Childhood Memories: Vacations with My Father at Hotel Bellini in San Clemente del Tuyú

“In a previous letter I told you to ask the doctor which vaccine can be applied to you, because in your situation prevention is better than cure.”

In July 1978, the repression intensified in the prisons and the paragraph demonstrates my father’s resistance. He was not convinced that not only was it impossible to apply any vaccine, but that we also did not have medical attention or in cases of manifest disease. At that time we had been detained for more than three years and more than two since the genocidal coup of March 24, 1976. Obviously his wishes betrayed him: our concern was not preventive vaccines, but waking up alive every morning.

“I have the camera that your sister lent me,” the Captain continues, “and I plan to go take photos of the neighborhood to send you. But I’m waiting for spring to come and with it the light that now shines due to its absence.

I also want to convince your mother to accompany me to San Clemente del Tuyú next January and we will spend a few days together at the old Hotel Bellini. The same one we used to go to with your sister, when you were kids, but the one I never went to with her, she preferred to stay at home.”

I never received the photos of the neighborhood and I don’t remember if my parents went to San Clemente or not, but this paragraph triggered memories that relieved me of several mornings of discomfort and fear, when death was around the wards and the endless walks inside the cell were the only possible activity in the Magdalena prison.

He would move the iron bunk to the center of the cell and begin to walk in circles around it, thus avoiding having to take three steps to the wall, turn, and take another three. The walk in circles was more agile and continuous. Sometimes it lasted six, seven or however many hours each one decided or endured. They were lonely, silent, and the intensity of the memories transported us to happy landscapes, like those days in San Clemente with my father and my sister.

The hotel was called Bellini; My old man, who never had a penny left over, rented a room for the three of us, and sometimes for the four of us, because my sister brought a friend. “She needs it, son,” the Captain explained to me, “instead, the two of us play together.”

The hotel was in front of the beach and the day started early. At eight we went down to the dining room to have breakfast of croissants and coffee with milk served by waiters from enormous coffee pots, with long wooden handles and aluminum stained by use and rust. When we finished, and before going up to the room to get ready for the day at the beach, my father would read the lunch menu that was posted on the windows of the dining room door. The price included lunch: vegetable soup or salad for the starter, and homemade vermichelis or ravioli for the second. When milanesas were advertised there was a celebration, because they were the specialty of the cook who, if I remember correctly, was the owner’s wife.

Then we went up to the room and loaded the umbrella, the tarps and the inevitable ball. Never lounge, because the Captain maintained that on the beach “you were not going to lie like a cow in the sun, but to take advantage of the sea that oxygenates and tones you up. Pure iron ”, he ruled very seriously.

My old man played “head” with me with the famous Octopus, all morning, while my sister clamored for his help to make a sandcastle. The Captain sometimes resigned himself and looked at me complicitly: “women’s game, son”, while he grabbed the bucket and ran to get water to make “a fortress, surrounded by water that prevents the enemy from crossing.”

We would return hungry at noon to devour the Bellini’s dishes. Later, my father gave himself up to the ceremony of making himself a coffee in a room so narrow that we barely fit. He carried a flask of rubbing alcohol and heated water while he whipped the instant coffee until beige and creamy. He would smoke a Saratoga and, between puffs, he would fill us with the sunscreens of the time: Ambre Solaire, or Emulsol, which were never absorbed. My sister and I hated those creams that left us sticky for hours, but we knew that there was no possible resistance: the Captain did not compromise. “They put it on or we stay. I don’t want them to end up sunstroke”, he affirmed while he anointed us neatly.

The dinners were not at the hotel, but a few slices of pizza or some cheap menu: “The less we spend, the more we stay,” he said. But he never stopped giving us some treats: the ice creams or the street fairs had us as clients, and Capi loved to see how the cans flew in front of his well-aimed big mouths. “I was the best marksman in my class,” he recalled excitedly, while he kept the prizes: seahorses that changed color depending on the weather, key chains with clams or pens encrusted with snails.

Many years later, I returned to San Clemente del Tuyú with Laura, my partner, and there was the old Hotel Bellini on the same corner as always. With its “modern” and sixties style, the same huge terrace balcony in front, the historic logo. The same armchairs, shelves and furniture. Same ornaments. The same carpets and narrow corridors, and the friendliness of its employees, who took us to visit all its corners.

That noon, in front of those black and white film images, as in an inverted mirror, I remembered those solitary walks in the cell of the Magdalena military prison, where I relived those childhood vacations that preceded other happy years of dreams, commitment and militancy, when the assault on paradise was there, within reach of our hands.

* The book The Captain’s Letters will be presented on Sunday, May 14 at 8:30 p.m. in the José Hernández room of the Book Fair.