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didn’t want to go on, wearing my school shoes.
    She must have felt terribly alone.

15
WHAT I KNEW
    When you’re a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child’s universe is a space that comprises home, school and – possibly – the neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyacá and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond this area were when we went on holiday (to Córdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents’ farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires.
    We get our first glimpses of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)

    Given my circumstances, I had a much greater formal experience of politics than children my age in other times and places. My parents had grown up under other dictatorships, and the name of General Onganía came up in stories throughout my childhood. Would I have been capable of identifying this bogeyman? My parents called him
La Morsa
(The Walrus) so I associated him with that crazy song by the Beatles. I had gleaned all the essential details from a quick glance at a photograph: he had a peaked cap, a huge moustache; you could tell from his face that he was a bad guy.
    I remember that, at first, I loved Perón because my parents loved Perón. Every time they mentioned
El Viejo
(The Old Man) there was music in their voices. Even mamá’s mother, my
abuela
Matilde, who was a snooty reactionary, gave Perón the benefit of the doubt because, as she put it, why would the Old Man return from exile in Spain at the age of seventy-something unless he was motivated by a desire to put things right? But something must have happened, because the music changed, became more hesitant and then more melancholy. Then Perón died. The rest was silence.
    (Around about this time, grandpa and grandma went to Europe for the first time and brought us back many souvenirs, including a catalogue of the Prado collection. I used to look through it all the time, but after my first time, I was careful to skip the page depicting Goya’s
Saturn Devouring His Children
, because it terrified me. Saturn was a hideous old giant; in his hand he held the body of a little boy whose head he’d already bitten off. I remember thinking that Saturn and Perón were the two oldest people I’d ever seen. For a while, Saturn alternated in my nightmares with the River Plate shirt I got from Tío Rodolfo.)
    After that point, things get confused. There were kidnappings, shootings and bombings. The Old Man’s supporters were among the victims and the victimizers. But there were some people about whom there could be no doubts. ‘Isabelita’, Perón’s widow, spokein the same high-pitched voice that ventriloquists use for their puppets. López Rega, her right-hand man, looked suspiciously like Ming the Merciless (the bad guy from
Flash Gordon
) but with shorter fingernails and no beard. Everything else seemed pretty grey to me. When I found out that some trade-union leader called Rucci had been murdered, I was confused. Was I supposed to feel