The Beginning of the End

 Dedicated to people affected by cancer and their relatives

During the night of Juanary,31of1980, Dad took leave of life holding my mother’s hand. Therefore, it was not easY to enter in my parent's house on the warm early morning of February,1.

I crossed in silence, and perhaps, with some tears rolling slowly down my cheekbones the thirteen kilometers from Chacras de Coria, where I lived in those times, to my parents’ house in Godoy Cruz. To find a true multitude gathered by the door did not surprise me. We had lived there since I was an adolescent, and I witnessed how our home, the house of Mr. Carlos Evans, was always the meeting point of Peron’s political party in Mendoza.
I hurried into the house and acting as if I didn’t care about that political conclave, I went, with firm steps and trembling spirit, to encounter my father’s lifeless body. The dark casket had been placed in the dining romm of the house that reunited us for a family lunch during so many Sundays. Hundreds of memories crossed my mind during that short path towards the funeral box where my father’s mortal remains lay.

I anticipated a long night surrounded by men and women who were mostly strangers to me. Small groups of people were standing in the living room, the kitchen, the dining room and every possible space of the house. The majority of those people didn’t even try to hide their intention to distribute what they supposed was the political inheritance of the former governor and national senator for the Province of Mendoza and the leader of the “Justicialista” party of the province. I did not feel accompanied by those men and women in whose eyes the glimmer of tears was as absent as the sorrow in their faces. Moreover, they didn’t even have the precaution to speak in low voice. They didn’t stop showing and speaking. I noticed how decisions, that would affect the members’ future of the Justicialista Party of Mendoza, were being made. I had had to witness so many similar events where the “peronistas” invaded the garage of our house to discuss ephemeral and enclosed power’s spaces.

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Patricia and Cristina with their Dad, Carlos Evans