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Show The Great Escape • 7 O Among so many Tupamaros with families in two generations, Arturo and his wife, Rosario, are an anomaly. Many Tupamaros had children before then incarceration, lost their families when then wives and children were forced to flee the country, then remarried and started again fifteen or so years later when they were amnestied along with Uruguay's return to democracy. Rosario and Arturo met in high school, one day before the teacher came in, while she was chatting with a friend, sitting backwards on her chair, and Arturo's booming voice made her think the teacher had arrived and she was in trouble. They have been together ever since. His paternal grandfather was military man; his father was a lawyer and a national representative for the Socialist party. His maternal grandfather was a businessman whose company built Uruguay's highways. Until he was nine, Arturo lived in what Uruguayans call a palace and what we would call a mansion. It had tenms courts, a pool, and room enough for three families inside. After that house, his father moved the family to a smaller, but by no means modest, home. Arturo was a poor student, completely distracted, while Rosario was diligent. They began dating when he was fourteen and she was thirteen. As soon as he graduated from high school, Arturo bought a parcel of land in nearby Pando and began to farm. The shack he built for himself was windowless and doorless, and infested by mice. He bathed m a nearby stream and relieved himself in a latrine he had dug. He was a true boherman, says his wife, the first boy to wear a white T-slnrt and jeans in school, and a man who really did not care at all for material things, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his upbringing. He only left behind his subsistence farm when Rosario refused to live there. If he wanted to marry her, he would have to take her to a normal apartment. On paper, a lot of things she said will look like cliches-"Once I met Arturo, there was nobody else." "When I heard that deep, resonant voice, I melted."-but somehow when she says them, they sound like ante-cliches. She remained faithful to him through all his years of clandest and prison. |