During summers and holidays, we Anglophiles congregated in the center south of Argentina, in a large country estate, or estancia, in what we called "the new house." To the west rose the last chain of the central sierras, toward the east and south stretched the great plains that had made the country as rich as their soil, the black dirt, lush, loud with grasses, insects, water, birds. A pliant earth that farther south hushed and hardened into stone, silence, steppe, a lunar desolation from which, long ago, the raiding Indians came.

An old house stood on a hill overlooking the new house. A massive and decrepit stone structure, abandoned by the family in the 1920s, the old house had been designed by Jesuit architects in the seventeenth century and was first occupied by the founder of our clan. There, without indoor plumbing or electricity, lived the one relative who had refused to move, the family's only "Germanophile," our Uncle Blas.

By the summer of 1941, the leading topic of conversation in the family was our uncle's "derangement" and his embarrassing defense of the Third Reich. From our rooms, we children could feel the walls shudder with the oaths of fathers and uncles, the moans of mothers and aunts. There were letters from Uncle Blas published in Buenos Aires newspapers, donations and speeches on behalf of German causes, and "the last straw," a Mercedes Benz limousine driving past us toward the old house. But when we children entered a room, conversations about our uncle ceased. So we began to hide and listen.

The latest story overheard concerned an elderly cousin who had run into Blas at a piano recital. He told of greeting him warmly to which Blas had replied: "Stop!" hand up, palm facing the greeter. Uncle Blas then pulled a small notebook out of his breast pocket, opened it, and traced down a page with his index finger.

"Good news!" he smiled at the startled relative as he replaced the notebook. "You're not on the list. I'm still speaking to you."

The most frightful stories about him were told by three women who had never met him. The English and French governesses who looked after my sixteen cousins called Uncle Blas "the Nazi," and spied on his house with binoculars. They warned us that he was "a confirmed bachelor who hated children," and if we dared to approach his house, his fierce guardian dogs, two Rhodesian ridgebacks called Graf and Spee—after the German battleship sunk in the River Plate in 1939—would tear us apart. Even my American mother, usually oblivious to her turbulent in-laws, perked up at the mention of our uncle's name: "Don't go there!" The spell of the forbidden became irresistible.