My Stylish Old Man

Buenos Aires, the 1950s.

“A proper English school student needs to learn how to secure a necktie into a Windsor knot,” declared Dad the day I wore my school uniform and tie for the first time. I could not have been older than seven. Dad led me to the large mirror in my parents’ bedroom, placed himself behind and, with his arms around me, showed me the critical moves, slowly instructing in Spanish, “Siempre . . . el primer lazo . . . va por adelante . . . Always . . . the first loop . . . goes from the front.” I repeated the move and Dad, his head above mine, changed from Spanish to German and approved proudly, “Ja, Ja, gut!” He went on, “Now, loop the wide part from your left over the top and . . . the second loop is . . . from the . . . back, el segundo lazo desde atrás.” And, to make sure that this became ingrained in my genes, he repeated the formula, “The first loop from the front, the second from the back . . . that’s the secret of a good Windsor.” I am forever wired for Windsors and have trouble doing anything else.

***

After spending time with Dad’s ghost in Samos in 1976 and thinking about him in the light of my conversations with Aunt Carola, I felt a warmth toward my Old Man that I had not felt for many years. As soon as I arrived at home in Cambridge, I rushed to my box of photos and to the little velvet bag in my valise. Inside the bag were the small things that I had put on the right pile and saved from my private bonfire in 1968. They were easy-to-carry objects that I had brought with me when I came to the States. I had not looked at them for almost ten years and I was eager to see them again.

I tossed the objects on to the bed and rummaged through them. I picked up each one and felt it, trying to sense my father’s hands. A pair of golden cufflinks with red stones and a key chain marked “MG” caught my attention. They brought back Dad’s flair. As shown by that 1935 photograph taken at the Goldstein & Galanis wine company’s patio, Dad was a spiffy dresser. In the photo, he is wearing French cuffs, a well-tailored suit, a tie with a Windsor knot, and is smoking a pipe. It is hard to tell, but I bet he was wearing the very same cufflinks that I was holding.

The cufflinks and the key chain took me back to a treasured moment of my boyhood years: my initiation into elegance. The moment had to do with neckties. Dad did not knot his ties any old way, but in perfectly symmetrical Windsors. The memory that returned through the cufflinks was from the day when my father taught me to tie a Windsor.  My flashback was not as dramatic as the one experienced by Garcia Marquez’s protagonist Colonel Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Colonel, as he was standing in front of a firing squad, remembered the day his father took him to see the ice. Yet, while my holding the cufflinks was not even close to Buendía’s terminal predicament, my paternal connection felt as powerful as his.

Like a cascade of Proust’s madeleines, the cufflinks led me straight to Dad’s stylishness, then to my Windsor knot, and ultimately to the blue uniform of the Urquiza Day Grammar School in Buenos Aires. Let’s start there.

My prescient parents decided that little Schorschi – the Viennese nickname of my childhood - needed to be raised in as many languages as possible; you never knew where he would end up. (They were right, of course.) German at home, Spanish from our live-in maid Nilda, English to be taught in school . . . and some inevitable Yiddish from my maternal grandma. They enrolled me into the private Urquiza Day School, two blocks away. I have many memories of UDS, but the first one is sensory: the noise of autumn leaves. In the fall, the two blocks were covered in piles of crispy Plane-tree leaves through which I charged at full and raucous speed on my way to and from school.

UDS ran two parallel linguistic universes, Castellano in the mornings and Inglés, in the afternoons. We wore the same blue uniforms with insignia and ties in both universes. The school required a blue blazer, grey pants, white shirt, and tie for us boys, and checkered skirts for the girls. My uniform included the school’s iconic black and blue striped tie, and this detail led directly to Dad’s tutorial on the sequence of loops for a proper Windsor knot. 

After his lesson, in which he steered my hands from above and behind, I repeated the looping procedure solo. When I finished, we stepped away from the mirror and looked. He approved and called Mom. She came over, admired the results, and the picture of the three of us smiling into the mirror, like an ancient sepia photo from an amusement arcade, came rushing back to my mind as I was holding the cufflinks twenty years later in Cambridge.

He was elegant, my Old Man, and the Windsors were the least of it. He had his suits made to order, favoring the double-breasted ones much in style in BA in the fifties.  Those were the days when middle class Argentine men dressed up in suit and tie just to go buy a newspaper at the corner kiosk, and women put on their high heels and jewelry when grocery shopping. Dad’s shirts had monogrammed French cuffs, and his large collection of swivel cufflinks were a source of endless wonder to my fingers. His ties were held to his shirt with a variety of clasps and he always sported a white kerchief in his breast pocket.  He carried his keys on that small keychain engraved “MG.” He wore discreet pinkie rings.

Dad passed to me his love of elegance. In my box of photos, I found one from a childhood friend’s bar mitzvah in 1963. I – fourteen at the time - am toasting my friend and Dad is looking on with an approving half-smile. Both of us are wearing Windsors and white square pockets . . . Like father, like son.

As part of his style, Dad smoked pipes; and his habit entailed an elaborate ritual. He owned about a dozen wooden pipes of different sorts, all kept on a circular pipe rack. Next to it was a ceramic tobacco jar with a fancy sealing mechanism that opened and closed an airtight rubber gasket. In the sealed jar he mixed his own tobaccos, adding spirits, such as cognac or whisky, and letting the tobacco absorb the flavors for a few months. I remember him calling me to his side once when he opened his jar, and the aroma of brandy-infused English tobacco wafting out comes back every time I see someone smoking a pipe.

Sometime around 2012, when I was in my sixties, I was approached by the Head of the Intellectual Property Department of the Universidad Austral Law School in Argentina. He invited me to come to BA once a year and teach a master’s level course in biotechnology patent law. I gladly accepted. My yearly classes were full of students from all over Latin America. They loved the idea of learning (in Spanish) how US law was adapting to such a quickly evolving scientific field. I was an almost local teacher with two disparate backgrounds, science and law, a combination out of the ordinary in LatAm. This time I was back in BA as a professor, seen and respected. Gone were the troubled days of my adolescence or that time in 1970 when I could not recognize little Jorgito across my internal psychological ravine. I loved every minute.

During one of those trips, I sought out and had dinner with Rodolfo, an old friend. We had been together at UBA’s School of Exact Sciences in 1967, about a year before I emigrated. Back then, Rodo (for short) had been an aspiring mathematician turned software pioneer. As many top professionals from Argentina, Rodo’s job choices after graduation had been stark. He could either join the brain drain and emigrate, or make ends meet some other way. He stayed and had since become a successful businessman.

After dinner, over a cortado, which is a sort of macchiato but with milk instead of cream, he said, almost as an afterthought, “You know, Jorge, I still have a few of the pipes.”

“Pipes?” I asked, “What pipes?”

“Your father’s smoking pipes. Don’t you remember you gave a few to me when you left in 1968? . . . That’s what? . . . Forty-five years ago?”

As with all other objects that I had avoided over the years but which I now wanted back, I had forgotten about the pipes. I did not even remember that I had given them to Rodo. I was confused whether I had left them with him for safekeeping or as a gift. So, I finessed it.

“My god, you still have them?”

“Yes, I’ve been a collector all my life and they’re part of a large assortment of other stuff I have at home.” After that, Rodo remained silent.

I suddenly appreciated that he had become attached to the pipes and that he might have trouble letting go, since parting with them might disrupt his collection. I recognized then that Dad’s pipes were not mine anymore. I had to understand and respect that.

“You know, Rodo,” I said diplomatically. “Those pipes now mean so much to me. I didn’t realize when I left that I would some day see mi Viejo, my Old Man, in them. Would you consider letting me have one or two? That is a gift that I would cherish.”

Rodolfo smiled. “Of course!” he said, to my relief. Since he knew that I was leaving BA the next day, he added, “I’ll be in the US soon on business and I’ll bring you the pipes.” And to seal the deal, we hugged.

A few months later, I did get two of Dad’s pipes as a gift from Rodo. One is a classic Bulldog with a tapered bowl rim and a square shank. The other is more sophisticated; it is known as a Full Bent Hungarian, with a black stem and a shiny wooden bowl. My Old Man sure knew his pipes. As I unpacked them, the first thing I did was smell them, hoping to get a whiff of the spirit-infused tobaccos of his smoking years. Yet, nothing. Almost half a century had passed. But since their mouthpieces are well chewed from years of smoking, I at least can see the imprint of Dad’s teeth. And when I handle them these days, I remember that distinct aroma that Dad so loved.

Dad’s keychain with the MG initials has been put to good use. My daughter Mara, who is named after her grandfather Mauricio, carries his initials. She has turned the keychain into a necklace, which she wears proudly. I wear the red cufflinks whenever the occasion invites me to put on a fancy shirt with French cuffs. Whether at the opera or in court, Dad is there with me.

***

Looking at all of these objects of Dad’s, his cufflinks, key chains, and pipes, triggers a mixture of feelings: joy, sadness, and a bit of anxiety. Joy for having them back, sadness for the premature loss of my father and of the many things, such as his humidors, which I recklessly left behind. And the touch of anxiety suggests a trace of guilt, which still occasionally flares up when I remember his death. But transcending those feelings, the  objects bring back my stylish Old Man from Buenos Aires and the day he taught me to tie a proper Windsor.