Eduardo Cárdenas: "Telling the story of the Bunge family is like entering Argentine history through the kitchen."

Arriving at Pasaje Lanín in Barracas is like being outside the city: houses with colorful Venetian tiles on the walls, birdsong, and car-free streets. When Eduardo Cárdenas, a former family court judge, retired university professor, and writer, discovered the neighborhood, he knew he wanted a space there: he bought a vacant lot, called his friend, architect Rodolfo Livingston , and said, “I would like a space without straight lines because I have lived my entire life in the law.” The gate opens, and it's hard to believe what you see: a wild garden with a small waterfall, ducks sleeping in the sun, and sculptures that stand the test of time (all 40 blocks from the National Congress). Cárdenas was born in Buenos Aires in 1945, studied law at the Catholic University of Argentina, and has always been interested in mental health and family. He was a member of the Commission for the Judicial Protection of Mental Patients and co-authored, with José A. Álvarez and Ricardo Grimson , a work on psychiatric hospitalization. He is also passionate about history, political philosophy, and art. In collaboration with Carlos Payá, he wrote biographies of Manuel Gálvez, Emilio Becher, and Ricardo Rojas , and La familia de Octavio Bunge (The Family of Octavio Bunge) (Eudeba), in three volumes (the first two had already been published by Sudamericana; the third and last are new).

"Telling the story of the Bunge family is like entering Argentine history through the kitchen. It's like when you're invited to a party and all the guests are there—the bishop, the ambassador, the politician, all the notables—but the elevator breaks down, and you enter through the utility room and go to the kitchen. There you realize the lady isn't paying the caterer's bill, for example, and you hear all the voices about how the party is built. These books try to be just that: to tell how 19th-century Argentina was built," Cárdenas explains about the reason for his collective biography.

–Why did you find it interesting to address the history of this family in this historical period?

–Carlos Payá and I had written the story of Manuel Gálvez, the Argentine novelist, and since he was married to Delfina Bunge, we had access to her diary, which she wrote from the age of 15, in 1890, until her death in 1952. That diary is something unprecedented in Argentine literature: I don't know of any other case of a diary kept by a teenager that talks about her loves, her schoolmates, her friends, her family, for so many years and where her philosophical and poetic thoughts were also captured: it was a fascinating diary.

–Delfina became a great writer, a close friend of Victoria Ocampo, isn't that true?

–Yes, we interviewed Victoria Ocampo to tell this story, and while we started with the idea of ​​writing about Delfina's life, as we got more involved, we realized she wasn't just an isolated flower in the middle of a vacant lot, but rather part of a group of people who had grown up in an intense intellectual environment. Her great-grandfather had come from Germany and married Genara Peña Lezica in Argentina. While no member of the family became president, they were always close to power and culture.

Her great-grandfather was a Protestant pastor from Germany and made his living from commerce, an activity he continued to pursue in Argentina. Delfina's generation included eight siblings, all interested in culture, philosophy, law, and politics. One of them was a Socialist deputy and had conducted a study on the state of the working classes and the social security solutions being offered in Germany. Another, Alejandro, had studied economics and was one of the fathers of modern economics in Argentina, incorporating mathematics and industrialist ideas. His magnum opus is titled A New Argentina . Also present were Jorge Bunge, an architect and creator of Pinamar, and Octavio Bunge, after whom the volumes are named. They had all distinguished themselves in some way, so we were inclined to write a history of the family and, through it, portray Argentine history from 1880 to 1910.

–And how did you reconstruct that story?

–With a lot of production: we obtained letters, we collected them from family members who had them in drawers, trunks, diaries, travel journals, and everyone very generously gave us that material.

–Who did you meet?

–With great-grandchildren and grandchildren, the family history was told in three generations. The first generation is the merchant Bunge, we're talking about 1820 and 1830, when capitalism was tending to encompass other areas and foreign merchants arrived in the Río de la Plata (in the midst of the Rivadavia era) and began to forge the relationship between Buenos Aires and Europe and set up their trading houses. The first Bunge in Argentina married Genara Peña Lezica , who came from a patrician family. That marriage produced eight children, who were part of the Generation of '80. The books tell how that generation was formed, how they were educated, how they were raised. But also what they sought when they married and what the family ties they created were like, which were also economic and political ties.

–What was life like in the socialist Bunge?

–The eighth son, named Octavio, married María Luisa Arteaga and had eight children with her, one of whom was Augusto. Augusto Bunge was very anti-religious and very close to Juan B. Justo. He studied medicine, and at that time, doctors were strongly influenced by socialism because they saw the need for vaccinations and education in the neighborhoods for hygiene and health preservation. So he was one of those socialists who went from neighborhood to neighborhood giving lectures in the style of the German socialists as well.

–And besides Jorge Bunge, there was another architect in the family, also very well-known...

–Yes, Ernesto Bunge was the one who designed, among other works, the Santa Felicitas Church in Barracas. He also designed the Escuela Normal 1 building and the old penitentiary on Avenida Las Heras. They were men who were always thinking about social issues. Although they were an influential family politically and culturally, they had no land or capital: many lived off contracts they made with the government. The socialists called this class budget-eating because they ate up the state budget.

–And how did the third generation develop?

–As I said, Octavio Bunge, who gives the books their title and who went on to become president of the Supreme Court, had eight children who also distinguished themselves: Carlos Octavio was a philosopher of law, but he also wrote novels and poetry. He was a multifaceted man and he was homosexual, at a time when that was a secret and something absolutely repressed. We found letters from his adolescence that were very strong and very critical of the class to which he belonged. Carlos Octavio remained estranged from his family until his father's death, who called him from his deathbed to make peace.

–How did you get to Victoria Ocampo?

–We learned that as a teenager, Victoria Ocampo was fascinated by Delfina Bunge, who was a little older than her. It's interesting to see in that relationship the beginnings of feminism in Argentina. Delfina didn't want to get married or do what women of her time did: rent a horse-drawn carriage to go for rides in the woods of Palermo or to the Bristol carnivals in Mar del Plata. She preferred to read and write.

–Why do the books end in 1910?

–They end in 1910 when Octavio Bunge dies. For Argentine history, I think 1910 is like watching a magnificent sunset, which is probably the most beautiful thing you can see of the day, but it ends when the day ends. In 1910, a new world order begins when Germany and the United States take over, and the Second Industrial Revolution takes place. What was not known is that Argentina would be left paying the price in the international order because it was clinging to a sinking empire. From then on, Argentine history becomes more complex; new problems arise for which the country was not prepared, and unfortunately, it is not prepared even today. We are still experiencing the fall of the British Empire because we could not, and I'm not saying we didn't know how, to integrate into the new world order.

–Do you consider yourself a Peronist? Why?

–I'm a Peronist because I'm stubborn, because what Peronism represents is resistance. Peronism was born when the first Spanish soldier shot an Indian with a blunderbuss. It's then that the defeated begin to build resistance, and they do so using the tools of the conquerors but to write their own histories. This is the idea of ​​Rodolfo Kusch, who for me is one of the greatest interpreters of Peronism, if not the best, and he was the man Pope Francis read and listened to the most.