of the facts had all the elements of an anecdote; just imagine a good joke teller, a storyteller, a Juan Verdaguer, a Víctor Hugo Morales, a Juan Perón, narrating what just happened: they would have a picnic; everything was wide open to hyperbole, to the absurd, the showing-off kind of storytelling, the “You’ll never guess what happened to me . . . !” But not Dami. None of that occurred to him. Illness, even the slightest symptom, brought him down irreversibly, threw him into the dark zones of neurosis, to the grimace of the dead smile. He began to feel nervous. His left eye was twitching slightly, and he had to go to the bathroom. Badly. He stops the car, goes into a bar, pees, leaves, gets in the car, takes off. Two blocks later he has to go to the bathroom again. The scene repeats itself. That’s how neurosis functions: one scene repeated, repeated, repeated (it’s curious, the opposite of neurosis is digression, though few realize it). He had to calm down. He decided to go through a mental exercise that always worked: making a list. The listing of things (the ten best goals he’d seen in his life, ten songs that start with A, the ten girls he’d like to sleep with—that list often split off into: including foreign actresses and models, only Argentines, from the ’70s, from the ’80s, from the ’90s, etc.) was an activity that emptied his mind, that helped him get a grip. He thought, thought, thought, and settled on: “ten jobs that a dichromat can’t do.” There’s no doubt, this time the neurosis was seriously getting the better of him. “Air traffic controller, merchant marine, customs inspector, firefighter, photographer, cartographer, chemist, police officer, bus driver, royal court painter.” He finishes the list and at that moment the light turns red, that is to say, green. He accelerates. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the topic disappears from his mind, from his worries. The abrupt mood change did, however, make some sense. What did Dami have to worry about? A police officer was the last thing in the world he wanted to be. Bus driver, next to last. The other eight didn’t have much appeal either; court painter, perhaps, but Dami was never good at visual arts. No, there was nothing there that might interest him. He brakes again at another traffic light (it’s incredible how well the traffic lights work ever since Ibarra was in office). He accelerates again and, at that moment, the thoughts come back to him. Now in a minor key: “What does it matter that I’ve never had any of those jobs, that I’ve never wanted to be any of those things? Dichromacy blocks that possibility, prevents my thinking in hypothetical terms. Why resign myself to be what I am? Why not believe that I can have an endless horizon of opportunities?” Dami was entering a melancholic phase, the phase of loss; neither loss of the present, the now, the instant; nor loss of the future, of interrupted probabilities, of uncertain circumstances; but instead, loss understood as a condition of possibility, loss of what could have been but wasn’t; of what could have been without his even being aware of it (maybe he was on the verge of becoming a customs officer and never knew it), of what could have happened but didn’t. There’s an issue of the French magazine
Lignes on the topic of “desire for revolution.” More than thirty essayists respond, including Virilio, Enzo Traverso, Roudinesco, Balibar; all of them offer their point of view on the possibility and meaning of revolution today (the magazine is from 2001); but one of the people interviewed, Jean-Luc Nancy, inverts the topic. After making a brilliant argument (one that doesn’t enter into the discussion for now), he concludes: “And so it can be deduced that ‘revolution’ is not really the problem in question, but rather ‘desire.’” Dami was experiencing something similar: an inversion of terms. Not a sense of unease due to an unfortunate present, or a dark future; but rather the unhappiness stemming from a past that could have been and wasn’t, because the past was one way and not another, this precise way and not any of the many other possibilities; the past as a previous future (I might as well say in passing, the analogy with Nancy’s philosophy is something of a stretch, but taking into account that all this was occurring to him while he was driving a Fiat 1 that was getting stopped by every traffic light, one shouldn’t expect much). It’s odd, but between one thought and another, between one traffic light and another, the weight of melancholic thoughts had evaporated, the neurosis was diminishing to the point that it was no longer present. It was gone. What had happened? He had realized something simple: he was a sociologist, not a chemist or an air traffic controller. The fact that he’d gotten to his age without being anything other than a sociologist implied that he’d never had the desire or the will to become a cartographer or a firefighter. Instead, here he was, on his way to work; an insignificant destination, but at the same time, as the saying goes, that’s all there is. All there is: a sociologist with the MG consulting firm, specializing in mass media. That’s Dami, an account analyst for a consulting firm with offices on Viamonte, facing the Teatro Colón. The consulting firm worked on various items: speech analysis and discursive strategies for companies, corporations, or politicians; media redesign, image consulting, quantitative and qualitative market research, briefs for publicity campaigns, internal communications for large companies (including the writing and production of house organs), plus a new project in the preparatory stage: an Observatory of Medium-Term Sociocultural Trends. It wasn’t a bad idea; in fact, it was highly successful in countries such as France, Italy, and the United States. It would begin with choosing a topic, such as personal fitness. With that precise selection, a series of quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative (focus group) studies would be initiated, with the aim of describing the various social imaginaries surrounding the topic: what keeping in shape means according to different socioeconomic classes, or according to age and sex; what relationships exist among the body, health, and well-being; the explosion of “lite” food products; the connection between the natural body and plastic surgery; the topic of physical recreation; the relationship between the body and clothing (the body as a hanger for displaying fashion vs. the body as a machine that uses clothes). With all those data, MG would be poised to sell that information (complete or segmented) to different clients: from yogurt companies to clothing brands, from five-star hotels to TV channels. Throughout the year, the Observatory would work on two or three projects, and it should have, in order to be profitable, about four or five clients, which is possible in the medium term. But it wasn’t time yet. The project was still in an embryonic stage, its launch was anticipated within the year. Dami had placed high hopes on the Observatory, he secretly felt that he might eventually direct it, or at least be the number two. It could end up being his big break, the road to progress. Meanwhile he worked at MG for a modest salary, though with some minor benefits: he arrived at noon, and above all, he didn’t have to wear a jacket and tie. Dami detests jackets and ties and, more than anything, shoes; to him, shoes in any form (moccasins, shoes with laces, ankle boots, shoes with buckles) embodied the very image of failure in life; those people who ride the subway day after day, gray linen pants with brown shoes, inevitably black socks, and starched cotton shirts; the people who check the weather forecast,
the real people; Dami avoided those people like the plague. But where did he run to? He didn’t wear real shoes, only Nike sneakers, a pair of Nike Cortez, Levi’s 501s, a graphic tee (that day he had on a Kiss T-shirt); he usually didn’t comb his hair, shaved only once in a while, and smoked black cigarettes. Did that make him so different? You only need to scratch the surface to see that everything in him was mere imposture, there was nothing deeper. Even his famous intelligence (his first memory is of a Kindergarten teacher telling him “You’re so smart!”) was nothing more than a rare form of hypervelocity adaptation. He wasn’t intelligent, he was fast, so fast that he seemed intelligent. He had the ability to arrive at a conclusion in minimal time, he understood the end of an argument when the speaker was only halfway through, he always came up with a good answer off the top of his head. Did that make him intelligent? In any case, you could say he was intuitive. His intelligence: fast-motion intuition. If the art of intelligence manifested itself in him in any form, it was that of converting flaws into virtues. For example: he was an insomniac, it took hours and hours for him to fall asleep, but instead of suffering from the situation, he flipped it around, inverted it, and turned insomnia into a philosophy. Blanchot: “To sleep badly is precisely to be unable to find one’s position. People who sleep badly always appear more or less guilty. What do they do? They make the night present.” Little phrases like these, and others, brought him swiftly to the ravine of the binary: on one side, Dami and those like him, those who see insomnia as a form of not finding their place in the world, that is, those who become intransigent toward the world, the world understood as the place of power, of the abuse of power, of dehumanized technology, of savage capitalism; in a world like that, not finding one’s place is a good thing, a reason for praise, an ethical characteristic; and
