La Boca is the Buenos Aires neighborhood where Marijke de Wandaleer was born and grew up, a place tied to the crowded immigrant households of her childhood and to the city she later remembered as home. Its importance lies in the contrast between her early life there and her eventual departure from Buenos Aires for Europe, a choice she came to question as her son entered military service.

Setting and Marijke’s Childhood

Marijke was born in a small, windowless room in La Boca. Her parents had arrived from Antwerp in 1891, expecting to find a place to live, but initially secured a flat already shared by two Italian families. The De Wandaleers were Protestant, puritanical, austere, and serious; their neighbors’ Catholicism, noisy sociability, and many children made the shared household feel intolerable to them.

The family moved as soon as it could to a conventillo in San Telmo, where it had its own dwelling but still shared a courtyard with Italian and Spanish immigrants. Marijke, the eldest of three children, remained associated with the neighborhood’s crowded, boisterous immigrant world even after the move. Her parents disliked her playing with the dark-haired, barefoot southern children who ran, shouted, danced, and fought in the courtyard, so she was often alone. She nevertheless memorized songs she would never dare sing aloud, including Italian and Spanish popular songs.

From La Boca to Buenos Aires’s Center

As Peter de Wandaleer’s grain-export business prospered, he was able to rent a three-room apartment on Perú Street, between San Telmo and the more reassuring Centro district, not far from Plaza de Mayo. The move marked a change in the family’s material circumstances: the business Peter had established with two German partners and a Belgian from Louvain became an important point of reference for immigrants arriving in Buenos Aires from northern and central Europe.

La Boca therefore belongs to an early stage of Marijke’s life, before the family’s prosperity enabled a move to a more comfortable part of the city. Yet the neighborhood’s social texture remains part of her background: the music and noise she was discouraged from joining, and the immigrant community her family tried to keep at a distance.

Remembered Home and Departure

Years later, after Jan returned home announcing that he was now a soldier of Europe, Marijke embraced and kissed her eldest son. She feared for his fate, but what she saw in his eyes frightened her more deeply. At that moment, she began asking herself why she had ever left Buenos Aires—the city where she had been born and raised, married, and been happy.

Her response was practical and irreversible: she had bought a first-class ticket on the first transatlantic ship sailing from Antwerp to the Río de la Plata, and she never returned. La Boca gives the remembered city a precise point of origin. The neighborhood is not presented as an idealized childhood refuge; it is the starting place of a life shaped by separation, family aspiration, and migration, later recalled against the danger gathering around her son in Europe.