You have to be careful believing the tales of your own family. But then again, who would we be without our family stories?
I don’t remember my paternal grandfather. Separated from my grandmother long before I was born, he went back to Misiones, and she and my father remained in the capital Buenos Aires. I am told that my father brought me and my sister to meet him once when I was 4, but I have no memory of that. But even what I have been told about that travel fits the tale of my grandfather Martin Suarez, the cavalry captain.
Actually, I don’t even remember what it was said to me, but whatever it was, it has created a second memory. So I see my mother, young and as beautiful as she always has been, waiting to meet her father in law, in a train station. I see a long platform, and somehow I have made a building for the train station that is suspiciously similar to the train station in a western. They are about to talk, finally, but they can’t, because I have run away and they have to find me, in a wild and lonely provincial town. My grandfather is distant, and moves little, with the composure of the powerful heroe. My mother is searching, her hairs on the air of the plains. Eventually, I am found. And that is all what I know, or remember.
And so with the hunting of Martin.
We have been told many times that Martin loved to hunt. In the house of my aunt there is still the fur of a yaguarete, a small feline that once upon a time was frequent in the Amazon area, and were priced hunting trophies. Also my own father had some tales about his own mistakes in the field, when finally he was allowed to go and hunt with his father. And yet, there is this thing, this memory that I can not have, of my grandfather hunting a tapir.
The tapir is a mighty animal in the south american mythologies. Which is no surprise. It is a big mammal, reaching the 2 meters and 300 kilograms, with a long prensile nose, like some sort of small short-trunk elephant. Also, they live a great deal of their life in the water, which in the Amazonas means that they are almost impossible to spot. Just imagine small and dark rivers encased in virgin tropical rain forest. In Venezuela a tapir is the stead of the most popular of our goddesses, Maria Lionza. Which gives her a great deal of the wild identity she has.
So then I see Martin, quiet and silently, walking with a rifle at his back, in some sort of tropical sabana, wading a river, looking penetratingly to the water surface to spot the animal swimming, or hiding. I never see him shooting it, but searching, intently and peacefully. It was said that he would take his “chata” a pickup truck, drive hours for as long as the road would bring him, and then continue on foot for few days. Chasing the tapir. Of course, nothing in this memory includes the bloody mess that hunting is, or the impossibility that a single man would chase, kill and bring back an animal of more than 100 kilos. But never mind that.
I believe that we need our own mythologies to shape us. And there is Martin, the captain that honorably served his country before the armed forces became genocidal, and came back to his own place, abandoning the city to found peace in nature. Again, as much as this tale does not include the reality of hunting, it neither includes the disaster of his marriage, or his abandoning son and daughter. But this is, really and truly, not important for us, a couple of generations later. The thing is that I do not intend start hunting (let alone that hunting in Europe today might be a bit different than chasing mythological beasts in a virgin rain forest) nor I will leave my wife, or my son. The thing is, or might be, that even earlier than I could comprehend them, I have been hearing about this man, blood of my blood, who went back to what he really was. The army captain that went back home, to nature.
I think that is a good tale to have in a family.
El fue un auténtico cazador...