Autobiography (english version)

Parallel lives

"I will never, I know that I will never come to know the nature of my conceptions".

Edgar Allan Poe.

I grew up in a binary matrix, jumping between one plane and another. I was born in Buenos Aires, but when I was only one year old my parents separated, and by the time I was three, I found myself moving to a completely different place, Entre Ríos.

My life was always in constant motion, spending nine months between the warmth of the Mesopotamian sun, the smell of wet earth mixed with horse manure, the long naps so hated by children, the stories and fables, the gossip, the afternoons of hide-and-seek in the street; and then the other three months, receiving impacts of lights and sounds, the clatter of engines, the rhythm of people walking down the street as if there were no tomorrow, the incessant stimuli that struck and enveloped me like waves...

It's not that I preferred one place over the other, I was two different people in them, as if my psyche were folded and depending on the territory I was in, I would adopt one of the two personalities. In Gualeguay I was an extroverted girl who loved sports and afternoons with friends, my grandmother used to tell me at that time: "you talk the hind legs off a donkey", and I won't lie, I always had something to say. On the other hand, in Lanús, I was a solitary little girl.

The solitude of living in a big city, far from my classmates, from the calm of the farms and the dirt roads, became ingrained in my being, it constitutes me, it moves with me like a grey, almost translucent cloak, making me experience reality as if underwater: words are never clear, the meaning of what I want to communicate always goes a bit beyond what I actually say. A certain calm surrounds me, freeing my muscles from tension, but at the same time the pressure of being submerged makes my lungs have to overexert themselves for the rib cage to expand and for oxygen to flow through my body.

Being alone made me need to tint everything around me with a magical aura, reading and poetry turned me into a masochist, I found beauty in sadness, pain seemed to me something beautiful that needed to be told, appreciated like a work of art. I became obsessed with temporality, life in Buenos Aires to me passed in slow motion, I saw people moving with grave and exaggerated gestures, their expressions of anxiety and madness seemed to me like beautiful asymmetric curves, the mixture of voices was a sweet symphony to my ears, regardless of whether they were hysterical screams of someone who missed the bus or whispers of some tramp frenetically going over the idea he has about himself, as if that would save him from oblivion, or exile.

I was fascinated by the contrasts of the neighbourhoods, how was it possible that in just a few metres I could go from the luxury of Recoleta to the poverty of Villa 31? How could dialects and clothing change?

At that time I hadn't read Marx or Bourdieu and my innocence had convinced me that between one place and another there were vortices, carrying me through a turbulent spiral flow, but in reality they were, just like my own childhood, the same side of a coin.

And then the buses, with their strange nostalgic experience. I think it was while riding them that my need to write was born.  I remember that on Saturdays we took the 128 bus with my older brothers to go to the shopping centre, we boarded the bus in Valentín Alsina to get off in the Palermo neighbourhood. Nowadays I make the same journey from time to time, just to relive those sensations. For a moment my entire existence is reduced to that journey, I am a single particle travelling in unison with something that moves through time. But it feels as if there is actually no present, I find myself suspended.

I look around and I don't see strangers, I don't just see people, I observe stories. Because that's what they are, a collection of events that will be forgotten by their future generations. A sum of fears, desires, anecdotes, obsessions, and feats. And as I watch them I can come to feel that I have known them all my life. Suddenly they become transparent to me, and their gestures allow me to understand everything. It's as if I could extend my arm and with my hand stir that cloud of thoughts that haunts them: "When will I get home?" "What did he mean by that?" "Does he think about me?".

Those beings on public transport should not be ephemeral, their chronicles, no matter how tiny and ridiculous they may be, should prevail on some paper, and from there propagate like spores, implant themselves in the body of another human being and germinate like seeds, be black holes that absorb the reader and transform them, enrich them with the experience of someone who is no longer, but who survives as an echo in the memory of the latter, who replicates and will replicate it until it becomes another virus incubating in another organism.

Isn't all this about that? Trying not to be forgotten. Sending a bottle with a message into the sea and hoping someone finds it.

I believe every writer, and I don't specifically mean those who have published a book, but those of us who enjoy the act of drafting an idea, a thought or a sensation, has a genesis. Mine lies – and I say this knowing the arrogance of making such an assertion – in that double life that perhaps will never become one.