I have a handwritten letter in an open envelope in my desk addressed to my mother by a Doctor Ramón Andía. I have never read it except to check on the date. It is 19 April 1936. It was written in Manila. My information on what happened when that letter was read, was that my mother went to Manila Bay and threw into the sea an opal ring the doctor had given her. Since I can remember my mother always refused to wear opals and would say that it was a bad luck stone.

 

 

Shortly after (again my information is spotty as I never asked questions) my mother, sister Dolly, brother Tony and their mother Lolita Reyes de Irureta Goyena (a widow) boarded a Japanese ship and sailed for Buenos Aires.

I was born August 31, 1942 and my mother often told me how hard it had been for her to become pregnant. My guess is that she married my father George Waterhouse Hayward in 1940. How they met I have never known as I seemed to not be curious enough to ask any questions.

For as long as I can remember my mother told me that her first love was Doctor Andía and that my father was just second best. 

My father worked as a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald. Around 1952 he would disappear for weeks. I would ask my mother where he was and she would tell me that he had written something Perón had not liked and was spending some weeks in a political prison called Villa Devoto. I was awed by my father's friends. One, called Manrique, had a noticeable bulge under his jacket that was an automatic. Another friend was writer Julio Cortázar for whom I was instructed to buy Argentine cigarettes called Arizonas, the same brand my mother smoked.

My father was an alcoholic. He voluntarily left our Buenos Aires home in Coghlan around 1952. He would come on weekends and take me to the movies. I adored my father even though he sometimes embarrassed me in front of my friends by arriving drunk. My mother could not understand how I would lie with him on the bed (he under the influence of gin) and we would sing My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean & Onward Christian Soldiers.

Somehow she could not fathom how I could love my father and always told me that I would never understand as I would never be a mother. 

When I returned to Mexico in 1967, after my service in the Argentine Navy, my mother shocked me. She told me that she had always loved me because I was her son. She added that she had never liked me. But now she was begining to like me as I had changed.

By the time I understood that, I could have retorted that she would never understand as she would never be a father, she was dead in 1972 and I was the father of two girls.

Because of Perón becoming dictatorial and burning churches, my grandmother convinced my mother that they had to leave Argentina. She sent my mother to Mexico where my Aunt Dolly lived to see if that was a possibility. It was and we moved in 1954.

Initially I told them that I wanted to stay with my father. I was not given a choice and the three of us left without telling my father we were gone.

It is for that reason that in 1964, when I found out I had to comply with military service in Argentina, I decided to go with the motive of finding my father. I did.

Just a few years ago,here in Vancouver, I met a nephew of Doctor Andía and told him about his uncle and my mother.  He said, “Impossible as my uncle was gay.”

Bingo! I can imagine the contents of the letter I have never read.

Today February 1, 2022 I have made a discovery that has delighted me and will probably prevent me from sleeping.

It was in a notebook, that was my chemistry notebook around 1955, when with my friend David Harris we built bombs in tin cans with potassium chlorate and aluminum powder.  We made huge explosions in neighbourhood empty lots. 

The notebook had some of my mother's poems.

 

It was tonight that I found a poem that is definitely a love poem to my father as Doctor Andía did not have blue eyes!

It is so satisfying to find out that my mother loved my father. The date of the poem is September 1956 when she was teaching in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, Mexico in a school for the children of the American Smelting & Refining Company. By the next year I was her student in the 8^th grade with five other boys.  

Below is my mother's poem Doubt.