I arrived at Miramar for work, to perform at the Kafandra bar. The function was good. I had to leave the hotel at 12pm. My transfer to Camet airport picked me up at six in the afternoon. Up until that point I had rented a tent at a spa.
As if time were rewound, in tent 47 Suache, my childhood friend, appeared: as many summers in Miramar as there were winters on the forehead of the narrator of Vvió una noche.
More than anywhere else, our childhood took place in front of that sea, like that of Serrat in the Mediterranean. If there is an Argentine coastal city that is somehow linked to that still sea that runs from Algeciras to Tel Aviv, it is undoubtedly Miramar. We lightly bumped fists with Suache and wondered about our lives. She was there with her grandchildren, a girl and a boy, aged 4 and 6 respectively. He was a young grandfather.
“On this beach I last saw a boatman,” he revealed. I don’t remember how long ago.
“You’re very lucky to remember that,” I conceded. I would pay for a dozen wafers to remember the last time I ate one.
The waffles were flat cone puffs of pastry. For some reason we children of the time considered that mortar a sweet, perhaps more suitable for building a house. Hansel and Gretel. The vendors included a resource that set them apart: They loaded the pods inside a large white metal cylinder, on whose top base a roulette wheel ran. The customer paid a flat fee, which purchased two wafers. But the seller would spin the roulette wheel, with a compass-like needle instead of the ball: the customer could receive as many extra wafers as his luck dictated. The maximum was twelve. I don’t know if receiving twelve hosts, if you had no one to share them with, was considered a reward or a punishment. But between friends, brothers and cousins, there was never enough.
“I remember when I last saw your father,” I said.
An outburst. I’ve never liked sand. I paid the price of stepping on it to get closer to the sea (just as I paid the price of the host, which I didn’t like, as a child, only to see the roulette needle spin, which dazzled me). After fifty years not even the proximity to the sea was worth it. I only stayed there until I picked up the truck. Perhaps the silence, the having nothing to talk about with Suache, after so much life together, made me pronounce that heresy. Suache nodded with a sadness devoid of tragedy.
That summer of our eight years, when his father was gone forever, was a traumatic event. For a while they thought he was dead. He had left a trail of unpaid bills. There was talk of kidnapping, of settling accounts. Once, more than thirty years after his disappearance, they told me this story: he had gone to sea at night with a woman, also from the spa. Tony, as Suache’s father was called, had drowned. The panicked woman had never spoken. Until thirty years later. I didn’t believe in the species at the time, but I found it interesting. Now Suache has completely undone it:
“He came in person shortly before he died,” she summarized, pointing to her male grandchild. He even gave him a Matchbox car. I have no idea where he got it from. A fortune, for sure. He gave him the car and he really died.
The ice cream vendor passed by: Suache bought two bottles of water, one for each grandchild, and a cone of his own.
“My old man wouldn’t buy me a Conogol even if I won it at roulette,” he said.
He asked me if I wanted one, but I joked:
-A host.
“I’ll leave the empty cone for you if you want,” he smiled.
-What did you tell him when you saw him again? -I consulted-. What did he say?
“I always knew where I was,” Suache confessed.
My eyes opened in a way that allowed me to see the past. Behind the sea there was no Africa. Just Suache and me, aged eight (everyone else was extra). His father was missing. This meant that our lives had no anchor. Not even we children were safe. But now he discovered, like a volcano carved into the shore, that the sacred fire of knowledge had indeed belonged to Suache. While I remained uncertain: a variant of the orphanage.
-That afternoon, my old man disguised himself as a barquillero. He left the spa with me, I was hiding in the wafer container. He put me in the back seat of the car. When we passed the Arch, on the side of the road, he told me that he had to run. That he didn’t say anything to anyone. Not even my mother. But I always knew where I was. He always communicated with me. My mother, as you know, from the first debts, took refuge in Armando. That walk from the Arch to the spa, at the age of eight, without telling anyone, was the longest of my life.
-Were there wafers in the bin? -I asked stupidly-.
Suache nodded.
-They saw him pass in front of the baths shouting “hosts”. But no one recognized him. It seemed spectacular to me, helping him escape like that.
– Did he sell any wafers while you were in the garbage?
Suache denied it.
-Like those bus drivers you see passing by when you’re at the stop.
-And now the whole family has come? -I tried to get out of that train of melancholy.
-Luca is Emanuele’s son. Sofi is Meli’s daughter. I no longer have a wife. They spend the weekend with me.
“I can’t imagine what it will be like to go around hiding in the barquillero’s bin,” I rewound, just as time had done without my consent.
“It depends,” Suache conditions. If your father takes you…
Neither the barquilleros, nor our parents, nor an infinite number of things that made me pay the price of treading the sand, would ever return. But they had given me an afternoon with the truth. Now I could go back to Buenos Aires.
Source: Clarin
