ARGENTINA: Quints Come Out

Millionaire Franco Diligenti’s 13-room mansion in Buenos Aires was merry with lights, flowers, a crowd of 500 and the world’s only living quintuplets. The crowd, mostly teen-agers in semiformal dress, spilled from the parlor to the patio, swirled around the skating rink, tennis courts and swimming pool. The two Diligenti boys in tuxedos and the three girls in white tulle gracefully acknowledged congratulations on their 15th birthday, the coming-out age in Argentina. Beamed papa Diligenti to Family Dr. Carlos Montagna: “We did a damned good job!”

The doctor’s job was keeping the children healthy with balanced diets and three checkups a week. The father was their stout shield against excessive publicity. He tried to hide the quints’ birth by registering them separately, and when the secret got out, he turned away reporters with short answers: “They are just children. Go find yourself a road show.”

The quints attend separate English-language boarding schools in the Buenos Aires area and see each other only on holidays. They do not look or act alike. Franco is a shy honor student, and Carlos Alberto is a husky athlete. Maria Fernanda is quiet, Maria Esther a chatterbox, and Maria Cristina somewhere in between. But they feel their special ties. The father, an Italian immigrant who got rich with textile mills and vegetable-oil factories, says the five are a kind of “Mafia,” with their own secret jokes and fierce loyalty. The children chatter in Spanish among themselves, speak Italian to their family and English in school.

Now entitled to be called señoritas, the girls can begin having well-chaperoned dates. In a few years the boys will be sent to college in either Canada or England. “When they were children,” said father Diligenti, “I had to make sure that they grew up as independent personalities, free from a quintuplet complex. Now that they are men and women, they must learn to fly on their own wings.”