Luciano Peralta
Along with his wife and a couple of Costa Rican friends, Mario visited the Rawson School last week, where he attended elementary school. It was after 40 uninterrupted years without stepping on Gualeguaychú again, without stepping on Argentina again.
Mario is the eldest of the three children born to the poet Juan Antonio Machado and his wife, Santa Dolores Marcelina Silveyra. In this note he spoke of them, their shadows, their ghosts and the power of forgiveness. “My dad and my mom were two very depressed people, each for their historical reasons in life. I remember a very damaged marriage, they never reconciled and I was in the middle for twelve years, until the brother who follows me was born,” he says, sitting under the shade of one of the ash trees in the courtyard of the lodging where he stops, a few blocks from the Gualeguaychú waterfront.
“I think my parents loved each other, but love is often not enough. They lived that typical marriage that is sustained ‘for the baby’, ‘for the family’ or ‘for what they will say’. In a society in which divorce was unmentionable and illegal”, he contextualizes, pauses and continues: “My father was abandoned by his mother when he was two years old, he always looked for her and was only able to find her when he was 20. He grew up with uncles , relatives, with a lot of pain, resentment, a feeling of abandonment and rejection, the rejection of a mother. That’s why I think the root of his depression comes from there, I think he was never able to heal that.”
Her words seem to be traced to those of her aunt “Lela”, who, in an anthology entitled “Gualeguaychú and her poets”, published by the group “Gente de Letras”, recalled that “her existence was crossed by that magic touch of poetry , but also because of a story of abandonment and loneliness”.
“He had three children and a woman who adored him. But this also cost him, he liked the night, bohemia and gambling; an explosive combination for those who wanted to share life with him”, recalled Lela, in that publication.
Although his work remains dispersed, since he could not or did not want to put it into a book, his poems say much of what his eldest son and sister say. In “La Rosa Blanca”, Cacho, as his friends called him, writes:
“In the old garden my mother
put up a small, throbbing rosebush
and in it were born fresh and fragrant
roses as white as daylight
“Today my life lost its hubbub
and the one who planted the rosebush is distant
but with every april they come back, lovers
to relive past joys”
Mario, the eldest son
In that “traditional and Catholic” family, studying psychology, as Mario wanted, was not an option. That is why he began his medical studies in La Plata, and although he remembers that things were not going badly for him, things began to get complicated.
“I studied for two years, until I realized that I was there to satisfy my parents’ wishes and not mine. That cost me dearly, because my father got very angry with me and cut off my financial support. From then on I was left alone and without money, but free, ”says the Gualeguaychuan, and accompanies what he says with a satisfied smile.
But neither was that freedom going to be complete. A few weeks later he was called by the Argentine Army to join as colimba. He was in Paraná, first, and in Buenos Aires, later, between 1978 and 1979.
“While in the Military Hospital I began to find out about the things that were happening and to investigate about it. Because we, the soldiers themselves, did not realize what was happening. I got to know the Navy Mechanics School, where there was all kinds of torture… I began to learn about the children who stole from their detained mothers, it was very difficult at that time. I came out of military service badly, to my personal history, crossed by the depression of my parents and my own, that horror was added. They call my generation the lost generation, and I think there is a lot of that, ”he maintains.
After leaving the colimba Mario began to study theology and thanks to contacts in Costa Rica, a few years later, he traveled to the Caribbean country to continue his studies. “I was very hopeless and angry with my country, like so many people who left in those years,” he says.
At 37, after a long academic path as a theologian, he returned to his adolescent desire: he studied psychology and graduated. “Psychology and spirituality helped me a lot. And I speak of spirituality and not of the church because many times it is a mere tool of power. I think it is necessary to reach people with these tools, and the vast majority of people cannot afford a psychologist. That’s why I serve a lot of people who can’t pay or I charge less, back in Costa Rica”, says his kind and calm voice.
Lastly, after a little over an hour of talk and a mate that was hardly brewed, he says that stepping on the Gualeguaychú again that he left behind at 27 generates “a mixture of feelings, sensations of joy, sadness and nostalgia.” And, “somehow, a conviction of where I have to continue directing my intention to the future. Forgiveness is very liberating, and I was able to forgive my country, which did what it could during those years, and my parents, because I understood that they dragged the neurosis of their elders, as I dragged their neurosis and my children mine.