They had been married for ten years when I was born. My mother had suffered two or three miscarriages in the early years of their marriage, and then nothing. She was forty-three, nearly forty-four, when I was born, and he was fifty. His family, the Garays, owned a small shipping business, which was slowly declining, and he was the third son. My mother was the English secretary in the firm, and I think his family saw the marriage as another example of my father’s lack of imagination and enterprising spirit. They were not, as far as I know, hostile or outraged, but they did not pay her much attention.

My parents treated me as a small adult in the household from as early as I can remember. If I was frightened in the dark, or if I was sick, or if I woke in the night, I could move quietly, without crying, into their bed, either in between them or beside my mother, and fall back asleep. My father would complain that I woke too early in the morning and wanted to sing or have a story read while he tried to sleep. I do not know what language I used when I spoke to them both. I suppose it must have been Spanish. I know in later years it was Spanish. But my mother always spoke to me directly in English, and in school I spoke in English, and because of my coloring I always believed I was English.

My mother had come to Argentina with her father and her sister, Matilda, in the early 1920s just after her own mother died. When I was a small boy I always wanted her to tell me the story of the voyage one more time. Days and days at sea, without a single sight of land, the sea flat and monotonous, going on forever. The story of the man who died and whose body was thrown overboard. And the storm that blew up. And the moment when they passed the equator, and the seasickness, and the terrible food. And the ship rocking and rocking, and the first-class passengers. And then the port of Buenos Aires, the long wait to disembark, and this new language, how they did not understand a single word anybody said. I knew this story as though its details were more real and absolute than anything that happened in our apartment, or in school, or in our lives during those years of childhood.