In the beginning of November 1967 I had just finished my two year obligatory conscription in the Argentine Navy. An admiral had found me passage in an Argentine merchant marine ship ELMA called Río Aguapey.

I was summoned by my Aunt Sara Pereira Rego de Irureta Goyena to her house on Larrea123. She had been married to my mother’s brother Antonio. They had a son, Jorge Wenceslao who was and is a fave cousin of mine.

I sat down in front of the beautiful woman who did not have the normal Buenos Aires accent. She was from the Province of Corrientes. Curiously Corrientes is the only province where they play the accordion instead of the bandonón.

She told me that because I would be going on a slow ship up Brazil and all the way to Veracruz, México that I would need protection. She presented me with an Italian switchblade that in Spanish is called a sevillana (from Seville). She then explained that she had communist tendencies and handed me a poetry book, Sóngoro Cosongo by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén.

It was this book that I read many times on my slow boat to Veracruz that made me note that Jorge Luís Borges was not the only poet around. Guillén even pioneered the invention of words to make them sound Cuban and was one of the first to write about a proud white man whose grandmother was not. The only poem, An Ode To Stalin is the only anomaly in this fabulous book that I had bound in leather by a French book binder in Mexico City.

I keep the switchblade in my oficina drawer as a memory of the fine woman and not for protection. A couple of years ago the knife stopped working. My resourceful camera repairman, Horst Wenzel had it opening most quickly. Today I oiled it. It really opens fast!

Because I knew that I was going to write this I can repeat what I repeat to so many deaf ears how wonderful it is to arrange the book, the knife and the album with Tía Sarita’s photograph.

My mother in 1950 hired a photographer to take the family photographs in our Coghlan garden. The album to this day is in perfect condition.