In 2019 I traveled to Berlin, invited by the German Embassy in Mexico, to cover the thirty years of the fall of the Wall.
I have published some of my reports in this same column and others in the International section. But there were stories and details that still remain in the pipeline. Experience throws a ball that does not finish until the last day of our life.
At the Farnesina -at that time the leadership of Angela Merkel-, the journalists shared a lunch, offsite, with specialized officials, perhaps one of the most fruitful courses in international politics which I was able to participate.
One of the academics, obviously anonymously, confirmed to me that, contrary to what I believed, China has been conducting an active policy of influence in the liberal West, including through their undergraduate students. My reading of Kissinger had convinced me otherwise.
The building and the view were majestic without being monumental.
Some strange and at the same time rudimentary wooden mechanical lifts, without doors, went up and down in constant motion (I deprived myself of boarding for fear of being guillotined by the device itself).
The same official who had revealed to me the Chinese ambitions, a moment before leaving in one of those tightrope walkers, pointed out to me an old Argentinian, on the outskirts of Berlin, with a story to tell me.
The next day, asking permission from the guide, I traveled according to the exact timetable of the subway and trains from Berlin to the site in question. For one of those inexplicable paradoxes of fate, that city from whose bowels the executioners of my ancestors had comeit was at the same time one of the few in which I didn’t get lost.
The old man who received me, ninety years old, with a barely pasteurized Spanish from more than fifty years in Germany, lived with a monkey. The animal watched us curiously, as if his master were an intruder too. Every now and then he got lost in the kitchen and came back with two biscuits, which he didn’t even bite.
Throughout his childhood, until the dawn of adolescence, the monkey cage at the Buenos Aires Zoo had been the meeting place between my host, whom we’ll call Tito, and his father. It’s not that they lived apart, but Alberto Spato, a lawyer and committed communist militant, had little time for family and fatherhood.
The organized communist faith was problematic in Argentina, as in any other country, including the Soviet Union; He influenced the life of his acolytes: risks, times, subterfuges. And Peronism hadn’t arrived on the scene yet…
Tito recalled with joyful nostalgia the visits to the zoo with his father around 1939. A year earlier the German ambassador had donated a couple of animals to the Buenos Aires zoo, Tito had read in the newspaper, in one of his first journalistic forays. , like an interested child.
Walks to the zoo, not necessarily hand in hand with his father but next door, were Tito’s solace, his highlight of the week. They visited elephant palace, lion den, leopard house and deer huts.
From the variety and exoticism of the different buildings for animals, Tito assumed, they became his vocation as an architect, which for one of those paradoxes of fate – the original sentence is Tito’s – had finally brought him, fifty years ago, to live in Berlin. But his favorite place in the Buenos Aires Zoo was the monkey cage.
His father bought the pet biscuits from the respective shop window at the entrance. Arriving at the monkey cage, he kindly dispensed one: Tito believed it was always the same monkey. A favorite monkey, which Tito, influenced by his father’s readings, called in his heart Manifesto, the Manifesto monkey.
For two years Tito celebrated every Saturday without holding hands. but together with his father, in the zoo of Buenos Aires.
-And what did you feel when they disarmed you? I stupidly interrupted.
“An immeasurable relief,” Tito puzzled me, with his accent somewhere between Buenos Aires, German and neutral. But luckily he continued with his story about him.
In one of his Saturday visits, perhaps because he never shook hands, Tito got lost (as happened to me in almost all other cities). But he was just lost for about ten minutes, when a man, who forcefully captured his attention, saved him; he took his hand and brought him closer to his father. The knight of yore, Tito discovered, he was the German ambassador.
On some other occasion, because that event somehow, not entirely rational, had alerted him; inside the zoo, behind them, Tito guessed that some other individual, from their appearance, could be an official of the German embassy, anonymous like those who had hosted me for lunch at the Foreign Ministry.
The visits to the zoo, together but not hand in hand with the father, less lasting than the dance of experience, lasted for almost two years.
In a cold June, as if Hell was frozen, as they made their way to the exit, passing the same monkey cage they had visited upon entering, Tito saw the lifeless Manifesto monkey, lying on the floor of the cage, surrounded by i his fellows, frightened or perplexed as if they do not realize the phenomenon of death.
He never visited the zoo again with his father; and the relationship between father and son remained so cold, much more than if hell were frozen, colder than the cold war, until Alberto, a centenary, sang applause and ordered himself to move to the ñato farmhouse, in another Buenos Aires winter, in the Belgrano neighborhood. In that icy tone Tito described to me the peaceful death of his father.
-Between 1939 and 1941 -Tito explained to me-, my father left secret messages to the Germans, in the monkey cage, due to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Treaty.
Manifesto was a trained monkey, donated by the Germans to the Buenos Aires Zoo. My father gave him a biscuit and the secret message; behind him came the German official, took the sheet from the hands of the Manifesto and conveyed the message to his superiors in Germany.
“The day I got lost, a particularly important message, received from the ambassador himself… A stroke of luck. In June 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, it all ended and the Party ordered my father to assassinate Manifesto. A poisoned cookie, with no message. Or maybe the poison cookie was the message. I’ve never forgiven him.”
My interlocutor and I were silent for a few seconds, watching his monkey, who kept bringing us cookies, which I had left untouched, on a saucer with a stamp of Patoruzú and the year 1978 with the Argentine flag. . Tito motioned me to taste at least one of the biscuits, but I preferred to refuse.
“I called it Manifesto,” she told me, referring to her pet.
-Need directions to get back to your hotel? she offered me, concluding our conversation with German precision.
“It’s one of the few cities where I don’t get lost,” I replied.
However, on that particular return, I got hugely lost and forgot my hotel name. But this is another story that I never stop revealing.
Source: Clarin
