My friend Jorge

Originally posted on the 5th of February

 

"Me encanta que me escuches", I love that you're listening to me. Says Jorge after he filled my head with words for forty-five minutes.

Jorge, year '61, is 49 and got a life behind himself that could be pure material for a novel. He spots me in the street from the furniture shop where he works while I was consulting the map of El Calafate and offers to help. I actually know what direction to take, but I stop to chat with him anyway. After the introductions, Jorge becomes a flood of words, we begin to talk about everything. Literature, philosophy, religion, politics, history, humanity... He's an idealist, Jorge. It is clear from how his eyes light up when he speaks about Borges as if he were his own brother, or when he explains the ideas of Ernesto Che Guevara  as if he had traveled around South America with him, or again when he talks about how beautiful were the valleys where he grew up when he was my age, in the Rio Grande.

He decides to present me with a gift, pulling out his guitar. He's got a country folk singer voice, the kind you see in the streets of the villages singing of times that no longer exist. When I ask him who wrote the song he had just sung with such passion, a broad smile appears on his face: "Pero claro: yo", Me, of course. He explains me that life has to be music and poetry, the one doesn't exist without the other. Nothing more, nothing less.

He tells me of his life, the years when an Italian woman took care of him together with his father; his passion for Adriano Celentano and Sofia Loren; his middle name, Luigi. He speaks of his time as a soldier in the Falklands War. There, fortunately, he never had to fight. Jorge was simply terrified at the idea of shooting another man.

Meanwhile time goes by, my excursion to the lagoon in search of flamingos is already going to hell. By his side, Jorge is getting hungry and drags me to lunch with him and his two patrones, employers, Mario and Jessica and their two daughters. Why not? It's a sunny Sunday and it's time of asado, barbecue, which stands to the average Argentinian the same way pasta stands for the average Italian. We eat tons of meat in a barbecue campsite, where I enjoy the typical Argentinian pace of life. Peace, tranquility, relaxation rule here.

I ask him how an idealist can be so happy in the world of today. "When I was younger - he says - I was always looking toward the tree in front of me, but I was forgetting the forest. One day I met God, he made me look around and I found that a tree is only a part of the forest. There are so many opportunities out there." But I know that Jorge is not a religious fanatic. Religion has nothing to do here, so I try to widen his vision. He decides to tell me the real reason behind his apparently neverending happiness. "Until a few months ago - he goes on - I was out on the street begging for money, almost always drunk. Had it not been for my patrones I wouldn't be here talking to you now." Tomorrow he will have one more reason to smile: his 17 and 13 years old children will visit him. Seven years went by since the last time he saw them. That's why Jorge keeps on smiling, smoking cigarette after cigarette due to the anxiety, with the laughters and teasing of Mario and Jessica in the background.

Before leaving, he askes me one favour for when I'll return to Italy. "I have always been fascinated by pizza chefs... Would you send me a video of one of them spinning the pizza in the air?"

Among the many direct questions with which he bombed me, there was this one: when does a man really die? I try to come up with some clever answers, give him a couple, he accepts them too. But none of these has the same simplicity of his one. "A man dies when nobody remembers him anymore."

I'll try to treasure it and to not forget about this little big man who, for one afternoon, made me spend a day as a true Argentinian. "Un dia diferente hoy, eh Alejandro?". A different day today, hu?
Holy words. Word of Jorge.