The excessive life of Captain Frontera's son

Luis Frontera in front of La Biela, a traditional bar in Buenos Aires Photo: Enrique Garcia Medina /

There are excessive lives.

Lives that should be shared among several people to be credible and bearable.

Luis Frontera's is one of those lives: tragedy, madness, violence and culture in almost unsustainable doses, as if the most terrible of the Argentine twentieth century had been embodied in a man.

At 76, Frontera tells

his amazing biography

in the novel

Familia.

"My father was a traitor to the country. One day he put his Argentine Army captain uniform in a burlap bag and left it on the entry table of the Ministry of Defense, before the gaping mouth of a noncommissioned officer.

"I'm going to war," he said.

"And he left".

Thus begins the novel, published in Argentina by Seix Barral.

It was 1936 and Captain José María Frontera was marching to fight against fascism in the Spanish civil war.

That trip unleashed a chain of misfortunes.

In a way, they still last.

Captain Frontera fought in Spain, met characters like Buenaventura Durruti and Valentín González

and was defeated.

When the time came, he had to choose between continuing to fight in France and returning to his country.

He decided to return.

He had a wife and eight children.

As soon as he set foot in Buenos Aires, he was arrested as a communist and sent to a Patagonian prison.

He went through jails and psychiatric hospitals.

No Argentine soldier had ever fought in a 20th century conflict and the Army was interested in learning about the psychological effects of modern warfare.

In a military prison in La Plata, he was granted permission for a visit from his wife.

From that visit, his last son, Luis Frontera, was born in 1944.

The family was very poor because Captain Frontera's pension had been cut off.

That was arranged a few years later, personally, by Evita Perón.

But Luis grew up with hardly going to school.

At 10 years old, a smoker and careless, he worked in a laundry.

“I was a street boy when street boys didn't exist yet,” he says, sitting on the terrace of the Cafe La Biela.

In this same cafe he met the writer Ernesto Sábato, the man who managed to get him out of the psychiatric hospital.

But we haven't got there yet.

When the father was released he returned home.

It was another.

"He just wanted to be quiet, read, drink alcohol and hurt the hands that were trying to caress him."

His daughters (except for the seventh, Esther) hated him.

Captain Frontera ended up leaving.

There is no space here to collect the many misadventures of brothers and sisters.

The last son, Luis, dedicated himself to looking for him, to investigate his stay in Spain, to claim his affection.

In the novel, the father dies soon.

In real life it lasted longer and came to praise a book of his son's poems.

They were always about you.

He participated in the terror of the time.

In the novel he tells that he shot a man in the street and perhaps killed him

Luis Frontera learned to read and write by going to the National Library run by Jorge Luis Borges every afternoon.

One day, the young Frontera spoke of Halley's Comet with the distinguished librarian and told him that he would surely be lucky enough to see it twice: it had soared through the sky in 1910 [Borges was born in 1899] and would do it again in 1986 [the year in which Borges died].

The boy got a Borgian answer: "That comet doesn't exist."

While the father was linked to the Montoneros guerrilla, the son, already a writer of poems, began in journalism.

In 1974 he traveled (aboard cattle trucks and newspaper delivery trucks) to Isla Negra, Pablo Neruda's Chilean home, and dined with the poet.

He worked for the magazine

and for the newspaper

, owned by the Revolutionary Workers Party, the political arm of the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP).

His work as a reporter for

had moments as sinister as they were absurd.

When the ERP kidnapped someone, for example, they didn't have to leave the table to receive information: their bosses even sent them the kidnapped documents.

“When they asked that the ransom be paid in small bills, I knew that that month I was going to collect in small bills,” explains Frontera.

Luis Frontera participated in the terror of the time.

In the novel he tells that he shot a man in the street and perhaps killed him.

Juan Domingo Perón returned to Argentina, the violence between right-wing and left-wing Peronism (Montoneros was the axis of all revolutionary guerrillas) turned into open warfare and

suffered an attack: “During the night of February 23, 1974 ", writes Frontera in

," a truck stopped in front of the building: groups of the Peronist Youth of the Argentine Republic got out and machine-gunned the newsroom for 20 minutes.

Some of us were able to escape through the terraces, like criminals.

And finally, when the police arrived, the journalists who had survived under their desks were detained while the attackers withdrew singing for Sarmiento and Suipacha ”.

Luis Frontera learned to read and write by going to the National Library run by Jorge Luis Borges every afternoon.

Luis Frontera had a wife and daughter.

A judge recommended that he stay away from them so as not to endanger them.

Thus they disappeared from his life.

One night, leaving the boarding house where he was staying, he was beaten.

In September of that year, a series of murders of girls, possibly rituals, affected him deeply.

"I went to my house, which was abandoned, and I began to repeat, although with greater virulence, something that I had already done as a teenager: cut myself on the wrists and chest with glass."

The idea, she explains, was to compensate for psychic pain with physical pain.

After this self-harm, she began her stay in a "Peronist asylum."

They were two years in and out.

The other patients called him El Interesante, because one of them had heard a doctor say that Frontera was "an interesting case."

Someone sent Ernesto Sábato a book of poems from Frontera.

Sábato pulled strings and got them discharged.

They met at the La Biela cafe and they got on for a while.

The collection of poems was published, but Sábato did not attend the presentation, which was attended by Tomás Eloy Martínez.

"One day Sábato told me that he had no room for new friends and we stopped seeing each other, that simple," says Luis Frontera.

The captain's son returned to work as a journalist after the dictatorship and met Ofelia Perdomo, his current partner.

Before he had had another son, years later diagnosed as schizophrenic.

The boy has spent more than 20 internments.

Luis Frontera would like to travel to Spain, to continue looking for traces of his father, and to write a new book about the new generation: "Captain Frontera's grandchildren have suffered even more than his children," he says.

“One of the granddaughters killed her father.

Another committed suicide in a mental hospital.

Another was killed by throwing himself into the passing of a bus ”.