In the 2009, extraordinary Oscar-winning Argentine crime drama “The Secret in Their Eyes”, there’s a memorable scene (one of many, actually) driven by Mario Alarcón, who plays the role of judge Raimundo Fortuna-Lacalle.
At the end of that scene, visible on YouTube, judge Fortuna-Lacalle stands next to Pablo Sandoval (played by the immense Guillermo Francella) and describes how he (who in the movie suffers of quite chronic alcoholism) started drinking “a bottle of Old Smuggler” in the middle of a small town in Argentina.
The name of the whisky brand is not anodyne and rang a bell in me; the film is set in 1974, right before the start of the “National Reorganization Process”. I was a baby at that point in time, but years later I had to endure the alcoholism of my mother, who would down a bottle of… Old Smuggler, precisely, and sometimes up to 4 times a week.
No, she never abused me or anything; no, she wasn’t violent. She was sad. She was deeply wounded, and wouldn’t go to a psychologist for a simple reason: if she did, and my father got wind of that, she could lose custody of her child (me) because my father could argue insanity in front of a judge.
So, 3 or 4 bottles of Old Smuggler a week. Yes, a whole bottle per evening. Sometimes coupled with tranquilizers. And in the process, she would tell me, once and again, the shitty situation of being herself, a divorced woman in 1970s and 1980s Argentina.
Which, to be honest, it was all 100% true. I just do not know exactly how she thought that a 6 year-old kid could help her. I could not; but of course, I thought I had to. Why you ask, well, because I loved her, and I wanted her to be happy. But I couldn’t do that. Her happiness was not my responsibility. But I did not know that. Couple a mother wound with a father wound, and that’s what you end up with.
The problem was that during the process, as I said, she also mixed various other substances with the bottle of Old Smuggler, like Valium and Lexotanil, and such a cocktail left wounds in her brain, which would directly lead to her death in 2010, at the young age of 65.
For my part, I had to learn to cope with her alcoholism, until I couldn’t do it anymore, and one morning of 1996 I literally fled home to take a vacation in Argentina, and then after I returned to Geneva I ended up renting my first appartment and moving out of her life completely the following year.
I wrote the paragraph above with a select mix of pride and sadness and shame and guilt… and, yes, with a glass of Glenfiddich next to my laptop. All of those feelings at the same time. It does not matter how much I write about this, it does not matter how often I talk about this in therapy, it does not matter how much I cry over these things, there are consequences. There are always consequences.
Yes, I was a weirdo when I was a kid. I know that many of you reading these lines, who knew me from the 1980s, will agree with this assessment. There were reasons for my odd behavior. But of course, nobody gave a fucking shit. I was alone handling all this; my father was of course very busy not being there that whole time, and then my grandmother passed away.
So I would come back from school, and I could smell that Old Smuggler shit from a block away, way before opening the door to my home. I knew my mum was dead drunk. I just fucking knew it. Probably puking in the bathroom floor. Probably meaning to tell me once again another story of her childhood. Probably yelling at me for not helping her at all. Probably crying asking me for forgiveness after yelling at me.
Of course, the most definining story of her childhood, that is, her father raping her, was hidden in her subconscious, and she wouldn’t learn about it until she started undergoing deep therapy in the early 2000s.
Whenever I tried to talk my mother out of that bottle of Old Smuggler, she quoted the following lyrics from a 1927 tango by Carlos Gardel, called “El Tabernero”.
Todos los que son borrachos
no es por el gusto de serlo,
sólo Dios conoce el alma
que palpita en cada ebrio.
Deepl just brilliantly translated the above lyrics as follows:
Not everyone who drinks
does so because they enjoy it;
only God knows the soul
that beats within each drunkard.
She was right. Only God knows the soul that beat within my mother’s chest.
I’m not drunk. I’m just processing, which I will most probably be doing until the day I die. Generational trauma is a thing, and then you die. And that’s why reading “It Didn’t Start With You” by Mark Wolynn has been such a trascendental event for me this year.