On the last day of work at TN, February 28, 2018, Florencia Etcheves returned the key that opened and closed her locker for 25 years and felt "like those police officers who hand in their badge and return home."
She,
the disciple of Enrique Sdrech who searched for rapists, narrated murderers, infiltrated the morgue and cried at sentences, somehow attended his funeral
as a television journalist.
There is a sound that he could never erase: that of an autopsy when
"the skin opens and hisses
. "
There is a smell that he could not cancel: that of
Cro-Magnon
.
There is a cloud that is always floating to the side of his memory, the gray dust of the AMIA.
There are historical cases, trials, judges and a place where the fatigue of his journalistic archive rests: writing.
With his sense of smell, sight, hearing and touch at full capacity, Etcheves worked tirelessly behind and in front of the camera in all roles.
One day at the height of his recognition as a familiar face on the news, an internal interference activated his sixth sense.
It was time to go.
The process of detecting this strange sensation and its "cure" lasted a year.
She did not discuss it with his psychologist, but with his "small table."
After amassing the matter, he abandoned daily communication with millions of viewers and became silent.
The cause:
that vocational "lover" who one day demanded formality, legality, to stop being a hobby.
Those who greet her today shouting
"what is your life?"
They do not know that the umbilical cut had its phases.
To gain momentum and jump, he first had to make sure that "there was water, a cushion, a cushioned ground."
From the first internal alerts to the final farewell to the viewer, it was necessary to plan the family economic scheme and work on what the "airless" emotional impact would be
.
How do you live now without the ritual of the news, without being part of that media construction of the Argentine agenda?
How does someone transform who no longer receives the popular daily gaze?
What does it feel like to exchange exposition for creative introspection?
"I didn't have the same joy
," he confesses exactly five years after saying goodbye.
She is sitting in her Nuñez house, suffocated by Chuki, the cat that she usually acts as a scarf and that silently accompanies the writing of all her novels, but she sounds liberated, full of air.
Forencia, at his house in Nuñez, writing his next novel.
(Photo: Guillermo Rodriguez Adami)
What is life like without the camera in your face?
-Personally, I like it better today.
When I made the decision it was because I realized that I didn't like it that much anymore.
Before, I loved it.
TV is my favorite medium, I enter the studio and feel like I'm in a womb.
At one point I wasn't fascinated anymore, I realized that I wasn't being happy.
And I don't know how not to be happy.
I am a pleasure-seeking, hedonistic person.
And I felt bad.
-Because?
-It seemed unfair to me with all the years that I had been immensely happy, unfair to my colleagues, we vibrated on a different wavelength.
I didn't have the same enthusiasm, and it's unfair because what's at stake there is other people's work.
I knew that the end of the cycle was coming.
-What did the end of the cycle have to do with? Was it vocational, related to the tyranny of exhibition, to routine?
-I like routines, they order me, they make me feel safe.
I'm one of those people who can sit at the same time at the same bar every day and order exactly the same thing.
I didn't mind the makeup routine, the same time of costumes, titles, pause.
For a long time I would wake up and be happy knowing that I would go to work.
That feeling when you are at the airport waiting for your suitcase and you see it.
And I stopped feeling it.
There was something that was no longer working and there was no way back.
Florence and a second vocation that made him leave the cameras (Photo: Guillermo Rodriguez Adami)
How to separate lovingly
The first time he entered TN, in July 1994, he did not have time to accommodate his ideas too much.
One blink and she was sent as an assistant to one of the most tragic journalistic missions
: the terrorist attack on the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association.
Paralyzed, still a "chicken", she had to take note of the landlines of her relatives while
she felt like she was floating in a nightmare, among ambulances, screams and debris
.
"In four days I was able to see the largest and in my opinion most perfect journalistic machinery working."
That whole history of television had started in an elevator, in the nineties.
In the building where she lived, on Pueyrredón Street, she ran into neighbor journalist Liliana Parodi, who asked her what she was studying.
"Would you like to try?"
, invited her, and Florencia joined the CVN signal with a multitasking internship:
"Serving coffee, carrying cables from here to there. Longobardi, Hadad, Embón, Mónica Gutiérrez.
I carried the cassettes, I took the times of the news cassettes international events, the famous 'timecode'. It was fascinating," he recalls.
At 52, quieter, Etcheves reviews what that process was like that lasted a year until she said goodbye to TV (Photo: Guillermo Rodriguez Adami)
Before journalism there was "confusion"
.
As a child she dreamed of being a dentist, but at 18 she was worried about tourism.
Finally, "a little dizzy," she enrolled in a degree in Communication at the University of El Salvador.
She studied for just a few months and looked for a similar course, but at the tertiary level.
They told her about the TEA journalism school and it was like a veil was torn away from her.
There is a song that reminds him of his first written chronicle and his first great journalistic lesson,
Welcome to the Jungle
, by Guns N' Roses.
They entrusted him to go out into the street, sharpen his senses, see and write, and while that song was playing he went into "a dive" that was half a bar, half a pool hall, addicted to cigarette smoke.
After reading Florencia's description, the writing teacher gave her a Masterclass.
'Why did she get in there, what, who, how where, when, why?
Why didn't she tell all that about the song, the smell, the feeling?'
Etcheves rewinds it and smiles.
"
I realized that you have to perceive, you have to use your senses, what I smell, what I feel, what the skin perceives. Whenever I have to write, that song reminds me 'do
n't forget how to count'
. "
-Did you discuss the topic "TV divorce" in therapy?
-No.
I am very rational.
I'm going to say something stupid, but I'm self-analyzing.
I put my little finger on point, I have my mechanisms.
More than a decade ago, with one of the three Martín Fierro who won for Labor journalism.
-How exactly was the last day of air?
-I am melodramatic, half set on Verónica Castro.
And she was thinking,
"This is the last time I walk through this hallway, this is the last time I take this elevator."
I gave away the thermos and the mate, it was like leaving an inheritance.
-Sometimes you leave TV and people believe that you cease to exist. Did you think about that risk, what it meant to "cease to exist" for so many?
-There is something strange about that.
I liked being on television.
But I left it and it doesn't mean anything to me.
Sometimes people ask me:
Were you the one from TN, and what are you up to now?
You think everyone knows what's going on in your life.
People have no idea what's going on in your life.
Enough of believing the story of social networks and lying fame.
Nobody is looking out for you.
Nobody cares.
Of course the exhibition serves to spread what one does.
I was on the most viewed channel in Argentina, four hours live, and I didn't know how to make Instagram live streams.
Flor and her friend Uma, the cat who accompanied her for 16 years.
-Did "what the literary environment will say" about coming from TV generate guilt or prejudice in you?
-No, because for me it is a pride to come from TV.
It's true, there is a pejorative thing about TV being a minor medium, or not having much analysis due to its immediacy.
For me it is not a lesser place, nor greater than others.
It is a place.
And it doesn't bother me at all when they say this is a writer and she came from TV.
It's true.
When I published my first novel in 2012, "The Virgin in Your Eyes", it sold a lot thanks to the fact that I was on TV.
Afterwards I could like it or not, but the path was much easier.
Discover a second vocation
Florencia could be the perfect protagonist of your next novel.
At 52 years old, she can tell her life journalistically, or in a fantastic story.
Perhaps she learned the latter from Don Carlos Etcheves, her father, who confessed that her first-born daughter had been for him "a boy for the first five minutes."
Family legend has it that at the Little Company of Mary sanatorium (today Mater Dei)
on November 22, 1971, there was a shortage of pink blankets for newborns.
Carlos saw through the glass of the nursery a lively baby covered with a light blue blanket and screamed
.
The misunderstanding ended thanks to the gesture of the nurse, who pointed to her lower parts to explain that it was "a flip-flop."
The Spanish Elisa, a hairdresser in Recoleta, his mother, had met Carlos thanks to the matchmaker Inés, Carlos's mother.
They say that Elisa's hypnotic beauty caused Inés to fight for her to become her daughter-in-law.
She succeeded after she warned her son "I have a girl to introduce you to."
Florencia Etcheves and her teacher Enrique Sdrech
Part of Florencia's childhood was spent in Brazil due to a family move.
After her return to Balvanera, independence occurred in Almagro.
In each of her moves, books were beacons, even if she even fantasized about becoming a writer.
Stephen King is still her favorite, the "friend" she never lets down.
Between the cameras, Etcheves wrote three novels
The Virgin in Your Eyes
,
The Champion's Daughter,
and
Cornelia
.
Later came
Wanderers
,
The Mermaid and
Frida's Cook
.
She is now planning, together with two other Florencias (Freijo and Canale), the book of the play they devised,
Of fires and flowers
, a tour of mosaics "that sowed flowers and unleashed hell."
Flor
writes meters from the remains of Uma, the cat who for 15 years accompanied the exploration of her writing with the cadence of her purrs.
It was the umpteenth feline to accompany her after Michi, her first, the one who slept with her in her crib in the seventies.
He decided to bury Uma, his previous cat, the one who now lives in a tattoo on his left arm,
under the tree in his garden
, where that mustachioed empress walked around chewing violet flowers.
It was that pet that inspired a viral epistolary catharsis that Florencia published in Clarín in 2018 with the title
My cat is dying.
Etcheves and her friend Débora Pérez Volpin.
If someone needs to entertain Florencia, just give them notebooks, notebooks, original notebooks.
She writes in green ink without exception.
A star of that domestic office is the cork board: "As a police investigator," she clicks and "unpins" ideas, characters and plots
for the audiovisual adaptations of her books, such as
Gone Girl
(Netflix), based on Cornelia.
In her life as a writing worker at Planeta publishing house, she discovered that she does not need a boss to respect schedules.
The scheme for sitting down to write daily occurs after her religious attendance at the gym.
She gets up at 7, has breakfast, trains, showers and gets ready to exercise her fingers on the notebook.
"I'm a daytime lady. After 4 p.m. I start to go out like a candle
. "
Florencia Etcheves, her husband, Juan, and her daughter Manuela.
There is a lot of ink on Florencia's body that tells of her biographical processes.
A Peter Pan on his back ("an unconsciousness", the first tattoo at 18 that he no longer sees and intuits "it must be sinister"), an "M" that symbolizes his daughter Manuela, and a set of two initials, hers and that of her husband, Juan, whom she met when he was 15 and she was 19. "He was a friend of a friend's brother. We met again in a bowling alley when I was 26. We never got married, it wasn't necessary."
Florence could never again innocently raise a glass every December 31st.
The trauma was born on Thursday, December 30, 2004, during the most distressing coverage in front of the camera.
She had just arrived overwhelmed from Córdoba as a reporter in a case of a serial rapist who ended up committing suicide when she saw the TN videograph: "Start of fire in a local Once."
Within hours, when he woke up, there were already more than 100 registered deaths.
"Cromagnon was the worst thing I had to see in my life.
I remember arriving and the bodies of the kids arranged as if they were sleeping. I remember the smell, the heat, the desperate people, the police officers with their faces contorted, the sirens, the taxi drivers carrying relatives who were looking for their children.
I never got over it
," he admits.
"I still remember the driver who took me, repeating like a machine
'This is a disaster, this is a disaster
'. I have flashes of all that. No new year was ever the same for me.
On the 31st I remember the morgue, the families with lounge chairs waiting to recognize bodies, of the mothers of pain consoling with love and peace. I tell it and I still cry
."
One of the many great photos from the Florencia journalistic collection, here with Raúl Alfonsín.
-Is it liberating to no longer cover tragedies?
-Yes, I think about it all the time.
Sometimes I say,
"it's a good thing I'm not there,"
although it also happens to me that I think
"I'd like to cover this."
-Did you retire from journalism?
-No!
I keep filling out forms with the profession "journalist".
I couldn't say 'I'm never going to go back to TV'.
Don't know.
If you had told me years ago "
you're going to leave TV",
I wouldn't have believed it.
And yet it happened.
-What advice do you give to those who hesitate, who don't know how to cut it, go after another profession?
-The first thing is to detect if it is a momentary anger, a temporary discontent or indeed a need.
Of course, no one is a rich young heir, you have to put things in order first.
I thought, I get along great with my colleagues, I have no salary complaints, I love the news, they treat me well.
So?
If your work lover really appears, don't hesitate.
Hug him.