Dedicated to the noble man who raised me, under
By Giovanna D. Preda Robertti
If the world ended today, which is how I refer to the hypothetical death of my parents, I would never have to worry. I would cry, my personal world would collapse, but I wouldn’t have a single financial concern. I sometimes think about this, and when I do, I retract the thought. The tragic moment haunts my mind; I want to free myself from it. But I can never do so for long.
If the world ended today, I would inherit close to two million dollars. With my current expenses, that would sustain me for fifty years, without ever needing to work a single day. Add to that the rental income from land, bank interest payments. If the world ended today, I’d be comfortable.
That is, in any currency, a lot of money. It’s attainable—not the treasure of billionaires like Elon Musk, not blood money. It’s earned money; if not fully meritocratic, it’s partially the product of luck, of cosmic chance, and partially an inheritance in the form of a foreign last name. If the world ended today, I’d win the lottery.
Is it boasting to talk about this? I think it is. Poverty is spoken and shown. Wealth is felt. I don’t know why it works this way; my parents never taught me the subtleties of our money. Money has always conflicted me. I know my dad never dirtied his hands with blood, but how ethical is it to have so much in a country where most have so little? I don’t know. I don’t know how to maintain peace of mind while watching my people suffer. I don’t know how to behave, what to do. When friends pawn furniture for medical treatments while my family travels to Colorado for far more serious and expensive procedures, without financial concern. I want to help them, I want to change things, but that’s not well regarded. I “boast,” but I didn’t earn the money I’ll inherit; in a way, it shames me, stains my conscience, and I don’t see it as a virtue. My family got their hands dirty—not with blood, but with ink and soil. I have clean hands. Is my inheritance a form of oppression? If the world ended today, I would be deeply confused.
It feels hypocritical to talk about it. I was born into precarity; we lived with my dad’s siblings and their families—13 people under one roof. When I was young, I could talk about money. I don’t know when I stopped being able to. Was it when people started asking if my dad was the president’s lawyer? Or when my surname became a whisper in every courthouse in the country? Or maybe even earlier, when Dad won his first high-profile case, representing Nicolás Leoz.
Within Paraguayan wealth, in this hermetic class, there are still castes. From the outside, you can’t see it, but it’s implicit. My dad is in one of the lowest—even though having millions of dollars is exceptional in Paraguay—because he still works. His job is our main source of income. This doesn’t bother me; on the contrary, I deeply admire his moral integrity, how he has always stood against oligarchies and corruption culture, and never fell into their traps. Even now, as their seductive song breathes down his neck.
But I do notice the looks, the unspoken words, when I talk to people from above, when I talk to my friends with dynastic capital surnames. “...my dad’s plane. You know how planes are.” Oops. You’ve dislocated me. And I’ll be honest, I’ve never been in a hangar. I’ve never seen a plane without an airline logo. But by saying it, you know it. You know we belong, but not fully. And that is felt, in every conversation.
“How was lunch at Cartes’ place?” “Great, his chef made lamb. You know I don’t like lamb, but I’d never had one that good.” It’s there, in that exchange between my parents, in our dining room filled with Burt paintings and a sofa more expensive than months of minimum wage, while one maid cleans the window and the other brings a plate of soyo. Soyo, a soup made out of boiled minced beef and scallions, an immovable emblem of the Paraguayan working class. There’s a certain parallel between this scene in my dining room and what I might see in a working-class household—the talk after lunch at the boss’s house, a glimpse into a life that could be and is not. I don’t know how accurate it is to call my dad a laborer, but through my eyes he’s an intellectual laborer. He dirtied his hands with ink and endless nights of coffee, broke his back so I wouldn’t have to break mine. But just as I feel like an impostor above, I also do below; what Paraguayan laborer accumulates millions of dollars? None. We all live under our own myths, and mine is my own socioeconomic belonging. I don’t know how much longer I can keep lying to myself, keep up the narrative thread of a misplaced humility. The more time passes, the more bank accounts grow, the farther I drift from my neighborhood—but I never get closer to the private planes. I drift from soyo, but the lamb still doesn’t belong to me.
And this displacement is felt in my exile. In how I miss the countryside accent. In how I speak more English than Guarani. It’s felt in my English accent, imperceptibly Hispanic, when they ask what state I’m from, or if I’m Canadian. It’s felt in my Spanish accent; so reminiscent of the old aristocracy, yet so foreign to today’s. It’s felt in the jopara words I use daily, few, but screaming to be heard.
It’s felt, above all, in my brother. Bruno doesn’t remember the little apartment behind my uncle’s house, but I do. He doesn’t remember the vecindad, as we lovingly call it in stories of precarity told during the first hours of December 25th. He doesn’t remember life before Leoz, before my cousins moved out, before my dad bought the house next door. Bruno belongs more than I do, but he still doesn’t have a yacht on the river, an apartment in Buenos Aires. We’re four years apart, but there’s a fundamental dissonance in our eyes. Bruno looks people in the eye, but doesn’t see what’s behind. I always have, even when I tried to deny it.
“The key to success,” said my dad to a young law student on a trip to San Pedro, with me beside him, “is to look others in the eye. Never the forehead, never the shoulder. [...] I always teach my kids this; I grew up like you, in Caaguazú. My kids grew up in Asunción, with more privilege. I hope they never look anyone in the shoulder.” This was my upbringing. This is my class consciousness. Always in the eyes—the words echo in my mind. I see them in everyone I meet, in my friends from below and from above. It’s always harder with the ones from above. I always ask myself: What the hell am I doing here? Why am I walking alongside the children of Kuwaiti oil magnates, with girls who own five different Marc Jacobs bags? Me, who comes from both little and much. Me, who comes from a colonial neighborhood in downtown Asunción; the neglected kind, the one with junkies sleeping on the street. Me, who carries Caaguazu and the vecindad, my first homes, in my veins. Because I remember precarity, it’s hard to look at people in the eyes instead of their shoulders. I always do, but it’s hard. Because I know how much I have, and it’s hard to process that there’s a global minority, small but real, who has far more. I’m not entirely sure that minority should exist. I am not sure it’s possible to get significantly richer than my dad without exploitation. I am not sure it’s possible to get as rich as my dad without abiding oppression somewhere down the monetary line.
That said, my precarity was never extreme. Yes, we lived with 13 people under one roof, but the roof was inherited. And though everything was cramped, we never lacked food. I always had a nanny. There was always a trace of Caaguazu nobility in our walls. What we had was a shared discomfort, but one that existed just as far from my current reality as it did from the tin-roofed homes a few blocks downhill, closer to the river. We were a lower-middle-class family with the surname of a small-town dynasty, and that’s how I learned another fundamental axis of my class consciousness: inheritance is not only monetary, it’s also historical. And my historical inheritance, simply by virtue of having Italian surnames and a first name that fits them, is immense in Asuncion.
My dad, the successful small-town lawyer, was actually the son of aristocracy in Caaguazú. My grandfather, as I understand it, did come from the bottom. Grandpa Hidalgo—or Grandpa Cachito, as he’s referred to in anecdotes predating the tragic February of 2001—was, in fact, from Asuncion. He grew up in the same house I did, the son of the first generation of Paraguayans on both sides of his family: Llamosas on his mother’s side, imported from Cantabria; Preda on his father’s side, imported from Lombardy like so many others of that time. Preda, my historical inheritance. It’s in my passport, a signal of a social class that cannot be measured in money but in the ability to watch a ceiling fall without collapsing with it. My grandmother got pregnant at 19, and they left the capital to build a life in the center of the country. For a while, they struggled financially, but then they began managing a quarry. They bought land—lots of land—and from there, the rest is family history. Mayor of Caaguazu, a Christmas card straight from the General’s office I would discover two decades after his death, buried in a box of papers. My grandfather was removed from office for lack of Stronista fervor, but he never lost prestige in his adopted city. Last year, I met an older man, a Liberal, who, upon learning my surname and hometown, said: “Don Hidalgo was at the station when they detained me in ’74. If it weren’t for him, they would’ve taken me. Your grandfather was the best mayor Caaguazú ever had.”
My grandfather, like my father, was a noble man. I never met him, and he was so beloved in our family that I’ve never heard of his flaws, but I know this: he dirtied his hands for money, with soil and sweat and ink.
A few months ago, my dad told me, “The best lesson my father gave me, and that I now pass on to you, is this: never become a businesswoman [...] Business always means tricking someone, and you’re too good to be in business. Live, like me, off your mind.” I don’t know how much money my dad inherited from Don Hidalgo, though I imagine it wasn’t much. When I was born, four years after his death, money was tight. My grandmother kept it afloat, but my dad and his siblings did not, or did so in small measure. When the world ends, when my parents die, that won’t be the case. The money Bruno and I will inherit changes lives. It changes countries. My dad is a worker, an intellectual laborer. A laborer with bourgeois tendencies. Just like money, and the letters behind a name, are inherited, inheritance also has a moral dimension. Mine is the “always in the eyes” and the old-school accent. A worldview, painted with memories of the vecindad.
In a country with such hermetic class systems as Paraguay, my family managed to climb and break the odds.
“What my dad gave me wasn’t money. It was education.”
“Here, take these books. You can be a communist, but never ignorant.”
“You have potential — but so do many children with even more potential than you who will never fulfill it. Our country is deeply unequal. Use what you have, and fight so that in the future all children can have your opportunities.”
These are not the kinds of things most Paraguayan fathers say, much less in an upper-class Colorado family like mine. All of these are my dad’s words, etched in my memory verbatim. The last one he said to me when I was nine. My upbringing was exceptional; full of perspective, full of formative words. My dad fights, in his own way, for his causes. Quietly. A black sheep among wolves drunk on opportunism, changing the system from within. I suspect that all of this not only displaces me in the closed-off Paraguayan bourgeoisie but also in the grand scale of my country. But my inheritance is not the same as my economic peers’. I inherit the echoes of my surname. I inherit a plot in Caaguazu. And I inherit the unbreakable morality of the men who carry and carried my surname. And none of this is some myth of self-exception. I’m not trying to provoke sympathy—if I were, I wouldn’t mention the figures of my inheritance. I’m just telling it how it is, the truth the people don’t know: that you can look others in the eyes, you can carry an unpronounceable surname. The rest of the world might look at your shoulders, but if you don’t eat lamb, they’ll look at your forehead. And I was taught to eat lamb only at borrowed tables.
If the world ended today—for me, for my friends—some would inherit airplanes, bank accounts in Miami. Some would go into debt for a coffin. If the world ended today, some of us would live the same. Many others would live with the bank breathing down their neck. When the world ended, for my father, he kept going, with material complications, but without collapse. For me, nothing would change. I would lose everything, and I would lose nothing. If the world ended today, my dad would leave me enough money to continue without hardship—and, more importantly, the legacy of the compass; the lessons that will never let me forget the path. If the world ended today, tomorrow I would eat soyo.