On Saturday, October 20th, 1979, around three o’clock in the afternoon, Marina Pueyrredón, distant great-great-granddaughter of some hero of the independence wars, sat with her friend Inés drinking mate in the balcony of her comfortable apartment overlooking Las Heras Avenue. It was a sunny day, outside temperature twenty-two degrees Celsius, humidity eighty percent, with fifteen percent chance of rain in the evening.
Marina wanted to tell Inés about a guy she had recently been dating, a certain Michael Fletcher, who described himself as “the only porteño born in the Sheffield shipyards that history remembers.” Michael was forty-something, grown-up, divorced, six-foot five-inches tall, with brown eyes, a cocky and swaggering gait, graying brown hair, and an everlasting two-day beard. They had met in a bar on Viamonte Street, thanks to Stephanie, a friend of Marina and journalist by trade who was living as an expatriate in Buenos Aires, far from her native Connecticut.
Michael was a literal captain. He worked for ELMA, the “Empresa Líneas Marítimas Argentinas,” a job that took him away from the Perla del Plata for months, sometimes up to a whole year. Durban, Singapore, and Hong Kong were regular stops.
Marina told Inés a considerable amount of crunchy details. She was barely thirty years old, worked in a finance firm in the microcentro, and was delusional about this older, mysterious man who commanded a 230 feet long ship across oceans and seas. Michael spoke fluent English–after all that was his paternal heritage–and a surprisingly good Rioplatense Spanish. He had traveled. A lot. And he was about to return to Buenos Aires. That day or the next.
He was a fan of electronics, and had gifted Marina with a brand-new Sanyo cassette player radio, model M-9994 MU. It was one of the first ones that could play chrome tapes back, the kind which, if used in a normal cassette player, would ruin your reading head. He also brought something called “View-Master,” a kind of colored binoculars to see photos in three dimensions. All these things were unheard of, completely out of the ordinary, like from another galaxy.
But what Marina liked most about Michael was when he would put on his reading glasses and read out loud a fragment of some English book. Marina would melt listening to that rough, distant voice reciting texts by Robert Frost, James Thurber, or Charlotte Brontë.
Inés watched attentively as Marina told her details, stories, anecdotes, her eyes floating in a limbo of illusions and restrained tears. She could not help but disbelieve that magical character floating in imaginary oceans. She doubted the fidelity of that romantic vignette, that hoarse voice, his build, his gifts.
In the distance one could hear a police car, shouts, people running. They sipped another mate.
Marina assured Inés that everything was all right, that Michael was not a sailor like the others, and to put her at ease they arranged to meet him next time he moored in Puerto Nuevo.
A week later they all met, and Michael showed the girls around the ship. The three of them then went to have dinner at the “Don Corleone” restaurant on Reconquista Street. They ordered some fried empanadas and a bottle of Cabernet, and stayed there until late listening to anecdotes, and Michael told them how different Hong Kong was from Buenos Aires, and how big the port of Durban was, and what electronic wonders he had brought with him, and a thousand other things.
That evening, Inés understood everything.
Two weeks later, Marina caught Inés sleeping with Michael in his apartment on Luis María Campos Avenue, across the street from Argerich Hospital.
On Wednesday, May 5, 1982, around ten o’clock in the morning, the weather was cloudy, outside temperature ten degrees Celsius, humidity ninety percent, with seventy percent of probability of rain in the evening. Marina stopped at a newsstand around the corner from her office to buy a copy of “Para Ti Magazine” and another of the “Almanaque Mundial 1982.” The cover of the Clarín newspaper announced the sinking of a British destroyer, named “Sheffield,” under fire by the Argentine Air Force.
Marina realized the name of the battleship sounded familiar. A tear run down her cheek. She paid and closed her wallet. She shook her head and continued on her lonely way down Alem Avenue.
This text is a fragment translated to English of my Spanish-language novel “Rogelio Suárez and the Dangerous Life”.