Covid 19 - Chapter 85 -  or… What happened in my convulsed town on day 85 of this endless quarantine?

Autumn gave us a disgustingly sticky day, with terrible humidity and a temperature above 25º C, despite being only a week away from winter. I tried to console myself thinking that the cold, unforgiving South wind would come any moment to sweep dry the sidewalks that I walk every day. I hoped too that it would ease hearts in the process; troubled with so much pandemic and bad news.

At mid-morning, I came across a long line of people who meandered for several blocks and rounded the corners of my neighborhood. My curiosity led me to the head of that seemingly endless snake and I arrived at the door of a large store run by the Bolivian community, where bags of food were being delivered. The colourful snake measured about 800 meters!!!

A Bolivian community in this lost town in the interior of the interior of Argentina???

Argentina has been a country of promise, the destination of thousands of immigrants in its last 150 years of history. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a great wave of Europeans and inhabitants of the Middle East landed in Buenos Aires and became dispersed within our territory. They escaped from hunger and wars. For example: my paternal grandparents, Jews, escaped from the Pogroms of Tsarist Russia; my maternal grandparents, from hunger and poverty in Lebanon; my wife's grandparents, from impoverished Italy after the First War, and so on. Thousands and thousands of stories. In recent decades, this wave of immigrants is mainly made up of our neighbours: Bolivians, Paraguayans, Peruvians ... now Venezuelans, and also thousands of people from the far East, especially China.

The Bolivians who came to Reconquista started selling clothes for the whole family at very affordable prices, in stores that belong to a countrywide network. This has made them very popular and their sales significant. For this and other reasons which I will not expand upon, Bolivian merchants are not viewed with sympathy by their local competition.

Immediately I could not resist the desire to record a historical event as a result of this crazy pandemic: Bolivian citizens who came to my country dreaming of a life that would lift them out of poverty, with safe work, with the guarantee of free education at all levels, especially the access to the excellent public university education of my country... GIVING FOOD???   Advertising manoeuvre… return of favours… limitless generosity? The questions skyrocket, but the important thing about all this is that a large number of people were receiving something very necessary and scarce at the moment: food.

It's also fair to ask: Did all the people who were waiting in that seemingly endless queue really need this food? Maybe yes ... maybe no. I do not know.

People within the business worked tirelessly to distribute said food, but suddenly municipal officials arrived, demanding that the protocols required in this Pandemic be followed. Impossible to make order of so many people’s anxiety !!! .... chinstraps, regulatory distance, cleaning of hands and feet ... a real madness.

What was the motive of the inspectors? Stop the delivery of food? I decided to mediate and explain to the inspectors that this decision would be a mistake: imagine the reaction of all these people who are waiting for their food bag! “Do you think they will go home like empty lambs after waiting hours in this terrible weather?”

The situation relaxed a little, the police arrived ... fortunately, the task was finished. I also retired because it was time to go back to my work. In the afternoon someone informed me that the decision was made to close the store of my Bolivian friends because the protocols had not been respected, something that was true.

I took the phone and communicated with friends at the Municipal House and reminded them of that quasi-millennial law: “The greater good must be above the lesser evil” ... without forgetting that the political cost of such a decision would be something terrible for the current government.

Around 7 PM the store opened its doors and it’s closure was already history. Bolivians: happy!!!... and many with a plate of food on their tables for at least the next few days.

My head laid upon the pillow in that anteroom of death that is sleep, I tried to make sense of my thoughts concerning this eventful afternoon…

Suddenly, the long awaited South wind bludgeoned us with all its power throughout the night. This nest of contradictory passions that is my people, like yours and that of the neighbour, was being purified.

Sheet and tablecloth

Its are rags of being human

if human they let it be.

Simple poor's gala

and not fancy bourgeois

that you can have a lot

but have no one with whom.

The son of the elements

weaves them more than once

and can with green leaf

adorn your nudity.

Wild one who sleeps miserly

and it kills hunger standing up.

Sheet and tablecloth.

They don't give them to you in jail

and no matter how much they give you

in exile they don't usually

relieve sleep or thirst

because they don't know the story

written on your skin.

One stained with wine

what a sign of joy is

and the other moistened

with dew to love

that no one is missing

in this cruel world.

María Elena Walsh (Argentine poet 1930-2011)