been changed.
Wonderfully written. I can “see” the palace, the mess, the smoke. I can hear the endless discussions and then, the feeling of loss. The realization that at least for some , life goes on. Life changes you, but memories are forever unmovable. Thanks for this lovely piece.
Debbie, what beautiful writing! I love your parallel between lives lived on or outside the beaten path. He had to be an engineer… a civil, no less, right?
Most interesting story beautifully written.
Alberto made a success of his life as an engineer, father and grandfather;
it would be interesting to know what happened to the Stratford clan.