The roost in the street, where the excuses end

The block of my house has become a perch. First I was going to put “a hotel” then “a room” but that would be hypocritical: a mattress placed on the sidewalk against a more or less rusty wall is not a hotel, it is not a room.

The block of my house has become a manger. When the boys of the popular cooking pot open the door, an increasingly long line stops to wait for this small plastic tray with a more or less indefinite stew. The tail lengthens. Some are men with the traditional worker’s bag: they have work, they eat from the pot. They sit in the corridors of shops, against the metal shutters, trying not to put the tray on the floor where we walk, where our dogs walk. As if they were children, they still eat with a spoon: cutting requires only other comforts.

Some are downright damaged: their clothes are lying around, their hair is in disarray. “You need to relax with that,” one of the potty boys said at a restaurant this week. “If he escabellireplied the man. Alcohol, of course. How not to dampen the sensations if you have to watch the world from the tiles.

Something like that must happen to this couple who moved in next to the garage. Monday a little before 8 am, when I was going to take the baby to school, they were already fighting loudly. I don’t know exactly what they were saying: the words came out with that sort of soft rubber band produced by alcohol. Cloudy eyes, oblivion and always gray, as the tango says.

Many of us look away: it is embarrassing to see people eating and sleeping in the street. It’s embarrassing to watch them do these private acts without hesitation. So vulnerable in their humanity. “It’s rags of human beings so human they let it be”sang Maria Elena Walsh in a topic called sheet and tablecloth. No sheet, no tablecloth, no bed, no table.

It’s embarrassing to see these private acts and not even think about the narrow: the smell of the sidewalks of Buenos Aires into account. Others that we can’t even imagine: do those who are in the street have the right to love? to sex?

It’s just that here, in the perch on the sidewalk, the stories end. Here the excuses go to the bottom. Inflation over one hundred percent year on year and food above all else. Unattainable rents with requirements worthy of credit in an international organization. Skyrocketing salaries.

“The apologies are not published,” he told us an old journalist when we explained an error to him. “The excuses are not baked”, he would say today. In the street charger, there is no talk, there is no pride in the price agreement, there are no words for statements like “We are the second economy to fastest growing in the world after China” (Alberto Fernández, 2023).

More and more people are sleeping around my house and all over town. This morning in the Barrio Norte -bourgeois district-, I came across a very old lady sitting against the window of the Carrefour, the bag with all her belongings, her hair still dyed. How long had she not been a customer of this same supermarket? How many years have you been without sitting on the floor, except, perhaps, to play with a boy? What will it be like the first time you go out on the street with nowhere to go, choose a hallway, dress invisible?

I remember The streeta job that the photographer did Your present looking precisely at these invisible people: people who have covered themselves so much with the cold and the stares that we don’t see them. You can see the covers, the cardboard. Some look like heaps of garbage. People who remain, that society has expelled, waste. It’s easy, easy, to believe that it’s madness, laziness. They are too numerous to think of individual problems.

I walk and my heart tightens and hardens too; as if I put a kitchen film on it, it becomes waterproof and life goes on. As if this misery were a natural, inevitable phenomenon. In this indolent and cruel, but above all cowardly world.

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