Maximo Menem has always been away from the media. However, he decided to break the silence and, for the first time, spoke of his illness, his father and the strained relationship with his Argentine family. In an interview with Velvet magazine, the young man told how he lived the last few years, after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor at 14. My mom died and was born again. We became closer than ever and, according to me, we now understand each other much better than before,” he said. The relationship with Cecilia Bolocco is very close, to the point that the 18-year-old adopted her surname.
Máximo said he never thought his illness could cost him his life: “I always knew I was going to be fine.” He also remembered the moment he found out about the ailment he was suffering from. He said he felt unwell and then his mother sent him to a clinic. She, she remarks, was key in the whole process. Early diagnosis increased their chances of recovery. However, the picture did not look good: at first, he had been told that he had only two years to live. He underwent emergency surgery in an operation that lasted six hours. At this moment, one of the few images that the young man remembers of his father, former President Carlos Saúl Menem, appears. “I remember waking up and seeing him sitting there. I remember the image, but I didn’t size anything else,” he said. On his father’s role, former President Carlos Saúl Menem, during the course of his illness, commented: “I remember waking up and seeing him sitting there. I remember the image, but I didn’t size anything else.” “Of course,” he clarified, “I felt anger that Zulemita had come, when she had always made my life impossible. Watching her cry on TV, that obfuscated me.” At the time, Zulemina had complained about not receiving information about her brother’s health. After the surgery, Máximo had to face a long recovery in the United States. “In Memphis it was all different, the place, the attention. We rented a house and my mom would panorama me all day. It made that year cute,” he said. The young man asked the doctor if he could explain why he had gotten sick. “He replied that he would get a Nobel if he knew. I think I had a very bad time in 2018 and this was the end of that bad experience,” he explained. For Máximo, according to his own account, it was always very difficult to contact his father: “In the end, we called one of his custodians, but it was difficult.” Visiting Argentina, the situation was not much different either: “I could never be alone with him. He didn’t talk much either, he was old. I don’t have many memories of him, because I didn’t know him much either.” When I was a kid I saw my cousins playing with their parents and I wondered why I didn’t have mine, but then you grow up. I think that my greatest references of dad are Pepo (cecilia’s partner) and Gonzalo Cisternas, the father of the 2 oldest children of the Diana. But I don’t know much about my dad,” she said.
