Diana Baccaro
04/10/2021 15:07
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 04/10/2021 15:07
The iPhone route has a unique hand and is well known to thieves.
It almost always ends in a gallery on Avenida Pueyrredón, where spare parts are sold
piece by piece
.
The battery at 22 thousand pesos, the camera at 20 thousand, the case at 15 thousand and so on until we have around 100 thousand per device.
But taxi driver Rudik Sirekanyan
knows only one route
.
She is the one who takes him to his house in Villa Crespo every night.
On a good day at work, he earns 4,000 "clean" pesos.
"
That is enough for me to put my head on the pillow,
" he will say after giving back to a passenger the phone he had forgotten on the back seat of his Chevrolet.
Rudik is Armenian and came to Argentina -
where 166 cell phones are stolen per hour
- in 2001. He never imagined that it would cost him so much to build his own exit route.
"My idea was to collect some pesos and go back to my country, but things got complicated ...
", tells a forced Spaniard.
He worked as a jeweler until the crisis exploded in December and had to exchange
gold for bronze
.
"
The trinkets saved me
," he smiles.
Until in 2003 he was able to make silver rings and charms again in a workshop on Libertad and Sarmiento streets.
Gold, never again.
He was at that all these years until the quarantine "broke him in the middle" again.
And at age 43, he had to start from scratch: "
In March I decided to sell everything and buy a used car to turn it into a taxi, but as half the country was closed, the license only came out in October
."
From jeweler to taxi driver.
When he arrived in Argentina he began to work with gold, then with copper and later he sold everything and bought a used car.
He transformed it into a taxi.
Photo: Lucia Merle
Since then Rudik sits behind the wheel of his taxi
every day from 8am to 10pm
.
Except on Sundays, he clarifies.
Sundays is for the family.
He met his wife, Liana, in Armenia.
There he went to find this kindergarten teacher in 2007. His cousins had told him about her.
Very well, of course.
And he just traveled with the certainty that he would bring the mother of his children to Argentina.
And he was not wrong.
Here the "baby" was born first, who is 12 years old today.
And then the male, 5.
Why Argentina, a country that received him on the edge of the precipice?
Rudik turns the spoon over his coffee cup and responds slowly, as if chewing something.
He knows that many Armenians have come here driven by the genocide of 1915. And he also knows that there is a large community (the third in the world) that jealously guards the customs and the language that unite it with its land.
And above all he knows that not a single family was saved from losing any of its members in that massacre organized by the Ottoman Turkish state that cost the lives of 1.5 million Armenians.
Sirekanyan stayed here perhaps for all that, along with
120,000
other
Armenians who today live in Argentina.
In fact, the day he found the lost cell phone in his taxi, he had an "urgent appointment" with the soccer boys, almost all Armenians, of course.
But the Tuesday game this time started without him.
Without number four on the court
.
First, he had to locate the owner of the phone, who turned out to be a journalist who kept most of the contacts and sources he made throughout his career in that small device.
The passenger had taken the taxi at random, near Plaza Congreso, heading to Carlos Pellegrini.
It was 9 pm and Rudik calculated that he would be on time for the football game.
But when he got out of the car to put on his shorts, he found the lost cell phone in the back.
He decided to wait until the device rang.
And it rang.
The next day Rudik
drove to the passenger's house to personally return
the cell phone that any thief would have placed on the black market for a value similar
to a month's
worth
of his work on top of the taxi
.
"What is strange about my land? The mountains," says Rudik, who married an Armenian girl and has two Argentine children.
"
What is strange about my land? The mountains,
" he says, and smiles again with a shy grin.
He was born in Aparán and perhaps to feel closer to home he took his family to see the mountains of Bariloche.
That was back in 2012. The first and only time they went on vacation.
Silver does not stretch, what is it.
Barely enough to pay the rent and the boys' school.
But Rudik doesn't complain.
Just smile.
How is a jeweler going to complain that he ended up turning copper into gold?
"
The trinkets, oh, the trinkets saved me from starving,
" he insists. And he drains the last sip of coffee because he is told that now he has to go find a passenger near Pueyrredón Avenue. Yes, you know the route. But it is not the iPhone route.
