Miguel Bornaschella - The satisfaction of having achieved my aims

In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Giulio Cesare met the Augusto, a ship of the same company which was making the same journey, but in reverse. Suddenly wailing sirens mixed with shouts and hands waving to the unknown were heard and seen. This was another important milestone stuck in my memory. The next port in Brasil was the port of Rio de Janeiro, and then the port in Santos. By those days my father already had the confirmation of the date of arrival in Buenos Aires: Saturday, 16 th of April 1955.

The port of Buenos Aires was overcrowded. I had never seen so many people altogether. The people from the ship greeted those on land without knowing each other, the same way we had greeted and waved the passengers on the Augusto in the middle of the ocean. After having waited for some time, we got off. My father and my brother were there and fetched us. We all greeted each other again and again. After four years my parents were meeting again and this made them feel excited for a good time. The whole family lived a special moment, there was some kind of commotion and the beating of their hearts could be heard. All this was caused by the family meeting, but I remained outside of this festive event. According to the reports of my memory, I can say that was the moment I met my father for the first time. We went altogether to Villa Clara by bus, our eyes big-open ready to watch everything, trying to explore the new landscape. While we were getting away from the city center, the face of my mother was becoming disfigured. At the same time, I can imagine, she was wondering how the location of our destiny would be. When after more than an hour we had finally arrived at our house, she stayed quiet, remained in silence looking at every single thing of the house and the immensity of the field, where there were few houses nearby… she did not make any comments.

Villa Clara was by that time, an immense area of field of 40 hectares, with big desolate pieces of land, and very few modest buildings. It is in the kilometer 28, between the General Belgrano Road and the National Route number 2, the Bosques railway station is twenty blocks ahead. Most of the activities were simple for sure, represented by some cows milking labour, and this milk production was just enough to be used and marketed among the neighbours in the town. The best known producer was the Callegary family. Jorge, was one of their children and we have grown a very deep and close friendship. Apart from those social manifestations, there was nothing else… The place was a wild and hostile large piece of land, where the roads were unpaved and the grass was gaining ground due to the absence of transit and people’s circulation. There were some promises of future pavement, electric light and natural gas, but those essential supplies would arrive a long time after. The things that we had to heat: water, food or whatever it was, had to be done with a kerosene heater. The lamp that gave us the dim light at night worked also with kerosene, until a year later just a bit more powerful lantern called “sol de noche”, arrived.

The house that my father had been able to build had a kitchen and two bedrooms. My father and my mother went to one of those bedrooms and we, the four children, slept in the other, in two separate beds: girls in one bed, boys in the other. Early in the morning our beds were taken out of the house, then that room turned into the dining-room. We all had lunch and dinner there…

My father was glad. He had carried home an RCA gramophone and played the songs of Beniamino Gigli, Feliciano Brunelli, operas and other Italian singers that I cannot remember, over and over again. Once after one of those old black vinyl discs had finished, the gramophone went on spinning and made a slight bouncing effect at the end, so I turned and spoke to my father for the first time: “Oh!”- I told him without knowing if I should call him “Dad” or by his name, “Could you stop the gramophone?”

After a while my father asked my mother how I was from the blow I had received in my head, and I heard her saying that I was right, but he should try and avoid hitting me where I had the mark of the wound. I had not understood if I had to be careful not to hit myself or if my father should not hit me in my head as a warning lesson. The fact was that I had heard the conversation and from that moment on, after making any kind of mischief for which I deserved a “lesson”, I advanced with my head and showed the deep scar. This helped my father calm down and eventually the blow was not so strong.

Everybody came to our house, greeted and welcomed us. We met up Uncle Fortunato and his family, too, but now they were our neighbours. It was as if all of them wanted to remake the life and traditions that had been left on the other side of the sea. But Mum did not stop watching the loneliness of the landscape. She compared it with all that had been left behind and the balance was negative. She became sad. I could see it in her face. Soon she spoke to my father and reprimanded him for having settled down in a place that was not better than the one we were coming from, since we had been in a town that was finding a way back to growth and soon would find solutions to overcome the crisis. In Villa Clara we had neither electricity nor safe running water. The discussion was not easy. Mum went on with her recriminations because he had made her sell all her properties in Italy to come and invest her money in an inappropriate place and consequently lose value. Dad knew that it was true. He had made a wrong choice and with little vision for the future. But he had a virtue. He did not disguise his mistakes with excuses. He only tried to explain that “he had not been able to build a better place because he had been sending her money every time he could”. He was about to take a piece of paper out of one of his trouser pockets where he had written down the corresponding accounting information each time he had sent her money, but Mum said once and for ever the unique phrase that both needed to end up with the dispute and start a new life: “There is no need to show me any accounting information”. She took the knitting bag, put it on the table and went on speaking: “Everything is here”. Every time she received an envelope with money, she made a ball of wool with the money inside, thus she had been keeping that money as an untouchable treasure. After this, before my father could hardly get over his amazement, Mum said another phrase: “This is what we have now” referring to all the new circumstances, and “with this we will survive the situation”, and never again she claimed for her fate. At least not did her.

When it was night, after dinner, my father and my mother went to their bedroom. The door was locked. I did not understand why. I was puzzled by this action… Although my sisters tried to explain to me that was something right, for me it was a new ingredient to have my life broken into two. I had to understand, with one or two blows, that nothing would be the same as it had been before.

The following day, our neighbour Juan D’Angelo and my father went to the port and fetched the rest of our belongings together with the Rossis with whom we had shared the long journey.

Migration rooms and the Immigrants’ Hotel in Argentina.