Volver (To Return)

Buenos Aires, late 1980s-early 1990s.

After many years of absence, I returned to BA in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was then that I recovered two missing heirlooms from my childhood. One is Dad’s Radius camp stove, the other is Mom’s cross-stitched tablecloth. They are now in the US with me. The stove is earmarked for my grandson Finn, who has admired it ever since he saw it sitting at home. The tablecloth is so fragile that it mostly keeps me company from the closet. 

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I flew back to Buenos Aires in 1989, halfway through my psychoanalysis. My absence of fifteen years had been partly involuntary and partly self-imposed. In 1976, the year I defended my PhD thesis, my student deferments to the Argentine army had run out and I received an order to return and be conscripted. That year also marked the start of the Argentine Dirty War, a bloody terror campaign imposed by the military dictatorship. So, I dodged being drafted and became a deserter. An arrest order was waiting at Ezeiza Airport in case I changed my mind. Part of my absence, however, had been voluntary. Throughout the 1980s I was forcing myself to emigrate emotionally into the US and to become an American. Of course, I was an American—a South American to be precise. But I was intent on growing into that variety that occupies the part of the continent north of the Rio Grande and south of Lake Superior. 

The Dirty War had ended in 1983, democracy had returned, and Presidente Raul Alfonsín had issued an amnesty to deserters. My arrest warrant was no longer waiting for my return. My emotional emigration was well on its way: I was married with kids, lived in the Washington suburbs, and had a job as a US lawyer. It does not get more American than that. Plus, Buenos Aires had started calling. My therapy was always full of dreams, which I dutifully wrote down on a night-table notebook and then analyzed during sessions. The dreams preceding my long-postponed return were full of beckoning from BA.

In 1989, on the first of several trips, I went alone. My marriage to Laurie was on the rocks, my daughters were still too young. As the plane landed at Ezeiza Airport I could barely contain my excitement at coming “home” and seeing dear friends again. The thrill, however, was short-lived. During our ride into the city, I looked out at a Buenos Aires I did not recognize. Perhaps more accurately, it was a BA that I had forgotten. The road from the airport was a landscape of weedy parks full of trash, smoggy bus exhausts, and smoking pedestrians. By the side of the road, I could see an increasing number of villas miseria, as the cardboard-and-tin slums are known. This was not the BA of my dreams, not my idealized hometown. This felt like an unfamiliar, congested Latin American city, far from the Southern Paris of my fantasies. 

At first, I thought that my strange feelings were due to the excited chatter of my long-awaited reunion with BA friends who had come to pick me up. But that's not what my feelings were. They were a mix of longing and dread. I held on to the door handle of the car with a grip that bordered on panic. I hated these feelings and I did not share them with my friends. I remained silent for the rest of the ride. Or I pretended admiration as one or another of my buddies proudly called my attention to a new highway or shopping center that had sprung up since my visit of fifteen years earlier. My trip into the city was sheer misery. I struggled with the notion that perhaps I had become what I had always been afraid of becoming: a quietly critical and condescending tourist. Maybe I was now an ugly American spoiled by the non-smoking restaurants, emission controls, and respect for public trash-cans "back home" in the US. This was no longer my home. I was sitting in the car mourning the loss. 

Carlos Gardel, the great tango singer of the 1930s, who lived most of his life outside of Argentina and died in exile in Colombia, used to sing of his trepidation of going back, in Volver, To Return. The schmaltzy tango—are there any others?—has become the lament of  homecoming émigrés:  Volver . . . con la frente marchita. . . 

To return. . . with my forehead all wrinkled / My temples turned silver by time’s falling snow / To feel. . . that one’s life is a twinkle / That two decades are nothing [. . .] / To live. . . with the soul firmly clinging / To one sweet remembrance / That makes me weep so.

Volver, sang in Gardel's nasal voice, played insistently in my head during the first day. I had finally come back to see the BA of my dreams, and my temples were not even silvery. But instead of a joyful reunion, the city was causing me sorrow. The hometown of my childhood illusions was gone. I ached to have it back, but I knew that from now on it would only exist in my heart. The next day I decided to leave the old BA in the past where it belonged, and my mood changed. I returned to my apartment in barrio Coghlan, my friends, my Spanish. I spotted little Jorgito again, happily skipping through the piles of leaves on his way to school. This time I absolutely recognized him as a younger me. Gone was the scary split of two decades earlier. 

In 1991, a year after my separation, I again traveled to Buenos Aires, now with my oldest daughter Thalia, who was ten. This time the sadness was replaced by joy and pride. During our week there I happily showed Thalia every corner of the city of my birth. 

An unexpected outcome of my returns to BA was to recover objects that I had left behind when I disposed of them before emigrating. Many of the objects had disappeared in the trash and were forever unrecoverable. I had left others with my or Mom’s friends, and it was some of those that reappeared almost by chance. By then I had learned on the couch that the objects were symbolic of my parents, and I was finally getting back parts of them. 

One day, as I was visiting with my best friend Micky, he reminded me that he still had Dad’s Radius kerosene stove. Neatly disassembled and kept in its metal box, the Swedish stove had ended up in the middle pile of things in 1968: gifts for my friends. I had left the stove with Micky with whom I had gone on many a camping trip during our teens. I had forgotten about the stove until Micky said that he had kept it in trust for me. I could have it back if I wanted it, he added.

  As we took the stove out of the box and assembled it, I also unpacked long-gone memories of Dad. Dad loved that camp stove. In it he boiled water at our weekend house on stilts in the Rama Negra on the delta of the Paraná River. I saw him produce a mate gourd and heard him praise Swedish innovation. I remembered Dad telling me that none other than Sir Edmund Hillary had carried an identical Radius stove as he climbed Everest in 1953. I also recalled that during my visits with Aunt Carola in Trieste, she had told me that in his young years, her brother Moritz had been a curious and “up-to-date” man. He was always exploring new things, she added. As I recovered the stove in 1991 in Buenos Aires, it time-travelled back with me. First we visited the curious Moritz of early 20th century Smyrna, and then Mauricio, the Dad of my childhood in the 1950s.

Another recovered object was a stitched tablecloth. During my trip with Thalia, we visited dear Nilda, our family’s housekeeper and ersatz Mom of my childhood. She invited us to her modest home in the suburbs of San Martín for an afternoon of memories. She served coffee and facturas, an Argentine croissant filled with dulce de leche. I was moved that Nilda remembered my favorite sweets. Here is a photo of the three of us on that occasion:

We sat and reminisced for hours. Before leaving, Nilda asked me to wait a second, went to her bedroom, and came back with a colorful cloth drooping from a hanger.  

“Te acordás de esto? Do you remember this?” she asked. “You left it with me when you went to Nueva York.”

I was stunned. “Isn’t this . . .  the tablecloth from way back when I was a boy?”

Nilda gave a delighted smile. “Sί . . . te acordás!”

A flood of memories gripped me. Decades earlier, when I was five or six, Mom, Nilda, and Omi worked together on a cross-stitching project. Every night they sat around the dining table and stitched different ends of a template tablecloth in multiple-colored threads. I would watch them from a corner of the living room as they shared this most intimate of women’s labors. At moments they concentrated quietly, at others they laughed, and sometimes they argued about the right color for the right section. Mom translated Nilda’s Spanish into Viennese German for Omi, and then translated Omi’s Shtetl Yiddish back into Spanish for Nilda. The women enjoyed themselves immensely.

I had forgotten about the cross-stitching project until that day. Tears came when Nilda handed me the tablecloth and told me to take it with me. I hugged her for a long time, grateful for the awakening of such cherished memories from long ago. When I returned to the US I made sure that Nilda would have a comfortable retirement. I think she did, until she passed away in the 2010s.

On one of our last days in BA, Thalia and I went to the Tablada Jewish Cemetery to visit my parents’ graves. It was a wintry August, not unlike the chilly 1961 morning when Mom died. We bought flowers at the gates and walked slowly down the monotonous streets bordered with tombstones. Thalia was curious, asking about the rows and rows of graves. In my mind’s ear, I could again hear the squeaky wheel of the cart that had carried Mom’s casket thirty years earlier. As we reached Mom’s grave we stood next to it, on the very spot of my childhood. I relived the moment when, as an eleven-year-old, I stared bewildered at the open hole. It all came back: the adult crowd in a dark forest with me as a numb and tiny rabbit. I looked at my daughter, realized that she too was almost eleven, and felt a deep sadness at the very thought of her losing one of her parents at such young age. And I was also sad for little me, standing there alone three decades earlier. That sadness was a feeling I had not allowed before.  

When Thalia was done arranging flowers on her grandmother’s tombstone, she came over to me. I put my arm around her shoulder and talked to my long-gone mother. “Mom,” I said in English (on the assumption that the dead are multilingual). “I’ve come back and brought you your granddaughter.”

I choked up but didn’t hold back; this time I let the sorrow and the joy flow together. I felt Thalia's squeeze on my hand and her loving smile looking up. At the moment when I saw my daughter put flowers on her grandmother’s tomb, I felt that one of the circles of my life, the one which had shattered long ago by that grave, had started to mend. 

Something else I did during that trip was to lay a tombstone on Dad’s grave, twenty years after his death. It had been a long time coming. It was delayed only by my adolescent anger, which, after several years on Gene’s couch, was finally lifting. Dad’s tomb is in red marble, just like Mom’s, although in a more modern style. It has his years of birth and death, and a Star of David. Under all that, I added an inscription that reassures him—well, it really reassures me—that he is forever on my mind:

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Here are photos of the cross-stitched tablecloth and of Dad’s fully assembled Radius stove. The tablecloth is hanging in our wardrobe. If I pay close attention, I can hear, behind the closet doors, the joint laughter of the three women who loved me so when I was a boy. The Swedish stove is on a display shelf waiting for my grandson Finn. When I give it to him, I will tell him how proud his great-grandfather Mauricio was to boil water on it at our weekend house on stilts out there on the delta of the Paraná River.