Meet Me Under The Ombu Tree Read online

  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.

  Still, in spite of her power and her prestige the upper classes considered her little more than a common tart who had slept her way out of poverty to become the richest, most famous woman in the world. But they were a minority; when she died in 1952 at the age of thirty-three, two million people turned out to witness her funeral and her workers petitioned the Pope to grant her a sainthood. Her body was embalmed for ever like a waxwork by a Spanish specialist called Dr Pedro Ara, and after being buried in various secret places all over the world for fear that it would inspire a cult, it was laid to rest beside the ‘oligarchs’ she hated in the elegant cemetery of La Recoleta in Buenos Aires in 1976.

  After Peron had fled into exile the government changed countless times due to the intervention of the military. If the present government wasn’t satisfactory the military stepped in. My father said they chucked out politicians before giving them a chance. In fact, the only time he was pleased the military interfered was in 1976 when General Videla ousted the incompetent Isabelita, Peron’s second wife, who had taken over the presidency when her husband died during his comeback in 1973.

  When I asked my father how come the military had so much control, he told me that it was partly due to the fact that it was the Spanish military who conquered Latin America in the sixteenth century. ‘Consider the military like school prefects with weapons,’ he once said, and as a child this seemed to make sense. I mean, who’s more powerful than that? I don’t know how they did it with all the chopping and changing, but my family was always canny enough to stay on the right side of whichever government was in power.

  During that dangerous time, kidnapping was a real threat to a family such as mine. Santa Catalina crawled with security. But to us children the men hired to protect us were just part of the place like Jose and Pablo and we never questioned their existence. They’d wander about the farm with their fat bellies bursting out of their khaki trousers and their thick moustaches twitching in the heat. Santi would imitate the way they walked - one hand on their guns, the other scratching their groins or wiping their sweaty brows with a grubby panuelo. If they hadn’t been so fat they might have looked menacing, but to us they were there to make fun of, or as part of our games; it was always a challenge to get the better of them.

  We were also accompanied to school. Grandpa Solanas had survived a kidnap attempt so my father made sure that in the city we were accompanied everywhere by bodyguards. My mother would have been delighted if they had kidnapped Grandpa O’Dwyer instead of Abuelo Solanas. I doubt they would have paid the ransom for him, though. Mind you, God help the kidnapper who’d be foolish enough to take on Grandpa O’Dwyer!

  At school in the city it was natural for children to turn up with bodyguards. I used to flirt with them at tea break. They’d loiter around the school gates in the midday heat guffawing at stories about girls and guns. If there had been a kidnapping attempt, those sloths would have been the last people to notice. They enjoyed talking to me, though. Maria, Santi’s sister, always cautious, would anxiously beckon me to retreat back into the playground. The more she flustered the more outrageous my behaviour would become. Once when my mother came to pick me up because Jacinto the chauffeur had been taken ill, she nearly keeled over because they all greeted me by name. When Carlito

  Blanco winked I thought she’d burst with fury; her face was as red as one of Antonio’s tomatoes. After that, tea break was no fun any more. Mama had spoken to Miss Sarah and I was forbidden to hang around the school gates. She said the guards were ‘common people’ and I wasn’t to talk to those who weren’t from my class. When I grew old enough to understand, Grandpa O’Dwyer told me stories that made me realise just how ridiculous that was coming from her, of all people.

  I didn’t understand the fear or ‘the dirty war’ as it was called when the military set out to destroy anyone who opposed their power during the mid-1970s, after the death of Peron. It was something I only learned about later when I returned after many long years to find it had slipped through the gates of Santa Catalina to claim one of her own. I hadn’t been there when those closest to me had been torn apart and our home violated by strangers.

  How strange life is, and how unexpected. I, Sofia Solanas Harrison, look back on the various adventures I have played out, and think how far I am now from the Argentine farm of my girlhood. The flat land of the pampa has been replaced by the undulating hills of the English countryside, and in spite of all their beauty I still long for those hills to open up and to see that vast plain rise

  out of the fields and settle beneath an Argentine sun.

  Chapter 2

  Santa Catalina, January 1972

  ‘Sofia, Sofia! Por Dios! Where has she got to now?’

  Anna Melody Solanas de O’Dwyer paced up and down the terrace, looking out over the arid plains with weary irritation. An elegant woman in a long white sundress, her flame-red hair pulled back into an untidy ponytail, she cut a cool figure against the Argentine sunset. The long summer holiday that stretched from December to March had been a drain on her patience. Sofia was like a wild animal, disappearing for hours, rebelling against her mother with a rudeness that Anna found difficult to deal with. She felt emotionally depleted, used up. She longed for the hot days to recede into autumn and for the school term to begin again. At least in Buenos Aires the children were shadowed by security, and thank Cod for school, she thought. Discipline would be her teacher’s responsibility.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, woman, give the girl some rein. If you pull her in too hard, one day she’ll seize her opportunity and run off altogether,’ growled Grandpa O’ Dwyer, shuffling out onto the terrace with a pair of secateurs.

  ‘What are you going to do with them, Dad?’ she asked suspiciously, narrowing her watery blue eyes and watching him lurch across the grass.

>   ‘Well, I’m not going to chop yer head off, if that’s what yer worried about, Anna Melody,' he chuckled, snipping at her.

  ‘You’ve been drinking again, Dad.’

  ‘A bit o’ liquor never hurt anyone.’

  ‘Dad, Antonio does the garden, there’s nothing for you to do.’ She shook her head in exasperation.

  ‘Yer dear mother loved her garden. “Them delphiniums are crying out to be staked,” she’d say. No one loved delphiniums like yer mother.’

  Dermot O’Dwyer was born and raised in Glengariff, Southern Ireland. He married his childhood sweetheart, Emer Melody, when he was barely old enough to earn a living. But Dermot O’Dwyer always knew what he wanted, and nothing and no one could ever persuade him any different. Much of their courtship had taken place in a ruined abbey that stood at the foot of the Glengariff hills, and it was there that the couple were wed. The abbey had lost most of its roof and in through the gaping holes twisted and turned the greedy fingers of the ivy plant, determined to claim what it hadn’t already destroyed.

  It rained so hard on the day of their wedding that the young bride wore rubber boots down the aisle holding her white chiffon dress above her knees, followed by her fat sister Dorothy Melody clutching a white umbrella with unsteady hands. Emer and Dorothy had eight brothers and sisters; there would have been ten had the twins not died before their first birthday. Father O’Reilly shielded himself against the rain under a big black umbrella and told the large gathering of family and friends that the rain was a sign of luck and that God was blessing their union with holy water from the Heavens.

  He was right. Dermot and Emer loved each other until the day she was taken from him, a dull February morning in 1958. He didn’t like to think of her lying pale and cold on the kitchen floor so he remembered her the way she was on their wedding day thirty-two years before, with honeysuckle in her long red hair, her generous, mischievous mouth and her small smiling eyes that sparkled for him alone. After she had passed on, everything in Glengariff reminded him of her. So he packed his few belongings - a book of photos, her sewing basket, his father’s Bible and a bundle of old letters - and spent every penny he owned on a one-way ticket to Argentina. At first his daughter believed him when he said he would only stay with her for a few weeks, but as the weeks

  rolled on into months she realized that he had come for good.

  Anna Melody was named after her mother, Emer Melody. Dermot loved her ‘tuneful’ name so much that he wanted to call their baby simply Melody O’Dwyer, but Emer thought Melody on its own sounded like the name you’d give a cat and so the child was christened Anna after her grandmother.

  After Anna Melody was born Emer believed that God decided they didn’t need any more children. She would say that Anna Melody was so beautiful God didn’t want to give them another child to live in her shadow. Emer’s God was kind and knew what was best for her and her family, but she longed for more children. She watched her brothers and sisters raise enough children to populate an entire city, but her mother had always taught her to thank God for whatever He saw fit to give her. She was lucky enough to have one child to love. So she poured the love she had inside her for a family of twelve onto her family of two and suppressed the nagging envy she felt in her heart whenever she took Anna Melody to visit her cousins.

  Anna Melody enjoyed a carefree childhood. Spoilt by her parents, she never had to share her toys or wait her turn, and when she was with her cousins she only had to whimper if she didn’t get her way and her mother would come

  running over to do whatever was necessary to make her smile again. This made her cousins suspicious of her. They claimed she ruined their games. They begged their parents not to have her in their houses. When she did appear they’d ignore her, tell her to go home, tell her she wasn’t wanted. So Anna Melody was excluded from their fun. Not that she minded. She didn’t like them either. She was an awkward child, happier out on the hills by herself than in a claustrophobic group of shabby youngsters running about the streets of Glengariff like stray cats. Up on those hills she could be anyone she wanted to be and she dreamed of living the fine life like those movie stars she saw at the flicks, all shiny and glossy with beautiful dresses and long, sparkling eyelashes. Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Deborah Kerr. She would look down onto the town and tell herself that one day she’d be better than all of them. She’d leave her horrid cousins and never come back.

  When Anna Melody married Paco and left Glengariff for ever, she barely cast a thought to her parents who suddenly found themselves alone in a home with only her memory to comfort them. The house became cold and dark without their beloved Anna Melody to warm it with her laughter and her love. Emer was never the same after that. The ten years that she suffered without her daughter were empty and soulful. Anna Melody’s frequent letters home were filled with assurances that she would visit, and these promises kept her parents’ hope alive until they knew in their hearts that they were shallow words written without thought or indeed, intention.

  When Emer died in 1958 Dermot knew that it was because her heart, sapped of its juices, had finally broken. He knew it was so. But he was stronger than she was and more courageous. When he set off for Buenos Aires he wondered why the hell he hadn’t done it years before; if he had, perhaps his beloved wife would still be with him today.

  Anna (only Dermot O’Dwyer called his daughter Anna Melody) watched her father rummaging around in the flowerbed and longed for him to be like other children’s grandfathers. Paco’s father, named Hector Solanas after his grandfather, had always been beautifully dressed and cleanshaven, even on weekends. His sweaters were always cashmere, his shirts from Savile Row in London, and he possessed a great dignity, like King George of England. To Anna he had been the nearest thing to royalty and he had never fallen off his pedestal. Even in death he loomed over her and she still longed for his approval. After so many years she still yearned to feel a sense of belonging that

  had somehow, in spite of all her efforts, eluded her. Sometimes she felt she was watching the world about her from a place behind an invisible glass window - a place where no one else seemed able to reach her.

  ‘Senora Anna, Senora Chiquita is on the telephone for you.’

  Anna was abruptly drawn back to the present and to her father who like a mad botanist was snipping away at anything green.

  ‘Gracias, Soledad. We will not wait for Señorita Sofia but eat as normal at nine,’ she replied and disappeared inside to talk to her sister-in-law.

  ‘Como quiera, Senora Anna,’ replied Soledad humbly, smiling to herself as she padded back to the hot kitchen. Of all Senora Anna’s three children, Soledad loved Sofia the most.

  Soledad had been employed by Señor Paco since she was seventeen years old. The newly married niece of Chiquita’s maid, Encarnacion, she had been instructed to cook and clean while her husband Antonio had been hired to look after the estate. Antonio and Soledad were childless, although they had tried to have children, but without success. She recalled those times when Antonio had slipped into her anywhere and everywhere, by the stove, behind a bush or tree - whenever an opportunity arose, Antonio had taken care not to miss it.

  What a pair of young lovers they had been, she mused proudly. But to their bewilderment, no child had ever been conceived. So Soledad had consoled herself by embracing Sofia as her own.

  While Senora Anna had given all her time to her sons, Soledad had rarely been without the little Sofia wrapped in her apron, nestled against her foamy breasts. She even took to carrying the child to her bed - she seemed to sleep better that way, enveloped in her maid’s womanly scent and soft flesh. Anxious that the child wasn’t receiving enough love from her mother, Soledad asserted herself in the nursery in order to make up for it. Senora Anna didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed almost grateful. She never was very interested in her daughter. But Soledad wasn't there to put the world to rights. It was none of her business. The tension between Senor Paco and Senora Anna wasn�
��t her concern and she only discussed it with the other maids in order to justify why she spent so much time with Sofia. No other reason. She wasn’t one to gossip. So she cared for the child with a fierce devotion, as if the little angel belonged to her.

  Now she looked at her watch. It was late - Sofia was in trouble again. She was always in trouble. She seemed to thrive on it. Poor lamb, thought Soledad

  as she stirred the tuna sauce and cooked the veal. She's starved of attention, any fool can see that.

  Anna marched into the sitting room shaking her head with fury and picked up the receiver.

  lHola Chiquita,’ she said curtly, leaning back against the heavy wooden chest.

  ‘Anna, I am so sorry, Sofia has gone off with Santiago and Maria again. They really should be back any minute ..

  ‘Again!’ she exploded, picking up a magazine from the table and fanning herself in agitation. ‘Santiago should be more responsible - he’ll be eighteen in March. He’ll be a man. Why he wants to muck around with a fifteen-year-old child I cannot imagine. Anyhow, this is not the first time, you know. Didn’t you say anything to him last time?’

  ‘Of course,’ the other woman replied patiently. She hated it when her sister-in-law lost her temper.

  lPor Dios, Chiquita, don’t you realize there are kidnappers just waiting out there to prey on children like ours?’

  ‘Anna, just calm down a little. It’s quite safe here, they won’t have gone far. .

  .’ But Anna wasn’t listening.

  ‘Santiago is a bad influence on Sofia,’ she ranted. ‘She is young and impressionable, so she looks up to him. And as for Maria, she’s a sensible girl and should know better.’

  ‘I know, I will tell them,’ Chiquita conceded wearily.