(Translated, adapted, corrected, and extended version from the original article in Spanish written in 2012.)
The name of my maternal grandmother was Herta Schlerff.
She died 40 years ago, when I was 11 years old. She suffered a series of chronic health problems, including a couple of heart attacks and a broken hip, but she died peacefully, in her sleep, one morning of April 1985 at the Clínica Olivos, near the corner of Arenales street and Maipú avenue, in Vicente López, province of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
(Note: in an ironic twist of fate, the Clínica Olivos is nowadays operated by the “Swiss Medical Center” of Argentina.)
We held her wake at a funeral home on Maipú Avenue, across from the presidential residence of Olivos. Her remains were cremated, and scattered in the waters of the Río de la Plata.
But there’s no point in telling you so many details about her death without first telling you more about her, and her life.
Grandmother Herta (as I always called her, to distinguish her from my other grandmother, Janina) was born into a family of Danube Swabians on December 31, 1903, in Philippopolis, a city in Bulgaria that was renamed Plovdiv after several world wars. The Schlerff family, German Protestants, were in the flower business. At that time, apparently, they were the most important florists in Eastern Europe: they were even the official suppliers, at the end of the 19th century, of Sultan Abdulaziz and others, which I suppose, in the days of the Ottoman Empire, was quite the big deal.
(Apparently there were still flower shops with the Schlerff name in Istanbul well until then 1960s. Herta had a postage stamp with her grandfather head in it. Influencers of another time.)
Grandmother Herta had four older sisters: Mizzi, Helene, Else, Hedi, a younger sister, Reemda, and the youngest, a half-brother called Ulrich. Of the six sisters, three married and three remained single, taking care of their mother, a woman named Nina Vollenweider-Schlerff, née Havel (1872-1955); a strong-willed lady who set the tone for the whole family.
For reasons that are unclear to me, Grandmother Herta attended primary school in Alexandria, Egypt. Apparently, one of the schoolmates of the sisters was a certain “Rudolf Hess”, and after comparing ages, I came to the conclusion that there is a high probability it was the same Rudolf Hess history books speak of.
The story takes another per saltum, and towards the end of the Great War Herta was studying mathematics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. My grandmother never disclosed the reasons for these geographical changes.
Grandmother Herta didn’t tell me much about her past life. She didn’t tell much either to my mother Evelyne, who at the end knew very little about her mother. Herta was an intelligent, taciturn, highly educated woman. She read constantly, explained to me incomprehensible math problems I brought from school, and tried unsuccessfully to teach me how to play chess. And I, being such an idiot, never paid any attention to her.
Grandma graduated from the University of Geneva with honors: she had the privilege of being among the first women to graduate in mathematics from that institution. Her diploma, signed by a certain William Rappard, was among the things I found in my mother’s apartment after she passed away.
After graduating, around 1921, Herta got a job at the newly created League of Nations in Geneva; she had to take an entrance exam, for which there were apparently 5,000 applicants, and my grandmother was one of the three people who passed.
Grandmother Herta was a genius.
Speaking of her time in Geneva, my mother once found one of those “perpetual diaries” in which my grandmother wrote down birthdays, addresses, and various events. On one of the pages of that diary, there was a mysterious inscription: “Place des Eaux-Vives, 7 p.m., Tapio Voionmaa.”
Just like that, with no indication of year or anything. My mother told me that when she asked my grandmother about this Tapio, she snapped (something unusual for her), snatched the diary from her, and forbade her to ever mention Tapio again. That was the end of it; my grandmother took the secret with her, but my mother thought they had been boyfriend and girlfriend, or perhaps lovers. Years later, a person with the same name became a minister and ambassador for Finland.
As you can see, my grandmother’s story is full of gaps and holes; I hope you’ll excuse the mess.
In the late 1920s, before the Great Depression, my grandmother married (perhaps á contre-coeur) a man named Roland George, a mechanical engineer from Geneva, freshly graduated from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich.
The George family had arrived in Geneva from France during the persecution of Protestants described in history books. They settled there, made their fortune, and then lost it.
The descendants of the George, including Roland, apparently wept day and night for the days when their family owned much of what is now called Petit-Saconnex, a neighborhood 10 minutes from downtown Geneva. Even as a child, I heard stories of the wealth of the George.
Some weird coincidences (or not): I rented my first apartment in the Grand-Saconnex, of all places. And my mother passed away precisely in the Petit-Saconnex, 100 meters from the graves of her grandmother and aunts at the Cimetière du Petit-Saconnex; that is, Ms Havel, and two of her daughters (if I’m not mistaken, Hedi and Reemda). I remember seeing their tombstones around 2002 or 2003; I don’t know if they are still buried there.
Circles close in mysterious ways sometimes.
(By the way, I am writing these lines as my train calls in at the Cornavin station in Geneva. It’s as if my DNA had a built-in GPS.)
Grandmother Herta married Roland in the late 1920s; he was the only one of my grandparents that I never met in person. He worked for an oil company called Astra. The company sent him to Mexico in the early 1930s to work on some oil fields. It was there that Herta and Roland’s first son, my uncle Charles, was born in 1932. Four years later, their second son, Henri, was born. His name is spelled with an “i” and not a “y,” as it is a French name. Both were born in Mexico, I believe in Mexico City, but I’m not sure.
I never met my uncle Charles, as he died in a car accident on Route 3 in Argentina in 1963. I have, however, met uncle Henri in person, but I don’t have much to say about him at this point.
In the late 1930s, my grandfather’s company sent him as far away from Switzerland as possible (I never knew if it was because of the war or because, as everyone has told me, the guy had an unbearable personality). That’s how my grandparents’ family ended up moving to Comodoro Rivadavia, in the province of Chubut, Argentina.
That place was the “asshole of the world”, as my grandmother used to call it. She didn’t use that expression often; only when talking about Patagonia. She told me that the wind drove her crazy. In the end, after insisting for a long time to leave that goddamn place, my grandparents settled in Buenos Aires. It was around 1941 or 1942.
Obviously, by then, returning to Europe was unthinkable. So they decided to stay in Buenos Aires. And in ‘44, my grandmother became pregnant for the last time, this time with my mother, Evelyne. At that time, the George-Schlerff family lived an anonymous and peaceful life in a house on Cuba street in Núñez, between Quesada and Iberá streets, a few blocks away from Congreso Avenue.
From Philippopolis to Núñez.
My grandfather Roland had a small factory producing spare parts for hydraulic machines in the late 1940s, which supported the family. Later, the company also supported the Peronist leaders in the neighborhood, who were given money so that Eva Perón’s social programs could prosper and so that the factory would not be closed down, or he would not be thrown in jail.
My grandmother never had any clear political leanings, except for being a staunch anti-Peronist. I remember how happy she was when Alfonsín won the elections in 1983, but my mother told me that she was also happy when the coup took place in 1976. The thing was, she was never in favor of Perón or the Peronists.
The next scene in my grandmother’s life is not so colorful or adventurous. From what I could understand and piece together, my grandmother did not want to carry my mother to term; this resulted in a certain apathy that my mother suffered until the day she died. An abandonment by her parents.
Actually, no, worse than that. My grandfather, at some point during my mother’s childhood, abused her, his only daughter. My mother discovered this memory, which was completely buried in her subconscious, through hypnotherapy, decades later.
We never knew if my grandmother knew about the abuse or not, but the fact is that in February 1963, my mother’s older brother, Charles, was killed on Route 3, in a car accident that his wife and two children (Silvia and Pablo) survived miraculously. This event was a turning point that forever changed the dynamics of the family. Charles was my mother’s beloved brother, the one who protected her; the one who, perhaps, knew the truth about the abuse.
My mother, however, learned of her brother’s death through a newspaper. She happened to be reading the obituaries. For some unknown reason, my grandmother did not want to tell my mother the news, who found out anyway, in this horrible way.
Human madness has no inexplicable roots. Sometimes it is incomprehensible, but it is never inexplicable. My mother teetered on the precipice of absolute madness at that precise moment. My mother’s entire life, her entire relationship with Grandma Herta, and also her relationship with me, was defined at that precise moment.
Grandmother Herta divorced from Roland in the early 1960s, and she and my mother moved into a house on Haedo street, in the Vicente López neighborhood, a few blocks from the intersection with Maipú Avenue, on the side of Florida. Grandmother worked as a part-time German translator for “Daher Boge”, one of the biggest manufacturers of shock absorbers for automobiles at the time, which had its offices in Munro. My mother worked, first as a clothing saleswoman, and then as a receptionist and secretary in the local offices of IBM Argentina (not yet in the current location in downtown Buenos Aires). Both mother and daughter struggled to make ends meet, often eating the same polenta that they prepared for “Brigitte”, their beloved Collie named after the one and only Brigitte Bardot.
As for my maternal grandfather, well, apparently he moved back to Mexico in the 1970s, and died alone around 1981. Police entered his home after his death, and contacted my mother to notify her about his death.
(Here’s a true story; my mother once met a younger colleague at work during the 1980s, who had spent his childhood in the neighborhood of Núñez, in –believe it or not– Cuba street, between Quesada and Iberá streets… and remembered that there was an old man living there, who used to yell alone and treat everyone like shit all the time, until one day he sold his home and disappeared. The address of that house was, precisely, the one where my mother and grandmother used to live. But I digress.)
Speaking of languages, while working as a German translator, my grandmother Herta was also teaching French to a close friend of my mother’s, Eleonora, who had to prepare for the Alliance Française exams. Years later, before coming to live in Switzerland, in 1989, Eleonora taught me French. And perhaps at this very moment, my friend Betina, one of Eleonora’s daughters and a well-known blogger and influencer in Argentina, is reading this text, and life goes on.
Finally, in the late 1960s, my grandmother Herta and my mother managed to save some money and bought an apartment overlooking the river in the lower Vicente López neighborhood, on 1574 Libertador avenue, between San Martín and Arenales. The architect in charge of the construction was a handsome young man with green eyes, about 27 years old, named Alberto Kosmaczewski. Soon after, my mother started dating him, and they got married in 1971.
Right around that time, my grandmother had her first heart attack. It was a Sunday afternoon, after lunch; my mother and she were watching the wildly popular “Los Campanelli” show on TV, and my grandmother said to my mother, “I feel sick,” and she went into a coma.
She had three cardiac arrests in the following hours, and was in a coma for 21 days. Miraculously, she survived, and her recovery was so good that she eventually flew to Europe to visit sisters and family.
It should be noted that by that time, the family’s financial situation had improved greatly. My grandmother began to receive her Swiss pension, which, given the exchange rate at the time, represented an income comparable to that of a senator, a drug trafficker, and a multinational manager, all combined and multiplied by two.
I was born in September 1973. My grandmother was very kind to me; she took care and brought me plenty of gifts from her trips to Europe, and she always spoke to me in French (why she didn’t speak to me in German is another of those mysteries). I grew up with her and my mother, who divorced my father in 1974. Perhaps my arrival helped to sweeten the relationship between the mother and daughter; in any case, I have no memories of bitter fights between them. Yes, there was a certain palpable tension, but no shouting or broken dishes.
Come to think of it, maybe it would have been good for them to break some dishes. I don’t know.
In 1981, my grandmother Herta was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. From then on, her health began to deteriorate steadily and inexorably. She trembled a lot and drooled constantly. In 1983, she had surgery on her trigeminal nerve, which somehow helped her cope with Parkinson’s, and we went to celebrate her 80th birthday in Pinamar, on the Atlantic coast. But all the treatment left her very weak.
We celebrated her last birthday one night in December 1984. She was 81 years old. It was crazy hot, I remember, and she suffered a lot from the heat.
In early April 1985, she fell and fractured her hip. The doctors didn’t know if she fractured her hip because she fell or if she fell because she fractured her hip. They told us that both situations were possible, although in reality, such information was utterly useless. They operated on her and put in a prosthesis, and 10 days later she passed away.
The last time I saw her was on a Friday evening, right after school. I was attending public school number 8, aka “Bernardo de Monteagudo”, which is located across the avenue from the clinic. I remember that as my mum and I were leaving my grandma’s room (we were heading to have dinner at the still-standing Muky restaurant), some doctors were just coming in to check on my grandmother. As the door of her room was closing, my grandmother was staring intently at me; I walked away looking backwards, holding my mother’s hand, fixing my grandmother’s eyes for the last time.
That look, my grandmother’s eyes, will remain forever in my memory.