sleeves and dig. 13 There was an English ditch-digger, she recited as if she were singing a bolero, who claimed to be from Inca-la-perra. They must have been Harriots or Heguys, digging ditches in the fields, now they act like aristocrats, they play polo in the estancias and flaunt last names that actually came from Irish peasants and rural Basques. Everyone here is a descendent of gringos, especially my family, but they all think alike and want the same things. My grandfather the colonel, for starters, boasted that he was from the north, from Piedmont, unbelievable, he looked down at the Italians from the south, who in turn looked down on thePoles and the Russians.â
The colonel was born in Pinerolo, near Turin, in 1875, and he didnât know anything about his parents, or his parentsâ parents. One story even has it that his papers were falsified and that his real name was Expósito, that Belladona was just the word spoken by the doctor who held him in his arms when his mother died in childbirth in a hospital in Turin. âBelladona, belladonna!â the doctor had said, as if it were a requiem. And thatâs the name they registered him with. Baby Belladona. His own son, the first man in the family without a father. And they called him Bruno because he was dark and he looked African. No one knew how he arrived in the Province of Buenos Aires when he was ten years old, with a suitcase, by himself, and ended up in a boarding school for orphans run by the Company of Jesus in Bernaconi. Intelligent, passionate, he became a seminary student and lived like an ascetic, dedicating himself to his studies and his prayers. He could fast and remain silent for days on end; sometimes the sacristan would find him praying in the chapel by himself and would kneel down next to him as if he were a saint. He was always a fanatic, as if he were possessed, intractable. His discovery of science in his physics and botany classes, and his readings of remote, forbidden works from the Darwinian tradition in the monastery library, distracted him from his theology and distanced himâprovisionallyâfrom God. This was how he told it himself.
One afternoon he went to his confessor and expressed his desire to leave the seminary and attend the College of Exact and Natural Sciences at the university. Could a priest become an engineer? Only of souls, the priest answered, and refused his request. Bruno rejected his confessorâs ban and kept appealing, but after the Head of the Company refused to respond to his petitions or receive him in person, he wrote anonymousletters which he would leave under the pew in front of the altar. Finally, one rainy summer afternoon, he ran away from the monastery where he had lived half his life. He was twenty years old. With the little money he had saved, he rented a room in a boarding house on Medrano Street, in the neighborhood of Almagro, in Buenos Aires. His knowledge of Latin and European languages allowed him to survive, at first, as a secondary school teacher in an all-boys school on Rivadavia Street.
He was a brilliant engineering student, as if his true education had been in mechanics and mathematics instead of Thomism and theology. He published a series of notes on the influence of mechanical communications on modern civilization and a study on the laying of tracks in the province of Buenos Aires, and before completing his degree he was hired by the Englishâin 1904âto direct the works of the Southern Railroads. They put him in charge of the Rauch-OlavarrÃa Branch Line and the foundation of the town at the intersection of the old, narrow gauge from the north and the English gauge that continued as far as Zapala, in Patagonia.
âMy brother grew up with our grandfather, he learned everything from him. He was an orphan too, or a half-orphan, because his mother abandoned my father when she was pregnant with Luca, as well as her older son, and ran away with her lover. Women
The colonel was born in Pinerolo, near Turin, in 1875, and he didnât know anything about his parents, or his parentsâ parents. One story even has it that his papers were falsified and that his real name was Expósito, that Belladona was just the word spoken by the doctor who held him in his arms when his mother died in childbirth in a hospital in Turin. âBelladona, belladonna!â the doctor had said, as if it were a requiem. And thatâs the name they registered him with. Baby Belladona. His own son, the first man in the family without a father. And they called him Bruno because he was dark and he looked African. No one knew how he arrived in the Province of Buenos Aires when he was ten years old, with a suitcase, by himself, and ended up in a boarding school for orphans run by the Company of Jesus in Bernaconi. Intelligent, passionate, he became a seminary student and lived like an ascetic, dedicating himself to his studies and his prayers. He could fast and remain silent for days on end; sometimes the sacristan would find him praying in the chapel by himself and would kneel down next to him as if he were a saint. He was always a fanatic, as if he were possessed, intractable. His discovery of science in his physics and botany classes, and his readings of remote, forbidden works from the Darwinian tradition in the monastery library, distracted him from his theology and distanced himâprovisionallyâfrom God. This was how he told it himself.
One afternoon he went to his confessor and expressed his desire to leave the seminary and attend the College of Exact and Natural Sciences at the university. Could a priest become an engineer? Only of souls, the priest answered, and refused his request. Bruno rejected his confessorâs ban and kept appealing, but after the Head of the Company refused to respond to his petitions or receive him in person, he wrote anonymousletters which he would leave under the pew in front of the altar. Finally, one rainy summer afternoon, he ran away from the monastery where he had lived half his life. He was twenty years old. With the little money he had saved, he rented a room in a boarding house on Medrano Street, in the neighborhood of Almagro, in Buenos Aires. His knowledge of Latin and European languages allowed him to survive, at first, as a secondary school teacher in an all-boys school on Rivadavia Street.
He was a brilliant engineering student, as if his true education had been in mechanics and mathematics instead of Thomism and theology. He published a series of notes on the influence of mechanical communications on modern civilization and a study on the laying of tracks in the province of Buenos Aires, and before completing his degree he was hired by the Englishâin 1904âto direct the works of the Southern Railroads. They put him in charge of the Rauch-OlavarrÃa Branch Line and the foundation of the town at the intersection of the old, narrow gauge from the north and the English gauge that continued as far as Zapala, in Patagonia.
âMy brother grew up with our grandfather, he learned everything from him. He was an orphan too, or a half-orphan, because his mother abandoned my father when she was pregnant with Luca, as well as her older son, and ran away with her lover. Women
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