Miguel Bornaschella - The satisfaction of having achieved my aims

He was my godfather and my brother and sisters’ godfather, and my heart and memories are still deeply grateful to him because he considered us, protected us, especially during my father’s absence, with pieces of advice and other more earthly planes. On that occasion he offered to take me to his house for some days, to distract me and clear my guilty mind. This was an unforgettable week. Carmela, my godfather’s wife, pampered me fondly with the same tenderness she had pampered her children, by the time already grown and were then adolescents. They had a truck and took me everywhere with them. They showed me different parts of the town and it was for me like visiting other parts of the world. Thus, when we went near my neighbourhood as a part of the route, I prayed my interior God, that it was not the time to come back home.

By those days Dad had not decided to come back yet. It was neither in his plans, not even had Dad sent any news with this thought. Despite this, he exchanged letters with our aunt Aida, his sister. She confused my father and complicated matters with a lot of lies which finally aggravated the situation so seriously that my father refused to come back to Italy.

Before this I had another mark in my memory. It happened that a new teacher arrived in the town, with his wife and his son. He punctually came back from school in the afternoon, got off the bus and walked four squares to arrive home. Perhaps it was in those days that my commercial vocation ready to give good service started. Then, much sooner than later, I offered to carry his briefcase and he would reward me with some chocolate. I do not know if that seemed to me fair or not, but I was interested in better and higher rewards. And I was not wrong, because in a short time the teacher bought a new ball for his son, and gave the old one to me. I did not evaluate if that had been fair or not… The great excitement did not give me time to think because my heart was coming out of my mouth, but this did not prevent me from thanking him expediently. I took the ball home holding it tightly against my body and left it on the opposite side of the table. We had just finished dinner when our uncle Pedro and his son Emilio arrived and visited us. My cousin and I got out of the house to play with the ball. He was four meters far from me. I kicked it slowly, carefully. Emilio kicked it back to me, but with less care, kicked it with much energy, pushing it to a final and fatal destiny. It went rolling down the mountain… I never saw it again. We looked for it that night: my mother, Uncle Pedro, Emilio and I. Mum looked for it the following day, at dawn, very early in the morning, but it was all in vain. Then I also learnt the meaning of resignation.

My mother, who had already lost the number of possible resignations in her life, intended not to add another one, so she began to demand the compliance of the deal made with my father. It would have worked if Aunt Aida’s comments had not reached Dad’s other siblings’ ears and finally his own ears… The fact was that as a malicious gossip but with unknown reasons, she put into a question Mum’s honesty, emotional and physical intimacy and loyalty. Her bad intention had not even the plausible range of rumour, since nobody else in the town, except Aida, believed that defamation, but in the distance and with all the difficulties in communication, she created an atmosphere of confusion and uneasiness. When my mother was aware of this, she did not act with hatred nor took any revenge. She just remained indifferent, giving no value to her attitude. But twelve thousand kilometers far away was my father… and he could not put things into place and mark the difference between gossip and absolute truth. He had now all the reasons not to confront the situation properly, though he was sure of Mum’s integrity. He could find no other solution but the one of meeting and gathering all in Argentina and thus go on with our lives together, here and forever.

Mum hardly made a new attempt to persuade him, she wrote another letter, but nothing else. It was then when Don Giovanni in Argentina, started the administrative proceedings to obtain my mother, my two sisters and mine’s formalities to migrate. This step, necessary to get the tickets, was processed and approved on January the 31 st, in 1955. At the beginning of March, Mum went on with her part of formalities in Italy. We had to move to Campobasso, where she got her passport in which we, her children were included. We moved from there to the Port of Genova for some medical examinations. Things seemed to be ready, just waiting for the moment for departure. The date to depart and the name of the ship should have to be confirmed. During those two days in which we had to deal with the medical examinations we stayed in the hotel for emigrants, which was near the Port. Someone warned Mum about a mistake made in the passport: my sister’s name, Josefa, had been written down wrongly, Giuseppe, this might make fail the departure if it was not rectified properly. Then we went back to the town and the following day we returned to Campobasso, with the mission of making the correction: “a” instead of “e” and give my sister the right identity name.

Mum had taken the decision to leave, and with her personality, decisions had no turning back. Because of this, everybody’s mood was altered during the day and night. Mum was tense, anxious to finish with everything. Customs formalities, other bureaucratic procedures, the uncertainty of the things her eyes would see when she started her new life, a new landscape, and other worries, kept her awake, and uneasy all the time. The difficult decision to sell her properties, the ones she had inherited from her family, was something that filled her with doubt and uncertainty. My Godfather, Antonio, was the person who would be in charge of this. He was the same person who had given me, together with his family, a complete week’s trip with which I got to visit the world… Some things were sold and others were rented and Antonio was also in charge of their administration. Many years later I understood my mother’s mistrust when she had to turn her properties into cash in order to invest that money and regain it, in a place which had never been well described and which she could not imagine. After all the gossiping spread by Aida, my father had no intention of coming back to Argentina, perhaps because he was scared or perhaps because he wanted to forget… So having properties in Italy would have been useless and unprofitable. Since then and until after we had settled down in Argentina, all the properties were sold little by little, one by one.

At the end of March the official notification arrived. On the 1st of April we would be parting from Geneva Port, in the ship called Giulio Cesare. We were lucky. Even though we would be travelling third class, it was a luxurious transatlantic. My mother did not last long in gathering the few things we had. She took a suitcase and a wooden chest. Our clothes, dishes, and cutlery, which I have had the joy of keeping throughout all these years, were put inside them. Mum also kept some tools to work in the field, her wedding dress, and some of my father’s books, some few photographs and the certainty that we would never come back home, though she had the conviction of knowing this was not the best option. Finally she would bring a bag filled with balls of wool and some knitting needles, to knit something that never existed, but which she never left apart until we arrived in Buenos Aires.

Mum was still finishing packing but the news of our departure had already passed around by word of mouth in and from all the houses in the neighbourhood up to the people in the valley. My mother had twenty-two godchildren and all of them came home to greet us, their families, and other families and neighbours. Mum herself told each of them about the distant corner of the world we were going to live in.