I confess that I fall in love with the lost causes, the hopeless outcasts, the desolate souls, the spirits in conflict, the apocalyptic scenarios and the vast solitudes of the landscape. I fall in love with the desperate and helpless, with those who drift because they have no other choice and carry the weight of derision on themselves.
When I was a little boy, I fell in love with the relegated ones from recess. That herd of royal carajitos that the gravitational forces of popularity excluded and left behind from the canteen, from the teacher’s indulgence, from the best desks, from the school glass of milk.
In the fifth grade of primary school I organized a lodge of quixotic protectors who sought out farts for fart seekers, especially those who intimidated the “weirdos.” This is the name given to the one who arrived disheveled and lazy, the bluish black, the chubby girl, the one who showed up with the grease-stained school chemise, the one who limped, the effete, the sluttiest, the worst student, the nerd.
We were not a gang of philanthropists playing at being heroes, but we were aware of our privileges as “normal” people facing the cruel fate of the different, disadvantaged by a society that rewards the bland. More than once we organized neighborhood brawls to execute the most vested with their own weapons and their own law.
Banished from fraternal friends and chimerical causes in adolescence, one grows up and no longer obeys instincts to give way to leisurely rationality, which finds its way between personal priorities, always selfish and devoid of a sense of transcendence.
I did not like Chávez at all on that February 4, 1992. Someone who was already on the mobile stages of the UCV came to think that he was just another soldier, one of those who were rising up at that time in other regions of the southern cone disgusted by the levels of corruption and impunity of the puppet governments of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but which in reality refer to the bitter memory of the dictatorships of the 50s, 60s and 70s throughout the continent.
That man seemed smeared with the patina of authoritarianism, hallmark of the military boot, and his preaching was unintelligible to ears unaccustomed to left-wing jingoistic discourse, sodomized as we were at that time with the comfort of our dubious advantages as affluent student, attracted by the media seduction of pop culture, declassed people who came to believe that by buying a car and an apartment we already owned the means of production.
It really was the coquito that Tarek William Saab was shoved into while he was being detained by the Metropolitan Police during the early hours of the April 2002 coup, that renewed our spirit of justice. The openly racist comments against Aristóbulo Istúriz, the power cut in front of the Cuban embassy in Las Mercedes, the coronation of Pedro Carmona Estanga as the visible head of the de facto government and above all, the sad but upright Chávez who said goodbye to his ministerial train in Miraflores, to be transferred to an unknown destination that fallacious dawn of April 12 under threat of starting the bombing of the palace. Thanks to this progressive show, we were able to recognize the old promoters of bullying trying to subdue, like when we were little kids, the weakest.
intact virility
You fall in love with ideas. In the sapiosexual phase of it all [email protected], it is believed to recognize in the wisdom of the other a kingdom of virtues that we romanticize while the illusion lasts. Chávez filled our bellies with yellow butterflies and made us emotional with the consolation of his daily presence.
It was a bestial love, which found in his words relief, guidance, fun, joy and hope, while all the other loves of life were left behind in the back room of the heart, victims of the grind that routine implies.
Virtually, together with him we met all of Venezuela and part of the world. We look at history, we recognized the true heroes, we strengthened maturity, we married the just, we reviewed universal literature and we even put our teeth into self-help manuals with that absurd pirouette of the Oracle of the warrior.
Chávez showed us that one can fall in love with a guy with the passion of a fifteen-year-old and keep his tough manhood in suspense, tenderly and without blushing.
