Having lived in four countries (Argentina, Mexico, USA[Texas] and Canada I have met quite a few remarkable women . Of one of them, my Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward , I have written about lots in these parts.
There is one woman that was featured in one of my first blogs in March 2006. I think I want to revisit it with more detail.
Sara López Colodrero the Irureta Goyena was married to my uncle Antonio de Irureta Goyena. They had a son Jorge Wenceslao (alive and well now living half of the year in Buenos Aires and the other half in in Goya, Province of Corrientes). We were good friends.
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| Left to right - my mother, me, my grandmother, Tía Sarita, Uncle Tony & Wency- my mother and grandmother are wearing Filipino dresses and my Uncle Tony a Filipino Barong Tagalog |
It was in 1950 when my mother hired a photographer to take
portraits of us in our long and narrow garden in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood
of Coghlan (named after an English railway engineer). The photographs are inside a nice red leather album that I have in my possession.
My Tía Sarita had an aunt caller Raquel who owned a very large ranch called Santa Teresita in Corrientes. It was perhaps in 1951 that Tía Sarita, Uncle Tony, Wency, my mother and I boarded a stern paddle wheeler that took us up on the Paraná River to the capital of the Province of Corrientes, Goya. On the way we would spot yacarés (crocodile in the indigenous language of Northern Argentina and Paraguay, Guaraní which is far more melodious than Italian ). From Goya we went on an open bed truck in the evening to Santa Teresita. Such was the transparency of the sky that I could have read a book in the massive brilliance of the Southern sky where I could spot the Southern Cross.
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| Alex & Wency |
An epiphany of light & the Southern Cross
The ranch was big enough that it took de sol a sol (from sunup to sundown) on a horse to traverse it.
One day I saw a gaucho leaning against a tree sipping on a mate. It was a routine as he was there every day until one day he wasn’t. I asked Tía Raquel what had happened. She told me that another gaucho had borrowed the mate without permission so the under-the-tree gaucho had knifed and killed him. Tía Sarita had told him to vanish so that the authorities would not find him.
One day we went swimming in the Río Corrientes. We were not allowed to enter the water until a gaucho on a horse went into the river and trotted around. It seems that those nasty piranhas did not like the smell of a horse and would go to other parts.
In all of this was my Tía Sarita who said little and smiled even less. One hot afternoon I was told to take a siesta. Outside my window I heard my mother and Tía Sarita chatting. My mother was told, “Our boys are almost men. Next year when we return (we didn’t) we should have them lie with two indias so they can find out what it is to be a man.”
Before I left Argentina, after my military service in the Argentine Navy, sometime in October of 1966, I visited my Tía Sarita. She gave me three gifts. One was Sóngoro Cosongo by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillen. She placed in my hand a switchblade and told me I need to protect myself in my journey back to my mother in Mexico in an Argentine merchant marine ship. The third gift was a little bottle of whale oil so that my switchblade would open quickly.
Looking back at this women I can state that she was singly responsible for introducing me to poetry (a poetry I could understand. This led to discovering that other Cuban, he the inventor of magic realism, Alejo Carpentier and more recently the Cuban Raymond Chandler, Leonardo Padura.
I cannot write her for sure if it was because of her or my grandmother that I was introduced to Ernesto Lecuona who my grandmother said was the Cuban Gershwin. Below is a link to my fave composition of his La Malagueña. There is another Malagueña composed by Mexican Agustín Lara.
The date inside my Sóngoro Cosongo of 1967 in the leading photograph is wrong. It should be 1966
