Miguel Wiñazki
05/29/2020 - 22:01
- Clarín.com
- Opinion
Villa Itatí. A bonfire at two in the afternoon. There are boys around who throw twisted irons into the fire.
They throw them with force, they strike the irons against the earth.
Nearby, half a dozen abandoned cars. This chronicler approaches.
Good morning.
─ ...
They do not answer.
─I'm a journalist, I want to know how they are here with the issue of contagions.
They look at me, they soak me. They don't get up. They are sitting on the ground. One stands up and says urgently:
ÍI came.
I follow it.
IráLook, I came to my house, here is my grandfather.
Grandpa is sitting in front of the sun in front of a colorful front, wearing gray twill pants that sparkle. Breathe loudly.
A woman approaches, suddenly an entire family surrounds me. The woman who seemed to lead the group comments to me alarmed.
IeneHas pressure. That's wrong. But the sun does him good.
─ You have no remedies, madam?
─No, for now we have the sun here.
I continue the walk. A man with a beard for a week and the hands of a mechanic. Sure enough, "I'm a mechanic," he tells me.
─Are there infections with coronavirus?
─No, not here. Well yes, some. They took a boy to the hospital yesterday but I don't know if he had asthma or what appeared now, the crown ... There are others down there, "he adds," but almost no one has caught it. I think, huh.
Y And who are you? He suddenly challenges me. Take off the mask.
I take off my chinstrap, he stares at me. He trusts, although he warns me: "Be careful with me, I have many lawyers, eh".
In front of a small warehouse there is a parrot in a huge cage, latticed with semicircular and rusty irons.
The parrot "talks" but says nothing. I walk two more blocks. A little boy stops me:
OnDon, I sell you a parrot.
"No," I say forcefully.
InFive hundred pe, pa. Isteinsists.
─I do not need the parrot, pa ─response─ and also I do not have here the five hundred pe, and also I have a cat in my house. If I buy you the parrot, my cat will bite you.
EroBut what you do with the parrot is not my problem. If the cat eats it I don't care anymore. But five hundred is cheap.
I glance askance at the parrot in the cage. Squeal. I feel you are also watching us with high concern.
Villa Itatí, in Quilmes, inside. (Juan Manuel Foglia)
Everyone plays life as they can.
How many live in Villa Itatí? No one can specify. Fifteen thousand says someone, forty thousand, others. Eighty thousand risk some.
According to the 2018 census, 3,128 live in Villa Azul, and 15,142 live in Itatí. They are 18,270 in total.
Very thin and slender boys pass by, jogging fast, with agility, at a brisk pace, as in a martial march. They come and go.
"They are Paco's," the mechanic warns me.
I cum He points to a door that is ajar and we stand to one side.
StosThese out there lower you. You have to be careful. These kids don't understand anything anymore, you see? It's complicated.
Those kids keep running. They come and go aimlessly. With what destination? They pass in front of us. Going and coming. They go, they don't go, they run. They are not going anywhere. They are running nowhere. They wander.
It was noon.
It was all a plea. The State that manifests itself as present, that spreads as a Present and saving State, was not there.
And if the State arrives early tomorrow it will be late.
"They are going to appear, then they are going to leave as always," says a man with a hat of about forty, or seventy, I don't know.
Blue Villa. In front of Itatí. Walled by police vehicles. They are locked up, cordoned off by the police and crowded together.
There are walls that did not fall in 1989 next to the Berlin Wall. On the contrary, peripherals and multiplies rose in a rage between one another.
"Come, baby," a lady yells at me, who is over sixty and it shows. "Come, listen, I asked to be opened here. We cannot go out to carton, to work. My husband is a bricklayer.
─ Are there many infected?
There must be, kid. They are infected with everything here. They locked us up. We are alone in here.
A female police officer looks at me with unfriendly but not entirely hostile eyes.
A minister tells me by message that everything is under control in the area.
The overcrowding, the disease, the abandonment, the cynicism of so many politicians, the flood, the lack of drinking water to drink and to clean, everything in all its very serious dimensions comes from afar.
I cross the southeast entrance again towards Itatí.
What if they lock you up, what happens? I ask one who is still around that bonfire of irons that melt and exude metallic fumes that break the smell.
IIf they lock us up, we all die here.