Mendoza

I haven’t written about my childhood for several days. I should be working now, not writing. But I just washed my hands in the kitchen, and saw the little milk pot that belonged to my grandmother and to Gladys and I’m brought back to my childhood. It’s amazing, for so many, many years I didn’t think of my childhood, and suddenly I think so much about it. It must be because I’m getting old. Or because of Gladys. It’s been two years since her death, and once again I blocked the date from my mind, just three days ago. But she lives in my heart and my mind all the time. I wish she would know that. I know she knew how much I loved her.

Back to the story. The story of my life before I was 6. Somehow it’s easier to organize my memories as pre-apartment and post-apartment, pre-elementary school and elementary school. A real person writing a real biography wouldn’t spend so much time that far in the past.
When I was 5, it must have been the summer before I turned 6, my whole family, my parents, David, Gabriela and I – as well as Granny and Gladys, went on vacation to Mendoza. Mendoza, one of Argentina’s provinces, is famous for its wines, for Aconcagua (the tallest mountain in the western hemisphere) and for being the plaza from which San Martín, Argentina’s version of George Washington, crossed the Andes to liberate Chile. We went to Mendoza because my father had a very good friend, a mate from college, living there. An incredibly nice guy, who had children around our same age. In Mendoza we stayed in Villa Catalina, an old colonial-style house that belonged to this friend. I remember the house faintly. There was a central patio, and all the rooms opened to it. You had to cross it to go to the small kitchen – I think I remember my mother drinking mate there, which would be strange because I don’t remember either of my parents as being big mate drinkers. We were more the type of person who had 5 o’clock tea – albeit at varying times.
One of this friend’s daughters had left some flowers, gardenias I think, in what she thought would be our bedroom – we slept in the other one, though.
I remember that the oldest sister was tall and pretty, the younger one, around my age, owned a scooter, the boy played with my brother. They were very nice. We also met their cousins, in my mind they are two dark-haired girls in white dresses. One of them, she couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7, already played the piano. Their father was also very nice, the type of guy who loves playing with kids. I remember him visiting us at our weekend home years later and we being very excited about it. I’d love for my girls to have a grown up that liked to play with children as much as him and my uncle Pancho – but I think those men are rare.
Back then I don’t think I liked the house, but my appreciation of colonial homes has increased over the years.
There is one bad memory, however. One day I was in the patio playing with a medicine bottle. It broke and the glass incrusted into my hand. You can imagine how painful it was to have it taken out.
Granny and Gladys stayed at Marina’s house – Marina being the mother of this friend. I have a vague memory of her also being protestant – being protestant in a Catholic country was a pretty big issue during my childhood. My grandmother, the daughter and grand-daughter of German immigrants, had been brought up as Lutheran. In La Plata, not finding a Lutheran church, she joined the Methodists. There were (are?) so few protestants in Argentina that the pastors from all the different denominations went to the same seminary in any case. Perhaps not the baptists. I don’t know if there was another Protestant church in La Plata. But my adventures with the church and religion merit a whole posting of their own.
In Mendoza, we went to visit the monument to San Martin – pictured at the left. I climbed it a little bit, my brother much more, and my mother was very afraid he’d fall. He would have wanted to climb it all the way to the top.
We also went shopping, my father’s friend had a store where they sold handicrafts as well. My mother bought us cardigans made from the wool of vicuñas, an extremely soft relative of the llama that lives in the Andes.
We spent a few days in Potrerillos, in a house up in the Andean mountains. Granny and Gladys came with us – the picture below shows us all in the front of the house. I don’t know how long we stayed there, perhaps only a couple of nights (how long was our trip to Mendoza anyway? Two weeks? A month?), but one of those nights my father forgot to turn off the lights of the car. The next day, as you can guess, the battery was drained. Unfortunately, we were pretty much incommunicado in the Potrerillos house. Fortunately we were up a steep hill – I think my father got the car working by “driving” down the hill.


We had fun during that trip – I remember driving all over the place singing:

Vamos de paseo, ti ti ti
en un auto feo, ti ti ti
pero no me importa, ti ti ti
porque llevo torta, ti ti ti
Por el tunel pasaré
la bocina tocaré…
The song goes on, I’m not sure of the lyrics anymore. I thought it was a song by Palito Ortega, but looking it up I see it was a song by Pipo Pescador sang by Gaby, Fofó y Miliki – los payasos de la tele. I loved the payasos when I was a little kid. They were a troupe of Spanish “clows”, one of them, Gaby I think, dressed in formal wear – the other ones wore long t-shirts and clown noses. They had tons of songs which I memorized as a child – they were also often sang at birthday parties. One of them said “my beard has three hairs, three hairs has my beard, and if it didn’t have three hairs, it wouldn’t be my beard”. Then you’d repeat it skipping a word, later two, and so on until there was only one word left. They had many other songs that I loved as well – including a birthday song, la gallina turuleca and hola don pepito. There are some videos of the program in YouTube. I wonder what happened to them (when I finish this, I’ll go read the wikipedia entry). I remember the name Pipo Pescador, and I have a faint image of someone with bagpipes, but I really don’t remember him at all.
We drove through many tunnels in the mountains of Mendoza – aka the Andes. We also drove across small streams of water that suddenly became rivers. At one point, I even got to steer the car sitting on my father’s lap. I felt so grown up.
We also bathed in mountain streams. In one, my brother and I scared each other with branches, saying that they were snakes. Perhaps we scared my mother. One of the branches, or snakes, was green.
One day, we went to San Juan, a neighboring province, known as well for its wine, and for being the home province of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a writer and politician who became the symbol of “teachers” in Argentina – reportedly for promoting education and teaching in Argentina. The day of his death is celebrated as “teacher’s day”. I still remember all the words to the Anthem to Sarmiento. He came from a poor family, I think his father died when he was young and his mother supported him by knitting in a huge loom under the fig tree (this is something all Argentinian little children learn in school – which supports my point that most time spent in school is wasted learning useless facts). In San Juan, we visited his house, saw the loom (which was probably not hers) and sat under the tree. In later years I’d be embarrassed of the picture showing me without my t-shirt.


I think it was when we returned from this trip that we found out about Fernando’s illness, his supposed hepatitis which would too soon be diagnosed as leukemia.