White medium black

My mother said that once my father had gone to a store to buy cloth to make a suit and had told the seller: "I want a medium-white black cloth."

It was supposed to be a funny phrase.

It seemed normal to me.

As a child, I was overwhelmed by things that had no nuances: someone was male or female;

someone was alive or dead.

In the middle, nothing.

At least one of those supposedly unique options proved to be false, but I wondered why, if things could be dry, damp, wet or soggy;

if it could sparkle, garuar, rain or rain;

if a person could be skeletal, thin, plump, fat or obese;

and if one could be sad even while being happy, there were no nuances in the options female-male, and alive-dead, among others.

That's why the half-white black seemed right to me.

My mother was amused.

She was a woman of few nuances: for her, things were pretty or horrible, perfect or disgusting.

I, for example, was "very pretty."

Meryl Streep was "horrible" (she seemed splendid to me).

The movie

marked an entire generation, but I had no record left except that of my mother's irritating voice that, every time ET appeared on the screen, in a tone that showed repulsion, repeated: “What a bug disgusting!".

It was gross to me, but also sweet.

When we saw

, when leaving the cinema my father said: “What crap!”, But he did not open his mouth during the projection so as not to spoil the

.

I didn't understand anything about the movie, but I came out ecstatic.

I am a fan of irrational glare.

It is like the unexpected advent of happiness, that levitation that looks like grief: joy and sadness at the same time.

White medium black.

Years ago we went with the man I live with to take care of the house of an uncle of his who had to have surgery.

It was a farm on the outskirts of an inland city.

It was a bumpy, uncomfortable train ride.

The formation suffered a failure and stopped for a long time in the middle of the field.

We went downstairs, we took some photos.

In them, I smile next to a bundle of my black leather jacket, extremely uncomfortable and icy.

That's how we were.

Naked and young.

Besides, I was happy but lived in helplessness, mired in a clumsy and quarrelsome sadness.

The farm was modest.

The mattress was expired, the light was soulless and scarce.

There was the smell of old things, of timid objects.

In the morning, after breakfast, we would go to feed the chickens, we would check the garden.

We led a mechanical life, full of precise rites: at such a time to draw water from the well, at such a time to cook.

We were workers who had devotion and greed for one another.

I hardly spoke.

The sunsets, the sight of thistles and stubble made me sick with nostalgia.

Around those days, a newscast announced that it would show the autopsy that had been done to the body of an alien.

I was never credulous, I have no interest in the possibility of life on other planets.

But I didn't want to miss the autopsy.

We went to see her at the neighbors' because there was no television on the farm.

It was a humble house.

Cold radiated from the center of the walls, from the floor.

People talked about inconsequential things, that didn't interest me, and when the program started there was a great silence.

The autopsy was a sham - is there any chance I didn't know? - but I looked at her spellbound.

The doctors dressed as astronauts, the body, the stretcher, the viscera.

In that suburb of earth and wheat, we all breathed the same fable before the smoking rays of the television.

Shortly after we returned to Buenos Aires.

We arrived full of welts.

We told the guy on the phone and he said, laughing, that the chicken coop was full of fleas.

We spent days doing laundry, disinfecting the apartment, scratching like unstitched.

They were good years.

Dangers came from Mars, we were crowned with minor tragedies, it was possible to pretend that this — that joyful sadness, the annoyance at the clumsy avoidable tragedies that worried us — was going to last forever.