Intimate worlds I grew up as a rich boy until my family went bankrupt and I learned what it means to earn bread and walk on mud – 16/03/2019

At fifteen, I experienced collapse. My family fell from high up and became debris. Dad, deceived and affected by the corralito, had broken his business in 2001 after forty years of sacrifice. Mom, meanwhile, was suffering a lot in intensive therapy after crashing her car on the guardrail of a highway. As for my sister and I, we had to deal with a declbadification that involved skipping the walls of the El Carmen country where we lived and the perimeter of one of the most bourgeois schools in Argentina: St. George of Quilmes. Our presence at this institution did not mean that my parents had illusions of greatness, but that they firmly believed that education was the greatest legacy they could leave us. However, the world was waiting for us like a lion to its preywith the jaws wide open.

A month before September 11, I was at a friend's house in the countryside. A private neighborhood inhabited by upper middle clbad people from the south of the suburbs, in which my family had built a big house.

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This afternoon, when the phone rang, I think that with my friend Leandro, we watched a game of Nacional B on TV in the dining room while we had chocolate. I did not live in this house, but the call was for me. It was Lea's mother who took me in her arms and stuck my head against her chest while she let me out in tears. That he had been serious, but that my mother was going to be fine, she repeated. She had fallen asleep while driving on the Buenos Aires La Plata highway, hand in Capital, she said. However, the truth was different, but I always called it "the accident". The truth was that he was dying in the intensive care ward of a hospital in Buenos Aires. When I visited him a day later, I was unrecognizable.

From those hours, I have the memory of an unconditional and infinite hug with my sister; both sitting on a bench near the trees in the neighborhood. We licked our wounds like dogs, knowing that we were going to face what was coming. This embrace, for us, involved an alliance.

What was a certainty and had a very bad mother at that time was that dad had cheated on the partner. In truth, they had been defrauding it for a long time, but the old man was a great denier who could never bear the emotional cost of being scammed by his trusted people. But this time it was in 2001 and the country was going through one of the worst economic crises in its history. Dad was no longer a child. He was sixty-nine years old. I could not get up.

He was a prestigious fruit and vegetable entrepreneur, respected for his career, his honesty and his generous spirit. Son of Spanish baker and Argentinean housewife, he is forced to go to work as early as the age of 12 when his father was bedridden by stomach ulcers.

With just the sixth year, he started baiting his friends at the central market. He has managed to stand out for more than forty years – as a field contractor – and to gain recognition from his colleagues by the force of willpower and intelligence to succeed in a country where there were still opportunities.

I remember some Saturday morning dad was bicycles in the garage at home to pedal. A little air in the wheels, grease in the chain and a test to see how the brakes were working reached him. I had to stretch the tips of my feet to avoid falling. Despite his age, he maintained an athletic state in which many asked him how he had succeeded.

To leave the country El Carmen in Berazategui, where we lived, we had to cross a trail of about two kilometers of asphalt until the security fence. But first we had to convince Mom that, because of the risk, she objected.

Football was another thing that dad could irritate mom. Especially those days when we had no way to make us miss the Independiente court: those who played against Racing. There too came out of the mouth of mother but repeated the word risk. The old man, who was a fanatic, had made me a member of a little boy. It had been more than fifty years since he was and the club recognized it with a card bearing the legend "Golden Wedding".

In the summer, I liked to accompany her to work. One day, then two followed. The second summer, I was with him four days out of five, and only because Mom was begging the next for her and my sister. The central market was a hostile place, or at least contrasted with the scenarios in which I moved in my adolescence, the country with all its comfort and its extravagances. However, I felt good on the market. I found it equalizer and stripped of this pretentious grin of some neighbors.

What I remember most of those days of "working" between bags of potatoes piled up in sheds full of earth, were the lunches with the workers. Dad gave me money to buy food and I came back with "sánguches" from milanesafries and sodas. I shared everything with them between spending to be such and such a club and other things they were laughing at but that I still did not understand. At that time, I learned that we were all the same. This money does not make people better or more important.

The economic collapse that decimated my family had a more serious effect: the deterioration of the health of my seniors, their marriage and all sorts of certainty about taking a course. Anyway, dad gambled until the last minute on his job to defend his reputation and reputation.

The crisis for me involved changing schools three times in three years, leaving the country where I had built very good friendships and undergoing a series of forced relocations. Only first with dad in a small room that a lady rented to Berazategui. We had tried in a boarding house, but the price was higher. We had nothing but a mattress, a table and two or three chairs. I remember it was the time of the World Cup in Korea and Japan, during which we came back in the first round because of the whims of Bielsa after defeating Nigeria, lost to England and have driven Sweden.Questions that perfectly fit our situation. Football was one of the great pbadions that my old man had pbaded on to me and, of course, Sundays of money to see Red at Avellaneda, they were no longer possible.

In 2003, I started living with Mom in an apartment I rented in Recoleta with the money that the insurance had paid for "the accident". After several operations in the spine and a long rehabilitation both psychological and physical, Mom began to take another chance. First, to reconcile with dad; then, relive together. The personal project was accompanied by the last attempt to rearm the family economy.

With the little money that dad had not come to save his business and that he had recovered at the time, they bought a newsstand on Avenida Santa Fe y Larrea. None of us would have imagined it, but it only lasted a year and a half. They no longer had to put the body on and everything ended in a maladministration that made them rethink the priorities: either selling the newsstand or giving up the last chance to get a roof over their heads. Yes, have everything to keep almost nothing.

After a short experience as canillitas, my parents bought a house in Villa Caraza, Lanús. It had to be reconfigured, rebuilt, but above all to find a starting point, a new ground on which to stand. Mom began doing odd jobs as a pedicure, which, from changas, became the entrance to the house. They were many like that. The elderly man, seventy-six years old, has benefited from minimal retirement.

From that moment, I started working at the Mercado de Avellaneda. My job was to serve the public and constantly sweep the floors. Again, he was tied with the pawns, but he was no longer the boss's son. Now, I saw it as a marginal world, composed mainly of the corridos of the system and myself.

Walking on mud, catharsis and exploring the north was not easy. The first rope to leave the swamp came with literature. A job in a Recoleta bookstore and meeting books that had accompanied me in my childhood were the first stars of a long overcast sky. I experienced a declbadification that forced me to rediscover myself, to ask myself thousands of questions in order to move forward.

Some time later, I started a degree in literature at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) thinking of becoming a journalist. However, because of my own experience and my repetitive behavior, I was unable to support long-term projects. I did not have a plan. Can any one have it?

My sister had become independent from the family at eighteen. Meanwhile, I was still living in Lanús, between friends of my old man and the acetone of Mama's nail polish removers, which stuck to the walls of the house. The turbulent years were starting to fall behind and, even if we had no fixed trajectory, we had reached a certain stability. There were more beautiful moments, but as Sartre said, It was ours and we did not want to waste it. However, that was what was missing. The time To take advantage For them, for my grandfather, who in 2006 died of a rare disease in the blood, a week after the end of the work, with the money that the state had paid him after a trial of more than ten years, his house with my grandmother. And also to daddy, who two years later, defeated but at peace, died of a stomach aneurysm.

Once again, the phone rang and we found my sister and me. On this occasion, at the door of the model clinic Lanús. A few hours later, we saw how dad had come out of an ambulance on a stretcher.

Time pbaded from my body to my lighthouse, to my life teacher and to be more noble and generous than I knew. The doctor responsible left us the choice between an operation with very good chances so that dad does not come to overcome it and even undergo it or leave it without the manipulations related to the surgery. We decided to become aware of the fullness of his life. It was his time to rest.

Today, already received as a journalist, I write in a newspaper specialized in economics, something that I could never have imagined. He can be. I owe a lot to mom, her resilience and her resurrection. Also to the pact that I sealed in this embrace that we had with my sister, many years ago and this allowed us to resurface his ashes.

Crossing this path has taught me to be humble and brave, to strive and understand that our true capital has always been the family.

In addition to his memory forever, there was a lot left for my father: to see me today to found my own family and to have overcome old wounds. I would love to have it even a day, to tell you that with Pili, my life partner, we bought with great effort and with a mortgage our own home. Take him to Independiente Court, which club he loved so much. That he read the notes I wrote today in the newspapers he was reading. Why not buy a bike, get up early, get ready, get out on the road and stop in a quiet place, hug him and say thank you.
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Daniel Blanco Gómez He is a librarian and journalist specializing in economics and politics. Voraz player, born south of Buenos Aires, is a fan of the King of the Cups. Once he read the sentence of the poet Cesare Pavese "literature is a bulwark against the crimes of life" and turned into religion. Hemingway's admirer, he dreamed of finding her in Paris – as in Woody Allen's film – and shared a beer "in a clean, well-lit cafe". Over the next few days, he plans to continue doing what makes him happy: enjoying his family; widen it with Pilar, the love of his life; Spend time with your friends and two dogs and write a novel.