I get along very well with the Argentines, despite the fact that in Latin America they have a reputation for being pedantic, presumptuous, boastful, for looking down on the rest of us, for not feeling Latin American, but European. Buenos Aires, although it hurts the self-conscious Latin Americans who have a phobia of everything Argentine (that is, a phobia of me too, because I am Argentine by sentimental choice and with great honor, American by convenience and Peruvian by family mandate), it is the city more European than Latin America. Like the great European cities, something has happened to Buenos Aires in recent decades that has not made it lose its dazzling splendor, but has endowed it with a certain risk, hidden danger, sleaze and morbidity: what used to be a An elegant Frenchified city, it has now become a chaotic, Latin American, Third World city, mixed with all the mestizo and furious bloods of this world.
In the same way that in Santiago de Chile there are a thousand Peruvian, Venezuelan and Bolivian industrialists with a reputation for being thieves (and Peruvian women with a reputation for being good nannies and cooks), in Buenos Aires you will see a live voice, a fascinating hodgepodge of European and Bolivian walkers without papers , Australian and Venezuelan tourists on motorcycles and against jobs, Canadians in student exchange, Peruvians in love exchange, refined gay Dutch and Central American gays without a penny who escaped from some hell to feel free in this great city and feel free with tremendous insolence.
Because Buenos Aires, with its jumbled days of daily protests and incendiary marches, with its usual madmen who conspire to interrupt a street without the police doing anything and looking at them with apathetic complicity, continues to be the most fantastic city in Latin America, and also the most European and third world. In it survive the noble traditions of those who stealthily hide their centuries-old money on the other side of the river, or the Ocean, those distinguished families of Recoleta and Palermo, Martínez and San Isidro, Nordelta and Puerto Madero, and the closed neighborhoods of Pilar and surroundings , who now have to cohabit (badly) with the vociferous and folkloric customs of the invaders, the intruders, the dispossessed and disinherited of this world, who have invaded their betters parks on weekends: the Bolivians and the Venezuelans , the Paraguayans and the Peruvians, the Ecuadorians and the Colombians, many of whom live crowded into tiny little rooms, but they do not care, or care little, because, all things considered, they do not live in those shabby dwellings, there they barely sleep huddled together like pack cattle. They probably feel (and that is why they choose to stay, proud) that they live in the great and misunderstood city of Buenos Aires, and not entirely in a smelly Eleven den, and not just in a shantytown ruled by a Peruvian drug boss or Colombian, and that Buenos Aires is, indeed, a great city, infinitely more stimulating, melancholic, beautiful and overwhelming than any of the miserable fucking cities from which they have escaped with admirable courage, because poor immigrants are the great misunderstood heroes of our time, the great dreamers, the great conquerors, those who risk everything in number of freedom.
Don't speak ill of Argentines or of Argentina or of Buenos Aires so soon, as if Mendoza or Rosario or Córdoba were genetically better than Buenos Aires on the banks of the brown river: don't annoy me with that small-town verse, that Argentines, my countrymen as far as I'm concerned (although for now I don't have an Argentine passport, a membership card in an open-air club of extravagant lunatics), are almost all funny, strange, bizarre, picturesque, almost all of them they like me, even the ones I don't like end up liking me, because they seem to me to be creatures as disproportionate as they are literary, I don't know if I'm explaining myself, I mean, it seems to me that almost all of them are crazy, but they don't realize it or they hide it Well, like great amateur actors, there are also those who think they are sane, and more than sane, wise, and more than wise, brilliant, creative, infinitely talented, effortlessly brilliant.
They reproach the Argentines who talk a lot and give themselves airs of know-it-alls. Well, that is precisely what excites me about them: listening to them say their chatter, their verses, their lies, their quarrelsome traps, because the funniest Argentines are almost always the most liars, the most cheats, the most scoundrels, those are the ones who better I like them and the ones I more easily become a friend, a lover, a lender or a gang member. Who did not know that the best friend in the world is always an Argentine does not know Argentina at all.
Every Argentine is the coach of the national soccer team (and, if they let him, also of the Spanish team). Every Argentine is president for life of his country (and, if they let him, bosses of Cuba and Venezuela too). Every Argentine has the perfect plan for the United States to get out of the crisis of high inflation, the impending recession and the stock market crash (and, if they do, for the whole world to get out of the crisis, and for Ukraine to beat it the war against Russia, perhaps if you talk to him about the Middle East, things are not so clear to him, but once an Argentine taxi driver assured me that he had met Bin Laden, that Bin Laden was deep down a Peronist, that they were good friends and maps were written, that he had talked at length one night in an Afghan tent with Bin Laden, the two of them smoking poppies, and that Bin Laden's original plan was not to bring down the Twin Towers, but to sink the whole of Manhattan, and that in reality, and the taxi driver knew this very well, except that it was a secret that he had to guard with zeal, Bin Laden found himself depressed because the terrorists only brought down the Twin Towers, but not hunter on the island of Manhattan).
Every Argentine is a prophet, a hypnotist, a visionary, an enlightened person. Every Argentine knows. He knows well and knows everything. He knows more than anyone, he knows more than you and me and any jerk in the ass. Every Argentine is back, he's a cool guy, he's cool, he's got all the vibes. Every Argentine has answers to any of the questions that could be put to him, even if he does not understand the question and if, when answering it, he does not even understand what he is saying. But he answers. He nodded his head. He speaks. phrase. He plays it. He builds the team. Order the country. Rule the world. He wins the wars. He divides the good from the bad, the decent from the "fats."
And every Argentine talks and talks and does not stop talking. And it doesn't matter if what he says makes any sense at all (because very soon one notices that everything in that tribe makes no sense and that the very spell of Argentina as a nation lies in the fact that nothing can be explained rationally and, nevertheless, everything is fascinating and enchanting and it is there where you would like to stay until the end of time, without being bored for a single day so little), what matters is that he does not stop talking and has opinions about everything and they are also emphatic, final statements, without concessions, atrabiliary, lewd (perhaps the average Argentine would like to be as outspoken as the late Maradona was in his days of glory and splendor), opinions in which in a few minutes he puts the world in order, and immediately sends you "to suck it" with a haughty, disdainful gesture, and then he gets home and it's pure chaos, and the woman tells him to go to hell, and only then does the Argentine shut up, if anything.
But on the street he doesn't shut up, what's going on, what occurrences: in taxis, in cafes, in bars, in buses, in markets with one hundred percent inflation, in certain unnerved corners of the center, the Argentine speaks and he speaks and is always ready to speak, to give his opinion, to take sides, to turn on, to become bilious, aggressive, passionate, Italian, Spanish, Galician, Canarian, exasperated, to shout and argue with anyone, because many speak without nobody listens to them or pays attention to them, and that is precisely what fascinates the Argentine average: that he does not stop talking and has a conclusive and arbitrary opinion about everything divine and human, and nothing makes him happier, rich or poor male or puto, lazy or laboring, who sits in any place in the city, order empanadas, pizzas, wine, sangria, beer, fernet, (but, above all, empanadas and pizzas), and start talking about any thing and spend hours talking and talking (sometimes yelling), he felt igniting irrefutable things, solving all crises, undoing wrongs, decapitating dragons and animating a meaning to the chaos of this world with the resounding and torrential verbal power that brings together Argentines, half Italian, half Spanish, in a great Tower of Babel in the that everyone speaks the same language and yet no one understands each other, no one can hear.
Nobody understands each other, nobody can hear, because each one feels the absolute owner of reason and does not seem to dispute in any way to make concessions or give a cent of reason to the other, to the interlocutor, to the contradictor. So the Argentine is, by genetic mandate, by the boiling of the blood, a preacher, a lewd talker, a creator of fictions like rivers, an amateur storyteller and, above all, a visceral enemy of silence and reconciliation. Although he is willing to talk, even if nobody listens to him (he just needs to hear the sweet and musical echo of his own wise and sententious voice), he always prefers to argue with another, and if possible to shouts, and then go to the hits and grab onto pineapples. Immediately seduce or persuade a gang of itinerant talkers, and two opposing sides are organized with white weapons that shine in the gloom of a grim full moon night and, already ready to kill and die, the conspired porteños cut a street and get into a fight. in a fierce brawl over some passionate matter (usually a passion that has to do with soccer, politics or national pride, three symptoms of the same disease, the incurable disease of being Argentine).
Then the Argentine, already involved in blows with another, and without remembering why the hell they started fighting in the first place, reveals (risking his life) that he has something in his crazy and histrionic genes that the rest of us Latin Americans certainly do not have, so diminished in regard to them: a blind faith in their opinions (even if you don't know what you are going to say and find yourself improvising in the middle of the zigzagging path) and a courage to die in a street riot, defending those opinions for which you are willing to give his life, trampled by a police horse that will defecate on his heroic corpse.
