Coffee intellectuals

Everything has been lost except honor, wrote Francis I, that king with large mustaches and haughty look, after Emperor Charles V took him prisoner and took him to Madrid wearing booties for which for some courtiers the French had feet similar to ducks. If to the phrase of the king you add that of Borges we are not united by love but by fright, you are ready to enter a café and find a type of Argentine identifiable by glasses, newspapers, if we are in winter the scarf, and if he still has hair left by the gray hair that is confused with the beard, That someone raises his head and looks for a second at the newcomer then dives back into the reading or drinks some of the cut and bites the crescent. The coffee intellectual seems to have escaped from a tango by Piazzolla, he has something of a bandoneonist although in his life he has had the instrument in his hands. The day the coffee intellectuals run out, something will have changed forever in Buenos Aires. There is much of the dignity that lost causes grant in those passionate about the written word who take refuge in a café spend most of their lives completely oblivious to the torments of this time. If you get close enough it will seem that their eyes are covered with cobweb, but it is not so, they have seen the great triumphs and the terrible defeats of these southern lands, rectifico: they have read it. In the newspapers they read the defeat of the Malvinas, the escape of De la Rua by helicopter, the victory of the soccer team in Qatar, those two young people on a traffic light that suddenly collapsed and it is strange to them that to celebrate a soccer victory it is necessary to climb in that urban gadget. It is a way of being Argentine that they do not recognize at all but that leads one to think that love does not unite us if not... You know what.