Miguel Bornaschella - The satisfaction of having achieved my aims

Sharing tasks with my sister Josefa was not easy, either. She had difficulty in starting a task and going on with it. She did not keep up labour obligations. My parents had bought a water pump with which we filled a tank and then used the water in the kitchen and in the bathroom. This way, my father had replaced the water fountain of Montaquila with it. He had connected the water pump to a pipe which carried the water to a tank of 250 liters which was on the terrace of the house. This brought a bit of comfort to our lives, especially to Mum’s. My sister and I had been assigned the task of pumping. We should have to pump four hundred or five hundred times each of us. That was enough to fill tank. But she never reached that amount and taking advantage of my shorter age, negotiated with me making me pump more times, but then she did not compensate my effort. Mum did not take long to note this action and obliged her to do and finish her part and sometimes made her work harder to make up for her cheat. Josefa got very angry and started to pump and pumped more than necessary. She pumped so many times that she reached and passed the tank level unnecessarily.

One Sunday afternoon I borrowed my father’s bike. He usually used it to go to his job, but according to the rotating shifts, he would not work until the evening on that Sunday. I had just started to ride when it seemed that the bike was against me. I immediately had problems with the chain. By trying to fix it, my hands were full of grease and everything was useless. When I tried to ride the bicycle, I had problems with the chain again and again. Every time I tried to fix the chain, I became more and more nervous. The fourth or fifth time was critical. Without measuring future consequences I threw the bike against the ground, jumped on its wheels, distorting the bike spokes and tyres, damaging it till it became unusable. At that very moment I became aware of the dimension of my anger, but what was even worse, I pictured my father’s mood when he needed to ride it. I came back home walking, while it was getting dark, pulling the bicycle by my side. I placed it on a concrete column and walked in pretending to forget what I had done just a short time before. Nobody noticed the incident. I did not have the courage to plead guilty and kept silent waiting for the serious repercussions that would arise. My father went to work at ten pm. Since he had finished his dinner at nine pm, he told Mum he would rest for a while and asked her to wake him up at half past nine. At twenty to ten Mum called him: “Giovanni, it’s twenty to ten”. My father got up immediately and asked her if the bike had the tyres well inflated. The countdown had finally arrived. It was factually as I had thought. I had hardly enough time to develop a last- minute strategy. I could hear his angry voice, it rumbled in our home, reached the sky and the land of Villa Clara: “lo ammazzo” ( I will kill him). He entered the house like a strong wind, holding his belt in his hand. He hit three times, four times my bed. He did not have much time. He had to leave soon for work if not he would arrive late at the factory. So with the same anger he came into the house, he left, swearing he would go on making justice the following day in the morning.

Mum entered the room immediately. I knew that the worst moment had passed and my last-minute strategy had had a positive result. I had put the pillow under the blanket and made my father believe that I had hidden myself there. But in fact I had hidden under the bed. When I saw my mother, I left that hiding place and asked Mum: “Did he go out?”. Mum slapped me in the face and this made my head hit against the bed. All the same, the balance was satisfactory. I had imagined things even worse…

Already in Argentina, I am with my sisters and a cousin in our house in Villa Clara.

Testimony of those times in a photo published in Clarin Newspaper: some men slaughtering a pig.

Some years after our arrival. The front of our house in Villa Clara, my mother and my sister, Livia, Mrs. Volpe and Mrs. Varone, also immigrants from Montaquila.

I was attending third grade at School Number 41. Today is School 10.

My notebook in 6th grade.

My First Communion.

I was almost a teenager next to my mother.

The soap “Manuelita”. Livia’s boyfriend gave it to her for her fifteenth birthday.

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