DANIELA
My name is Daniela de Montecristo and I am a citizen of the universe, although I was born in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, in the year 1915, the youngest of three sisters. Later my father remarried and had a little son, but the child died before his first birthday, and Papa had to be happy with what he had, that is, with my sisters and me. I don’t know why I’m explaining all this. It’s ancient history, or children’s stories if you like, of no interest to anyone now. I lost my virginity at the age of thirteen. That might interest someone. I was deflowered by one of the ranch hands. I can’t remember his name, all I know is that he was a ranch hand and must have been somewhere between twenty-five and forty-five. He didn’t rape me, I do remember that. At least I never thought of it as rape, afterward I mean, when it was over, and I was getting dressed behind an ombu tree, and the ranch hand, around the other side, was pensively rolling a cigarette, which he then lit and gave me for a couple of puffs on it, my first ever puffs of smoke. I remember that vividly. The bitter taste of the tobacco and the plains stretching away endlessly and my legs trembling. What was really trembling, though, were my thoughts. I could have gone and told on him. All that night I kept turning the idea over in my mind, and the next two nights as well. But I didn’t do it. Partly because I wanted to repeat the experience. Partly because it wasn’t my father’s ranch; it belonged to one of his friends, so the punishment wouldn’t have been administered by my blood relations, it would have fallen outside what I took to be the ambit of real justice, the justice of the blood. My father never had a ranch. My older sister married a lawyer, a pathetic shyster who never tired of declaring his inordinate love for my father. My other sister married the son of a ranch owner, a crazy kid who within a few years managed to gamble away a small fortune and get himself cut out of the will. To sum up: my family was always middle class, and whatever efforts we made, from our various starting points, in our various and often contradictory ways, to climb up a rung and enter the rigid, immutable upper crust, official guardian of justice and morality, the fact is we never moved out of our social compartment, which, although comfortable, condemned the livelier minds in the clan (myself, for example) to a restlessness that even then, at the age of thirteen, on that ranch, which wasn’t our property, I could glimpse like a dizzying mirage, a space in time where time itself was cancelled, time as we know it, and that was why I began by saying that I am a citizen of the universe and not, as the saying goes, of the world, because I may be old but it should be quite clear that I’m not stupid, and the world cannot contain a dizzying mirage like that, although perhaps the universe can. But I was talking about restlessness. I was talking about the night when I thought about telling on the ranch hand who had deflowered me. I didn’t, and I didn’t have sex with him again. Restlessness, my first apprehension of restlessness, declared itself as a fever, so my father sent me back to Buenos Aires, where I was entrusted to the care of a physician, Dr. Guarini.