My mother’s hair is fine and gray and her scalp shows through it. She’s nearly bald above her forehead, and for a long time now she hasn’t taken the trouble to comb her hair over the bare spot there. My mother’s family loses their hair very early, and they also go gray very young, as if they suffered from premature old age. It hasn’t happened to me, and my father assures me his creole blood saved me; he raises his fist to the sky when he says it, but never his eyes.

I was born in Buenos Aires, in the family residence on Avenida Libertador. The three of us—I’m an only child—got the fourth floor. My maternal aunt inherited the fifth, and my uncle, the third. The bottom two floors were used for parties and dinners and other rare social occasions, so they were almost always empty, though impeccable, with polished floors and shining dishes. I never liked that solemn building with its dark and heavy furniture, the floors of such expensive wood that we could never wear shoes, and my father’s art collection that didn’t leave a single blank space on the walls.

I liked our country house in Chascomús a little more. We never went to the other estates, which were more comfortable—some of them magnificent—because my mother preferred this modest quinta, the first house her family had occupied when they came to Argentina from England two hundred years ago. Near the house is the cemetery that in town they call “English,” even though it’s mostly Scottish people buried there. It’s small and very well cared for. My grandmother is buried there: she died really young and I used to like to visit her in my black dress and patent leather shoes. The cemetery is ours, in a way, because it’s my family that pays the expenses of the church, which is always empty, and of cleaning, keeping the place up for the very few tourists who are interested in this pampa curiosity, with its Celtic crosses and its dark green moss that will stick to your clothes.

When I was little, Florence Mathers used to stay on Libertador only long enough to recover from her trip, and then she’d accept our invitation to stay at the house in Chascomús. I don’t know how many properties she has in the pampa, but it must be a lot: she raises horses and livestock. She likes the Argentine countryside, its emptiness and its sad sunsets, the perpetual smell of burning leaves in autumn and the smoke from the grill night and day.