Download the Full Version of textbook for Fast Typing at textbookfull.

com

Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-

Dictatorship Argentina 1st Edition Jordana Blejmar
(Auth.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/playful-memories-the-
autofictional-turn-in-post-dictatorship-argentina-1st-
edition-jordana-blejmar-auth/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWNLOAD NOW

Download More textbook Instantly Today - Get Yours Now at textbookfull.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies:

Memories of Everyday Life 1st Edition Iveta Silova

https://textbookfull.com/product/childhood-and-schooling-in-
postsocialist-societies-memories-of-everyday-life-1st-edition-iveta-
silova/
textboxfull.com

Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Memories of

Historical Trauma Kim Wale

https://textbookfull.com/product/post-conflict-hauntings-transforming-
memories-of-historical-trauma-kim-wale/

textboxfull.com

How Generations Remember: Conflicting Histories and Shared

Memories in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina 1st Edition
Monika Palmberger
https://textbookfull.com/product/how-generations-remember-conflicting-
histories-and-shared-memories-in-post-war-bosnia-and-herzegovina-1st-
edition-monika-palmberger/
textboxfull.com

Making the World Safe for Dictatorship 1st Edition

Alexander Dukalskis

https://textbookfull.com/product/making-the-world-safe-for-
dictatorship-1st-edition-alexander-dukalskis/

textboxfull.com
VI Latin American Congress on Biomedical Engineering CLAIB
2014 Paraná Argentina 29 30 31 October 2014 1st Edition
Ariel Braidot
https://textbookfull.com/product/vi-latin-american-congress-on-
biomedical-engineering-claib-2014-parana-
argentina-29-30-31-october-2014-1st-edition-ariel-braidot/
textboxfull.com

From Dictatorship to Democracy in Twentieth-Century

Portugal 1st Edition Raphael Costa (Auth.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/from-dictatorship-to-democracy-in-
twentieth-century-portugal-1st-edition-raphael-costa-auth/

textboxfull.com

The Business Turn in American Religious History 1st

Edition Amanda Porterfield

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-business-turn-in-american-
religious-history-1st-edition-amanda-porterfield/

textboxfull.com

The preventive turn in criminal law First Edition Carvalho

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-preventive-turn-in-criminal-law-
first-edition-carvalho/

textboxfull.com

Palgrave handbook of mass dictatorship Corner

https://textbookfull.com/product/palgrave-handbook-of-mass-
dictatorship-corner/

textboxfull.com
 Playful Memories
The Autofictional Turn in
Post-Dictatorship Argentina

Jordana Blejmar

palgrave macmillan memory studies

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Series Editors
Andrew Hoskins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, United Kingdom

John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science
Macquarie University
Macquarie, Australia
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends
that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to
that of memory, from “what we know” to “how we remember it”; changes
in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory;
panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination
with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of
trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed
to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty
years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts
affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This
groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is “memory”
under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for
its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theo-
retical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14682
 Jordana Blejmar

Playful Memories
The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship
Argentina
Jordana Blejmar
Department of Communication & Media
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, United Kingdom

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

ISBN 978-3-319-40963-4    ISBN 978-3-319-40964-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40964-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957792

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover image © Lorena Fernández / Lola Arias, Mi vida después (2008)

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To James, Luca and Emilia
 Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the patience, kindness
and support of many people. I should like to thank Joanna Page for the
encouraging and yet challenging ways in which she engaged with the work
undertaken here. Aníbal Jarkowski, Ana Longoni and Javier Trímboli were
wonderful friends and generous interlocutors. While I was preparing this
book their work and our discussions were constantly in my mind.
I should also like to thank other friends and colleagues.
In Argentina: Gonzalo Aguilar, Ana Amado, Estanislao Antelo,
Alejandra Birgin, Mario Cámara, Gabriel D’iorio, Lucía De Leone,
Luciana Di Leone, Silvia Duschatzky, Inés Dussel, Cynthia Edul, Claudia
Feld, Carlos Gamerro, Martín Kohan, Guillermo Korn, Federico Lorenz,
Cecilia Macón, Daniela Pelegrinelli, Patricia Redondo, Roberto Pittaluga,
Sylvia Saítta, Valentina Salvi, Yaki Setton and Marcelo Topuzian; the Núcleo
de Estudios sobre Memoria at the Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y
Social, the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales and the Facultad
de Filosofía y Letras at the Universidad de Buenos Aires; the Bers, the
Etembergs and the Romarowskis; María Millán, María Mónaco, Mariana
Santángelo, Lucía Tennina and Noelia Piqué.
In the UK: the Centre of Latin American Studies in Cambridge, in
particular Julie Coimbra, Charles Jones, Geoffrey Kantaris, Rory O’Bryen
and Erica Segre; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Jens Andermann,
who sparked my interest in coming to study in the UK; Mariana Casale
O’Ryan and June Taylor; Stefanie Gänger, Ed King, Gustavo Rocha and
Paula Porroni, fellow latinoamericanistas at Cambridge; Katia Pizzi and
Bill Marshall, who welcomed me to the Institute of Modern Languages

vii
viii Acknowledgements

Research in London; the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures

in Liverpool, especially Claire Taylor, whose support in recent years has
been immeasurable; Sarah Wright, Emma Wilson and especially Stephi
Hemelryk-Donald from the Leverhulme-funded network Childhood and
Nation in World Cinema; Vikki Bell, Ben Bollig, Andrea Noble and David
Rojinski. Further thanks go to my editors at Palgrave Macmillan.
I am grateful to Natalia Fortuny, Luis Ignacio García, Silvana Mandolessi,
Cecilia Sosa and Mariana Eva Perez, who have been involved in many proj-
ects tied to the topic of this book. Also to Victoria Torres, Kirsten Mahlke
and the team from the European Research Council-funded Narratives
of Terror and Disappearance. Thanks to Constanza Ceresa, Stef Craps,
Gabriel Gatti, Fernando Reati, Alicia Salomone and Saúl Sosnowski.
I should like to extend my thanks to all the artists who shared their sto-
ries and trusted me with their oeuvre. In particular I should like to mention
Ana Adjiman, Laura Alcoba, Lola Arias, Gabriela Bettini, Marcelo Brodsky,
Natalia Bruschtein, Félix Bruzzone, Albertina Carri, the Colectivo de
hijos, Claudia Fontes, Gustavo Germano, María Giuffra, Victoria Grigera
Dupuy, Lucila Quieto, María Soledad Nívoli, Mariana Eva Perez, Nicolás
Prividera, Ernesto Semán, Ángela Urondo and Paloma Vidal.
Thanks to the Scorers, especially Jane and Tony, for their support while
I was working on this book. And special thanks to my parents, sister and
brother—working and living far from them is always the most difficult
decision I have to confront. Finally, this book owes everything to the gen-
erosity, patience and selflessness of James Scorer. He shows me everyday
how powerful and subversive love and laughter can be.
 Contents

1 Introduction   1

2 The Autofictional Turn, Playful Memories of Trauma

and the Post-Dictatorship Generations  13

3 Toying with History in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios  45

4 Self-Fictionalization, Parody and Testimony in Diario

de una princesa montonera—110 % Verdad and
Montonerísima  69

5 Happily Ever After? Guerrilla Fables and Fairy Tales

of Disappearance  93

6 Lucila Quieto’s Ludic Gaze 115

7 The Defamiliarized Past in Félix Bruzzone’s Comical

Autofictions 145

8 Monstrous Memories 171

ix
x Contents

9 Conclusion 197

Bibliography 209

Index 225
 Abbreviations

CdC Club de Colaye

Cdh Colectivo de hijos
CONADEP Comisión Nacional para la Desaparición de Personas (National
Commission on the Disappearance of Persons)
ERP Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary
Army)
ESMA Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (Navy Training School)
EU European Union
GAC Grupo de Arte Callejero
HIJOS Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia, contra el Olvido y el Silencio
(Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion
and Silence)
ID Identification
YPF Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (Fiscal Oilfields)

xi
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1   Lola García Garrido, Xoel López and Iván Moiseeff,

Mazinger Z contra la dictadura militar (poster), 2010 3
Fig. 3.1   Albertina Carri, Los rubios, cartografía de una película, 2007 55
Fig. 4.1   Mariana Eva Perez, Diario de una princesa montonera—110 %
Verdad, 2012 (Photo: Damián Neustadt; collage: Natalia
“Kit Sch” Perugini) 79
Fig. 4.2   Mariana Eva Perez, Diario de una princesa montonera—110 %
Verdad, 2012 (Photo: Esteban Tula Santamaría) 83
Fig. 4.3   Victoria Grigera Dupuy, Montonerísima, 2015 (Photo:
Natalia Mayans) 88
Fig. 5.1   Hugo Aveta, Calle 30 Número 1134, Espacios
sustraíbles, 1998 103
Fig. 5.2   María Giuffra, La hija del guerrillero, Los niños del Proceso,
25 × 35 cm, mixed technique, 2006 (wwww.mariagiuffra.com)105
Fig. 5.3   María Giuffra, Este dolor, Los niños del Proceso, 40 × 50 cm,
charcoal and acrylic, 2005 (wwww.mariagiuffra.com)106
Fig. 6.1   Photographs that formed part of the exhibition Archivos
incompletos, ARGRA, 2008 116
Fig. 6.2   Lucila Quieto, El traidor, collage, 2008/2009 116
Fig. 6.3   Lucila Quieto, Arqueología de la ausencia, photograph,
1999–2001122
Fig. 6.4   Lucila Quieto, Sargento Kirk en el Cordobazo, collage and
transfer, 2007 126
Fig. 6.5   Lucila Quieto, Campo de Mayo, collage, 2008/2009 127
Fig. 6.6   Lucila Quieto, Untitled, collage, 2013 131
Fig. 6.7   Pedro Camilo del Cerro, El viaje de papá, photograph, 2007 133
Fig. 6.8   Verónica Maggi, El rescate, photograph, 2007 134

xiii
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 6.9   Gabriela Bettini, Mi tío Marcelo, Recuerdos inventados,

photograph, 2003 136
Fig. 7.1   Book covers for Félix Bruzzone’s Los topos, 2008, and
Las chanchas, 2014 147
Fig. 7.2   Drawing reproduced in Félix Bruzzone’s Las chanchas, 2014 152
Fig. 8.1   Photograph reproduced in Ernesto Semán’s Soy un bravo
piloto de la nueva China, 2011 177
Fig. 8.2   Lola Arias, Mi vida después, 2008 (Photo: Lorena Fernández) 184
Fig. 8.3   Lola Arias, Mi vida después, 2008 (Photo: Lorena Fernández) 186
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 2010 a writer (Iván Moiseeff), a visual artist (Lola García Garrido) and
a musician (Xoel López), all born between 1975 and 1982, collaborated
on the creation of a promotional poster and soundtrack for a non-existent,
big-budget film. Borrowing elements from animé and science fiction, the
plot summary for Mazinger Z contra la dictadura militar (Mazinger Z
against the Military Dictatorship), printed on the reverse of the poster,
outlines how a group of young guerrilleros resist the 1976–1983 Argentine
military dictatorship with the assistance of the famous Japanese super
robot. On the front of the poster an image shows the dictator Jorge Rafael
Videla, driving a green Falcon car adorned with a sticker of the 1978
World Cup and carrying a licence plate with the devil’s number (666).
He is escaping from a big fire that is destroying three of the most iconic
constructions of Buenos Aires: the Casa Rosada (Government House),
the Pirámide de Mayo (an obelisk in the central square of Buenos Aires)
and the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA, the navy training
school that became the most emblematic clandestine centre of torture
and disappearance during the dictatorship). But Videla cannot go far. The
disproportionately large figure of Mazinger Z, reflected in the front of the
car, with his legs wide open as if he were a cowboy, suggests that in this
alternative and humorous version of Argentine history the dictator finally
gets what he deserves.
Mazinger Z contra la dictadura militar forms part of an ever-growing
corpus that reflects a new trend in post-dictatorship Argentine art and litera-
ture, one that takes a playful, irreverent, non-solemn and anti-monumental

© The Author(s) 2016 1

J. Blejmar, Playful Memories, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40964-1_1
2 J. BLEJMAR

approach to the traumatic past. Similar traits, for example, can be seen
in the miniature installation Juguetes (Toys) (2012) by Jorgelina Paula
Molina Planas, one of the first granddaughters found by Abuelas de Plaza
de Mayo in 1984. In this work, part of the series Geografías interiores
(Interior Geographies), the artist reconstructs the abduction of her mother
in 1977 using a doll’s house and scary toys (an angry Ninja turtle, GI Joe
and a bear) in the role of the military perpetrators, and Barbie and other
dolls in the role of members of her broken family (the artist, who was
three-and-a-half years old, was in the house when the kidnapping took
place). And in the book Las teorías salvajes (Wild Theories) (2008) by
Pola Oloixarac, the protagonists create a videogame, Dirty War 1975
(in English in the original), in which the players select the characters that
they want to be (e.g. Che I, “with black beret, uniform Sierra Maestra, without
cigar,” or Che II, “cigar, bandana with red star and beard”) and win points
by carrying out certain militant tasks.1 Moreover, in a blog post entitled
“Actividad paranormal en la ESMA” (“Paranormal Activity in the ESMA”)
(2008), Oloixarac refers to a series of paranormal phenomena that she
experienced in the former ESMA (now converted into the memory site
Espacio Cultural Nuestros Hijos) while attending a series of lectures:
“four chairs suddenly broke without explanation,” “I had been told that
somewhere in the property there is a tree that bleeds” and that “there is
constant poltergeist activity.” Visiting the ESMA, she concludes, was like
being in the “[fantasy park] Italpark’s ghost train but with content for
adults”2 (Fig. 1.1).
Deploying what I call in this book a “playful memory,” young contem-
porary artists and writers, many children of disappeared and persecuted
parents, often use humor, popular genres, children’s games and visual
techniques commonly taught at school to provocatively represent the dic-
tatorship and toy with trauma. Paraphrasing Ernst van Alphen’s comments
on post-Shoah practitioners, we can say that with the arrival of the post-
dictatorship generation, playing with the Argentine traumatic past is no
longer unthinkable.3
This volume addresses precisely that controversial tension between
trauma, play and humor, and it accords an unprecedented centrality to con-
temporary films, photography, literature, plays and blogs that have changed
the whole panorama of mourning, remembering and representing trauma
over the past decade or so by offering playful accounts of the past and of the
self. The majority of the works date from between 2003 (the year when for-
mer president Néstor Kirchner, who in 2004 asked for forgiveness on behalf
of the Argentine state, won the general elections, when the amnesty laws of
 INTRODUCTION 3

Fig. 1.1 Lola García Garrido, Xoel López and Iván Moiseeff, Mazinger Z contra
la dictadura militar (poster), 2010

Obediencia Debida and Punto Final were overturned, and when Albertina
Carri’s groundbreaking film Los rubios was released) and 2015 (the final year
of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s administration).
By focusing on a select number of representative works of this new mem-
oryscape in Argentina, I approach these productions not as second-hand
or adoptive (post-)memories but rather as memories in their own right,
related to but also separate from those of the adult survivors. Furthermore,
while I recognize the diversity of experiences of the dictatorship and the
subsequent ways of addressing them in art and literature, I also suggest
that the work of the pioneering practitioners that form my corpus share
similar aesthetic choices.
4 J. BLEJMAR

In particular, I focus on two traits that I believe distinguish these nar-

ratives from previous accounts of the authoritarian past—namely, the uses
of “autofiction” and of “playful aesthetics” in creative accounts of this
period. Indeed, the photographic montages, semiautobiographical nov-
els, subjective documentaries, testimonial artworks, blogs and biodramas
by the post-dictatorship generation are characterized both by the use of
humor and by an original interplay between imaginative investments of
the past, the fictionalization of the self, visual collages and artistic modi-
fications of documentary archives. Though instances of this interplay are
evident in cultural productions from previous decades, it is my contention
that the widespread development of this approach pays testament to a new
cultural formation of memory in Argentina.
In this book I thus trace and conceptualize the common preoccu-
pations, motives and strategies of these artists. I show how they look
towards one another’s work across boundaries of genre and register,
creating an unprecedented “community of post-orphaned artists.”4
These artists, as sociologist Gabriel Gatti puts it, recognize that they
are, and always will be, orphans (in the case of those who are children
of disappeared parents) but who also want to do something creative and
life-affirming with that condition. Even the artists and writers who are
not descendants of the victims of the dictatorship studied here share
with them a certain generational gaze characterized by a similar (play-
ful) aesthetics and ethics of remembering. As a result, the phrase “arte
y literatura de los hijos” (“art and literature of the children”) should be
understood here in a broad sense.5
Strictly speaking, although all of the artists I mention here are of a
similar age, not all of the artists of the post-dictatorship generations use
playful and autofictional devices to address trauma. Nicolás Prividera, son
of a disappeared mother and director of the film M (2007), has proposed
a way of categorizing the “children of,” which, while controversial, might
be useful to understand the novelty of the artists I study here. Using the
imaginary of science-fiction films, he has said that children of disappeared
parents are, on the one hand, like “replicants,” subjects who merely repeat
the discourses and words of their absent parents, and, on the other, what
he calls “Frankensteinian” children, who want to escape and deny their
paternal legacy altogether. In between there are authors and artists such
as Félix Bruzzone, Albertina Carri and Mariana Eva Perez whom he calls
“mutant” children, subjects who do not refuse paternal inheritance but
who resist being confined in a safe place and instead always reappear in
 INTRODUCTION 5

unexpected forms, brought together not so much (or at least not only)
by a shared history of trauma but by the necessity to do something con-
structive with their history. “The ‘mutant’ condition of these artists,” said
Prividera on the occasion of the book launch for Bruzzone’s Los topos (The
Moles) (2008), “helps them (and us) to escape the labyrinth by going over
it instead of through it, and to look for answers in the present (or even in
the future) rather than in the past.”6
Ultimately, the use of autofiction, parody and humor, I suggest, allows
these artists, especially those who were also young victims of the dicta-
torship, to present themselves, in the words of Alain Badiou, as “creator
bodies” rather than as merely “suffering figures,” replacing the spectacle
of victimhood for a more productive and affective memory.7 In June 2004,
Badiou presented a series of conferences at the Universidad Nacional de
Rosario, Argentina. There he suggested that the transformation of suffer-
ing into entertainment (in the mass media or in trials) is one of the most
revealing traits of our time. He argued that such entertainment reduces
the figure of the victim to a slave-like “suffering body,” making it impera-
tive to recover the body made by ideas: the “creator body.” Rather than
regarding them as passive sufferers of the distressing mechanisms of state
terror, Badiou’s notion of creator bodies forces us to reconsider children
of the disappeared in terms of subjectivity and agency, as artists, filmmak-
ers and writers. In other words, the victim should become, as Badiou put
it, “the testimony of something more than itself.”8 A victim should not
be defined only by the spectacle of suffering or by the body reduced to
its animality. Only then will we be able to found an idea of justice beyond
this spectacle and beyond the mere pity and commiseration towards the
victims. For this new understanding of justice, concludes Badiou, we need
bodies of thought, creativity and ideas, the type of victims that I address
in this book.
The volume is divided into nine chapters informed by four hypotheses,
which provide the main thread of my analysis and which I return to in
both the chapters and the conclusion:

1. that autofictional and playful accounts access areas of the dictatorial

past previously unexplored by more conventional testimonies;
2. that memory in the expressive and playful practices of the post-
dictatorship generation represents a diverse and often contradictory
texture of singular versions and accounts that are not brought into
any form of conclusive synthesis;
6 J. BLEJMAR

3. that by admitting autofiction and playful aesthetics as alternative

forms of witnessing, these memories can access the point of view of
the other (the perpetrator) in ways that previous, testimony-based
accounts could not;
4. that these new memory practices can make us better understand,
through their self-reflexivity, the relations between documentary
evidence, recall and imaginative investment that are common to all
forms of memory.

Chapter 2 discusses what I call the “autofictional turn” in post-

dictatorship Argentine culture. I address contemporary debates about
the concept of “autofiction,” a term coined by French writer Serge
Doubrovsky in 1977 (a year after the coup in Argentina) to describe texts
characterized by the establishment of a simultaneous pact with the reader
in stories that are based on true events (an autobiographical pact) and
have characters with “real” names, but which are presented under the
label of “roman/novel” (a fictional pact). The 2001 Encyclopedia of Life
Writing defines autofiction as “one of the forms taken by autobiographi-
cal writing at a time of severely diminished faith in the power of memory
and language to access definite truths about the past or the self.”9 Indeed,
rather than professing “to tell the truth as sincerely as possible, autofiction
acknowledges the fallibility of memory, and the impossibility of truthfully
recounting a life story.”10 The emergence of autofiction is closely linked to
the difficulties posed to language by trauma and the extreme experiences
of the twentieth century, notably the Shoah. Autofiction is thus based on
the premise that to bear witness to past events (especially traumatic ones)
we need the obliqueness of fiction.
Notions of ambiguity, fragmentation and distrust in the referential
capacity of language, the deconstruction of the biographical illusion and
the possibility that autofictions have to imagine different versions of the
past are all, I argue, key elements of the cultural memories addressed here.
In this chapter I also explore to what extent the debates about autofiction
have influenced those studying the cultural memory of trauma in Latin
America, and particularly in Argentina, and what contributions Argentine
autofictions can make to the wider field of memory studies. As Ana Casas
states, an unexplored aspect of autofiction is its functionality in art forms
other than literature.11 This book tests the effectiveness and limitations
of autofiction not only in different disciplines but also in texts that are
 INTRODUCTION 7

intrinsically multidisciplinary (plays that incorporate screens in their

mise-en-scène, novels that include photographs, films that employ theatri-
cal features, etc.). Finally, I also pay attention to another important feature
of contemporary autofictions of trauma—namely, their generational and
playful status. Artists and writers who grew up during the dictatorship bear
witness to the past not so much by “sticking” to the facts but by establish-
ing a freer, looser relationship with their referent and with so-called reality,
thus redefining notions such as “testimony,” “witness” and “truth.”
Chapter 3 analyzes Albertina Carri’s pioneering autofictional film Los
rubios (The Blonds) (2003), paying particular attention to the controver-
sial Playmobil stop-motion sequence that reconstructs the abduction of
the director’s parents. It suggests that toy and game art not only redirect
our gaze away from the experiences of adult survivors and towards those
of their heirs, offering a new (child-like) perspective on the period, but
also connect state violence to the violence inherent in everyday objects
and to practices of childhood during both dictatorship and democracy.
Moreover, in their rejection of realism and mere reproductions of the past,
toy art and playful memories revitalize the images and cultural transmis-
sion of Argentine history at the same time as suggesting, as van Alphen
puts it, the ontological impossibility of completely and comprehensively
mastering trauma.
Chapter 4 looks at the use of parody in one of the most provocative
autofictions of recent years: Mariana Eva Perez’s blog Diario de una princ-
esa montonera—110 % Verdad (Journal of a Montonera Princess—110 %
Truth) (2009–2012). First, I analyze recent debates about the notion
of postmemory coined by Marianne Hirsch in 1997, paying particular
attention to Perez’s intervention in this debate and her questioning of
the applicability of the term to local experiences of trauma. I suggest that
rather than the vicarious or absent nature of their memories, what brings
together the artists and writers addressed in this book is a shared aesthet-
ics and ethics of remembering embraced in adulthood, of which parody
is one of the most significant. In the second part of the chapter I illus-
trate these hypotheses with an analysis of Perez’s blog and of the stand-
up show of another daughter of disappeared parents, Victoria Grigera
Dupuy’s Montonerísima (2013), highlighting what I consider to be one
of the main achievements of these artists—namely, the creation of a new
language and vocabulary of memory that refashions the politics of mourn-
ing in the aftermath of trauma.
8 J. BLEJMAR

Chapter 5 examines both the role of autofiction and the recurring use
of motifs, structures and imaginaries taken from fairy tales and children’s
fables in Laura Alcoba’s literary representation of her clandestine child-
hood during the 1970s, La casa de los conejos (The Rabbit House) (2008),
and in María Giuffra’s Los niños del proceso (The Children of the Process)
(2001–2005), a visual portrait of an orphaned generation. Following a
group of scholars of fairy tales who have studied the links between this
genre and testimonial accounts of collective trauma, I argue here that
post-dictatorship artists and writers use fairy tales and children’s fables
to address the tension within their recollections of childhood between
historical knowledge of the events and affective responses to their experi-
ences of violence.
Chapter 6 looks at the ludic montages and collages by photographer
Lucila Quieto. The daughter of a disappeared father, Quieto modifies the
photographic archive of the dictatorship via an artistic work that includes
the projection of images of the disappeared onto present bodies and physi-
cal places, curating toy installations as well as reframing, cutting and draw-
ing documentary photographs. In her work, Quieto resorts to autofiction
to create the “missing” picture in her family album (the photograph with
her father that she never had) and to imagine alternative courses of history
in which her childhood heroes meet real villains. Ultimately she moves the
photographs of the past beyond their role as a document of tragic events
to play with history, to appropriate it and to make it more “accessible” to
future generations.
Chapter 7 looks at the relationship between fact and fiction, and auto-
biography and fantasy, in Félix Bruzzone’s implausible and humorous
autofictions. I argue that his literature has experienced a radical transfor-
mation in recent years, from his 2008 collection of short stories, 76, to
the publication of his third novel, Las chanchas (The Female Pigs) (2014).
This transformation consists in the progressive abandonment of explicit
references to Bruzzone’s life (he is also a son of disappeared parents) in
favour of a more ambiguous, original and adventurous type of autofiction.
Indeed, in Las chanchas the autobiographical material and allusions to him
being a son of disappeared parents subsists but as a mere echo rather than
as explicit references to his life. In this sense his novels echo the idea of
autofiction in the work of Julio Premat,12 who studied writers such as
Jorge Luis Borges, Ricardo Piglia and César Aira, all of whom introduce
themselves as characters in their fictions but always in parodies, as frag-
mented subjectivities and as mere reflections of a potential identity that is
never quite materialized.13
 INTRODUCTION 9

Chapter 8 examines the representation of the figure of the perpetra-

tor and of the children of perpetrators in Lola Arias’ biodrama Mi vida
después (My Life After) (2008) and in Ernesto Semán’s novel Soy un bravo
piloto de la nueva China (I Am a Brave Pilot of the New China) (2009).
I argue here that autofiction offers post-dictatorship artists and writers
what testimony, autobiography and historical chronicles cannot—that is,
it allows them to imagine not only their own childhood memories but
also the memories and experiences of the “other,” of those who carried
out the crimes. In these texts the perpetrators are portrayed as two-faced
men, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, half-human and half-monstrous. In the
last section of the chapter I link the representation of the “monsters” of
Argentine history in art and literature to Manuel Alberca’s definition of
autofiction as an androgynous and experimental genre, part fiction and
part autobiography—that is to say, a monstrosity.
Finally, the conclusion summarizes the main traits of the playful auto-
fictions of the post-dictatorship period and suggests ways in which other
similar works, including self-figurative novels by children of exiled parents
and the cultural memories of child bystanders, could bring to light new
aspects of the Argentine recent past.

NOTES
1. Oloixarac’s particular image perhaps has an antecedent in Carlos Gamerro’s
inclusion of a videogame that apparently allows (Argentine) players to win
the Malvinas/Falklands War in his novel Las islas (The Islands) (1998). In
Gamerro’s book, however, Argentina never actually recovers the islands
since a virus ends up allowing a British invasion of the Argentine mainland.
2. Oloixarac, “Actividad paranormal en la ESMA.” Unless otherwise stated,
all translations from Spanish to English in this book are mine. In a chapter
of his book Los gauchos irónicos (2013), literary critic and writer Juan
Terranova argues that both Mazinger Z contra la dictadura militar and
Oloixarac’s chronicle hybridize traditions and create tensions that work on
taboos. “For many reasons,” writes Terranova, “the last dictatorship and
its administration of violence always implied, and still do, a hard serious-
ness. … The spokespeople who denounced and shaped the history of state
terror in Argentina [also] made it impenetrable to humor” (p. 75).
Terranova adds that although the first years after the return to democracy
witnessed irreverent responses to the dictatorship, there is something dif-
ferent in the works of this generation of artists and writers, the majority of
whom went to school in the 1980s. He suggests that this difference relies
more on the aesthetics and elements of these representations (e.g. in the
use of popular genres or icons of pop culture) than in their content.
10 J. BLEJMAR

Following Martín Kohan and Gabriel Gatti, I would argue, however, that
one of the main differences between the playful memories of this genera-
tion and those of the previous one is precisely a change in the target/
content of their irreverence: together with profaning and playing with the
meanings and images of the dictatorship, the artists addressed here, many
of them also young victims of the military regime, parody the discourses
and institutions of memory that have shaped their identities.
3. Van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust,” 69.
4. Gatti, Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay, 130.
5. In this book the term “post-dictatorship generation” is also used in a broad
sense to refer to artists and writers who were born in the late 1960s and
1970s: Laura Alcoba (1968), Lola Arias (1976), Félix Bruzzone (1976),
Albertina Carri (1973), María Giuffra (1976), Victoria Grigera Dupuy
(1978), Lucila Quieto (1976), Mariana Eva Perez (1977) and Ernesto
Semán (1969). These artists were born shortly before or during the dicta-
torship and therefore have a different experience of the period than the
generation of artists and writers born in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
such as Carlos Gamerro (1962) and Alan Pauls (1959), who were old
enough to be activists or to fight in the Malvinas/Falklands War but who
experienced the dictatorship not as direct participants but rather as bystand-
ers or young witnesses of the events. Thus we can call this latter group a
“first generation” of post-dictatorship artists and writers (a generation that
started writing or filming after the disappeared artists from the “absent
generation”) and “second generation” to the former, comprising subjects
who spent their childhoods in the military regime. It is worth noting, how-
ever, that even the term “second generation” is not problem-free, as I
discuss in Chapter 2. Perhaps that is why some scholars, such as Ana Ros,
have preferred not to make such a distinction, calling the latter simply the
“post-dictatorship” generation (The Post-Dictatorship Generation in
Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 4). Among other things, the term “sec-
ond generation” implies a false historical distance between the remember-
ing subjects and the events in question, and it collapses the experiences of
writers and artists such as Perez, Quieto and Giuffra, who have no or few
memories of the dictatorial period, with those of writers and artists such as
Alcoba and Semán, who were old enough to understand what was going
on around them. For the sake of economy, however, I still use the term
“post-dictatorship generation” or “second generation” to refer to the art-
ists of both groups, brought together not (only) by similar, albeit not iden-
tical, biological-temporal locations but by shared, often irreverent, ways of
addressing the period in art and literature. For further discussion of the
concept of “generation” and its uses during the post-dictatorship period,
see Drucaroff, Los prisioneros de la torre, 25–47.
 INTRODUCTION 11

6. Prividera, “Plan de evasión.”

7. Badiou, “La idea de justicia,” 21–23.
8. Badiou, “La idea de justicia,” 21.
9. Jolly, Encyclopedia of Life Writing, 86.
10. Jones, Spaces of Belonging, 96.
11. Casas, “La autoficción en los estudios hispánicos: perspectivas actuales,” 15.
12. Premat, Héroes sin atributos.
13. Casas, “La autoficción en los estudios hispánicos: perspectivas actuales,” 12.
 CHAPTER 2

The Autofictional Turn, Playful Memories

of Trauma and the Post-Dictatorship
Generations

It is 1972. A five-year-old girl is sitting in the corner of a small kitchen

while a man and a woman, possibly her parents, are setting the table for
dinner. All of a sudden, a loud noise, stronger than a knock, interrupts
them. Armed men break into the house. Everybody is shouting. In a sec-
ond scene, the girl is in a bedroom with someone who appears to be her
mother. One of the armed men is there. He explains to the woman that
they are not there for her but for her husband. He demands that she tell
him everything she knows. The man looks at the girl and asks her whether
she is scared.
These memories are those of Cecilia Vallina. In the early 1970s her
father was involved in the creation of a clandestine film—Informes y testi-
monios sobre la tortura política en la Argentina (Reports and Testimonies
about Political Torture in Argentina)—that intended to denounce the dic-
tatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–1970). The scenes referred to
above are in fact part of that film. Vallina took the part of the girl in the
film, though the house and parents were not hers. Yet she “remembers”
and treasures those images not as a simulacrum but as “the only memory
I have of that experience.”1 Here the term “experience” is ambiguous:
does it refer to the experience of participating in a film or the experience
of being a child of persecuted parents? This ambiguity remains unresolved
in Vallina’s text, perhaps because both experiences were often confused in
her mind.

© The Author(s) 2016 13

J. Blejmar, Playful Memories, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40964-1_2
14 J. BLEJMAR

Vallina was only able to confirm that these scenes were not memories
of her real life thirty years after the events, when she received the only
­surviving copy of the film from Cuba. Even after seeing the film the bound-
aries between what she lived, what she pretended to be living and what she
remembered remained unclear. That confusion was compounded when
she was ten years old and someone told her about the disappearance of the
parents of a friend during the last dictatorship, a story that corresponded
directly with the events of the film. These images that she had kept inside
her as “false memories” suddenly acquired the status of a prophecy: the
fictional kidnapping became real, but in someone else’s life. At that point,
says Vallina, “that image turned somehow into experience.”2
The childhood memories of many artists and writers who grew up dur-
ing the dictatorship are, like Vallina’s, comprised of images of what they
lived, what they remembered, what they imagined and the stories they
were told during and after the events. In their cultural memories of those
years they turn to that hybridity precisely to make explicit the difficulty
of discriminating fact from fiction in their narratives of the past and of
the self.
What other reasons motivate these writers and artists to turn to autofic-
tion in their cultural remembrance of the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina?
Are the autofictional and playful aesthetics of post-dictatorship memory
the evidence of a paradigmatic shift in the way the dictatorship and the
years prior to the coup are being transmitted from one generation to
another? Are these works inhabited by a new type of “testimonial subject”
unrestrained by the traditional norms, purposes and words that we habitu-
ally associate with testimonies? Or, on the contrary, is there nothing essen-
tially new in these works? Is it possible, in other words, that they are just
another symptom of the so-called post-modern “subjective turn” and the
mere exhibition of the intimacy that has dominated the public sphere in
blogs, social networks, autobiographical performances and reality shows
in recent decades?
In this book I address these and other related questions by focusing
on the work of a select group of post-dictatorship artists, photographers,
filmmakers, playwrights, bloggers and writers: Laura Alcoba, Lola Arias,
Félix Bruzzone, Albertina Carri, María Giuffra, Victoria Grigera Dupuy,
Mariana Eva Perez, Lucila Quieto and Ernesto Semán. Bruzzone, Carri,
Grigera Dupuy, Perez, Quieto and Semán are all children of disappeared
parents, whereas Alcoba’s father was a political prisoner during the dicta-
torship. Alcoba went into exile with her mother when she was ten years
 THE AUTOFICTIONAL TURN, PLAYFUL MEMORIES OF TRAUMA... 15

old. Lola Arias has no direct victims of the dictatorship in her family but
was born during the year of the coup, which means that, like every other
member of her generation (myself included; I too was born during the
dictatorship in Argentina), she was affected by the violence of those years,
albeit in different ways. In a broader sense, all of us are both heirs and
orphans of an absent generation.
The new millennium has witnessed the emergence of a still-growing
corpus of works by post-dictatorship artists and writers. I have focused my
analysis on the works of the nine artists listed above, first, because I believe
that each of them in their own field has been a pioneer in the way that they
playfully combine fact and fiction to address the effects of the dictatorship
in their lives: Arias and Grigera Dupuy in theatre, Bruzzone, Semán and
Alcoba in literature, Carri in cinema, Quieto in photography, Giuffra in
art, and Perez in social networks and theatre. They have all, sometimes
unwittingly or without wanting to, been sources of inspiration for other
writers and artists of that generation who also address their own childhood
memories of those years in art and literature using autofiction.
Second, I have chosen these artists not only because they have explicitly
recognized the influence of each others’ work in their own autofictions
but also because many of them have worked in collaboration on differ-
ent projects. Their shared aesthetics and ethics of remembering and the
affinity that they mutually express for each others’ works prove that these
are much more than mere personal or individual testimonies, subjective
exercises or adoptive memories. In addition and unlike, for example, many
post-conflict artists who use humor or “play” when dealing with other
traumatic events, such as the Holocaust, to address a vicarious memory of
the past (including David Levinthal and Zbigniew Libera), many of the
artists discussed here often direct that humor towards their own condition
of being children of disappeared parents and young victims of the dictator-
ship. They use it as a way to speak of their own (unspeakable) experiences
of trauma. Thus, as we will see in Chapters 3 and 4, neither the “subjec-
tive turn” nor theories of postmemory can explain, at least on their own,
all the ramifications and complexities of this new cultural phenomenon in
Argentina.
While this trend has similarities with other transnational aesthetics, it
also has attributes specific to its own local context of production. Thus
before offering close readings of the works of my corpus in this chapter,
I shall revisit the main trends dominant in writings of the self, art and
literature during the immediate post-dictatorship era in Argentina in an
16 J. BLEJMAR

attempt to understand what is new (if anything) in the more contempo-

rary cultural memories of political violence.
One of the hypotheses of this book is that during the 1980s and 1990s,
testimony/(auto)biography and fiction generally circulated in different
spheres, used dissimilar languages and established opposite reading pacts.
It is my contention that the autofictions that emerged in the new millen-
nium, and particularly following the release of Los rubios in 2003, embody
a space of convergence between these genres, offering new and original
ways of approaching trauma and memory in ego-literature and art.

Testimonies and the Preservation of Historical

Memory
The politics of memory during the first decades of the post-dictatorship
era had three specific aims: to remember, to show and to prove—all imper-
ative for the construction and conservation of a historical truth that aimed
to reinforce a weak democratic culture in Argentina. This preliminary
approach to the past emerged in a context of the demand to remember,
epitomized by slogans such as “Ni olvido, ni perdón” (No forgetting, no
forgiveness). These demands were made all the more potent by the 1986
Ley de Punto Final and the 1987 Ley de Obediencia Debida, passed by
the democratic government of Raúl Alfonsín, which, together with the
official pardons given to military leaders by Carlos Menem in 1990, called
for forgiveness and reconciliation.
Within this context, the 1985 Juicio a las Juntas played a key role in
the public preservation of historical memory. The testimonies of the survi-
vors offered both in the witness box and in the Nunca más report (1984)
served as the main evidence against the military. As argued by Argentine
sociologist Emilio Crenzel in La historia política del Nunca más: La memo-
ria de las desapariciones en la Argentina (2008), focusing on the need for
proof, the judges employed a protocol by which they would interrupt
testimonies of witnesses whenever they included memories of sensations
or personal reflections on their experiences. As sensations and reflections
could not be proved, in the eyes of the court they were not facts. The
judges considered that, had they allowed the introduction of such unreli-
able elements of memory, they would have put at risk the preservation of
historical truth, since impressions or subjective considerations would have
cast doubt on the veracity of the testimonies and threatened their main
aim: to denounce.
 THE AUTOFICTIONAL TURN, PLAYFUL MEMORIES OF TRAUMA... 17

Likewise, the Comisión Nacional para la Desaparición de Personas

(National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, CONADEP)
edited the testimonies in the Nunca más report to stress the witnesses’
condition as victims, keeping to a minimum, for example, information
about political affiliations. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in his book, Crenzel
makes no distinction between the term testimonios and denuncias indi-
cating how the testimonies included in the report were required to pri-
oritize factual and historical evidence over personal opinions or political
ideologies.3 Even when the subjective memory of the survivors—tactile
impressions, evocation of smells and so on—played an essential role in, for
example, identifying the sites where subjects were detained and tortured,
this memory was mainly considered by the commission to be “objective”
evidence and proof of the systematic and widespread nature of the felo-
nies. The objectivity of the testimonies is, according to Crenzel, reinforced
by the references made in the report to the scientific knowledge of the
professionals who participated in the investigations and corroborated the
words of the witnesses: architects who inspected the clandestine detention
and extermination centres, photographers who documented such inspec-
tions and lawyers who collected data at the sites. The Nunca más report
was edited in such a way as to “recover the reality and veracity of a crime
denied over and over again by its authors.”4 In other words, the document
sought testimonies that aimed, following the verbs used by Crenzel, to
prove, establish, present, reconstruct, illustrate and explain the facts.
With the twentieth anniversary of the coup, a number of new insti-
tutions—notably the Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la
Cultura de Izquierdas en la Argentina, Memoria Abierta and Comisión
Provincial de la Memoria—reinforced the practice of conserving the
historical memory of the recent past by creating a wealth (patrimonio)
of documents and oral testimonies. New voices—such as those of for-
mer left-wing militants or of the children of the disappeared, gathered
together in the collective group Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia, con-
tra el Olvido y el Silencio (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice
Against Oblivion and Silence, HIJOS)—added fresh perspectives on the
debates of the past by discussing, for example, the ideologies and ideas
that guided the lives of the disappeared in the years prior to the coup.
These debates turned to previously understudied events of the period,
including the 1969 popular uprising of students and workers known as
the Cordobazo, the assassination of the former dictator Pedro Eugenio
Aramburu by the guerrilla group Montoneros (an act considered to be the
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
associate had behaved decently, you might have been asked to visit
us.’
“‘Yes,’ announced the big grey; ‘Miss Fairley has asked the bully
who rides me and myself to spend a few days with you next week. I
suppose they’ll settle it then.’
“But the officer and horse who commanded the battery which held
the Weldon railroad weren’t going to be beaten as easily as that, you
may be sure! When I took my rider back to the stable that afternoon,
I heard him say to the orderly: ‘Jackson, I’m going north next week,
and shall want Reveille to start before me. I’m in too much pain to
give you your orders now, but come round to-morrow morning and
get your instructions.’
“Yantic was nothing but a little village clustered about a great
woollen-mill, without any stable or hotel to live in, so we had to put
up at Norwich, a place seven miles away; and it was a case of put up,
I tell you, in both food and attendance! For a decently brought up
horse to come down to a hotel livery-stable is a trial I never want to
go through again. In the field I never minded what came, but I do
hate musty corn and damp bedding.
“You girls would have laughed to see the roan filly’s face the first
time we met on the road.
“‘Horse alive!’ she cried, without so much as a greeting, ‘you don’t
mean to say you have hopes? Why, Mr. Solitaire and that horrid Mr.
Lewis arrive to-day, and the thing’s probably as good as decided.’
“‘My Major is very resolute,’ said I.
“‘So is a mule,’ snapped Miss Gaiety, ‘but we don’t think the more
of him for that.’”
The polo pony gave a horse laugh as he said, “That was one on
you.”
“It was,” acknowledged Reveille; “and I regret to say it made me
lose my temper to such an extent that I retorted, ‘I can’t say much for
the taste of your woman!’
“‘No,’ assented the filly; ‘if what you and Mr. Solitaire say is true,
she’s taking the worse of the two. But then, a human can’t help it. If
you covered a horse all over with clothes, do you think any one would
know much about him? Moreover, two-thirds of what men do or say
is said or done only to fool a woman. How can a girl help making
mistakes, when she’s got nothing to go by but talk? Why, look at it.
Your Major seems balky most of the time, won’t talk half of it, and
when he does, says the things he shouldn’t; while Mr. Lewis is always
affable, talks well, and pays indirect compliments better than any
man I ever met.’
“‘If she could only be told!’ I groaned.
“‘She would be, if I could talk,’ sighed the mare. ‘I’d let her know
how he treats his horses!’
“‘Miss Gaiety,’ I ejaculated, ‘I’ve got an idea.’
“‘What?’ she demanded.
“‘Wait a bit till I’ve had time to think it out,’ said I. ‘Gettysburg
wasn’t fought in five minutes.’
“‘Gettysburg was a big thing,’ she answered.
“‘So’s my idea,’ I told her.
In the meantime my Major was explaining to Miss Fairley that the
government had sent him to New London to inspect the ordnance at
Forts Trumbull and Griswold, and that he found it pleasanter to stay
in Norwich, and run down by train to New London for his work.
That’s the way humans lie when it doesn’t deceive any one and it isn’t
expected that it will. Of course Miss Fairley knew what brought him
North, and why he preferred Norwich to New London! One thing he
did do, though, which was pretty good. He apologised to her for
having said what he did before their first ride, told her that his
wound had been troubling him so that at times he scarcely knew
what he was saying, and declared he’d been sorry ever since. He was
humble! The Eleventh Battery of Light Artillery would never have
known him.
‘There,’ sniffed Miss Gaiety; ‘if the idiot had only talked in that
vein ten days ago, he might have done something. Oh, you men, you
men!’
“At least he won a small favour; for when he asked leave, at
parting, to be her companion the next day in a ride, she told him he
might join her and Mr. Lewis, if he wished. But the permission
wasn’t given with the best of grace, and she didn’t ask him to
luncheon before the start.
 “I thought out my idea over night, and put it in shape to tell. My
Major took me to the Fairleys’ a little early, and so went in, leaving
me alone. In a minute, however, a groom brought the filly and the
grey round to the door, and with them came Sagitta, the Russian
wolf-hound, whom, it seems, Mr. Lewis had brought from Europe,
and had just presented to Miss Fairley.
“After the barest greetings, I unfolded my scheme. ‘I don’t know,’
said I, ‘what Mr. Sagitta thinks, but we three are a spike-team in
agreeing that Mr. Lewis is a brute.’
“‘I bow-wow to that,’ assented the dog. ‘He kicked me twice,
coming up yesterday, because I was afraid to go up the steps of the
baggage-car.’
‘So far as we can see he is going to win Miss Fairley,’ I continued.
‘As Miss Gaiety says she’s a dear, I think we ought to prevent it.’
“‘Very pretty,’ says the grey; ‘but, may I ask, who is to interfere and
put the hobbles on him?’
“‘We are to tell her he’s cruel.’
“‘She won’t understand us, if we tell her till doomsday. These
humans are so stupid!’ growled Sagitta.
“‘That’s where my idea comes in,’ I bragged—a little airily, it is to
be feared. ‘We can’t, of course, tell it to her in words, but we can act
it.’
“‘Eh?’ exclaimed the filly, with a sudden look of intelligence.
“‘Not possible,’ snorted the big grey.
“‘I see,’ cried the mare, her woman’s wits grasping the whole thing
in a flash, and in her delight she kicked up her hind legs in the most
graceful manner.
“‘Heyday!’ exclaimed the grey, using our favourite expletive.
“It didn’t take me long to explain to him and Sagitta, and they
entered into the scheme eagerly. We were so hot to begin on it that
we pawed the road all into holes in our impatience.
“Presently out came the three, and then the fun began. Mr. Lewis
stepped forward to mount Felicia, and at once Miss Gaiety backed
away, snorting. Then the groom left us, and tried to hold her; but not
a bit of it; every time Mr. Lewis tried to approach she’d get wild.
 “Finally my Major joined in by walking over to help, and the mare
at once put her head round and rubbed it against him, and stood as
quiet as a mouse. So he says: ‘I’ve only my left arm, Miss Fairley, but
I think we can manage it;’ and the next moment she was in the
saddle.
“Lewis was pretty angry-looking as he went toward his own horse;
and when he, too, began to back and snort and shiver, he didn’t look
any better, you may be sure of that. You ought to have seen it! The
brute caught him by the bridle, and then the grey kept backing away
or dodging from him. Out on the lawn they went, cutting it up badly,
then into Miss Fairley’s pet bed of roses, then smashing into the
shrubberies. I never saw better acting. Any one would have sworn the
horse was half dead with fright.
“It didn’t take very much of this to make Lewis lose all self control.
“‘You cursed mule!’ he raved, his face white with passion; ‘if I had
a decent whip, I’d cut the heart out of you!’ And suiting the action to
the thought he struck the grey between the eyes with his crop a
succession of violent blows, until, in his fury, he broke the stick. Then
he clenched his fist and struck Solitaire on the nose, and would have
done so a second time if Miss Fairley hadn’t spoken.
“‘Stop!’ she called hotly, and Lewis dropped his fist like a flash.
Felicia was breathing very fast and her cheeks were white, while her
hands trembled almost as much as Solitaire had. Her face wore a
queer look as she continued: ‘I—excuse me, Mr. Lewis, but I couldn’t
bear to see you strike him. He—I don’t think he—something has
frightened him. Please give him just a moment.’ Then she turned to
my dear, saying, ‘Perhaps you can calm him, Major Moran?’
“I should think he could! Talk of lambs! Well, that was Solitaire
when my Major went up to him. He let himself be led out of the
flower-bed back to the road as quiet as a kitten. The moment Lewis
tried to come near him, however, back away he would, even from my
confrère. The groom tried to help; but it takes more than three
humans to control a horse who doesn’t want to be controlled.
“After repeated attempts they got tired of trying; and then Mr.
Lewis suggested, with a laugh that didn’t sound nice: ‘Well, Major,
we mustn’t cheat Miss Fairley of her afternoon; and since you seem
able to manage my beast, perhaps you’ll ride him, and let me take
yours?’
“Usually I should have been very much pained at my comrade’s
nodding his head, but this time it was exactly what I wanted. Whoop!
Ride me? Neigh, neigh! If you ever saw a coward in an ague of a blue
funk, that is what I was. I blessed my stars none of the Eleventh
Battery were round! Lewis tried; but, do his best, I wouldn’t let him
back me. When my Major interfered, I sidled up to my dear just as if
I couldn’t keep away from him; but when he attempted to hold me
for Lewis to mount, I went round in a circle, always keeping him
between me and the brute. It was oats to me, you’d better believe, to
see the puzzled, worried look on Miss Fairley’s face as she watched
the whole thing.
“Well, they discussed what they called ‘the mystery,’ and finally
agreed that they couldn’t ride that afternoon, so we horses were sent
down to the stable, and the three went back to the verandah. Sagitta
told me afterward what happened there.
‘Come here, pup,’ calls Lewis to him, the moment they were seated.
“Sagitta backed away two steps, bristling up, and growling a bit.
“‘Come here, you brute!’ ordered Lewis hotly, rising.
“Sagitta crouched a little, drew his lips away from his fangs, and
pitched his growl ‘way down in his throat.
“‘Look out! That dog means mischief,’ cried my Major.
“‘Are the animals possessed?’ roared Lewis, his voice as angry as
Sagitta’s snarl, yet stepping backwards, for it looked as if the dog
were about to spring.
“But my Major didn’t retreat—not he! He sprang between the wolf-
hound and Miss Fairley. ‘Down, sir!’ he ordered sharply; and Sagitta
dropped his lips and his bristles, and came right up to him, wagging
his tail, and trying to lick his hand.
“‘Isn’t it extraordinary?’ cried Miss Fairley, with a crease in her
forehead. ‘Here, Sagitta!’
“‘Miss Fairley, be careful!’ pleaded my Major; but there wasn’t the
slightest necessity. Sagitta was by her side like a flash, and was
telling her how he loved her, in every way that dog could. And there
he stayed till Lewis came forward, when he backed away again,
snarling.
“Now, in all their Washington intercourse my Major had been the
surly one; but in the interval he had evidently had time to realise his
mistake, and to see that he must correct it. Probably, too, he wasn’t
depressed by what had just taken place. Anyway, that afternoon he
was as pleasant and jolly as he knew how to be. But Mr. Lewis! Well,
I acknowledge he’d had enough to make any man mad, and that was
what he was. Cross, sulky, blurting out disagreeable things in a
disagreeable voice, with a disagreeable face: he did make an
exhibition of himself, so Sagitta said.
“After as long a stay as was proper, my Major told them he must
go, and I was brought round. Miss Fairley came to the stoop with
him, and didn’t I prick up my ears when I heard her say:
“‘Since you were defrauded of your ride to-day, Major Moran,
perhaps you will lunch here to-morrow, and afterward we will see if
we can’t be more successful?’
“The next day our interference was done a little differently. When
we were brought round to the door, there was Mr. Lewis with a pair
of cruelly big rowelled spurs on his boots, a brutal Mexican quirt in
his hand, and a look on his face to match the two. Of course the grey
gave him a lot of trouble in mounting, but we had already planned a
different policy; and so, after enough snorting and trembling to make
Felicia look thoughtful, he finally was allowed to get on Mr.
Solitaire’s back.
“Much good it did him! The filly and I paired off just as if we were
having a bridle trip in double harness; but do his best, Mr. Lewis
could not keep the grey abreast of us. Twenty feet in front, or thirty
feet behind, that was where he was during the whole ride, and Lewis
fought one long battle trying to make it otherwise. He had had the
reins buckled to the lower bar of the curb, so it must have been pretty
bad for the grey, but there was no flinching about him.
“Every now and then I could hear the blows of the quirt behind
me; and when, occasionally, the grey passed us, I could see his sides
gored and bleeding where they had been torn by the spurs, and
bloody foam was all round his jaw, and flecked his chest and flanks.
But he knew what he meant to do, and he did it without any heed to
his own suffering. There was joy when the filly told us that every time
the swish of the quirt was heard she could feel her rider shiver a
little; and Felicia must have been distressed at the look of the horse,
for she cut the ride short by suggesting a return home.
“Sagitta informed us afterward that if Mr. Lewis had been bad the
day before, he was the devil that afternoon on the verandah, and
Miss Fairley treated him like one. What is more, she vetoed a ride for
the next day by saying that she thought it was getting too cold to be
pleasant. When we had ridden away, Solitaire later told me, she
excused herself to Mr. Lewis, and went to the stable and fed the grey
with sugar, patting him, and telling the groom to put something on
the spur-gashes.
“We horses didn’t hear anything more for three days, at the end of
which time my pal and I rode over one morning, and reminded Miss
Fairley that she had promised to show us where we should find some
fringed gentians; and though it was the coldest day of the autumn,
Felicia didn’t object, but ordered Miss Gaiety saddled, and away we
went.
“We really had a very good time getting those gentians! Nothing
was ever done with the flowers, however, owing to circumstances
which constitute the most painful part of my confession. For a horse
and an officer, I had been pretty tricky already, but that was nothing
to the fraud I tried to perpetrate that morning. After our riders had
mounted for the return to Yantic, I suggested to Miss Gaiety what I
thought would be a winning race for my Major, which was neither
more nor less than that she should run away, and let him save Miss
Fairley. The roan came right into the scheme, and we arranged just
how it was to be managed. She was to bolt, and I was to catch her;
but since my Major had only his left arm, as soon as she felt his hand
on the rein she was to quiet down; and I have no doubt but it would
have been a preeminently successful coup if it had been run to the
finish.
“What actually happened was that the mare bolted at a rabbit
which very opportunely came across the road, and away she went
like a shell from a mortar. I didn’t even wait for orders, but sprang
after her at a pace that would have settled it before many minutes.
Just as I had got my gait, however, my poor dear gave a groan, reeled
in his saddle, and before I could check myself he pitched from my
back to the ground. I could not stop my momentum under thirty feet,
but I was back at his side in a moment, sniffing at him, and turning
him over with my nose, for his wounded arm was twisted under him,
and his face was as white as paper. That was the worst moment of my
life, for I thought I’d killed him. I put my head up in the air, and
didn’t I whinny and neigh!
“The filly, finding that something wrong had happened, concluded
to postpone the runaway, and came back to where I was standing.
Miss Fairley was off her like a flash, and, kneeling beside my
treasure, tried to do what she could for him, though that really wasn’t
anything. Just then, by good luck, along came a farmer in an oxcart.
They lifted my poor dear into it, and a pretty gloomy procession took
up its walk for Yantic.
“When we arrived at the Fairleys’ house, there was a to-do, as you
may imagine. He was carried upstairs, while I went for the doctor,
taking a groom with me, because humans are so stupid that they only
understand each other. I taught that groom a thing or two about
what a horse can do in the way of speed that I don’t believe he has
ever forgotten.”
“Did you do better than 1.35½?” inquired the Kentuckian; but
Reveille paid no heed to the question.
“After that sprint I had about the dullest month of my life,
standing doing nothing in the Fairleys’ stable, while nearly dying of
anxiety and regret. The only thing of the slightest interest in all that
time occurred the day after our attempted runaway, when Mr. Lewis
came down to the stable, and gave orders about having the big grey
sent after him. He wasn’t a bit in a sweet temper—that I could see;
and though I overheard one of the grooms say that he was to come
back later, as soon as the nurse and doctors were out of the house,
the big grey thought otherwise, and predicted that we should never
see each other again. Our parting was truly touching, and put tears in
the filly’s eyes.
“‘Friends,’ said Solitaire, ‘I don’t think he will ever forgive me, and
I suppose I am in for a lot of brutality from him; but I am not sorry.
If you ever give me another thought please say to yourself: “He did
his best to save a woman from having her life made one long night-
mare by a cruel master.”’
 “Nothing much happened in the weeks my Major was housed, with
the exception of one development that had for me an extremely
informing and delightful quality. One day, about a month after our
cropper, Felicia came down to the stable, and without so much as a
look or a word for Miss Gaiety, came straight into my stall, flung her
arms about my neck, and laid her soft cheek caressingly against it,
for some moments. Then she kissed me on the nose very tenderly,
and offered me what I thought were some little white stones. I had
never tasted sugar before, and nothing but her repeated tempting
and urging persuaded me to keep the lumps in my mouth long
enough to get the taste on my tongue. (I have to confess that since
then I have developed a strong liking for all forms of sweetmeats.)
What is more, she came down every day after that, and sometimes
twice a day, to caress and feed me. There was no doubt about it, that
for some reason she had become extraordinarily fond of me!
“It is awfully hard in this world to know what will turn out the best
thing. As a matter of fact, the tumble off my back was about the
luckiest accident that ever befell my Major; for it broke open the old
wound, and as the local doctors did not have six hundred other
injured men under them, they could give it proper attention, which
the hospital surgeons had never been able to do. One of them
extracted all the pieces of bone, set the arm, and then put it in a
plaster jacket, which ought to have healed it in good shape very
quickly. But for some reason it didn’t. In fact, I became very much
alarmed over the length of my Major’s convalescence, till one day I
overheard one of the stablemen say:
“‘Lor’! He won’t get well no too fast, with Miss Felicia to fluff his
pillers, an’ run his erran’s, an’ play to him, an’ read aloud to him, an’
him got nothin’ to do but just lay back easy an’ look at her.’
“Then I realised that it would be some time before he would feel
strong enough to go back to his ordnance inspecting.
“Finally, one afternoon, the filly and I were saddled and brought
round to the front door, and there were Miss Fairley and my Major,
both looking as well and happy as their best friend would want to see
them. It was a nice day, and away we went over the New England
hills.
“There wasn’t much surliness or coolness on that ride, and what
they didn’t talk about is hardly worth mentioning. After they had
fairly cantered, conversationally, for over three hours, however, they
slowed down, and finally only Felicia tried to talk, and she did it so
jerkily and confusedly, with such a deal of stumbling and
stammering, that presently, try her best, she had to come to a halt,
too. Then there was a most awkward silence, until suddenly my
Major burst out, more as if the sentence were shot from a gun than
as if he were speaking it:
“‘Oh, Felicia, if you could only—’
“That seemed to me too indefinite a wish to answer easily, and
apparently Miss Fairley thought the same, for another silence ensued
which was embarrassing even to me. So far as I could make out, my
Major could not speak, and Miss Fairley would not. I was as anxious
as he was to know what she would say, and in my suspense I
suddenly conceived an idea that was little short of inspiration,
though I say it who ought not. I asked the roan filly:
“‘Is your Felicia resting her weight on the side toward my Major, or
on the side away from him?’
“‘She has a very bad seat in her saddle,’ the mare told me, ‘and she
is resting all her weight on the side next you.’
“‘Then, Miss Gaiety,’ I suggested, ‘I think they will like it if we
snuggle.’
“‘Well, just for this once I will,’ replied the filly, shyly.”
Reveille turned in his stall, and, walking over to his manger, picked
up a wisp of hay. But the action was greeted by an outburst from the
ladies.
“Oh, you are not going to stop there, dear Mr. Reveille!” they
chorused.
“I always did hate a quitter on the home stretch,” chimed in the
discontented cob, pleased to have a grievance.
The narrator shook his head.
“No gentleman,” he asserted, “who overheard what followed would
ever tell of it; and a horse has an even higher standard of honour.”
“Ah, darling Mr. Reveille,” pleaded the feminine part of his
audience, “just a little more!”
“I hate to seem mulish,” responded the horse, “and so I will add
one small incident that is too good not to be repeated. When we rode
up to the house that evening, shamefully late for dinner, my Major
lifted Miss Fairley off Miss Gaiety in a way that suggested that she
might be very breakable, and, after something I don’t choose to tell
you about, he said:
“‘I wonder if we shall ever have another such ride!’
“‘It doesn’t seem possible, Stanley,’ whispered my Felicia, very
softly. ‘You know, even the horses seemed to understand!’”
Just as Reveille finished thus, a human voice was heard, saying:
“You will have the veterinary see the cob at once, and let me know
if it is a case which requires more than blistering.”
Then came a second and very treble voice. “Papa,” it begged, “will
oo lif’ me up on ol’ Weveille’s back?” And the next moment a child of
three was sitting astride the old warrior and clinging to his mane.
“Well, you old scoundrel,” said the human, “do you know you are
getting outrageously fat?”
“Weveille isn’t not any scoundwel,” denied the child, earnestly.
“Mama says Weveille is a’ ol’ darlin’.”
“Your mama, fortunately for Reveille and me, always had a soft
spot for idiots,” explained the man, stroking the horse’s nose
affectionately. “But I will say this for the old fellow: if most folly
resulted as well as his, there would be a big premium on fools.”
Reveille winked his off eye at the other steeds.
“Aren’t these humans comical?” he laughed.
 A WARNING TO LOVERS

Before some blazing logs, which fill a deep fireplace with warmth
that overflows to just the right extent into the room, stands, slightly
skewed, a sofa. The sofa is a comfortable one. It is short, deep, and
low; and the arms have a suggestion of longing to be filled that is
truly seductive. In addition, two down cushions imply that the sofa is
quite prepared to fit itself to any figure, be it long, short, broad, or
narrow. Altogether, it is a most satisfactory sofa.
But the satisfactoriness does not end here. Seated at one end of
that sofa is a girl, clearly in that neither grass nor hay period, which
begins at sixteen and ends at eighteen. Not that it is intended to
suggest that because the girl is neither hay nor grass she is
unattractive. Quite the reverse. New-mown hay is the sweetest, and
the girl, if neither child nor woman, is, in her way, just as sweet.
In algebra, when a, b, and c are computed, it is possible to find the
unknown quantity x. Applying an algebraic formula to the above, we
at once deduce what is necessary to complete the factors. It may be
stated thus: a, a sofa, plus b, a charming girl; and as a, a sofa, must
be divided by two, we find the unknown quantity to be x, a man, and
the product of our a, b, and x to equal xxx, or triple bliss. Nor is this
wrong. The sofa does not do more than seat two people comfortably,
yet at the present moment there are little spaces at both ends.
Concerning the other details of this a ÷ 2 + b + x − 0 (i. e. Mrs.
Grundy), it seems needless to enlarge.
“And isn’t it wonderful, Freddy, that you should love me and I
should love you?” cooed the girl.
“Just out of sight,” replied Freddy.
 Most people would agree with the above remarks, though the
circumstance of a man and woman occasionally loving each other is a
phenomenon recognised, if not approved, by science. But though
these two did not know it, there was a wonder here. Freddy has been
spoken of in the masculine gender, because, as Shakespeare wrote:
“The Lord made him, therefore let him pass for a man.” Otherwise
his manliness was open to debate. Lovable the girl unquestionably
was, or at least very fast verging upon it, but it passeth human
intelligence how Freddy could inspire any sort of feeling except an
intense longing for a gun loaded with goose-shot.
“And that we should have loved each other for so long, and never
either of us dreamed that we cared one little bit for each other,”
continued the girl.
Freddy did not assent to this sentiment as readily as to the former.
Freddy had been quite sure that Frances had been pining for his love
in secret for some months. So he only remarked: “We got there all
the same.”
“Yes,” assented Frances. “And we’ll love each other always, now.”
“But I say,” inquired Freddy, “what do you think your father and
mother will say?”
“Why, they’ll be delighted,” cried the girl. “It couldn’t be better.
Cousins,—and just the same age—and, and— Oh, lots of other
reasons, I’m sure, but I can’t think of them now.”
“Let’s tell them together,” suggested Freddy, courageously.
“Freddy! Of course not. That isn’t the right way. No, you must
request an interview with papa in his library, and plead eloquently
with him.”
“I suppose I must,” answered Freddy, with a noticeable limpness
in his voice and vertebræ.
“Wouldn’t it be fun if he should refuse his consent!” exclaimed the
girl.
Freddy did not recognise the comical quality. “I don’t see it,” he
moaned.
“Why, it would be so romantic! He would of course order you to
leave the house, and never, never darken his doors again. That’s what
the father always does.”
 “You think that’s fun?”
“Such fun! Then, of course, we should have to arrange for romantic
meetings, and secret interviews, and you would write little letters
and put them in a prayer-book in our pew; and watch to get a
glimpse of me as I go in and out of places; and stand on the opposite
side of the street each night, till you saw the light in my room put
out. Oh! What fun it will be!”
“It might be raining,” complained Freddy.
“All the better. That would prove your devotion. Don’t you love me
enough to do that?”
“Yes,” said Freddy, meekly, “but I hate getting wet. Sometimes one
catches a nasty cold.”
“Any one who tells a girl he loves her with a fervour and passion
never yet equalled by man should not think of such things,” asserted
Frances, disapprovingly.
Freddy had an idea that a girl who reciprocated such a passion
should not seem so happy over the prospect of her lover undergoing
the exposure, but the youth did not know how to express it. So he
proposed: “Let’s keep it a secret for the present.”
“Let’s,” assented Frances. “We won’t tell any one for a long time,
but just have it all to ourselves. And when I am riding in the morning
you must join me; the groom will think it’s all right. And whenever
papa and mama are to be out in the evening, I’ll put a lamp in my
window, and—”
Ting!
It seemed as if some of the electric current which made that
distant muffled ring had switched and passed through the happy
pair. Both started guiltily, and then both listened with the greatest
intentness; so intensely, that after a moment’s pause they could hear
the soft gliding sound of the footman’s list slippers as they travelled
down the hallway; could hear the click of the lock as he opened the
front door; could hear the murmur of voices; could hear the door
closed. Then, after a moment’s silence, a voice, for the first time
articulate to them, said: “I’ll wait in the morning room.”
“Freddy,” gasped the girl, “it’s that horrid Mr. Potter. Quick!”
 Both had arisen from the sofa, and Freddy looked about in a very
badly perplexed condition. He was quite willing, but about what was
he to be quick?
“Sit down in that chair,” whispered the girl, pointing to one at a
more than proper distance, and Freddy sprinted for it, and sat down.
The girl resumed her seat on the little sofa, and putting her hands in
a demure position, rather contradictory to her quick breathing and
flushed cheeks, began: “As you were saying, the De Reszke brothers
were the only redeeming— Oh! Good evening, Mr. Potter.”
“Good evening, Frances,” responded a tall, rather slender, strong-
featured man, attired in evening dress, who had leisurely strolled
into the room, and who did not offer to go through the form of
shaking hands. “Talking to the fire?”
“No. Freddy and I were chatting about the opera.”
Mr. Potter put on his glasses and languidly surveyed the region of
the fireplace. Then he turned and extended his investigation, till his
eyes settled on Freddy, stuck away in the dim distance.
“Oh, are you there, youngster?” he remarked, in a tone of voice
implying that the question carried no interest with it. He looked at
his watch. “Isn’t it rather late for you two?”
“It’s only quarter past ten,” answered Frances, bristling
indignantly. “And if it were twelve it wouldn’t make any difference.”
To herself she said, “How I hate that man! Just because he’s thirty-
four, he always treats us as if we were children; and the way he
tramples on poor, dear Freddy is outrageous!”
“You don’t seem to be very sociably inclined,” said Mr. Potter.
“From the distance between you I should think you two chicks had
been quarrelling. Come, make it up.”
“Not at all,” cried Frances, indignantly. “I never lose my temper;
except when you are here.”
“Is that the reason you haven’t asked me to sit down?” asked
Potter, smiling.
“Of course you are to sit down, if you want,” exclaimed Frances.
“Here.” And she moved the four inches towards her end of the sofa
that had not been occupied under the previous arrangement.
 Mr. Potter seated himself leisurely in Freddy’s old place, and
arranged one of the cushions to fit the small of his back. “I came to
say good-bye to your mother,” he explained, “and as I’m too busy to
stop in to-morrow, I decided to wait. You youngsters needn’t think it
necessary to sit up to entertain me. Won’t Freddy’s mother be
sending his nurse for him if he stays much later?”
“I’m so glad you are going to Europe,” remarked Frances. “I hope
you’ll stay a long while.”
Mr. Potter put his glasses on again and looked at Frances calmly.
“Hello!” he said mentally, “the kitten’s learning how to hiss.” Aloud
he announced: “I shall only be gone for a month or two,—just the
voyage and a change.”
“What a pity!” responded Frances, bitingly.
“I thought you’d miss me,” replied Mr. Potter, genially.
Frances gave an uneasy movement on the sofa, a cross between an
angry shake of the shoulders and a bounce.
“Where are you going?” questioned Freddy at this point, feeling
that as a grown man he must bear his part of the chat.
“Look here, littleun,” said Mr. Potter, “if you expect me to talk to
you back there, you—” At this point he suddenly ceased speaking, as
if something more interesting than his unfinished remark had
occurred to him.
“Freddy found it too warm by the fire,” explained Frances hastily,
guilty at heart, if to outward appearance brazen. But Mr. Potter did
not hear what she said, and sat looking into the fire with a suddenly
serious look, which nevertheless had a laugh not very far underneath.
After quite a pause, Frances said: “How entertaining you are!”
“Yes,” assented Mr. Potter, coming back from his thoughts; “I
always enjoy myself, and I find that other people do the same.” Then
he again relapsed into meditation.
“Isn’t he just as horrid as can be?” raged Frances, inwardly. “He
believes just because some women think him clever, and because
men like him, and because he’s a good business man, and because
mama’s always praising him to his face, as she would any one who
was papa’s partner, that he is perfect. And no matter how you try to
snub him, he is so conceited that he won’t see it. Horrid old thing!”
Aloud she asked, “What are you thinking about?”
Mr. Potter laughed. “That’s a great secret,” he asserted.
⁂
An hour later, Mr. Potter was seated in a library, smoking, with a
glass of seltzer—and something else—at his elbow. Opposite to him
sat a man of perhaps twice his years, equally equipped with a cigar
and seltzer—and something else.
“Well,” remarked the senior, “I think if we can get the whole issue
at 82½ and place them at 87 and accrued interest, we had better do
it.”
“That’s settled then,” agreed Mr. Potter. “Now, is there anything
else? I don’t want to have cablegrams following me, since I’m going
for a rest.”
“No,” replied the other. “I know I shall want my partner’s advice
often enough, but I’ll get on without you. Take a rest. You can afford
it. There’s nothing else.”
“Then if you are through with business, I want to speak to you of
Frances,” said Mr. Potter.
Mr. De Witt turned and looked at Mr. Potter quickly. “What
about?”
“Do you know that that girl’s grown up, and we none of us have
realised it?”
“Well?”
“And do you know that she has seen next to no people,—that her
morning ride, her studies, and her afternoon drive with her mother
are the only events of her day?”
“Well?”
“And that her summers, off in that solitary country house of yours,
with never a bit of company but Freddy De Witt and myself, are
horribly dull and monotonous?”
“Well?”
“And that to kill time she reads a great many more novels than is
good for any one?”
 “Come, come, Champney, what are you driving at?”
“One more question. Mrs. De Witt and you are dining out almost
nightly. What do you suppose Frances does evenings?”
“Does? Plays a bit, and reads a bit, and goes to bed like a good
child.”
“But I tell you she isn’t a child any longer, so you can’t expect her
to behave like one. It dawned upon me this evening, and the quicker
it dawns upon you the better.”
“Why?”
“Do you want her to make a fool of herself over Freddy?”
“Freddy!”
“Yes, Freddy.”
“Ridiculous! Impossible!”
“Because they are a long way towards it, and if you want to end it,
you’ll have to use drastic measures.”
“Her own cousin, and only eighteen! I never heard of such folly.”
“But I tell you those two think they are in love with each other, and
if you don’t do something, they’ll really become so before long.
Thinking a thing is two-thirds of the way to doing it, as is shown by
the mind cure.”
“I’ll put an end to it at once,” growled Mr. De Witt. “Never heard of
such nonsense.”
“And how will you end it?” inquired Mr. Potter, smiling a little.
“End it? Tell them to stop their foolishness. Send him about his
business.”
“I thought that would probably be your way. Don’t you think it
would be better to get an injunction from the courts?”
“What good would an injunction do?” asked Mr. De Witt, crossly.
“Just as much good as your method. You can no more stop boys’
and girls’ love by calling it foolishness than the courts can. If you do
as you propose, you’ll probably have a runaway match, or some other
awful bit of folly.”
“Well, what can I do?”
 “The best thing is to pack your trunks and travel a bit. That will
give her something else to think about, and she’ll forget all about the
little chap.”
“But I can’t leave the business.”
“The business will run itself. Or, if it won’t, what’s a year’s profits
compared to your only daughter’s life happiness?”
“But the bonds?”
“Don’t bid on them.”
“I can’t go. I can’t leave my business. Why, I haven’t been away
from it for more than a week in forty years.”
“All the more reason for going now.”
“I have it. Her mother and she shall sail with you.”
“Oh, get out!” ejaculated Champney, “I’m going for a rest.” Mr.
Potter had been the slave for many years of two selfish sisters and a
whining mother,—a mother who loved to whine,—and womankind
meant to him an absolute and entire nuisance.
“That’s it,” said the senior partner, regardless of this protest. “You
arrange to stay for six months instead of two. I’ll do your work
gladly.”
“I can’t,” groaned Potter.
“Come, Champney,” wheedled the elder, “you say yourself that my
little girl’s life happiness depends on her going. For my sake! Come! I
did a good turn for you—or at least you’ve always said I did—in the
partnership. Now do one for me.”
Potter sighed. He was used to being martyrised where women were
concerned and had not learned how to resist. “Well, if you say so. But
I’ll have to leave them there. Two months is my limit.”
“All right,” assented the senior, gleefully.
“Perhaps,” thought Potter, “perhaps they won’t be able to pack in
time.” And the idea seemed to please him.
For half an hour longer they chatted, and then Potter rose.
“Tell me, Champney,” inquired the senior, “how did you find out
about it?”
“Oh,” laughed Champney, “that’s telling.”
 ⁂
The next day there was woe in Israel. Mr. De Witt was cross over
the “children’s folly,” as he called it. Mrs. De Witt was deeply insulted
at such sudden and peremptory marching orders. “Men are so
thoughtless,” she groaned; “as if one could be ready to go on a day’s
notice!” Champney was blue over the spoiling of his trip. Freddy,
when he heard the news, was the picture of helplessness and misery,
and only added to the friction by coming round and getting in
everybody’s way, in the rush of the packing. As for Frances, she
dropped many a secret tear into the trunks as her belongings were
bestowed therein. Never, it seemed to her, had true love been so
crossed.
“I know Mr. Potter is at the bottom of it.” (Frances was not
alluding to the trunk before which she knelt.) “He’s always doing
mean things, yet he never will acknowledge them. He won’t even pay
me the respect of denying them.” Frances slapped a shawl she was
packing, viciously. “To think of having to travel with him! He won’t
even look at me. No. He doesn’t even pay me the compliment of
looking at me. I don’t believe he’s even noticed my eyes and
eyelashes.” Frances gazed into a hand-glass she was about to place in
the trunk, and seemed less cross for a moment after the scrutiny.
“He’s just as snubby as he can be. I hate snubby people, and I’ll be
just as snubby to him as I know how. I’ll—”
“Good afternoon, Frances,” interrupted a voice, which made that
young lady nearly jump into the trunk she was bending over. “I came
up to see if I could do anything for you or your mother, and she sent
me in to ask you.”
Frances was rather flushed, but that may have been due to the
stooping position. “I don’t think of anything,” she answered.
“I’ve had some chairs sent on board, and laid in novels and
smoked glasses and puzzles; and oysters, and game, and fruit, and
butter,” said Champney, with a suggestion of weariness, “and I don’t
think of anything else. If you can suggest something more, I’ll get it.”
“I don’t know— Yes. You might change your mind and let us stay at
home,” snapped Frances.
“Don’t blame me for that,” laughed Champney. “That’s your
father’s doings.”
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

textbookfull.com