As a girl, I dreamed of sailing. Not because we were a family of sailors, nor because my great-grandfather had come from Genoa as a stowaway on a cargo ship. No. My passion for ships and the sea was due to Sandokan, the character created by the Italian Emilio Salgari, whose adventures I, as a child, read with a passion. 

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But it was right around that time that my father bought his first boat. It was an old launch he received as part of the payment for another business deal, which he renamed Rebelde Soledad. The fact that he had given the boat my middle name thrilled me so much that it was the beginning of a passion that still fascinates me today and that I share with my father. After that, other launches or sailboats came along, and finally, El Velero arrived. El Samarkanda. A 44-foot Frers with a wooden deck, on which I felt, now, like the Captain of the Yucatán, the Corsair of the seas in search of adventure and danger. 

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My father, for his part, loved having me accompany him to the river, and he took care to teach me the basic maneuvers. That's how I learned to trim the sails, to trim them when the wind picked up, to luff or tack depending on our course. More than once we were caught in the Pampero, a wind that appears suddenly and without warning, with black storm clouds threatening shipwrecks. I can still see Dad today as he did back then, sitting at the helm of the Samarkanda, his arm extended and steady, his smile wide open, his curls tousled in the wind, and the brown water of the Río de la Plata.

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That ship was like a son to Dad, and like a brother to me. When he sold it, we all suffered, and even today, when we happen upon it on the river, under the command of another captain, we resist the temptation to rush to board it and reclaim what was once ours, like in the best Salgari novels. But we don't, of course. Our minds come to their senses, and we remember that no one took that ship from us, that we sold it, and for a good price, and that those people enjoying it wouldn't understand such a robbery. So we watch it pass, leaving behind us a trail of coffee-with-milk foam that disappears as quickly as our dream of once again being masters of the seas aboard the majestic Samarkanda. 

 

In this month of June and in any other month of the year, I want to celebrate my father and all the fathers who knew how to instill passions in their children, because these are also excellent ways to teach how to live.