The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

108 Café de Flores 1952

Dad rented a room from a German woman who still nourished some hope of victory and secretly idolised Hitler. He shrugged his shoulders with embarrassment when the steel-breasted woman in her floral dress showed me a gramophone record of the Führer’s speeches. He later told me that she had offered him a well-paid desk job for a Nazi association in Argentina, but he had turned it down. My father had obviously learned from his participation in the Second World War that it was best to stay away from that lovely crowd. Most of his time was spent working for a blacksmith, and he led a simple life but let me know if he’d met someone famous on the street. Once, when he was walking through the El Palomar district, he saw the presidential couple drive by in a car, and he talked about it for years. ‘I looked Juan Perón in the eye.’ Even the winter he’d spent in the Russian prison camp hadn’t managed to cure him of his leader-induced paralysis syndrome.

Grandad suffered an unexpected heart attack and died in January 1952. Dad travelled home to the funeral, but I stayed behind. I didn’t feel up to taking the little girl on such a long voyage. She was the apple of my eye and, by spring, was already chatting to me in Spanish and Icelandic. I could just stare at her for days on end and found it difficult to leave her in the care of Juan’s sister, a fourteen-year-old beauty queen, to accompany him to a bar. For the first time, I was truly in love. Of course, I had loved the SS poet, but the love for a child is different from the love for a man. Children don’t desert you, cheat on you, or allow themselves to be shot in the back in an open field. You can trust a child.

And the world had never seen a more beautiful child than Blómey Benítez. It was as if the inner beauty of her father had been able to make her in his own image. I did my utmost to dress her up as much as I could when we went out, even though I couldn’t even afford a patched dress for myself. When the Italian women in La Boca saw me leading her down the path, they nodded their heads at her, but not at me. She belonged to another world. And in due time she would inherit three hundred hectares of land and three thousand living bulls.

On 1 May, the Perón couple held a huge event in the city centre. People poured onto the streets. Juan and I tried to squeeze our way into the main square with little Blómey in a pushchair in the hope of catching a glimpse of the heroes, but the size of the crowd made it impossible. Instead we sat at on outdoor bar on one of the side streets and drank in the atmosphere, which was unlike anything I had experienced. Even though we were in the heart of winter, the weather was mild, the sun sat in the sky, and joy radiated out of every face, not least those of women, who had their star in the First Lady. A number of things could be said about Eva Perón, but no one could deny that she had fought for a profound change that now enabled Argentinian women to vote for the first time. She moved through the city in an open car and waved to the crowds, stuffed with drugs and concealing a support brace under her coat. The woman was extremely ill and died only three months later, at thirty-three years of age.

Juan’s friends had joined us and we had a nice little party there on the pavement. Our child tottered between tables, nibbling at a piece of bread, was given some soda water, and made friends with the owner’s kid, a little boy. I had few worries about her. Like most of the streets of the centre, this one had filled with pedestrians and there were no cars about. But as soon as the speeches started in Plaza de Mayo, people moved away from the street to gather in the broad avenues leading to the square. The voice of the first speaker echoed across the rooftops, while down on the street we stayed chatting, laughing and smoking, the young people of Baires.

One of Juan’s friends was a yellow-toothed poet with a wry sense of humour who was a great raconteur. I kept an eye on Blómey, who crawled under the next table to stretch out for a leaflet on the pavement. Then she stood up to triumphantly show it to the son of the owner, who had made paper aeroplanes out of other leaflets. I noticed that my girl had a dirty face and called her over to me; someone had given her chocolate. I was about to wipe her face when the boy called out to her and she ran after him. They ran straight across the street: the paper aeroplane lay on the other side. I shouted at Blómey to stay off the street, but Juan told me to relax, there were no cars around. The owner, a portly man with a smiling moustache, stood in the open doorway and had overheard us.

‘That’s okay, our son was brought up here. He’s always careful.’

The name of the establishment stood over him in gilded letters against a green background: café de flores.

A cheer suddenly rose from the crowd when the president started to speak. Perón was a powerful orator with a manly voice. My Calderón idolised him, but now as many times before, I got the impression he was trying to contain his admiration. Here, among his cynical friends, it was unbecoming to be a Perónista. The poet launched into a bawdy story about Perón. Regardless of whether it was true, exaggerated, or fabricated, it was hilarious. Juan adjusted his beret and leaned back in his chair, red with wine but ill at ease. And all of a sudden he got on my nerves. Everything he said at home vanished here.

Blómey walked over to me and had learned the name of her new toy: avión de papel. I managed to wipe her mouth, missing one of the punchlines in the poet’s story. Then she found another leaflet and asked me to make another aeroplane for her. Juan took on the task, relieved to be able to sidestep out of the story about the president, and he folded the paper with trembling hands. Then he fired the plane across the street in his tense and unthinking state and I bit my tongue. Blómey chased after it and tried to shoot it back at us, but the plane nosedived to the ground.

Perón finished his speech, and cries of exultation reverberated across the square and gardens. Then it was as if wind started to blow from every corner. It was impossible to describe it, but the neighbourhood, streets and city were electrified with expectation. Someone had turned on the radio in the bar, and a voice mentioned the First Lady’s name, which echoed in every mouth all the way out to the pavement. ‘She’s about to begin.’ I looked Juan in the eye and understood that, as usual, he didn’t have a dime in his pocket. In irritation and pride I suddenly stood up and said I’d settle the bill and headed to the till at the very back of the café.

I had just reached the counter when I heard a thud behind me, when I heard the sound of an engine on the street and that harrowing thud. I turned and blacked out for an instant: it took a few moments for the sunny, bright image of the tables, pavement, and street to develop out of the darkness again. And then I saw that in the middle of it there was a car, an American convertible. A man with a bright hat had stepped out of it. I rushed out, saw Juan stoop over something in front of the car, and then saw something that I have replayed in my mind every day since: my daughter lying on the street and the stream from her skull glistening in the sun, her smile vanished. That was the most difficult thing, to see the look on her face, not even two years old, meeting her maker: it was serene, serious, full of reverence. She had vanished into another world.

I pushed Juan away and bent over the child, losing both mind and heart. The poet friend groped her little wrist and shook his head. Juan enveloped me from behind, and the last thing I saw was the bumper of that car. A shiny chrome American bumper. The sun glared against it, and the crowd’s shadows stretched along it. On the right of the licence plate I spotted countless tiny drops that sparkled in the sun and looked like hundreds of small islands in a broad fjord. In my panic I tried to find those I knew best and the one where Grandma still lived, but I was dead before I could.

I wasn’t reborn until two hours later. To a life different from the ones I’d known before. Life number seven.