Departing at Dawn

7 The Photograph

35 7 The Photograph There were five siblings, three brothers and two sisters . The brothers and my mother, Amalia, looked a lot alike. They had the characteristic Inca face—a deep dark brown color—and they were tall, stout, and muscular. Their hair, jet black in their youth before turning prematurely gray, was thick and straight and they wore it combed back. All of them were nearsighted, with a slightly crooked gaze. Avelina, who was eleven years older than Amalia, had not inherited the height or the distinguished gait of her siblings, but she did get the skin color and became nearsighted at an early age. She owed her very life to science and incubators because without them she would not have survived her difficult birth. This was a family of arrogant yet poor people, despite the land they had owned ever since the conquest. The only thing their land was good for was raising goats as hard and muscular as themselves. It was just a vast expanse of barren land, “desert” in the scornful words of my mother, the youngest. That is all they had, except for their pride based on who knows what. Maybe it simply emerged from that parlor where I was now 36 sitting and where I had lost my composure, much to my surprise , for I too was a Riera, and a Rojas del Pino on top of that. I had the same last name as my aunts and uncles, and the same inexplicable haughtiness, the tendency to brag about being the opposite of meek, being a law unto ourselves, just because, because that’s the way we were made. “The clothes tag in the selvage edge,” was how it was described at home. All the boys were named Tristán after their father’s friend, Trist án Frías, who had done some really big favor for my grandfather . Although it was never clear to them exactly what he had done, it had to be important for, in honor of and gratitude toward him, not only was each son given his first name but he was also their godfather. Tristán Nepomuceno, the oldest, was known as el Negro; Tristán Clímaco as Maco; and Tristán Javier, Javier—each one named for his own saint, because that is how Grandmother wanted it, not to mention that that was just the way it had always been done. The girls were born after the boys and Grandmother chose the names, names of heroines she liked: “Avelina” was for Avelina Hauser in Castillos de los Riscos, an ever repeating radio soap opera, and “Amalia” came from the novel by José Mármol. The Riera brothers had beautiful voices and a talent for singing and playing guitar, and because of that they liked nightlife and formed a group, Los Hermanos Tristán, that performed folk music and tangos. They played guitars to accompany the criollo waltzes they sang and the gaucho poetry they recited—all of which led to more and more parties best 37 suited to the single life. They did this, as my mother used to say, “because your grandmother brought them up wrong.” Yet all of them landed good jobs in the public sector: Tristán Nepomuceno as an administrative employee with the railroad, because he was long-winded and had good handwriting ; Tristán Javier with the post office, a position he obtained through my father after Papa married my mother and made peace with her family; and Tristán Clímaco as a low-level administrator with the Provincial Police before he retired early and moved to Buenos Aires, after the grandparents died, where he married a widow. They met my father in the early fifties when he regularly stayed out late to listen to the peñas.9 He was a manager of government employees, sent by the politicos to Catamarca, La Rioja, Mendoza, San Juan, or wherever he was needed to promote the Peronist agenda. He ended up as Chief of Mail Services in Tucumán. When he was in La Rioja, he stayed in the Príncipe Hotel, where there was a restaurant and bar that my uncles often played in. That is how he got to know them. By that time he was over forty and had two almost fully grown sons living in Catamarca with his legal wife, who was several years older than...