On July 9, 2007 it snowed for the first and only time in a century in Buenos Aires.
He remembers it anyone who is old enough to do so, except César González.
At that time he was 17 years old and was completing the second of five years he spent in prison for an assault that ended in kidnapping and marked the end of a childhood that was never such.
Raised in a slum in the Buenos Aires urban area, González robbed for the first time at the age of seven, at 12 he was already a renowned thief in his neighborhood who wore expensive clothes and shiny chains, and at 16 he had been shot six times.
Of the latter, he survived in a public hospital.
Confined to a juvenile institution, on July 8, 2007, he got into a fight with another inmate and the psychiatrist in charge medicated him to calm him down.
He was unconscious for three days.
When he woke up, his classmates told him that they had gone out to the yard to play in the snow.
He couldn't believe it.
He had missed the first snowfall since 1918, but he was already beginning to farm for the rest of his life.
About how he got there, César González (Buenos Aires, 34 years old) wrote a memoir published at the end of last year in Argentina.
The Resentful Child
(Reservoir Books, 2023) has been a small editorial hurricane of this chaotic Argentine summer.
With the extremely accelerated pace of a life that is told as a miracle, González narrates in the first person the adult awakening experienced by countless children raised in the Argentine peripheries: that of the thieves who become adults among fleeting money, drugs and violence, that of the
squirting kids
.
A filmmaker who has directed a dozen films, this is his first novel and the fifth book he has published after three collections of poems and a book of essays that he wrote after encountering literature in prison.
“When I was shot at age 16, I regretted that they had not killed me.
It was the perfect ending: dying in a shootout with the police was the legend he had worked for.
“I'm not saying this in a joking way, they took away my marble,” says González.
“In prison I understood that I was not going to steal anymore, that I wanted something else and that I was going to do everything that society does not expect of a villero.
I looked at the menu and asked myself: what does society least allow for a black villero?
What was most terrifying was poetry and cinema.
“I started by writing poetry.”
“Letters, mask of my wound!
/ Encourage me this afternoon / because if I don't write I am stone / and I will once again be just a file/”, reads one of the poems from his first book,
The Revenge of the Tied Lamb
(Continente, 2010), which he published at 21 years old, he barely left prison.
In 2013 he directed his first feature film,
Diagnosis Esperanza
, in which he was already beginning to show, between Italian neorealism, documentaryism and the French new wave, the faces of an Argentina that had never before narrated itself in such detail.
She did it all from the Carlos Gardel neighborhood, in western Buenos Aires, where she lives to this day.
Staying for a few days in a borrowed apartment that allows him some silence to work in the center of Buenos Aires, González speaks with EL PAÍS in a cafeteria in the elegant Recoleta neighborhood.
Ask.
“I am intimidated by the presence of other kids who resurrect my past,” she writes to open his latest book.
What does it mean?
Answer.
It's my life.
No matter how many years go by and I have achieved this point where in a certain circle of society I am already known and perhaps my work is valued, I can't stop thinking that I was that kid.
And the eternal question of why I remained alive and so many others did not.
Q.
What is your response to that?
A.
I don't have it.
I try to answer it in the book.
I know many kids who had minor injuries than the ones I had and did not survive.
Some much more intelligent, lucid, and even charismatic who did not pass the 18-year-old barrier.
And, at the same time, it also always puts me under the responsibility of representing ourselves up to the mark.
To represent that life with the greatest possible beauty.
I was going to say dignity, but it's a word that doesn't seem to me to honor what I'm trying to express.
That's why I say beauty.
Live up to the complex beauty of life.
The melancholy, the wounds, the pain.
And I'm not saying I have responsibility in a moral sense.
Being what I am because of where I was born, because of where I lived, because of my skin color, because I have been imprisoned, because I am a villero, I am part of a group that shares certain identity axioms.
Q.
How much external construction is there in that identity?
A.
It is all external.
The story about life in the villages, the story or the meaning made language, made writing, made image, never left the village.
Historically, others have always told us who we are, how we should dress, our defects and even our virtues, which have always been that of the one who “breaks his back working”, the one who “never stole” or “preferred to starve rather than die”. to steal.”
Q.
When you talk about your first childhood excursions outside your neighborhood, you talk about “the town looking inward.” What does that mean?
A.
The world began and ended in the neighborhood.
The only reason for being outside is work or criminal.
The outside is another world, one of another species, Martian, that has another language.
The villa was the entire universe.
For me, social class continues to be the priority to explain how the world works.
Q.
Is going against an imposed narrative the responsibility you describe?
A.
Exactly.
I recently read a book by a German named Patrick Eiden-Offe,
The Poetry of Class
, which tells of an entire movement that existed among the emerging working class of industrialized European countries around the 19th century.
They wrote literature of all kinds that were erased from history.
One of these workers says that we must fight on two fronts against the humiliation of society: on the one hand, in real life, against the 12 hours of daily exploitation in factories, against child wages and abuse.
But we also had to fight in the world of representation.
It is something that I always said in other words: it is a battle that must be undertaken.
The subjectivity of the youngster reaches Argentine society from a very uniform place.
The fight is to demand the right to complexity, to excess, to a lot of verbs and adjectives that for us never present themselves as a possibility.
Eva Perón also said it: “Our workers are not only hungry for bread, but for culture.”
We are not satisfied with just filling our bellies.
Today we have a president who defends the “right” to starve, but not even the coldest soul could be against someone feeding themselves.
But, on the other hand, it is not the case that a poor person is at the same level in cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, or academic terms.
That awakens very dark passions.
Q.
Argentina has the virtue of having democratized certain access to culture, was it part of your youth?
A.
In several aspects I am an expression of the best of Argentine society.
From the fact that they saved my life in a public hospital and that they did not notice that I came in wounded by a gunshot for going to rob someone else.
They could have calmly let me die saying “this shitty black man is useless, he is one less” and no.
I went in with cardiac arrest, they resuscitated me, they operated on me for nine hours and on the fifth hour my heart stopped again.
Was 16 years old.
And then, in prison, the same thing: the teachers who work in prison are part of public education, they are part of a sensitivity that, fortunately, exists in a sector of our society.
And thanks to them I found books, I saw that there was another possible life, I could aspire to be an artist.
The writer and filmmaker César González, during the interview with EL PAÍS.Mariana Eliano
Q.
How did your neighbors take the publication of the book?
A.
Luckily we are not all photocopies who think the same.
Complexity, contradiction, is something that is not usually attributed to us.
When I debate and argue with the residents of popular neighborhoods, sometimes a "you vindicate the squirt kids" arises; it seems that I am making a certain apology, and they ask me to pay attention to the bricklayer, the worker, the cardboard cutter.
I have always done it.
But we are the black sheep of the working class dismembered since the eighties, the famous lumpenproletariat.
Why do I focus primarily on those kids who generate criticism from my neighbors?
Because I'm still alive thanks to the fact that someone noticed me and believed that I was something more than a grotesque in a cell, condemned to die there.
Or to go out and come back in, to go out and get shot and it will be the last.
Q.
Not everyone agrees…
R.
And I celebrate it.
Sometimes I think of Carlos Tévez, of Kun Agüero, those types of examples of people who have left neighborhoods where no one questions them.
Tévez, being the righteous egoist that he is, can walk into [his own neighborhood] Fuerte Apache quietly and no one says anything.
I go out for a walk in my neighborhood and sometimes they say things to me.
Because?
Because I do not express the example of success in material terms, and in ideological terms I do not side with power either.
Q.
I imagine there is a distance between being a footballer who becomes a multimillionaire and a writer.
R.
Kids who were imprisoned and wrote have always existed.
I think I was able to break the fourth wall and settle in with my own speech.
I can't speak for others, but suddenly I see young boys who live a life similar to mine and they say, “Look at Caesar, crazy.
Do you remember that they questioned it?
Look at the guy now looking for kids to appear in his movies.”
To me, teachers like Patricio Montesano, who gave a magic workshop in prison and talked to us about culture, art, history, gave me that.
And it has to be something that is replicated, that feeds back.
Many kids are afraid to talk about their experience as slutty kids, like kids from the village.
Because?
Because there is a filter of morality and time.
For example, it happens when a prisoner appears on television, the first thing they ask him is if he is sorry.
It's a rhetorical question.
And yes, what are you going to tell them.
Then he directly gives an order: you have to ask for forgiveness, I asked for forgiveness.
In 2010, in one of the first interviews they did with me, on the radio, they asked me.
"Are you sorry?"
I answered if he asked the same thing to politicians, businessmen, to all the people who went to that studio, because we all have a dark side.
I asked him if he asked the same thing to everyone, or just to the poor guy who committed a crime.
Silence.
I didn't go with the message of redemption, of atoning for sins, and they paid attention to me.
But obviously he was sorry for committing harm to another.
For some reason I started writing.
It made me feel much kinder feelings than those I felt by exercising violence.
Q.
How do you see the current political moment?
He was one of the few people who said openly and from early on that Javier Milei could become president.
A.
Yes, because a Peronist Government was taking food off the table of Argentines.
Peronism has the founding myth of leading the working class to break into the history of this country to never leave again and built its mythology based on social justice.
Milei would be an inexplicable phenomenon if he had defeated a Peronism with full employment and controlled inflation.
The Argentine historically votes with his pocket.
A society does not become fascist in four years.
That does not exist.
Q.
Do you think there was a lack of understanding about everything Milei could do?
A.
Before the elections I made a film called
Al Borde
, where many people from the popular sectors spoke in favor of Milei.
It broke my heart, but they had arguments.
A little boy says that he worked 12 hours a day and it was not enough while the politicians earned by sitting around doing nothing.
He was absolutely right.
Meanwhile, other private school kids who also voted for him laughed, saying they supported him because he was funny, because they thought he was cool.
The right knew how to manipulate the hatred that the working class rightly feels in the face of the loss of their standard of living.
He did not address that hatred, he knew how to manipulate it.
And the Argentine people are almost hysterical.
One day we won the World Cup and we celebrated it by singing for the kids of the Malvinas and the other day we voted for president someone who admires Margaret Thatcher.
Q.
What is happening in Argentina?
A.
More than a class struggle, we see a class that is fighting alone among itself so as not to remain in history with a pathetic and bizarre image.
If it weren't for us being starved, I would laugh at this moment.
Argentina had presidents like Bartolomé Mitre, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Julio Argentino Roca, who with their contradictions, with exterminations, built monuments, museums, schools.
They developed a country that was a colony.
Juan Bautista Alberdi, a liberal whom Milei admires so much, translated Rousseau.
Juan B. Justo translated Marx.
That same class today is represented by Mauricio Macri, who does not know how to speak in a straight line, and a crazy person like Milei.
Q.
Cultural circuits tend to be endogamous.
How was your emergence?
A.
I never asked for permission.
Not to steal, not to write, not to make movies.
We can do a left-wing Lombrosism... to see any photo from a film festival you have to put on sunglasses so as not to be dazzled by whiteness.
That is very shocking in Argentina.
They don't even bother to follow the political correctness of the Oscars, which have gone from painting white with cork for films to awarding others with black actors before seeing them.
I don't know if you saw dark-skinned directors at the Buenos Aires Film Festival… unless they come from another country.
Here in the cinema, inequality and discrimination are much more perverse.
Not in literature, because Roberto Arlt and Raúl González Tuñón existed here, who are study material today.
Q.
Has the way the cultural world perceives you changed since you started?
A.
It's been 14 years since I got out of prison.
They were fulfilled on January 15.
My films were all made in a very artisanal way and only one had a budget.
It would have to be done to the cultural world.
Some love me, for others I am a cute boil that overshadows their plans.
The popular sectors have been represented a lot without being from there, and they have been praised.
They have gone to Cannes, Venice, Berlin doing misery porn.
But it's not about proper names, it's about how one sector looks at another, and, first and foremost, who has access to the means of production to create.
Q.
Do you think it is necessary to come from a place to tell it?
Q.
Neither one thing nor the other.
It is not a sine qua non condition, nor does having experienced the worst of misfortunes guarantee you writing a good book or making a good movie.
Conversely, there may be a villager who films a film that for me is disastrous or that does not share his ideology.
But I do highlight the fact of production, that there is material justice in access, that these films are made.
We must compare the history of access to the means of production.
There must be about 50 Argentine films from the last 20 years that were made by upper-middle class people touching on the theme of the slums.
Now, there should be 50 villeros movies, with the same budgets, counting what they sing.
That would be real justice.
But it's not going to happen.
Q.
As a child your dream was to be a known criminal in your neighborhood. What do you have now?
A.
Filming a movie with a serious budget.
I wrote a script three years ago that would be my first more traditional film.
I hope we can film it.
I am realistic in my dreams because everything is already difficult enough.
González, on February 7 in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Recoleta.Mariana Eliano
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