In a sense, he’s each one and none of us, the free man we all would like to be, the stranger we’re all afraid of
You lay your head on the ground, hoping the cool breeze coming straight from the Andean heights will invade your body and relax you more than the liquid you just drank. The Andes. You’ve been here before. The immensity of this landscape seems more than anyone can encompass. With mind or with the heart. Every inch of this place seems to invite intimate and almost inevitable reflection, but as always, you resist. You let the thoughts swarm in your head, you don’t restrict or resist them. The loneliness that hits you now is immense; in a way, your entire existence now boils down to you and this mountain. By concentrating hard, paying close attention, you can hear birds and even voices in the background. But all these subtle sounds pass through you more than anything else. You’ve repeated more than once that you needed this, this freedom: you, a backpack, and the Andes. No cell phone to communicate with anyone, no belongings that connect you to anyone or anywhere. You, a backpack, and the Andes.
As thoughts parade, one by one, down the catwalk of your mind, you almost allow yourself to play with them. You’re not, and never will be, the type who lives by reminiscing, by memories. You pride yourself on being the kind of person who lives one day at a time, the typical carpe diem type. But even so, some thoughts are stubborn, insistent, wanting to attract attention, wanting to impose themselves on others. All the strength of your concentration, any and all meditation techniques, nothing will make some images disappear from your head. In a way, these permanent images are like beacons that, deep within your memory, illuminate the step-by-step of your life. Some make you joyful, remind you of a moment of genuine happiness. Others make you sad; these are the images you’d most like to forget, but can’t. In the end, the exchange of these images, these passages in time, their intermittency, is what connects you to the world around you. What’s that phrase you use to express your personality? Ah, yes, you’re “unconnectable.” You can’t connect. Not completely. Never completely.
That book you left at the hotel in Santiago. What was it about again? Who was it a gift from? Oh, you’ve never been the reading type, but you liked that book. No pasó nada [Nothing happened] by Antonio Skármeta. A simple story, very short. And so curiously similar to your own in so many ways. You’ve never liked seeing yourself reflected in anything other than the mirror. A girl telling you that you reminded her of someone from her past is enough to instantly kill your desire. A film that portrayed a character you might identify with, who reflected you in some way, would lose its appeal, because you’ve never been able to stand seeing yourself perfectly reflected in anyone. But Skármeta’s book appealed to you because there’s no identity, only a somewhat blurry identification. You felt some empathy towards the hero, a young man exiled in Germany fleeing Salvador Allende’s dictatorship in Chile in 1973. The way the young man tries to adapt to his new life in a completely foreign environment, like a complete stranger, couldn’t help but resonate with something inside of you. The difference is that the character was exiled by forces beyond his control. You are an exile by choice.
When did it start? Do you remember everything, all particulars, or have you conveniently forgotten those details that didn’t add anything good to your life? No, memory is your greatest asset in life; you could be terrible in every other aspect, except this: you forget nothing. Ever. Your earliest childhood memories are happy ones because they’re all about being held in your mother’s lap as she took you to the house of a friend of hers, who would take care of you while she worked as a housekeeper. You clearly remember growing up among six siblings in a poor neighborhood of Buenos Aires.
You remember, with vivid detail, that old, poorly built house in that old, working-class neighborhood. How there was barely room for two people in that space occupied by seven. You remember your mother yelling at your siblings, your father’s expression when he came home tired after a day’s work as a baker; you even remember the moment he began drinking heavily, becoming increasingly distant and depressed. One image is particularly vivid in your memory: you and your siblings, four boys and one girl, born exactly one every two years, you the second-to-last of the six, all gathered around a very simple Christmas tree, but bought with all the money your father managed to save after paying the rent and buying groceries. You, your siblings, your mother, and your father were all joyful and content around that tree, celebrating a holiday that represented something you, at the time—we’re talking about your five years—barely understood, but that moment in itself was beautiful and magical enough, wasn’t it? After a whole year apart, where you only saw your mom and dad right before bed, there you were, reunited, and it was time to celebrate, hug, and open the simple gifts your parents had bought with so much love. You still remember that blue toy car, don’t you? That piece of plastic made you happier at that moment than you had ever been before.
But if we skip ahead just a few months and select an image of you at six, we’ll be looking at a very different scene, won’t we? You remember the noise, the crowd gathered, the hugs, the people approaching your mother, who was crying and holding your little brother in her arms. Amidst that hustle and bustle, which today seems so distant, so far away in time that it’s almost, but only almost, as if it were a movie you have watched some day, could you truly grasp the enormity of what had happened? Your father, who, for some unknown reason, had become an alcoholic and a overly depressed man, had suddenly been hospitalized and slipped into a coma, never to wake up again. Did you realize you’d never see that sullen, distant, evasive man again, who, in his own way, loved you and worked hard to support you and your siblings? No, you won’t lie and say you felt the significance of what was happening at that moment. It was only later, and little by little, that you realized that life would become more difficult from then on, because your mother would have to work twice as hard to raise so many children alone.
She would also become more distant, almost as distant as your father, and if before you always ran to her when your brothers beat you, now you had to fend for yourself, with your older sister taking over the housework while your mother was away. You can’t forget how hard it was to get used to school, can you? Even in a school geared toward humble people like you, there was the weight of humiliation that some tried to make you feel at any cost. It was only then that you realized the difference between you and the others. Your father wasn’t an Argentinian; he was a Polish immigrant who had moved to Argentina as a child, fleeing World War II. Your mother wasn’t Argentinian either, but Paraguayan. The unlikely couple emerged from a meeting of two people who recognized in each other someone fleeing, one from war, the other from the extreme poverty of Paraguay. The combination worked, at least for a time, and the children ended up with a very typical physical appearance, one that one could tell from a distance didn’t correspond to typical Argentine features. For a long time, this wasn’t something that worried you at all, but at school, surrounded by a crowd of boys from all walks of life, you felt like a fish out of water for the first time. You weren’t ugly, you didn’t have any physical disabilities, but perhaps you suffered from the worst of all: you were different from the others and poorer than all of them. Your features blended the Paraguayan physique, your mother’s strong features, with a touch of Polish blood. The result was exotic and, therefore, an easy target for teasing at school. Did you even realize back then that those kids were taking out their frustrations on you? After all, most of them were as miserable as you. No, maybe you couldn’t quite grasp it. What you do remember is that it was there that the realization dawned on you that you were an outsider among those boys, and among people in general.
It’s true that school didn’t leave you with many happy memories, but it also wasn’t all bad, was it? On the one hand, you suffered from the bullying of the kids, but on the other, you escaped the suffocating atmosphere of your home, a space that grew smaller and smaller as you and your siblings grew. One certainly fond memory you have is that girl—what was her name?—you met in second grade. Very pale, with black hair tied tightly with a clip, utterly beautiful. The first time you felt the urge to be close to someone. You remember doing everything you could to get close to her, don’t you? But then one day, a great disappointment: she laughed at you because your clothes were all dirty, since your sister could barely manage the house, having been forced to work to help your mother. You couldn’t forgive her for laughing at you in front of others. And in fact, since then, you’ve never been able to forgive anyone who laughed at you, for whatever reason.
But you certainly didn’t spend much time licking your wounds, did you? A year later, at eleven, came your first real girlfriend. And, how could you forget, your first ejaculation. You can still think about how strange it was to feel that strange liquid coming out of your penis, right? No one had told you it was like that. The sensation was strangely fascinating, on the one hand an intoxicating pleasure, on the other a feeling of… guilt? Guilt for what? To this day, you still don’t know, but what you do know is that you would ejaculate a million times in the following years, with or without a girl around. But you were very careful with that young lady, so as not to scare her. She was so fragile, a young girl whose delicate features made you want to take care of her. She inspired two new feelings in you besides passion. The first was jealousy. You couldn’t stand to see anyone near “your girl.” The other was courage. Until then, you had usually ignored the boys’ abuse. Now you were starting to fight back. For the first time, you fought for real, landing a punch in the boy’s face, which really hurt him. Your mother was called to school and wasn’t happy about what happened. The result: your pride in standing up to the school bullies was humiliated by a beating at home. You obviously couldn’t hit your mother. But that beating left a lasting impression on you. You swore that no one, not even your mother, would ever humiliate you like that again.
If we jump back in time a bit, we’ll discover the exact moment you decided you wanted to travel, to see the world beyond the borders of Buenos Aires, huh? Perhaps it was that encounter at fourteen that still seemed to oscillate between something real and a dream, without you ever being able to tell the difference. One 16-year-old girl appeared to you at first like a mirage in the desert. She was at once exotic and inviting, her features unlike anything you’d ever seen, a unique beauty, and a way of speaking that captivated by being simultaneously elusive and fascinating, as if she wanted to capture and release you in a single impulse, a force attracting and repelling you with equal intensity. Gypsy was the word, the description, the ethnicity, the brand, the stigma. That little girl, 1.56 meters tall, carried within her all the drama of a people. She was there at that moment and gone the next day. Her family was a traveling circus troupe, her daily routine consisted of one place for one week and another the next. How could this not fascinate a shy, friendless boy who wanted at any cost to break free from the cramped environment he lived in, where everything was so repetitive and predictable? You would never see that girl again after that night, but that night was magical, wasn’t it? You felt like a character in a romantic movie, stealing the girl from her family for an escapade that would become one of the sweetest memories of your life. You were both alone in the back of the carnival she was part of, with only a poetic starry sky for company. Someone with little imagination might say you just wanted to take her clothes off. But it was more than that; it was your first time, her first time. There was no pressure or imposition whatsoever. You exerted over her simply the same fascination, the same power she exerted over you—two forces that didn’t cancel each other out, but complemented each other, in a flow where orgasm was more than simply an expected climax; it was a summary, and like a draft, of a process of sublimation that words couldn’t adequately describe. You had never felt anything like it. And never after was it exactly like that night.
That was undoubtedly a moment you’ll never forget, but since life is an endless sequence of images flashing one after the other in your head, you soon became accustomed to the idea that that girl would never again be a part of your life. She would be one of the many images you would recall from time to time with great fondness. As the months, and then the years, passed, a series of events led you to acquire other images for your library of memories. The young gypsy girl instilled in you a desire to travel, for the nomadic life, but at first you had no idea how you would abandon your life in Buenos Aires and travel the world penniless. The very city where you were born was a world almost unknown to you. The truth is, you restricted yourself to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where you could go more unnoticed. In any place frequented by the wealthier people, you were looked at askance, for not having the appearance of a typical porteño and for always being dressed humbly. So, even if the city where you were born was so full of charm and wonderful places to visit, you knew that you would always be a stranger, an outsider, there, even if you had all the money in the world.
Your family’s situation had improved when your older brother became a police chief, and you were all able to move into a larger house. By this time, your older sister had already married, and you, at 16, were expected to get a job not only to help with expenses but also to have money for yourself without having to ask others. It was shortly after you got your first job, as a baker’s assistant, the same way your father started, that another particularly difficult moment occurred and became a new, permanent image in your mind.
In this image, you’re sitting on the living room sofa, staring at a portrait of your father and mother as newlyweds, a photo faded by time. Your middle brother, two years older than you, recently enlisted in the army, was inconsolable and leaned on your sister, who was pregnant with her first child and also deeply distressed. No one there—not your brothers, not the relatives called to the wake, not the neighbors—no one noticed what was happening to you. What you were feeling wasn’t grief. It was obvious that you loved that woman, even though you’d grown accustomed to seeing her distant, always busy, always nervous about the bills to pay and the humiliations she endured for a meager salary. What you felt was more a sense of helplessness because you hadn’t had time to do anything good for your mother. You’d barely had time to receive your first paycheck, and she was dead, your mother was dead, and with her, something in you died. If your father’s death caught you at a time when perceptions were clouded by childhood naivety, now the loss was all too real and concrete for a 16-year-old boy already bearded, who was more than aware of what that death entailed. If you had so often felt the need for a father to explain things you didn’t understand, now you also wouldn’t have a mother to admonish you, to help or comfort you when you needed it most. You had never felt so alone as you did that day, before your mother’s coffin. You didn’t even bother to find out the cause of her death. She was dead, no longer there, that was all. More than ever, you felt the urge to run away, but you didn’t know where. The night wouldn’t bring you an answer that day, and you would sleep the worst sleep of your life, wondering if the next day might show you a way beyond that despair.
Perhaps it was the search for an answer that led you to be lying in that place in that night, lying where exactly, can you remember? Or do you only remember being semi-paralyzed, dry-mouthed, barely able to move, with a myriad of distorted images swirling endlessly inside your head, out of control, directionless? It was as if your entire life flashed before your eyes, but not successively or at a speed that allowed you to connect anything with anything. You were simultaneously fighting with your brothers over the television, unable to answer the questions the teacher asked you correctly at school, lying under a tree in the park you liked to go to occasionally, crying, sick, in your mother’s arms, and also crying, without knowing why, beside your father’s coffin. All those distorted images of your own life merged together with others of things you’d never seen, people you’d never met, conversations you’d never had, a kaleidoscope of distorted figures that blurred together, giving you a feeling of vertigo and imbalance that seemed like it would never go away. In that moment, you had lost all sense of what was happening, and it was only some time later, when you’d regained control of your body and lucidity, that you found a word to describe what had caused that seemingly endless trip that lasted no more than a few minutes in fact: heroin. Later, you remembered that you’d drunk heavily before using the opioid and were very lucky not to fall into a coma. How did you end up there?
It was, in a way, the most rebellious phase of your life, your years of wayward youth, and the fact that you managed to survive them relatively intact shows that you had far more strength than anyone would have guessed based on what they would see if they saw you drugged or drunk, as was so common in those days. After eighteen, you had no direction in life. With no money to support yourself, your older brother, who ran things at home as if he were now the head of the family, kindly asked you to leave. Of course, you felt a bitter taste in your mouth when you realized that you were now literally on your own. Without a father or mother to support you, without real friends, without family, because although you somewhat liked your brothers and especially your sister, you knew they wouldn’t carry you on their backs for the rest of your life. It was then that you embraced the idea of a classmate from your school days and joined an urban tribe of troublemakers, very common in Buenos Aires in those years (you remember it clearly, it wasn’t that long ago, 28, 30 years?). At first, you just wanted a group to fit in with and, ultimately, discover if you belonged somewhere in the world. And it was in the middle of the street, in the urban jungle, in the effervescent chaos of the Buenos Aires nightlife, that you learned more about life than you ever had before. It wasn’t just about mastering a coded vocabulary, some slang you barely understood at first, nor about wearing jackets, putting gel in your hair, and putting on a mean face to impress girls. It was about learning to survive in an environment where people let loose and reveal themselves as they truly are.
This period marked the beginning of your obsession with nightlife, with bars, nightclubs, tanguerías [tango clubs], and the noise of cities that never sleep, so typical of Buenos Aires. And you learned to get by with small scams; yes, you gradually learned the tricks to make some money with minimal effort. But if at first you were little more than a jacket-wearing pickpocket, it was your encounter with Mussolini that made you an expert in the art of taking from others what they wouldn’t give you willingly. Mussolini, who had in common with the original only a bald head, Italian origins, and perhaps a slightly authoritarian attitude, ruled much of the porteño underworld, and he took a liking to you at first sight. Perhaps he identified with your origins as the son of foreigners. He was the offspring of an Italian shepherd and a Mexican ceramicist who, somehow, had crossed paths on a street in La Boca sometime forty years earlier. But he, el Jefe [the Boss], had nothing to do with his father, a fervent Protestant who kicked his son out of the house at seventeen for vagrancy and would die in shame if he knew what would become of him later. Mussolini liked to say he was self-made, where “self-made,” in his case, referred to being involved, however timidly, in every type of crime and misdemeanor that was committed in La Boca. From selling out tickets for soccer matches at La Bombonera to the drug trade, from the mildest kinds to heroin, from mugging foreigners visiting Palermo or Recoleta to prostitution, everything had at least a finger of “el Jefe.” At first, you were horrified to have come into contact with such a shamelessly infamous individual. Your goal in the gang was to survive while you could, but not to do just anything for money. You never hurt anyone, and in truth, the example of your parents, who worked themselves to death but remained honest, was still a recent image in your head.
It was clear you didn’t belong there, even though you tried your best to fit in. But it was also clear you’d grown somewhat fond of Mussolini, because, from his perspective, he didn’t seem like a truly bad guy; he even showed you many gestures of genuine kindness. He found you a place to live, an apartment that was the first of your many temporary homes, a palace compared to the shack you’d been living in until then, in that slum whose name you can’t even remember. Moreover, his affection for you seemed genuine. So much so that you messed up on the “job” several times, and he forgave you, with a discreet smile on his face, as if to say, “Okay, kid, sure you have a lot to learn, but look, don’t try my patience, huh?” In a way, Mussolini fulfilled the role of father figure that your father, who died fourteen years earlier, couldn’t fulfill. You still remember the exact details of that night at El Viejo Almacén [a very famous tango club in Buenos Aires] when several members of the gang gathered to celebrate Mussolini’s 41st birthday. He, addicted to tango and especially Astor Piazzolla, drank heavily, demanded (and succeeded) that only Piazzolla be played that night, and proceeded to tell his entire life story over and over, simultaneously embarrassing some of the patrons with the noise he made and at the same time moving you with what was an uncharacteristically exaggerated effusion for him, something that came from the heart, something sincere. There you discovered that he felt as out of place in life as you did, that he was frequently beaten by his father because he wanted to be a musician, to play tango, and his father wanted him to become a soldier, and that he also suffered through the hardships of the street, being beaten, arrested several times, and nearly dying of malnutrition, until he discovered someone who reached out to him and put him “on the right path.” Of course, he wasn’t alluding to his life of crime clearly -I hate loudmouths, that was one of his trademark phrases- but it’s a fact that, except for tourists, few there could have never heard of el Jefe.
Yes, you learned a lot from Mussolini. As you listened to that man talk so languidly about the most disparate things, about how he missed his mother or how to win a woman, you wondered how it was possible that the next moment, he could be ordering a murder or “re-educating” a bookmaker who wasn’t properly passing on his share of the illegal gambling. It was almost as if he were there teaching you in practice the secret of the double life, the right way to live stealthily, how to assume an appearance of candor, almost innocence in front of others, and be the exact opposite when no one else is looking. Until then, you were as direct and honest as you could be in your dealings with people. You kept to yourself, didn’t mess with anyone. And it’s true that concrete, real violence, picking up a gun and firing it cold-bloodedly in the face of an enemy, that was alien to your nature and remains so today. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that el Jefe taught you to be cheeky? To no longer act like a slouch, to know when to join in and when to skedaddle? Was it any surprise that he had such a knack for the fair sex? It wasn’t a matter of imposing force; women were genuinely interested in him, in that ambiguous personality that captivated and repelled with equal intensity and, truth be told, with equal candor. He seemed to genuinely like those he liked and hate those he hated; he never seemed to be lying about his feelings. There was never a shortage of women, and although he had two or three “official” ones, who, of course, didn’t know about each other, there were still all the others for whom he felt some affection or attraction. He especially loved the exotic, the unusual types: Asians, Brazilians, Indians—all those who contrasted with the typical Argentine female (but that didn’t stop him from marrying one of these; he said they were excellent mothers and housewives). He seemed to know everything about them, and they didn’t seem interested in contradicting him. Except for the girls who sold, or, in his jargon, rented, their bodies under his supervision, he didn’t allow women among his “employees.” He said violence and crime didn’t go with women. He swore he’d bedded hundreds of them, and you saw no reason to doubt it. But he never referred to a woman specifically, nor did he allow the kids (that’s how he called his “employees”) to speak disparagingly of or treat a woman poorly in front of him. As long as one didn’t make a scene out of jealousy, embarrassing him in front of others, he treated the ladies in a curiously chivalrous manner for a tough mobster like him.
And it was perhaps because of this that you developed your peculiar way of dealing with women. His advice was, if you just want sex, make it clear from the start and be prepared; if you want something more, and especially if you get the girl pregnant, be prepared to take responsibility for her and the child. He inherited his father’s aversion to abortion; the girls who worked for him had to undergo regular checkups, take care of their health, and demand condoms from their clients. In a way, this is where you fell from grace with him, right? You tried as hard as you could. As the money started coming in and you became something of a pet of the boss, it was inevitable that you wanted to have sex like never before, since now you had the money to pay for whatever the girls wanted and an excellent place to take them, right in the center of one of the city’s most famous neighborhoods. Growing up in el Jefe’s eyes meant, among other things, that you could make certain demands. One of them was that you no longer wanted to use drugs recreationally, as was common at the parties Mussolini hosted. The heroin experience had nearly killed you, and you realized you preferred being lucid to “tripping.” At most, you’d have a few drinks, of which there was an abundant supply everywhere you went; you could just choose, and you became accustomed to a gin and tonic and a caipirinha, a Brazilian drink made with cachaça [brandy], sugar, and lemon. Another requirement you could make related to your long-held desire to travel the world: to learn the art of forging documents. Mussolini knew nothing about that, but he knew, of course, a kid who knew all about it: a funny character called el Pequeño [the little one]. It was funny because el Pequeño was a huge, muscular guy. You wondered why the hell he was called that, and eventually discovered that the reason was quite unflattering. In any case, in a matter of months, el Pequeño taught you everything you needed to know about the art of forging documents and papers of all kinds: identity cards, birth and death certificates, passports, driver’s licenses, and documents proving you held a profession, lived somewhere, or even represented an institution or country. This proved fundamental to everything that followed in your life.
Just as important as mastering the art of document forgery was mastering the art of social refinement. You learned to dress elegantly, express yourself correctly, and speak impeccable English—all in a little under three years. Your plans were to stay working for el Jefe for just a little while longer, saving enough money to live on your own for several years afterward. It’s clear that part of the routine of this job was waking up every day not knowing if the first news of the day wouldn’t be about Mussolini’s death or arrest, or a police knock on your door, leading you to jail. It was this perpetual uncertainty, a product of a life in the underworld, on the margins of society, that bothered you most. Not that you had many scruples about what you did. What you did have was love for yourself, too much love, and you didn’t need to be a genius to understand that that life couldn’t last long. Movies never portray more than a fraction of that reality. Yes, it’s a world of violence, filth, and corruption—the Scorsese are right about that. What they can’t express is the emotional impact of this world on the flesh and blood of someone as perceptive as you, right? The sooner you could escape that vicious cycle, which invariably ended with someone like you in the obituary and someone else taking your place, the better. But then, as always, the inevitable happened, and it came in the form of a gorgeous pair of legs. You still don’t know whether to thank or hate that young lady. French on her mother’s side, she inherited all the charm of her race: the Bardotian features, the meticulously blond hair, the green eyes, the generous breasts. You still can’t understand what that angry and emotional muse saw in you, but at the time, it hardly mattered, did it? There were furtive encounters in different parts of the city, because you wanted to strictly follow the rule of not getting involved, but at the same time, the girl was too tempting to resist. Today you know that it was your ego in action, the idea of being desired by a perfect woman like that was very good for your ego.