A Winter’s Tale

As if the cultural differences didn’t suffice, the issue of planet placement makes it so that, while folks hover over turkey in the North, we fan ourselves and endure the heavy heat of noon here in the south.

In the south, I was born in winter. In the north, I would have been born in summer.

Back in 76 (to think back to a time when mother was beginning to hope for me), Argentina underwent a military coup, still very much at the forefront of memory and conversation today. The military took away constitutional power indefinitely; they would stay, they said, until the whole of society was western, national, christian. I’m not kidding, just translating.

Repression, euphemistically speaking, took the usual forms: kidnappings, suspicion of dissent, hegemony, death. Mind you, I first heard of dictatorship from the lips of my beloved grandmother, who called it “keeping order”. She painted visions (that I picturesquely proyected at naptime) of men climbing up buildings. In my mind, I dressed them like ninjas- they gripped the mold like frogs. But I heard no more of the dictatorship while living it; it wasn’t until college that I knew it existed, as it was in history books. And even then, I must have lived somewhat blindly, because I never could connect dates and events to my having already existed, and to the portrayal (or lack of it) of events as they were ocurring.

Think: as people paraded, throwing bits of paper, having fraudulently won the soccer world cup of 78, others in the detention camps, two blocks away, were being broken in an array of sadistic choices, kept from their family, unheard of again. Same story across the river, with some years’ overlap. 78, the world cup, June 2 the first game, my first birthday, Italy versus France: winter in the Southern Hemisphere.