“The child is father of the man” said once William Wordsworth. Many people I know and many more I do not know rushed to their childhood in search of their present identity. I never tried this exploration intentionally, but, as time went by, in some strange ways, I became experimentally certain of the truth enclosed in those words.

Let us rewind the tape a bit. I have recently, under the heading of “Diario de un linyera de alma”, compared my own life to the continuous wandering of a drifter. In this rather long and sometimes blind continuous walking I came across an uncountable number of very little incidents almost completely deleted from my memory in the course of time.

Curiously enough, writing in retrospection, many of these trivial events reentered my already old mind almost surreptitiously. Let us, by way of example, take some of them, which mysteriously returned in a sort of chain.

One series of these unexpected experiences did not start on the wonderful fells of Wordworth´s Lake District but on the no less wonderful hills of Tandil. As for the great majority of my fellow citizens Che Guevara entered my brain in 1959. I was in Tandil, on holidays, having breakfast in the thick and fresh shadow of some huge pines. I was listening to the radio. Suddenly a mystic Caribbean breeze from another hill, called Sierra Maestra, caressed my young imagination, a then young imagination, full of dreams of heroic even if utopic social ideals and arcane adventures. I did not figure out neither awful bloodshed nor scattered corpses in the least. I only felt transported to a world of glorious and romantic deeds in the pleasant atmosphere of a fairy tale.

It was in 1999. In the evening. Bus terminal in Tandil. November. I had just finished my teaching task that Friday and was waiting for my bus to Mar del Plata. Thedeparture was due a bit late. My eyes were attracted by a magazine in a newsstand. In its cover there was the unmistakable face of the Che in full colour. It was an impression similar to that experienced fourty years before also in Tandil. I bought it and got on the bus. I took a seat and fumbled for the reading light.
Fortunately it was working that night. I covered my ears not to be disturbed by the deafning sound from the movie they were projecting, and, ¡surprise!, in the central pages I found : Alta Gracia, with a photo of the house where Che had lived and a small map of the Carlos Pellegrini neighbourhood where it is placed. I looked at it several times. Again and again. I soon recognized, as in a mist, “my” neighbourhood once in my childhood in Alta Gracia and “my” house near the then very famous Sierras Hotel. Many,many years ago.

Scanning a couple of books and my own memory I discovered that Che was four days older than me. Both had been born in June 1928 and since 1932 to 1936 both had been neighbours in Alta Gracia. I lived there, intermittently, half of the time of the first eight years of my life because of my father´s lung disease. Before 1932 we had occupied a chalet called Villa Nydia and after that date we lived in some other place nearby. Precisely in that year the Guevara family went to Alta Gracia because Ernesto suffered from asthma. They rented different houses but since 1934 they lived in Villa Nydia, exactly where I had lived before. During four years, from 1932 to 1936 we shared the same neighbourhood very near Sierras Hotel to whose park we both often used to go.

In July 2001 the “Museo Municipal del Che” was opened in Villa Nydia. I was there during the week of the inauguration. It was a physical encounter with my early childhood. How to describe my feelings on that occasion would be an impossible task.

After that I believed nothing else would be discovered in the chain of that series of coincidences. But there was no end. For the celebration of the Week of the Che 07, I sent to the museum a brief paper called “So far and so near”. One of its paragraphs ran like this:

Teté (as he was called then) had a good number of friends. He was very friendly and naughty. I was looked after very much at home and very rarely was alone outdoors. Practically the only friend in those days whose name I remember was Dante, son of the caretakers of a luxurious neighbouring mansion. With Dante I walked all the streets and places of Villa Carlos Pellegrini (a rather small and peaceful district close to the then aristocratic Sierras Hotel). From time to time we engaged with other children of the neighbourhood in some spontaneous football match at a quiet crossroads. We were no more than a dozen. The Che´s biographers say he often was mixed in that kind of events. It seems almost impossible we have not met more than once.

To my great surprise, a week ago I found in a blog of “Isla Negra”, something written recently by one of Che´s brothers, Roberto:

My parents´relations were those of rich people and ours those of the poor ones, people who lived permanently in the area. Our friends were the children of the peasants and “caseros”, that is to say, those who were the caretakers of other persons´ houses and properties. I remember the Vidosa, Ariel and Dante, whom we named Tiqui….

Apparently, a common friend was another close link in this chain of little coincidences. One more. Is not this a strong and strange revival of childhood in the life of an old man, the revival of that child who, in Wordsworth´s words, can really be called his “father”?.

Carlos Rafael Domínguez, born in 1928, in the west of the province of Buenos Aires, has been living in Mar del Plata for over forty years. He taught in several English Teacher Training Schools. He was very fond of linguistic studies. In this field he wrote numerous papers of academic character when teaching at local universities. Presently he translates English classic literary works into Spanish. Lately being a double-amputee is devoting himself to creative writing in Spanish: Palabras marcadas, Más palabras, poems, narratives.