Meet Me Under The Ombu Tree (2 page)

I left Argentina in the summer of 1976, but as long as my heart beats, its resonance shall vibrate across those grassy plains, despite all that has happened since. I grew up on the family ranch or
campo
as they say in Spanish. Santa Catalina was set in the middle of that plain which is part of the vast eastern

region they call the
pampa.
Flat as a ginger nut biscuit, you can see for miles in every direction. Long, straight roads cut through the land, which is arid in summer and verdant in winter, and in my day those roads were little more than dirt tracks.

The entrance to our farm resembled the entrance to those spaghetti western towns; it had a large sign that swung in the autumn wind saying
Santa Catalina
in large black writing. The drive was lengthy and dusty, lined by tall maple trees planted by my great-grandfather, Hector Solanas. In the late nineteenth century he built his house, the house I grew up in. Typically colonial, it was constructed around a courtyard and was painted white with a flat roof. At the two front corners stood two towers; one housed my parents’ bedroom, the other my brother Rafael’s. As the firstborn he got the nicest bedroom.

My grandfather, also called Hector just to make everyone’s lives more complicated, had four children - Miguel, Nico, Paco (my father), and Alejandro - and each one built a house of their own when they grew up and married. They all had several children, but I spent most of my time in Miguel and Chiquita’s house with Santi and Maria, two of their children. I liked them the best of all. Nico and Valeria’s and Alejandro and Malena’s houses were always
open to us as well, and we spent as much time there as we did at home.

At Santa Catalina the houses were built in the middle of the plain, divided only by large trees - pines, eucalyptus, poplar and plane trees mostly, which were planted equidistant from each other in order to resemble parks. At the front of each house were wide terraces where we would sit and gaze over the uninterrupted fields that stretched out before us. When I first arrived in England I remember how the houses in the countryside delighted me, their gardens and hedges were so neat and groomed. My Aunt Chiquita loved English gardens and tried to emulate them, but it wasn’t really possible at Santa Catalina; beds of flowers simply looked out of place due to the vastness of the land. My mother planted bougainvillea and hydrangeas and hung pots of geraniums everywhere instead.

Santa Catalina was surrounded by fields full of ponies; my uncle Alejandro bred them and sold them all over the world. There was a large swimming pool set into a man-made hill screened by bushes and trees, and a tennis court that we all shared. Jose managed the
gauchos
who looked after the ponies and lived in houses on the farm called
ranchos.
Their wives and daughters worked as maids in our houses, cooking, cleaning and looking after the children. I used to yearn for the long summer holiday, which lasted from the middle of December to the middle of March. During those few months we wouldn’t leave Santa Catalina. My fondest memories are of that time.

Argentina is very Catholic. But no one embraced the Catholic religion as fervently as my mother, Anna Melody O’Dwyer. Grandpa O’Dwyer was religious in a sensible way - not like my mother, whose life was inhibited by the need to keep up appearances. She manipulated religion to suit herself. Their arguments on the Will of God used to keep us children amused for hours. Mama believed that everything was the Will of God - if she was depressed God was punishing her for something, if she was happy then it was a reward. If I gave her trouble, which I managed to do most of the time, then God was punishing her for not bringing me up right.

Grandpa O’Dwyer said she was simply shirking responsibility. ‘Just because yer testy this morning don’t go blaming it on the Good Lord; it’s the way you look at the world, Anna Melody, that makes you want to change it.’

He used to say that health is a gift from God while happiness is up to us. To him it was the way you saw things; a glass of wine could be half full or half empty depending on the way you looked at it. It was all about having a positive

mental attitude. Mama thought that was blasphemy and used to go quite pink in the face if he ever mentioned it, which he did often as he enjoyed tormenting her.

‘Slap me with a kipper, Anna Melody, but the sooner you stop putting words into God’s mouth and take responsibility for yer moods the happier yer gonna to be.
¹

‘May you be forgiven, Dad,’ she’d stammer, her cheeks clashing with her sunset red hair.

Mama had beautiful hair. Long red locks like Botticelli’s Venus, except she never looked serene like Venus, or poetical. She was either too studied or too cross. She had been unaffected once - Grandpa told me she used to run barefoot around Glengariff, their home in Southern Ireland, like a wild animal with a storm in her eyes. He said her eyes were blue but sometimes they were grey like a drizzly Irish day when the sun’s pushing through the clouds. That sounded very poetic to me. He told me how she was always running off up the hills.

‘In a village of that size you just couldn’t lose anything, least of all someone as lively as Anna Melody O’Dwyer. But once she’d been gone for hours. We searched those hills, calling for her to the skies. When we found her she was under a tree by a stream, playing with half a dozen fox cubs she’d found. She knew we were looking for her, but she just couldn’t tear herself away from them cubs. They’d lost their mother and she was crying.’

When I asked him why she had changed, he replied that life had been a disappointment. The storm’s still there, but I can’t see the sunshine pushing through no more.’ I wondered why life had so disappointed her.

Now my father was a romantic figure. His eyes were as blue as cornflowers and his lips curled up at the corners even when he wasn't smiling. He was Señor Paco and everyone on the farm respected him. He was tall, slim and hairy. Not as hairy as his brother Miguel - Miguel was like a bear and so dark-skinned they called him
El Indio
(the Indian). Papa was fairer like his mother and so handsome that Soledad, our maid, would often blush when serving around the table. She once confessed to me that she was unable to look him straight in the eye. Papa understood that as a sign of humility. I couldn’t tell him it was because she fancied him, she would never have forgiven me. Soledad didn’t have much contact with my father, that was Mama’s department, but she didn’t miss a thing.

In order to understand Argentina through the eyes of a foreigner I have to
cast my mind back to when I was a child, riding along in the horse-drawn cart called a
carro
, with Grandpa O’Dwyer commenting on things that to me were commonplace and mundane. Firstly the nature of the people. Argentina was conquered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and ruled by the viceroys who represented the Spanish crown. Independence from Spain was won on two days - 25 May and 9 July 1816. Grandpa used to say that having two dates to celebrate was typical of the Argentines. They always have to do everything bigger and better than everyone else.' he’d grumble. I suppose he was right; after all, the avenue in Buenos Aires called Avenida 9 de Julio is the widest in the world. As children we were always very proud of that fact.

In the late nineteenth century, in response to the agricultural revolution, thousands of Europeans, mainly from Northern Italy and Spain, immigrated to Argentina to exploit the rich land of the
pampas.
That is when my ancestors arrived. Hector Solanas was the head of the family, and a fine fellow he was too; were it not for him, we might never have seen an ombu tree or the ginger nut plain.

When I cast my thoughts to those fragrant plains it is the rough brown faces of the
gauchos
that emerge with all their flamboyance out of the mists of my memory and cause me to sigh from deep within my being, because the
gaucho
is the romantic symbol of all that is Argentine. Historically they were wild and untameable
mestizo
(people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood) - outlaws who lived off the large herds of cows and horses that roamed the
pampas.
They’d capture the horses and use them to round up the herds of cows. They would then sell the hides and tallow, which was very profitable, in exchange for
Mate
and tobacco. Of course, this was before beef became an exportable commodity. Now
Mate
(pronounced ‘matay’) is the traditional herbal tea they sipped from a decorated round gourd through an ornate silver ‘straw’ called a
bombilla.
It’s quite addictive, and according to our maids it was also good for weight loss.

The life of a
gaucho
is on horseback — his skill as a horseman is possibly unmatched anywhere else in the world. At Santa Catalina the
gauchos
were a colourful part of the scenery. The
gaucho
attire is showy as well as practical. They wear
bombachas
, baggy trousers with buttoned ankles that go into their leather boots; a
faja,
a woollen sash they tie around their waists which they then cover with a
rostra,
a stiff leather belt decorated with silver coins. The
rostra
also supports their backs during the long days on horseback. They
traditionally carry a
facon,
a knife which is used for castrating and skinning as well as for self-defence and eating. Grandpa O’Dwyer once joked that Jose, our head
gaucho,
should have been in the circus. My father was furious and thankful that his father-in-law didn’t speak any Spanish.

The
gauchos
are as proud as they are capable. On a romantic level they are part of the Argentine national culture and there have been many novels, songs and poems written about them. Martin Fierro’s epic poem ‘El Gaucho’ is the best example of these — I know because we were made to memorize large portions of it at school. Occasionally when my parents entertained foreign visitors at Santa Catalina the
gauchos
would put on fantastic displays for them. This would involve rodeo, the breaking-in of horses and much riding around at terrific speed with their lassoes snapping the air like demonic snakes.

Jose taught me how to play polo, which was rare for a girl in those days. The boys hated me playing because I was better than some of them, and certainly better than a girl should be.

My father was always very proud of the fact that the Argentines are indisputably the best polo players in the world, even though the game started in India and was brought to Argentina by the British. My family would go and watch the top tournaments played in Buenos Aires in the summer months of October and November at the polo ground in Palermo. I remember my brothers and cousins using those tournaments to pick up girls, rather like at Mass in the city where no one paid too much attention to the priest because they were far too busy eyeing each other up. But at Santa Catalina polo was played almost all year round. The
petiseros
, stable-hands, would train and care for the ponies and we had only to call the
puesto
to let them know when we’d be playing and the ponies would be saddled up and ready, snorting in the shade of the eucalyptus trees, for when we wanted them.

In those days, the 1960s, Argentina was ravaged by unemployment and inflation, crime, social unrest and repression, but it hadn’t always been like that. During the early part of the twentieth century Argentina had been a country of vast wealth due to the exportation of meat and wheat, which is where my family had made their fortune. Argentina was the richest country in South America. It was a golden age of abundance and elegance. My grandfather, Hector Solanas, blamed the ruthless dictatorship of President Juan Domingo Peron for the decline, which resulted in Peron’s exile in 1955 when the military intervened.

Peron is still as hot a topic of conversation today as he was in the years when he was dictator. He inspires extreme love or extreme hate, but never indifference.

Peron, who rose to power through the military and became President in 1946, was handsome, charismatic and clever. Together with his wife, the beautiful though ruthlessly ambitious Eva Duarte, they were a dazzling, charismatic team disproving the theory that to become ‘someone’ in Buenos Aires you had to belong to an ‘old’ family. He was from a small town and she was an illegitimate child raised in rural poverty-a modern-day Cinderella.

Hector said that Peron’s power was forged in the loyal following of working classes he had so carefully cultivated. He complained that Peron and his wife Evita encouraged the workers to rely on handouts instead of working. They took from the rich and gave to the poor, thus draining the country of its wealth. Evita famously ordered thousands of pairs of
alpargatas
(the traditional working-class espadrilles) to give to the poor and then refused to pay the bill, thanking the unfortunate manufacturer for his generous gift to the people.

Among the working classes, Evita became an icon. She was literally worshipped by the poor and the downtrodden. My grandmother, Maria Elena
Solanas, told us a gripping story of the time she went to the cinema with her cousin Susana. Evita’s face appeared on the screen as it always did before the film and Susana whispered to my grandmother that Evita obviously dyed her hair blonde. Once the film had finished Susana was dragged into the ladies’ room by a mob of angry women who brutally cut off all her hair. Such was the power of Evita Peron; it drove people to complete madness.