In front of the sea, under a brief sky, a group moves, confronts, threatens each other, and kills.
Tomás Tello, 18 years old, was stabbed, and that blood colors the sand, blood and sand, and everyone's drama is concentrated in those blades that liquidated a life and the future of that body no longer beats.
It is a herd, the feet in the sea, the ignorant feints, the ribbed fangs running to murder, the death that arrives and the worst of Argentina once again springs up, there when there should only be beach happiness and youth.
No.
That nihilistic will to end everything, the empty heads, the hands like claws, the monstrous movement wobbling and the ocean as a witness to human evil in its most decapitated dimension.
Underneath all the economic, political and social difficulties rises that hydra that spreads all Argentine dramas with poison: marginality imbued with cruelty, of lethality armed in nests of deep emotional ignorance.
In the face of these barbarities, all the good intentions for transformation clash somewhere.
Nothing is going to be easy.
Neither the decrees nor the omnibus laws, nor the vibrations of shouting "Long live freedom", are victorious in the face of a psychosocial disaster that turns life into a honeycomb of criminal bees, which do not fly but build the hive of terror.
Not everything is like that. There is a thriving dimension with a willingness to study, work and peaceful coexistence.
But from the depths of larval Argentina there are forces that seek to break, violate and kill. And that, in a very profound sense, blocks the way to the necessary transformations.
The miseries of old politics, savage populism and widespread corruption have their roots in that ferocious substratum.
The new officialdom is now beginning to manifest its own amateurism and is also confronting the interdictions opposed by that irreducible plane called reality.
The real thing doesn't change with magic wands.
It is true that the president did not promise magic, but the opposite.
It is possible that a good part of the population has assumed that the magic wand of a giant DNU could solve as many dramas as the ones we suffer.
There are multiple Argentine corporations, which are conservative of their own corporate returns and will fight to maintain them. They are ghosts that exist. They are adept at blocking any changes. They are the mediators between the destitute and the money that has circulated in abundance and without scrutiny among them and spent in abundance and in multiplied corruption.
But there is still something deeper than these conglomerates collectively sealed in on themselves.
In an indirect way, the bestiality built and promoted by education, demolished, among other things, by the expulsive indoctrination of schooling, opening a path towards integral illiteracy. There is a departure from the rules of participation of all citizenship and a representation that only represents itself is delegated to anyone.
There is a phrase that circulated, they say, among the savages of Santa Teresita involved in the crime of Tello. "Stand on your hands" they say they invited. It's a phrase that shows a fundamental reversal.
The hand transcends and humanizes the ancestral fact of merely standing still. The hands surpass the legs and build the human. To do a handstand is to return to the quadrupedia and the law of the jungle.
The captains of the arena of Santa Teresita became fierce that morning and one with a dagger that he took from some illiterate hell killed a boy as if he didn't care.
The captains of the Arena were not trained for the games of life, but for those of everyday nothingness.
Argentina's problem is supra-economic, although it is of course seriously economic. But that is a consequence of a moral desert, not in the sense of a hollow seminary moral, but in the sense of a generational scrapping sunk in the swamp of a return to the law of the jungle, which is no law at all.
That's the confrontation: the law or its opposite.
This must not be the year of magical thinking, to use that beautiful and very harsh title of Joan Didion's book in which she tells how she believed that her very close dead would return one day.
The year of magical thinking in Argentina would be the year of the assumption that we have already changed.
There is a long way to go, and the massive disappointment when it is verified that the road is indeed arduous and time-consuming, could determine a process deeper than an eventual economic depression: the massive social depression.
Maybe it's all good anyway. Everything is so strange that it is even possible that Argentina will breathe and at some point overcome the depth of the crisis.
In any case, it is an extensive journey against hatred and brutalism.
In front of the sea, death has not relented this nascent summer either.
Blood and sand spill into everyone's nightmares. But there are also the adventurous dreams.
And between nightmare and dreams, reality imposes its complicated and inevitable rules.
Because without realism the triumph will be sung for the usual nightmares.