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Sample translations submitted: 2
Spanish to English: Dogs Without Owners
Source text - Spanish Perros sin dueño
Un cuento de Ernesto Ferrini
Ilustración de Xxx
1.
La historia de los secuestros me fue referida por Buñuelo en la barra de un restaurante francés cercano a mi apartamento, y de no ser porque los diarios habían recogido la noticia, o al menos parte de la noticia, supongo que hubiese calificado la historia de fantástica. Literatura fantástica.
Por entonces almorzaba en el Piquenique cada diez o quince días, siempre acodado a la barra y acompañado de un libro. Acababa de mudarme al vecindario –Porta Genova, una zona proletaria revalorizada en la última década tras la llegada de algunos modistas de fama– y el restaurante me había gustado enseguida. El decorado se decantaba por la madera clara y el fierro batido, recreando una atmósfera que yo imaginaba muy normanda o muy bretona, mientras la cocina tendía al eclecticismo y en ocasiones olvidaba la tradición francesa. Fuera de esporádicas conversaciones con el propietario, parapetado del otro lado del mostrador, transcurría mis almuerzos en silencio, entre el tenedor y la lectura.
Un mediodía cualquiera, mientras aguardaba mi pedido mirando por el ventanal, apareció Buñuelo. Es decir, apareció un metro cincuenta de humanidad envuelto en una falsa piel de leopardo. Si bien nos cruzábamos con cierta regularidad en el vecindario –la panadería, el café de via Montevideo, la vieja charcutería–, era la primera vez que coincidíamos en el Piquenique. Nunca habíamos hablado. Colgó su abrigo felino del perchero de la entrada, atravesó el salón y trepó a uno de los taburetes de la barra. Con dificultad. Cuando sus piernas regordetas quedaron colgando, pidió un expresso. Fuera, una lluvia fina de mediados de otoño lamía el rostro elegante y austero de Milán, un rostro de fachadas de piedra y transeúntes enfundados en largos abrigos negros.
–Qué clima horrible –dijo Buñuelo desenrollando la bufanda rosa.
El propietario, cuyo aspecto remitía a una versión pop de El Quijote, asintió sin volverse. Vigilaba reconcentrado el chorro de líquido negro que fluía de la máquina, como si la calidad del café fuese a depender de la intensidad de su mirada. Cuando la última gota terminó de caer acomodó la tasa sobre el platillo, entre un chocolatín y la cucharita de rigor, y volvió a la caja. Algunos clientes esperaban en fila para pagar.
Buñuelo despotricó contra el clima de Milán por un buen minuto: que la niebla, que la humedad, que el invierno. Su voz áspera y afectada, una voz de wasabi y fresas, era difícil de ignorar. Tras otros dos o tres comentarios sueltos, extendió la mano y se presentó. Yo ya había cerrado mi libro.
–Mucho gusto –dijo–, soy Buñuelo.
Nunca mencionó su nombre. Todos, absolutamente todos, lo llamaban así: Buñuelo. Aunque percibí en el apodo cierto matiz ofensivo, tuve la impresión de que él lo asumía de buen talante. Quizá lo llevaba encima desde siempre, como un lunar o como una vieja cicatriz sobre la ceja, y a fuerza de escucharlo se había acostumbrado. Como sea, le caía de maravilla.
He olvidado cómo prosiguió la conversación o qué secuencia de argumentos nos condujo a hablar de nuestras ocupaciones. De seguro, fue Buñuelo a forzar el tema. Dijo que trabajó toda su vida en un cabaret de Porta Venezia, un local transgresivo pero refinado con música para bailar y espectáculos en vivo.
–En mis años frescos tuve mi propio show –dijo con orgullo–. Una escena para mí solito todos los jueves.
Según pude entender, el número abundaba en plumas y lentejuelas. Buñuelo parodiaba –aunque parodiar sea quizá un eufemismo– al personaje interpretado por Michel Serrault en La Jaula de las Locas. Las demás noches atendía las mesas y ayudaba en el bar; durante años. Al cumplir los cincuenta, optó por una jubilación anticipada. El cuerpo no le respondía. Se arrastraba por las madrugadas como un pez globo en el asfalto caliente. Además, la vieja guardia había sido relevada casi por completo y empezaba a sentirse fuera de lugar.
–Los chicos no estaban mal, pero prefería a mis amigos.
Sus amigos, explicó, se habían marchado de Milán o habían muerto, lo que para él venía a ser lo mismo. Supuse que seguiría el minuto de silencio que acompaña la mención de los amigos muertos, pero Buñuelo no reparó en el rito funerario. Sonrió con malicia y preguntó a qué me dedicaba. Yo había terminado de comer y llevaba cierta prisa por volver a la oficina, es decir, a mi apartamento. Sin entrar en detalles dije que escribía. Al mismo tiempo descolgué una pierna del taburete y posé la punta del pie en el suelo. Buñuelo debió de advertir mi propósito de fuga. Interrumpió un comentario sobre lo mucho que le gustaría saber escribir para preguntarme, entre alarmado y sorprendido, si no pensaba tomar café. Y comoquiera que tardé un instante en responder, se giró hacia el propietario y me ordenó un expresso.
El dueño estiró su metro noventa hacia la cafetera y yo volví a sentarme. Los dos camareros, un albanés y una ecuatoriana, revoloteaban entre las mesas con los últimos pedidos de la tarde o cargados de platos sucios y vasos manchados de rouge, mientras la lluvia arreciaba y sus goterones resonaban contra los ventanales como un ejército de escarabajos suicidas. Buñuelo retomó su cháchara y yo le oí resignado hasta que llegó mi café. Entonces se llevó una mano al pecho y alzó la otra como si llevase una invisible bandeja sobre la palma abierta y vuelta hacia atrás.
–Confieso, muchacho mío –dijo amagando un puchero–, que he llevado una vida atribulada. Una vida cursada de escenas grotescas y divertidas y patéticas y escandalosas. Una vida hendida de historias. Y mira tú cómo son las cosas: si la divina providencia tocara la punta de mi nariz con su varita mágica y me regalase la facultad de escribir bien, debutaría con una historia que no me pertenece. Una historia que sólo me atañe como observador y como oyente. Pero soy viejo para creer en las hadas. La divina providencia me endilgó un cuerpo de sapo que tras el beso del príncipe hermoso se transforma en otro sapo, y luego se esfumó para siempre. Esperar el milagro, a estas alturas, es perder el tiempo.
Buñuelo se removió incómodo en el taburete. Dijo que guardarse la historia carecía de sentido. Prefería contármela; sin compromisos, por el puro gusto de contar una buena historia. Y empezó a hablar.
2.
“Es probable que nunca te enteraras de los secuestros. En esa época, estamos hablando de octubre o noviembre del 2001, todo se diluía enseguida en el clima apocalíptico del 11 de septiembre y la guerra de Afganistán. El caso tampoco daba para mucho: crónica local sin muertos ni heridos, poca cosa. A lo más, algún artículo en el diario y una o dos menciones en el telediario. La versión que voy a contarte, sin embargo, no proviene de la prensa sino de Tagliaferri, el policía encargado de las investigaciones.
“A Tagliaferri lo conocí en un bar de via Tortona que ya no existe. Un bar suspendido en el tiempo, horripilante. Parecía decorado por un campesino polaco o, mejor dicho, por un campesino polaco de gusto atroz. Patos disecados colgados del muro, saca tu línea. Pero quedaba a la vuelta y abría hasta tarde. Yo acababa de renunciar al cabaret y pagaba los años de trabajo nocturno. Todas las noches, para matar el tedio y combatir el insomnio, despachaba un medio de tinto o un medio de blanco. Cerveza no, porque engorda. Éramos siempre los mismos en el bar a esas horas. Cuatro o cinco noctámbulos ansiosos de conjurar el escozor de las sábanas frías, prestos a todo excepto a rehacer el camino a casa. Yo, por así decirlo, era la fémina del grupo. Sabía cosas que ellos no sabían, entendía cosas que no entendían. Me gustaba hablar, pero también los escuchaba. Cada tanto, además, dispensaba un buen consejo. Fue así que gané la confianza del inspector Tagliaferri.
“Una noche Tagliaferri apareció en el bar con la hora encima. A regañadientes, el tabernero le concedió diez minutos para una cerveza. Los otros, ya de salida, terminaron de irse y el inspector vino a sentarse a mi mesa, botella en mano y cara de perro apaleado. Como si lleváramos media hora conversando, dijo que la situación, en efecto, pintaba negro. Muy negro. Amigo Buñuelo, recalcó, esto va de mal en peor.
“En un inicio pensé que se refería a la vida en general, qué sé yo, el clima o el costo del alquiler o los desmadres en Medio Oriente, y asentí con desgano. El inspector Tagliaferri, digámoslo de una vez, no brillaba por su optimismo. Resignado a una suerte que lo había abandonado en tropel, creía en la desdicha como otros creen en Dios o en el Libre Mercado. Cada nube celaba un chubasco; cada sonrisa, una trampa. Supongo que no carecía de motivos. Cuarentón, pobre, solitario. En el trabajo, por circunstancias que ignoro, había pasado a engrosar la lista de los apestados. Le endilgaban sólo las minucias, los casos de poca monta. La pinta de seguro le jugaba en contra, y si lo digo yo, rey de los sapos, tómame la palabra. Mi amigo arañaba apenas el metro sesenta y cinco, la estatura mínima requerida por la benemérita, y a falta de patrimonio, acumulaba kilos. Vestía mal incluso para la policía y, pecado mortal del decoro, intentaba escamotear su calva peinando los largos cabellos de lado a lado. En sus días buenos, que eran pocos, asemejaba a un híbrido entre Jack Nicholson y Maradona. Sin embargo, aceptaba su destino de perdedor nato con cierta mansa tranquilidad. Sólo le aterraba caer aun más. La muerte, por contra, no parecía turbarlo. En cierta ocasión en que los noctámbulos del bar discurríamos sobre el amor y la vida y la pérfida dama, Tagliaferri dijo que no se pegaba un tiro porque había visto en la tele a un par de hombres rana franceses buceando entre delfines. Dónde, no sabía con exactitud, pero suponía que en algún rincón del Mediterráneo. Antes de irme, había dicho, quisiera nadar con esas criaturas, como los condenados franceses de la televisión.
“Volviendo a la noche que nos interesa, te decía que respondí al lamento del inspector con displicencia. Qué lata, pensé, otra pestífera perorata. En cambio, como si hubiese adivinado mis pensamientos y buscase darme la contra, se hundió en un silencio tenaz que me llenó de angustia. ¿Ha sucedido algo?, le pregunté. Tagliaferri respiró hondo y botó aire por la nariz. Alzó la botella del pico, entre el pulgar y el índice, y la hizo oscilar delicadamente, como en un ejercicio de autohipnosis. El líquido remedaba el vaivén en diminutas olas que trepaban apenas la pared de vidrio, volvían al centro, subían del otro lado. Al cabo de un minuto devolvió la botella al posavasos y me miró reconcentrado.
“Están secuestrando perros, dijo.
“El relato del inspector no abundaba en detalles. Durante las últimas dos o tres semanas, distintas comisarías de Milán habían recibido algunas denuncias por el secuestro de perros. Las declaraciones de los agravados variaban de caso en caso, aunque todas compartían cierto elementos que Tagliaferri calificó de insólitos. Sin embargo, dado que las prioridades de la policía volaban lejos del mundo canino, más aun en aquellos días de miedo y de guerra, los delitos habían merecido poca o nula atención. Sí, señora; cómo no, señora; haremos lo posible por devolverle su mascota sana y salva, señora. Y nada más: la denuncia al cajón.
“Hasta que ayer por la mañana, dijo Tagliaferri, le birlaron el boxer a la mujer de un diputado verde. En el parque Sempione, cerca del Arco de la Paz. A mediodía, el marido acudió a la central para la denuncia correspondiente y se enteró, en modo asaz fortuito, de los otros secuestros y de la absoluta indiferencia policial. Legambiente puso el grito en el cielo. La WWF puso el grito en el cielo. La Liga Nacional para la Defensa del Perro puso el grito en el cielo. Esta mañana, prosiguió el inspector Tagliaferri, aparecieron los primeros reporteros; y por la tarde, el jefe me mandó llamar. Y tras entregarme un manojo de expedientes, me asignó el caso.
“Reaccioné con júbilo ante la noticia. Bravo, parece un caso importante, aplaudí. Pero Tagliaferri me liquidó con una mirada feroz de sus ojos azules. ¡Qué chorradas dices!, me recriminó. La política urgida de nuevas y más severas leyes antiterrorismo, las fuerzas del orden en máxima alerta, y yo siguiendo el rastro de cuatro bestias sarnosas. ¡Perros secuestrados! Este caso es un castigo, dijo el inspector. Este caso, amigo Buñuelo, se prefigura como la última escala de mi descenso a un escritorio en cualquier oficina administrativa.
“Poco después, el tabernero recogió la mesa y apagó las luces. Esperamos en la acera a que corriese el cierre metálico y nos encaminamos en silencio a la esquina de Tortona con Bergognone, donde nos despedimos y proseguimos por rumbos distintos.
“A partir de esa noche disminuyeron las visitas de Tagliaferri al bar. Llegaba pasada la medianoche y nunca permanecía más de media hora o cuarenta minutos. Bebía un par de cervezas apoyado a la barra, siguiendo nuestras conversaciones con los ojos entornados y la boca cerrada. En una ocasión le pregunté por las investigaciones. Para entonces los secuestros habían golpeado el vecindario: dos o tres perros, incluyendo el pequinés de mi vecina del piso de arriba, un bicho abominable y vulgar. Tagliaferri se mostró satisfecho con sus avances. Incluso, optimista. Dijo que había interrogado a todas las víctimas y determinado el modus operandi del secuestrador. Para empezar, los delitos se perpetraban en uno de tres parques: Sempione, Solari o Jardines Públicos. Los animales, por otra parte, no eran arrebatados a sus dueños ni introducidos por la fuerza en una furgoneta en marcha; simplemente, abandonaban a sus propietarios.
“Al parecer, explicó Tagliaferri, los perros siguen a un tipo vestido de azul. Enteramente de azul. Algunas víctimas no advirtieron su presencia o no la relacionaron con el secuestro de sus mascotas, pero las que sí, digamos dos de cada tres, describen la escena en términos casi idénticos. El tipo, que por comodidad llamaré Azul, se acerca al animal que pretende secuestrar e inicia un ritual que los testigos parangonaron al yoga o al tai chi o a los pasos de una danza tribal. Luego ejecuta unas cabriolas algo espasmódicas y emite un silbido agudo y entrecortado, como de pájaro tropical, que excita a los perros. Una excitación que cabría definir como lúdica, dijo el inspector. A este punto, Azul amaga la carrera. Recorre unos pocos metros, frena en seco. El animal lo imita, ladrando y moviendo la cola. Vuelven a partir, a detenerse. Según los testigos, repiten el movimiento una docena de veces, avanzando en línea recta o en espiral, hasta que Azul echa correr como un endemoniado y no se detiene más. El perro, huelga decirlo, tampoco.
“Una semana después nos reencontramos en el bar. El ánimo de Tagliaferri lamía zócalos. Dijo que sus pesquisas habían enfilado un binario muerto: una tras otra habían naufragado en un lodazal de malentendidos y banales coincidencias, mientras los perros seguían desapareciendo sin dejar rastro, a ritmo de uno o dos por semana. El sospechoso bien podía considerarse un fantasma. Azul frecuentaba los parques, celebraba ritos perrunos y escapaba con su peludo botín en pleno día, sin que nadie atinase a detenerlo. Peor aún, los testigos habían sido incapaces de proporcionar un identikit válido más allá de la vestimenta, o mejor dicho, del color de la vestimenta.
“Un jodido espectro, dijo Tagliaferri. Un espectro sin un móvil para sus delitos: ni reivindicaciones ni exigencias de rescate. Explícamelo tú, amigo Buñuelo, porque no lo entiendo. ¿Es una broma tonta? ¿Una cámara escondida?
“Sospeché que Tagliaferri no esperaba una respuesta y mantuve el pico cerrado. Al cabo de unos segundos desovilló el suplicio. Dijo que estaba harto de la investigación. Harto de transcurrir tardes enteras apostado entre los árboles de un parque para que nada suceda. O para que suceda en otro parque. Harto de unos interrogatorios absurdos, harto de anotar razas de perro en su libreta. Harto de soñar con perros. Harto de soñar que ha sido transferido a una oficina administrativa y que ante su ventanilla se extiende una infinita fila de perros.
“Le propuse que se tomara unas vacaciones. Tagliaferri me quedó mirando con expresión desencajada. Por un instante temí que rompiera a llorar. En cambio descargó una carcajada potente y burlona. Unas vacaciones, dijo muerto de risa. Esa sí que es buena.
“Fue la última vez que lo vi en el bar de Tortona.”
3.
Los últimos clientes del Piquenique atravesaron el salón. Vacilaron un instante en el umbral, escrutando el cielo en busca de una señal que no apareció, y saltaron fuera entre risas y lamentos festivos. Se perdieron del otro lado de la calle: tres o cuatro figuras grises corriendo bajo la lluvia.
El propietario descorchó una botella ya empezada y sirvió tres vasos. Había seguido la historia de los perros secuestrados desde su extremo del mostrador, despachando los asuntos de caja sin particular esmero. Buñuelo sonrió y se restregó los ojos con ambos puños, un gesto infantil que dejó entrever al niño gordo y travieso que debió de haber sido. Alzó el vaso, lo demoró entre los labios. Retomó su relato. Dijo que unos meses después, a mediados de marzo, una prima le prestó su apartamento estivo en Camogli, un pueblo de pescadores reconvertido al turismo, como la mayoría en la costa de Liguria. Para entonces sus disturbios del sueño se habían agudizado. Pasaba las noches en blanco y se desplomaba en la mesa del primer café, o bien caía rendido al anochecer y despertaba de madrugada.
Una mañana poco antes del alba, cansado de dar vueltas en la cama, había bajado al pueblo. Las lanchas de los pescadores dormían en una esquina de la playa, del lado de la basílica, aunque unas pocas se perfilaban contra el cielo en medio del mar. Buñuelo supuso que los cafés no tardarían en abrir. Cruzó hacia el puerto y se sentó a esperar. Despuntaron los primeros rayos. En la cabeza del muelle algunos hombres conversaban en corro. Primero los creyó pescadores, pero al cabo reconoció una de las figuras. Tagliaferri.
–Lo ametrallé a preguntas –sonrió Buñuelo–. ¿Dónde se había metido, qué hacía en Camogli, cómo iba la investigación? El inspector echó una mirada a las barcas acostadas al muelle y dijo que disponía de unos minutos antes de zarpar. Recorrimos el muelle de regreso y entramos a un café apenas abierto. Había adelgazado, o eso me pareció, y su voz sonaba diferente, como si hablara en otro idioma, o como si se tradujese a sí mismo desde otro idioma, un idioma incomprensible y lejano. Dijo que un jueves por la noche, camino a casa, había timbrado su móvil. A las nueve, hora para él inusual.
–¿Quién era? –apuró el propietario del Piquenique.
–Un colega –dijo Buñuelo–. Para avisarle que acababa de llamar un tipo con información sobre los secuestros. Un soplón o algo así.
–¿Y qué dijo? –pregunté.
–No mucho –Buñuelo se encogió de hombros–. Dejó una dirección: Argelati 42 o Argelati 44, ya lo recuerdo. Tagliaferri no andaba lejos y fue a echar un vistazo. Encontró abierto el portón, subió al tercero. No tuvo que tocar para advertir que la puerta estaba entornada. Una trampa, se dijo. Una maldita trampa. Sin mucho pensarlo, empuñó la Beretta de ordenanza y saltó dentro. Pero en el apartamento no había nadie.
Buñuelo ignoraba cuánto transcurrió Tagliaferri en el apartamento. Quince o veinte minutos, tal vez menos. Había registrado las habitaciones en busca de una pista, sin suerte. Cuando estaba por irse, oyó un chirrido entrecortado que no tardó en reconducir al silbido que los testigos atribuían al sospechoso. El inspector se asomó a una ventana. En la acera opuesta, un tipo vestido como el Llanero Solitario parecía desafiarlo con la mirada. Tagliaferri lo reconoció de inmediato. Azul amagó la carrera, como hacía con los perros. Apenas recorrió un par de metros. Tagliaferri dudó entre pedir refuerzos o actuar por su cuenta. Decidió jugársela. Oiga, gritó desde el tercer piso, espéreme ahí mismo; debo hacerle unas preguntas. Para su sorpresa, Azul asintió con la cabeza. El inspector bajó a toda prisa, pero el sospechoso ya no estaba. Lo divisó cien metros más allá, en el cruce de Argelati con Fumagalli. Cuando había recorrido media calle, sólo al trote pues sus intenciones de alta velocidad sucumbieron enseguida a una condición física penosa, Azul ejecutó dos o tres cabriolas y desapareció tras la esquina.
–Una persecución –dijo el propietario.
–Un juego de perseguidos y perseguidores –corrigió Buñuelo tras un sorbo de vino–. Se dieron la caza por más de un kilómetro, siempre a trompicones. Azul mantenía la distancia de seguridad con una soltura que rallaba en la befa, pero el inspector no se rindió. Superó via Fumagalli bañado en sudor y notó que el sospechoso aguardaba del otro lado del Naviglio Grande, inclinado sobre el pretil del canal. Tagliaferri atravesó el Naviglio, dejó atrás los bares atiborrados de via Casale y alcanzó la plazuela de la estación ferroviaria de Porta Genova. Entonces rompió a llover –dijo Buñuelo–. Torrencialmente. Peor, mil veces peor, que esta lluvia sediciosa.
Buñuelo señaló los ventanales del restaurante, o mejor dicho, el agua que chorreaba por los ventanales. Dijo que Azul había remontado los muchos peldaños del puente peatonal que cruza la línea férrea y conecta el centro de la ciudad con via Tortona. Tagliaferri había hecho lo propio y se habían encontrado frente a frente, setenta metros de tablones de madera de por medio.
–Dos pistoleros en una de cowboys –dije.
–Doc Holiday y Johnny Ringo en Tombstone –apuntó el propietario.
–Lo mismo pensó Tagliaferri –concedió Buñuelo–: en qué momento desenfunda y me deja frío. Pero su contrincante descendió del otro lado y enfiló via Tortona. Por un minuto, el inspector temió que lo estuviese conduciendo a su propia habitación, no lejos de ahí. Azul, sin embargo, bordeó la manzana y retornó al puente. Tagliaferri no entendía nada. Tagliaferri, a decir verdad, dijo Buñuelo, parecía apenas un trémulo espectro azul marchando bajo la lluvia. Una sombra azul treinta metros delante, que en vez de volver al Naviglio o coger el corso Colombo en dirección al centro, embocó via Ventimiglia. Una calle sin salida. El inspector reprimió una sonrisa y avanzó despacio. La lluvia, si cabe, arreció. Golpeaba los coches aparcados a lo largo del muro del ferrocarril con estrépito de bombo. Tagliaferri sintió miedo. Se percató de su vulnerabilidad. Poco veía bajo las columnas de agua, nada oía aparte de los persistentes goterones. Por segunda vez ese día empuñó su revólver. Avanzó piano piano, agazapado como un gato o como una rata, tanteando el suelo a cada paso. De improviso, un resplandor azul despuntó sobre su izquierda, a pocos pasos de distancia. Tagliaferri apretó el gatillo. Tres veces. Ni siquiera oyó los disparos. Luego parpadeó como un obseso, la mente en blanco, los brazos caídos. Al cabo de un tiempo indeterminado, que en el café de Camogli recordaba como eterno, se acercó. No pudo menos que sonreír ante el blanco de sus disparos. Un póster.
–¿Un póster? –pregunté desilusionado.
–Le Grande Bleu –dijo Buñuelo.
–¿El filme de Luc Besson? –objetó el propietario–. Imposible, es un filme de 1988.
–¿Y qué quieres que te diga? –se fastidió Buñuelo–. Es lo que me contó Tagliaferri. Que avanzó casi a tientas hasta el fondo de la calle y disparó sobre un póster de Le Grande Bleu. Un póster azul, todo mar y todo cielo; y al centro, recortadas contra los destellos turquesa del Mediterráneo, las diminutas siluetas de un hombre con medio torso fuera del agua y un delfín saltando sobre su cabeza.
–¿Qué sucedió luego? –preguntó el propietario.
–Eso mismo quise saber –dijo Buñuelo–, pero Tagliaferri consultó la hora y dijo que debía irse. Camino al muelle mencionó la agencia turística. Dijo que la había encontrado de casualidad. Una agencia pequeña, dedicada al avistamiento de ballenas y delfines en el mar de Liguria. Esa mañana salían en busca de delfines. Y si las condiciones lo permitían, podría nadar entre ellos. Me sobrecogió una angustia espantosa. ¿Es tu primera vez?, pregunté. Tagliaferri sonrió. No es como crees, dijo. Estrechó mi mano y saltó abordo.
Buñuelo nos miró al propietario y a mí alternadamente, en silencio. Dijo que había visto a otras cuatro o cinco personas en la embarcación. Vestían abrigos impermeables y zapatillas deportivas. Algunas gaviotas pasaron graznando sobre sus cabezas y se perdieron tras la torre del castillo. Entonces vio el cielo y pensó que la jornada se perfilaba espléndida; y ese pensamiento, por algún motivo que aún no aferraba del todo, lo había hundido en una profunda melancolía. Hubiese querido saber más de los últimos días del inspector, pero el motor escupió un rugido infranqueable. Tagliaferri saludó con la mano y la barca zarpó mar adentro.
4.
Poco después escampó y regresé al trabajo. Siguió para mí un periodo de montaña rusa: nació mi primer hijo, publiqué una novela, boté un cálculo renal que me hizo llorar como un niño y me dejó en estado catatónico. Durante meses apenas frecuenté el vecindario. Tampoco tropecé con Buñuelo y, en cierto modo, olvidé a Tagliaferri y los perros secuestrados.
Hace unos días, sin embargo, la historia me pegó como camión desbocado. Esperaba el tranvía en la parada de Montevideo con Solari, frente a la esquina del parque cercada con una valla metálica y destinada a las necesidades de los perros. De improviso, distinguí a Buñuelo tras un gran roble. Vestía de azul de pies a cabeza; un pitufo desnudo. Tuve la impresión de que acechaba a los cuatro o cinco animales que jugaban a darse caza unos a otros en la zona canina. Y me pareció, a pesar de la distancia, que estiraba la jeta y juntaba los labios. Le quedé mirando hasta que apareció la mole naranja y chirriante de un viejo tranvía. Ningún perro se fijaba en él.
Translation - English Dogs Without Owners
A story by Ernesto Ferrini
Illustration by Xxx
1.
I learned about the kidnappings from Fritter, at the bar of a French restaurant near my house, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the papers had picked the story up, or at least part of it, I would have thought he’d made it up. A fantastic creation, I would have said.
In those days, I ate lunch in the Piquenique every ten or fifteen days, always with my elbows on the bar and a book in my hand. I had just moved to Porta Genova, a working class neighborhood that, after the arrival of several famous designers, had experienced something of a renaissance in the last decade, and the restaurant had appealed to me at once. The furnishings were blonde wood and wrought iron, recreating what I imagined to be a very Norman or Breton atmosphere, while the food tended towards the eclectic, sometimes abandoning French tradition completely. Aside from sporadic conversations with the owner, who stood barricaded behind the counter, most of the time I ate in silence, a fork in one hand, a book in the other.
One day, while I was waiting for my food and looking out the window, Fritter appeared: less than five feet of humanity wrapped in an imitation leopard-skin coat. While we bumped into each other rather frequently in the neighborhood −at the bakery, the café on Via Montevideo, the old butcher shop −it was the first time we had done so at the Piquenique, and we had never spoken. After hanging his coat on a rack in the entrance, Fritter crossed the room and, not without difficulty, climbed up onto one of the stools at the bar. Once he had settled in, his chubby legs dangling above the floor, he ordered an espresso. Outside, a fine mid-autumn rain was falling, licking the elegant, austere face of Milan, a face of stone facades and passers-by in long black coats.
“What dreadful weather!” Fritter said, removing a pink scarf.
The owner, who looked like a pop version of Don Quixote, agreed without turning around. His attention was focused on the stream of black liquid jetting out of the espresso machine, as if the quality of the coffee depended on the intensity of his gaze.
When the last drop had fallen he placed the cup on a saucer, between a small bar of chocolate and the obligatory little spoon, and returned to the till, where several customers were waiting in line to pay.
Fritter railed against the weather for a solid minute: the fog, the humidity, winter in general. His voice, harsh and affected, a voice of wasabi and strawberries, was difficult to ignore. After two or three more random comments, he stretched out his hand and introduced himself. By this time, I had closed my book.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m Fritter.”
He never mentioned his real name. Everyone, absolutely everyone, called him Fritter. While I sensed something slightly pejorative in the nickname, I got the impression that Fritter took it in good humor. Maybe he’d always had it, like a mole or an old scar over his eye, and by hearing it so much had got used to it. Whatever the case, it fit him to a tee.
I’ve forgotten how the conversation went or what led us to the subject of our occupations, but, for certain, Fritter was the one who brought it up. He had worked all his life in a cabaret in Porta Venezia, he said, in a transgressive but refined establishment, with music for dancing and live shows.
“In my prime, I had my own show” he said proudly. “Every Thursday, a bit just for me.”
From what I could gather, the act was full of feathers and sequins. Fritter parodied –although “parody” is perhaps a euphemism here −the character played by Michel Serrault in The Birdcage; other nights, he waited tables and helped behind the bar. When he turned fifty, his body no longer obedient to his commands, Fritter had opted for early retirement. In addition, the old guard had been almost entirely relieved, and Fritter had begun to feel out of place. Unable to sleep, he would drag himself through the early morning hours like a bloated fish on the hot pavement.
“The new boys weren’t bad,” he said, “but I missed my friends.”
They, he explained, had either left Milan or died, which for Fritter came to mean one and the same thing. I waited for the moment of silence that normally follows the mention of dead pals, but Fritter didn’t bother paying anyone any respect. Instead, he smiled mischievously and asked me what I did for a living.
I had finished eating and was in a somewhat of a hurry to get back to the office, that is, my apartment. Without going into detail, I told him I was a writer, while at the same time lowering one leg from the stool until the tips of my toes touched the floor. Fritter must have picked up on my attempt at escape. He interrupted a comment about how desperately he wished he knew how to write in order to ask me, looking somewhere between alarmed and surprised, if I wasn’t going have another coffee. And as I took a moment to answer, he turned to the owner and ordered me an espresso.
The owner moved his six-foot-two frame towards the coffee maker, and I settled back down on the stool. The restaurant’s two waiters, an Albanian and an Ecuadorian, fluttered between the tables, carrying the final orders of the day or dirty plates and lipstick-stained glasses, while the rain picked up, thudding against the large windows like an army of suicidal beetles. Fritter resumed his chatter, and I resigned myself to listening until my coffee arrived. Bringing one hand to his chest, he raised the other in the air as if he were carrying an invisible tray, his open palm turned back in a highly affected gesture.
“I must admit, my young friend,” he said, looking as if he were going to pout, “I’ve led a troubled life. A life full of grotesque, entertaining, pathetic, and scandalous moments. A life cleaved by stories. And yet, look at how funny things are: If divine providence were to touch the tip of my nose with his magic wand and grant me the power to write, I would make my debut with a story that had nothing to do with me at all. A story that concerns me only as an observer and a listener. But I’m too old to believe in fairies. Divine providence stuck me with a toad’s body, which after being kissed by the beautiful prince turns into another toad, and after that, disappears forever. This late in the game, waiting for a miracle is a waste of time.”
Fritter shifted uncomfortably in the stool. Keeping the story to himself, he said, would be silly. He’d rather tell it to me, without any obligations, for the simple pleasure of telling a good tale. And then he began to speak.
2.
“You probably never heard about the kidnappings. At that time, we’re talking about October or November of 2001, everything disintegrated in the apocalyptic climate of 11 September and the war in Afghanistan. Anyway, the case wasn’t such a big deal to begin with: local story with no deaths or injuries. Nothing more than an article in the newspaper and one or two mentions on the television news. However, the version that I’m going to tell you isn’t from the press but from Tagliaferri, the policeman who was responsible for the investigation.
“I met Tagliaferri in a bar on Via Tortona that no longer exists. A bar suspended in time. Quite hair-raising, actually. It seemed to have been decorated by a Polish peasant with atrocious tastes. Stuffed ducks hanging from the walls. You add it up. Yet it was nearby, and it stayed open late. I had recently resigned from the cabaret and was paying the price for years of working at night. In order to kill the tedium and combat insomnia, every night I’d polish off half a bottle of red and half a bottle of white; never beer, though, because it makes you fat. At those hours, the faces in the bar were always the same: five or six night owls anxious to exorcise the distressing itch from the cold sheets, up for anything but the return walk home. I, you might say, was the woman of the group. I knew things the rest didn’t, understood things they couldn’t understand. It’s true, I liked to talk, but I also was a good listener, and every once in a while I’d hand out a choice piece of advice. In this way, I earned Inspector Tagliaferri’s trust.
“One night, Tagliaferri showed up in the bar just before closing time. Grudgingly, the bartender granted him ten minutes to drink a beer. The others, already on their way out, exited the bar, and the inspector, a bottle in his hand and an expression on his face like a dog that had just been kicked, came and joined me at my table. As if we’d been talking for half an hour, he said that the situation, in fact, was bleak. Very bleak. ‘Fritter my friend,’ he stressed, ‘this is going from bad to worse.’
“At first I thought he was talking about life in general, or the weather, or the rent, or the chaos in the Middle East, what did I know, and I half-heartedly agreed. Let’s be frank about it, Inspector Tagliaferri was not known for his optimism. Resigned to a fate in which providence had abandoned him completely, he believed in misfortune the way others believe in God, or the free market. Every cloud concealed a heavy shower, every smile a snare. I suppose he had good reason for it, being fortyish, poor and alone as he was. At work, and for reasons I can’t say, he’d joined the ranks of the blighted, lumbered with petty details and cases of little note. Also, his self-assured look worked against him, and coming from me, king of the toads, you can take my word for it. My friend Tagliaferri was barely five-feet four, the minimum height required by the police, and in place of personal possessions, he accumulated weight. He dressed poorly, too, even for a policeman, and, deadly sin of decorum, tried to hide his baldness by combing the remaining long strands across the middle. On good days, and these were few, he looked like a cross between Jack Nicholson and Maradona. Still, he accepted his fate as a born loser with a kind of mild tranquility. The only thing that terrified him was declining further. Death, on the other hand, did not seem to bother him in the least. One night, we night owls were in the bar, pondering love and life and treacherous women, when Tagliaferri said the reason he didn’t put a bullet in his head was because he’d seen a couple of French divers on television swimming underwater with dolphins. He didn’t know exactly where they were, though he assumed somewhere in the Mediterranean. ‘Before I check out,’ he’d said, ‘I want to swim with those creatures, just like those damned Frenchmen on television.’
“Returning to the night in question, I told you that I had responded to the inspector’s despair with indifference. What a bore! I thought. Another bloody lecture. Yet, as if he could read my thoughts and was going to prove me mistaken, he sank into a stubborn silence which suddenly made me worry. ‘Is everything all right?’ I asked him. Tagliaferri took a deep breath, exhaling through his nose. He raised the bottle by the neck, holding it between his thumb and index finger, and swung it gently, as if performing an act of self-hypnosis. The liquid mimicked the swinging in little waves that barely climbed the wall of glass before returning to the centre and then up the other side. After a minute or so, he set the bottle back down on the coaster and fixed me in his gaze.
‘They’re kidnapping dogs,’ he said.
“The inspector did not provide many details. Over the last two or three weeks various police stations in Milan had received reports of missing dogs. The statements of the victims varied from case to case, though they all shared certain elements which Tagliaferri considered unusual. Still, given the fact that the priorities of the police are quite remote from the canine world, and even more so in those days of fear and war, the crimes had received little or no attention. Yes, madam. Of course, madam. We’ll do everything we can to return your pet to you safe and sound, madam. Nothing more. The complaint went straight into the drawer.
“‘Until yesterday morning,’ Tagliaferri had said, ‘when they swiped the boxer of the wife of a Green politician in Sempione Park, close to the Arch of Peace. Around lunchtime, the husband arrived at the police station to file a complaint and, quite by chance, learned of the other kidnappings, as well as the absolute indifference of the police. Well, Legambiente hit the roof. WWF hit the roof. The National Canine Defence League hit the roof. This morning,’ Inspector Tagliaferri continued, ‘the first reporters appeared. This afternoon, my boss called me in. And after handing me a stack of files, he assigned me to the case.’
“I responded enthusiastically to the news,” Fritter went on. ‘Bravo!’ I said. ‘It sounds like an important case.’ Tagliaferri pierced me with a fierce look of his blue eyes. ‘Stop talking drivel!’ he reproached me. ‘Politicians pressing for new and stricter antiterrorism laws, the police on maximum alert, and here I am following the trail of four mangy little beasts! Kidnapped canines! This case is a punishment,’ the inspector said. ‘Fritter, my friend, this case is the beginning of the end, the last stop on my descent to a desk in some godforsaken administrative office.’
“Soon the bartender cleared the table and turned out the lights. We waited on the sidewalk while he pulled down the metal shutter and then walked in silence to the corner of Tortona and Bergognone, where we bid each other goodnight and went off in different directions.
“After that night, Tagliaferri visited the bar less and less. He’d arrive after midnight, and never stay more than thirty or forty minutes. He’d drink a beer leaning against the bar, follow our conversations with half-closed eyes, and not say a word. Once, I asked him how the investigation was coming along. By then, the wave of abductions had hit the neighborhood: two or three dogs, including my upstairs neighbor’s Pekinese, a nasty, abominable little creature, had disappeared. Tagliaferri seemed satisfied with his progress, optimistic even. He said that he had questioned all the victims and determined the modus operandi of the kidnapper. To begin with, the crimes were perpetrated in one of three parks: Sempione, Solari or The Public Gardens. The animals, moreover, were not snatched away from their owners or forced into a moving van; rather they abandoned their owners.
“‘Apparently,’ Tagliaferri explained, ‘the dogs follow some guy dressed in blue. Entirely in blue. Some victims were unaware of his presence, or didn’t connect it to the disappearance of their dogs, but the ones that did, two or three that is, described the scenario in almost exactly the same terms. The guy –for the sake of convenience I’ll call him Blue –approaches the animal he intends to kidnap and begins a kind of ritual that the witnesses compared to yoga, or tai chi, or the steps of some tribal dance. He then starts capering spasmodically about, emitting a choked, high-pitched whistle, like a tropical bird, that agitates the dogs, an agitation you might describe as being playful. At this point,’ he went on, ‘Blue makes as if to leave, running several yards and then coming to a sudden stop. The animal does the same, barking and moving its tail. Then they start off again, and come to another sharp halt. According to the witnesses, they repeat this movement about a dozen times, advancing in a straight line, or in a spiral, until Blue finally takes off running like a demon. And this time, he doesn’t stop. The dog, it goes without saying, doesn’t either.’
“A week later, I saw Tagliaferri in the bar again. This time, he was seriously in the dumps. The investigation, he said, had led to a dead end. One lead after the other had foundered in a muck of misunderstandings and banal coincidences, while in the meantime animals continued vanishing without a trace to the tune of one or two dogs per week. The suspect might as well have been a ghost. Blue visited the parks, performed his canine rituals, and escaped with his hairy haul in broad daylight, without anybody so much as raising a hand to stop him. Even worse, the witnesses had been unable to provide a valid description apart from his clothes, or better yet, the color of his clothes.
“‘A bloody ghost!’ Tagliaferri said. ‘A ghost without any motive, demands, or ransoms. Enlighten me Fritter, my friend, because I don’t understand. Is it a silly joke? A hidden camera or something?’
“I suspected Tagliaferri wasn’t waiting for an answer, so I kept my mouth shut. And after a few seconds, he unwound his terrible ordeal. He was fed up with the investigation. Fed up with spending entire afternoons waiting among the trees in the park for nothing to happen; or for it to happen in another park. Fed up with absurd questionings. Fed up with taking down the breeds of dogs in his notebook. Fed up with dreaming about dogs. Fed up with dreaming he had been transferred to an administrative office and, looking out the window, discovering a line of dogs stretching infinitely into the distance.
“When I suggested he take a vacation, Tagliaferri stared at me with a stricken expression. For an instant, I had the awful feeling that he was going to cry. Instead, he burst out in mocking laughter. ‘A vacation,’ he said, splitting his sides. ‘That’s a good one.’
“I never saw him at the Tortona again.”
3.
The remaining customers in the Piquenique crossed the room. They hesitated for an instant in the threshold, scrutinizing the sky for a sign that did not appear, and then, between laughter and festive groans, hurried out the door. They disappeared across the street, three or four grey figures running off in the rain.
The owner uncorked an already opened bottle and served three glasses. He had been following the story of the missing dogs from his side of the counter, tending to matters of the till without much care. Fritter smiled; he rubbed his eyes with both fists, a childlike gesture that hinted at the fat, mischievous boy he must have once been. Raising his glass, he held it between his lips for a moment before resuming his story. Some months later, he explained, in the middle of March, a cousin of his lent him her summer apartment in Camogli, a fishing village which, like most villages along the Ligurian coast, now serve mostly the tourist trade. By then, Fritter’s insomnia had grown worse. After a sleepless night, he would collapse into the chair of the first café he encountered, or at dusk pass out from exhaustion only to awake in the middle of the night.
Tired of tossing and turning in bed, one morning, slightly before dawn, he went down to the village. The fishing boats rested in a corner of the beach, next to a basilica, though a few could be seen outlined against the sky in the middle of the sea. Fritter figured the cafés would open soon, so crossing over towards the port, he sat down to wait. The first rays of light were beginning to appear. At the head of the wharf, some men were talking in a circle. At first, Fritter thought they were fisherman, until he recognized one of them. It was Tagliaferri.
“I riddled him with questions,” Fritter said, smiling. “Where had he been all this time? What was he doing in Camogli? How was the investigation coming along? The inspector glanced at the boats tied to the pier, and said he had a few minutes to spare before pushing off.
We left the wharf and entered a café that had just opened its doors. The inspector had lost weight, or at least it seemed that way to me, and his voice sounded different, as if he were speaking in a different language, or as if he were translating himself from another language, one incomprehensible and remote. One Thursday night, he said, on his way home, his cell phone had rung. It was nine o’clock, an unusual hour for him.
“Who was it?” the owner of the Piquenique urgently wanted to know.
“A colleague,” Fritter said. “To let him know that a guy had just called with information about the kidnappings. An informer, or something like that.”
“What he did he say?” I asked.
“Nothing much really,” Fritter said, shrugging his shoulders. “He left an address: Argelati 42, no, Argelati 44, now I remember. Tagliaferri wasn’t far from there, so he went and had a look. The front door was open, and he went up to the third floor. He didn’t have to knock to realize the door was unlocked. A trap, he said to himself. A bloody trap. Without giving it much thought, he took out his regulation Beretta and stepped through the door, but the apartment was empty.
Fritter did not know exactly how much time Tagliaferri spent inside the apartment. Fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe less. “The inspector checked all the rooms in search of a clue, but found nothing,” Fritter said. “When he was about to leave, he heard a labored screech, and it wasn’t long before he connected it to the whistling sound that the witnesses had attributed to the suspect. The inspector leaned out of the window. On the opposite sidewalk, a man dressed like the Lone Ranger seemed to be challenging him with his gaze. Tagliaferri recognized him at once, and Blue made as if to run, just as he had with the dogs, advancing a few yards and then coming to a stop. Tagliaferri wondered whether he should call for backup or act on his own. He decided to chance it. ‘Hey!’ he shouted out from the third floor. ‘Wait right there! I need to ask you a few questions.’ To his surprise, Blue nodded his head in agreement. The inspector hurried back down into the street, but the suspect was no longer there. Then, a few hundred yards ahead of him, at the corner of Argelati and Fumagalli, he spotted him. After Tagliaferri had run for half of a block, more like trotted really, since any attempt at high speed would have been impaired by his pitiful physical condition, Blue performed two or three playful hops before disappearing around the corner.
“A chase,” the owner of the Piquenique said.
“A game of the pursued and the pursuer,” Fritter corrected him, taking a sip of wine. “The hunt went on for nearly a mile, always in fits and starts. Blue kept a secure distance with grating nimbleness, but the inspector didn’t give up. Bathed in sweat, he left Via Fumagalli behind and found the suspect waiting for him on the other side of Naviglio Grande, leaning against a parapet of the canal. Tagliaferri crossed Naviglio, went past the jam-packed bars on Via Casale, and came to the square of the Porta Genova railway station. Then it started to rain,” Fritter continued. “A real downpour. A thousand times worse than this rebellious shower.”
Fritter indicated the large windows of the restaurant, or rather the water dripping down the panes. “Blue,” he resumed, “had climbed the numerous steps of the pedestrian bridge that spans the railway tracks and connects the centre of the city with Via Tortona. Tagliaferri had done the same, and the two of them now found themselves standing face to face, just eighty yards of wooden plank between them.”
“Two gunslingers in an old Western,” I said.
“Doc Holiday and Johnny Ringo in Tombstone,” the owner added.
“Tagliaferri was thinking exactly the same thing,” Fritter said. ‘When will he draw and shoot me dead.’ Yet his opponent went down the other side, making his way along Via Tortona. For a moment, the inspector feared he was leading him to his own apartment, which was not very far from there. Blue, however, went around the block and doubled back to the bridge. Tagliaferri was confused. To be honest, he could just barely make out a flickering blue ghost going off in the rain, a blue shadow thirty yards ahead that, instead of returning to Naviglio or taking Corso Colombo towards the centre, went down Via Ventimiglia: a dead end street. The inspector repressed a smile and advanced slowly. The rain, in the meantime, had got worse, noisily pounding the cars parked along the railway wall like a bass drum. Tagliaferri became afraid; he sensed his vulnerability. He could barely see through the sheets of rain, and the only thing he could hear was the large persistent drops. For the second time that day, he took out his revolver. He advanced cautiously, crouched down like a cat, or a rat, feeling the ground with every step. Suddenly, a blue figure flashed to his left, just a few steps away, and Tagliaferri squeezed the trigger, three times; he didn’t even hear the shots. Then he began twitching like an obsessive, his mind gone blank, arms dangling at his sides. After an indefinite amount of time, which in the Camogli café Tagliaferri remembered as seeming eternal, he moved closer to his target. When it came into view, the only he could do was smile. It was a poster.”
“A poster?” I asked, disappointed.
“Le Grande Bleu,” Fritter said.
“You mean the Luc Besson film?” the owner said. “Impossible. It came out in 1988.”
“What do you want me to say?” Fritter said. He was annoyed. “It’s what Tagliaferri told me. That he had advanced, almost on tiptoe, to the end of the street and fired at a poster of the Le Grande Bleu. A blue poster, all sea and sky. And in the centre, silhouetted against the turquoise brilliance of the Mediterranean, were the tiny figures of a man, half of his torso sticking out of the water, and a dolphin leaping over his head.
“And then what happened?” the owner asked.
“That’s exactly what I wanted to know,” Fritter said, “but Tagliaferri looked at his watch and said he had to go. On the way back to the wharf, he mentioned the tourist agency. He’d come across it by chance: a small operation devoted to whale and dolphin sighting in the Ligurian Sea. That morning, they were leaving in search of dolphins. If conditions permitted, you could swim with them. A terrible thought gripped me. ‘Is this your first time?’ I asked him. Tagliaferri smiled. ‘It’s not what you think,’ he said. After that, he shook my hand and jumped aboard.
Fritter looked at the owner and me without saying a word. He then explained that five or six other people were on the boat, all dressed in raincoats and sports shoes. Seagulls cawed over their heads, vanishing behind a castle tower. Fritter saw the sky, and thought the morning was shaping up to be a magnificent day. And this thought, for reasons he was still unable to grasp completely, had plunged him into a deep melancholy. He would have liked to learn more about what the inspector had been doing all that time, but by now the motor was spitting out an unbridgeable roar. Tagliaferri waved, and the boat headed out to sea.
4.
Soon it stopped raining, and I went back to work. After that, my life was like a rollercoaster: my first child was born, I published my first novel, and I passed a kidney stone that made me cry like a baby and left me catatonic. For months, I hardly even visited the neighborhood. Nor did I cross paths with Fritter. In a way, I had forgotten altogether about Tagliaferri and the kidnapped dogs.
A few days ago, though, the story hit me like a freight train. I was waiting for the tram, at the stop on the corner of Montevideo and Solari, facing a corner of the park where, set off by a metal fence, dogs relieve themselves. Suddenly, I spotted Fritter behind a large oak, dressed in blue from head to toe: a naked Smurf. He seemed to be lying in wait for the four or five animals chasing each other around the dog park. Despite the distance between us, he appeared to be making a face, his lips pursed. I continued watching as the screeching orange bulk of an old tram appeared. Not a single dog seemed to notice him.
Translated, from the Spanish, by Kevin Krell
Dogs Without Owners
A story by Ernesto Ferrini
Illustration by Xxx
1.
I learned about the kidnappings from Fritter, at the bar of a French restaurant near my house, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the papers had picked the story up, or at least part of it, I would have thought he’d made it up. A fantastic creation, I would have said.
In those days, I ate lunch in the Piquenique every ten or fifteen days, always with my elbows on the bar and a book in my hand. I had just moved to Porta Genova, a working class neighborhood that, after the arrival of several famous designers, had experienced something of a renaissance in the last decade, and the restaurant had appealed to me at once. The furnishings were blonde wood and wrought iron, recreating what I imagined to be a very Norman or Breton atmosphere, while the food tended towards the eclectic, sometimes abandoning French tradition completely. Aside from sporadic conversations with the owner, who stood barricaded behind the counter, most of the time I ate in silence, a fork in one hand, a book in the other.
One day, while I was waiting for my food and looking out the window, Fritter appeared: less than five feet of humanity wrapped in an imitation leopard-skin coat. While we bumped into each other rather frequently in the neighborhood −at the bakery, the café on Via Montevideo, the old butcher shop −it was the first time we had done so at the Piquenique, and we had never spoken. After hanging his coat on a rack in the entrance, Fritter crossed the room and, not without difficulty, climbed up onto one of the stools at the bar. Once he had settled in, his chubby legs dangling above the floor, he ordered an espresso. Outside, a fine mid-autumn rain was falling, licking the elegant, austere face of Milan, a face of stone facades and passers-by in long black coats.
“What dreadful weather!” Fritter said, removing a pink scarf.
The owner, who looked like a pop version of Don Quixote, agreed without turning around. His attention was focused on the stream of black liquid jetting out of the espresso machine, as if the quality of the coffee depended on the intensity of his gaze. When the last drop had fallen he placed the cup on a saucer, between a small bar of chocolate and the obligatory little spoon, and returned to the till, where several customers were waiting in line to pay.
Fritter railed against the weather for a solid minute: the fog, the humidity, winter in general. His voice, harsh and affected, a voice of wasabi and strawberries, was difficult to ignore. After two or three more random comments, he stretched out his hand and introduced himself. By this time, I had closed my book.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m Fritter.”
He never mentioned his real name. Everyone, absolutely everyone, called him Fritter. While I sensed something slightly pejorative in the nickname, I got the impression that Fritter took it in good humor. Maybe he’d always had it, like a mole or an old scar over his eye, and by hearing it so much had got used to it. Whatever the case, it fit him to a tee.
I’ve forgotten how the conversation went or what led us to the subject of our occupations, but, for certain, Fritter was the one who brought it up. He had worked all his life in a cabaret in Porta Venezia, he said, in a transgressive but refined establishment, with music for dancing and live shows.
“In my prime, I had my own show” he said proudly. “Every Thursday, a bit just for me.”
From what I could gather, the act was full of feathers and sequins. Fritter parodied –although “parody” is perhaps a euphemism here −the character played by Michel Serrault in The Birdcage; other nights, he waited tables and helped behind the bar. When he turned fifty, his body no longer obedient to his commands, Fritter had opted for early retirement. In addition, the old guard had been almost entirely relieved, and Fritter had begun to feel out of place. Unable to sleep, he would drag himself through the early morning hours like a bloated fish on the hot pavement.
“The new boys weren’t bad,” he said, “but I missed my friends.”
They, he explained, had either left Milan or died, which for Fritter came to mean one and the same thing. I waited for the moment of silence that normally follows the mention of dead mates, but Fritter didn’t bother paying anyone any respect. Instead, he smiled mischievously and asked me what I did for a living.
I had finished eating and was in a somewhat of a hurry to get back to the office, that is, my apartment. Without going into detail, I told him I was a writer, while at the same time lowering one leg from the stool until the tips of my toes touched the floor. Fritter must have picked up on my attempt at escape. He interrupted a comment about how desperately he wished he knew how to write in order to ask me, looking somewhere between alarmed and surprised, if I wasn’t going have another coffee. And as I took a moment to answer, he turned to the owner and ordered me an espresso.
The owner moved his six-foot-two frame towards the coffee maker, and I settled back down on the stool. The restaurant’s two waiters, an Albanian and an Ecuadorian, fluttered between the tables, carrying the final orders of the day or dirty plates and lipstick-stained glasses, while the rain picked up, thudding against the large windows like an army of suicidal beetles. Fritter resumed his chatter, and I resigned myself to listening until my coffee arrived. Bringing one hand to his chest, he raised the other in the air as if he were carrying an invisible tray, his open palm turned back in a highly affected gesture.
“I must admit, my young friend,” he said, looking as if he were going to pout, “I’ve led a troubled life. A life full of grotesque, entertaining, pathetic, and scandalous moments. A life cleaved by stories. And yet, look at how funny things are: if divine providence were to touch the tip of my nose with his magic wand and grant me the power to write, I would make my debut with a story that had nothing to do with me at all. A story that concerns me only as an observer and a listener. But I’m too old to believe in fairies. Divine providence stuck me with a toad’s body, which after being kissed by the beautiful prince turns into another toad, and after that, disappears forever. This late in the game, waiting for a miracle is a waste of time.”
Fritter shifted uncomfortably in the stool. Keeping the story to himself, he said, would be silly. He’d rather tell it to me, without any obligations, for the simple pleasure of telling a good tale. And then he began to speak.
2.
“You probably never heard about the kidnappings. At that time, we’re talking about October or November of 2001, everything disintegrated in the apocalyptic climate of 11 September and the war in Afghanistan. Anyway, the case wasn’t such a big deal to begin with: local story with no deaths or injuries. Nothing more than an article in the newspaper and one or two mentions on the television news. However, the version that I’m going to tell you isn’t from the press but from Tagliaferri, the policeman who was responsible for the investigation.
“I met Tagliaferri in a bar on Via Tortona that no longer exists. A bar suspended in time. Quite hair-raising, actually. It seemed to have been decorated by a Polish peasant with atrocious tastes. Stuffed ducks hanging from the walls. You add it up. Yet it was nearby, and it stayed open late. I had recently resigned from the cabaret and was paying the price for years of working at night. In order to kill the tedium and combat insomnia, every night I’d polish off half a bottle of red and half a bottle of white; never beer, though, because it makes you fat. At those hours, the faces in the bar were always the same: five or six night owls anxious to exorcise the distressing itch from the cold sheets, up for anything but the return walk home. I, you might say, was the woman of the group. I knew things the rest didn’t, understood things they couldn’t understand. It’s true, I liked to talk, but I also was a good listener, and every once in a while I’d hand out a choice piece of advice. In this way, I earned Inspector Tagliaferri’s trust.
“One night, Tagliaferri showed up in the bar just before closing time. Grudgingly, the bartender granted him ten minutes to drink a beer. The others, already on their way out, exited the bar, and the inspector, a bottle in his hand and an expression on his face like a dog that had just been kicked, came and joined me at my table. As if we’d been talking for half an hour, he said that the situation, in fact, was bleak. Very bleak. ‘Fritter my friend,’ he stressed, ‘this is going from bad to worse.’
“At first I thought he was talking about life in general, or the weather, or the rent, or the chaos in the Middle East, what did I know, and I half-heartedly agreed. Let’s be frank about it, Inspector Tagliaferri was not known for his optimism. Resigned to a fate in which providence had abandoned him completely, he believed in misfortune the way others believe in God, or the free market. Every cloud concealed a heavy shower, every smile a snare. I suppose he had good reason for it, being fortyish, poor and alone as he was. At work, and for reasons I can’t say, he’d joined the ranks of the blighted, lumbered with petty details and cases of little note. Also, his self-assured look worked against him, and coming from me, king of the toads, you can take my word for it. My friend Tagliaferri was barely five-feet four, the minimum height required by the police, and in place of personal possessions, he accumulated weight. He dressed poorly, too, even for a policeman, and, deadly sin of decorum, tried to hide his baldness by combing the remaining long strands across the middle. On good days, and these were few, he looked like a cross between Jack Nicholson and Maradona. Still, he accepted his fate as a born loser with a kind of mild tranquility. The only thing that terrified him was declining further. Death, on the other hand, did not seem to bother him in the least. One night, we night owls were in the bar, pondering love and life and treacherous women, when Tagliaferri said the reason he didn’t put a bullet in his head was because he’d seen a couple of French divers on television swimming underwater with dolphins. He didn’t know exactly where they were, though he assumed somewhere in the Mediterranean. ‘Before I check out,’ he’d said, ‘I want to swim with those creatures, just like those damned Frenchmen on television.’
“Returning to the night in question, I told you that I had responded to the inspector’s despair with indifference. What a bore! I thought. Another bloody lecture. Yet, as if he could read my thoughts and was going to prove me mistaken, he sank into a stubborn silence which suddenly made me worry. ‘Is everything all right?’ I asked him. Tagliaferri took a deep breath, exhaling through his nose. He raised the bottle by the neck, holding it between his thumb and index finger, and swung it gently, as if performing an act of self-hypnosis. The liquid mimicked the swinging in little waves that barely climbed the wall of glass before returning to the centre and then up the other side. After a minute or so, he set the bottle back down on the coaster and fixed me in his gaze.
‘They’re kidnapping dogs,’ he said.
“The inspector did not provide many details. Over the last two or three weeks various police stations in Milan had received reports of missing dogs. The statements of the victims varied from case to case, though they all shared certain elements which Tagliaferri considered unusual. Still, given the fact that the priorities of the police are quite remote from the canine world, and even more so in those days of fear and war, the crimes had received little or no attention. Yes, madam. Of course, madam. We’ll do everything we can to return your pet to you safe and sound, madam. Nothing more. The complaint went straight into the drawer.
“‘Until yesterday morning,’ Tagliaferri had said, ‘when they swiped the boxer of the wife of a Green politician in Sempione Park, close to the Arch of Peace. Around lunchtime, the husband arrived at the police station to file a complaint and, quite by chance, learned of the other kidnappings, as well as the absolute indifference of the police. Well, Legambiente hit the roof. WWF hit the roof. The National Canine Defence League hit the roof. This morning,’ Inspector Tagliaferri continued, ‘the first reporters appeared. This afternoon, my boss called me in. And after handing me a stack of files, he assigned me to the case.’
“I responded enthusiastically to the news,” Fritter went on. ‘Bravo!’ I said. ‘It sounds like an important case.’ Tagliaferri pierced me with a fierce look of his blue eyes. ‘Stop talking drivel!’ he reproached me. ‘Politicians pressing for new and stricter antiterrorism laws, the police on maximum alert, and here I am following the trail of four mangy little beasts! Kidnapped canines! This case is a punishment,’ the inspector said. ‘Fritter, my friend, this case is the beginning of the end, the last stop on my descent to a desk in some godforsaken administrative office.’
“Soon the bartender cleared the table and turned out the lights. We waited on the sidewalk while he pulled down the metal shutter and then walked in silence to the corner of Tortona and Bergognone, where we bid each other goodnight and went off in different directions.
“After that night, Tagliaferri visited the bar less and less. He’d arrive after midnight, and never stay more than thirty or forty minutes. He’d drink a beer leaning against the bar, follow our conversations with half-closed eyes, and not say a word. Once, I asked him how the investigation was coming along. By then, the wave of abductions had hit the neighborhood: two or three dogs, including my upstairs neighbor’s Pekinese, a nasty, abominable little creature, had disappeared. Tagliaferri seemed satisfied with his progress, optimistic even. He said that he had questioned all the victims and determined the modus operandi of the kidnapper. To begin with, the crimes were perpetrated in one of three parks: Sempione, Solari or The Public Gardens. The animals, moreover, were not snatched away from their owners or forced into a moving van; rather they abandoned their owners.
“‘Apparently,’ Tagliaferri explained, ‘the dogs follow some guy dressed in blue. Entirely in blue. Some victims were unaware of his presence, or didn’t connect it to the disappearance of their dogs, but the ones that did, two or three that is, described the scenario in almost exactly the same terms. The guy –for the sake of convenience I’ll call him Blue –approaches the animal he intends to kidnap and begins a kind of ritual that the witnesses compared to yoga, or tai chi, or the steps of some tribal dance. He then starts capering spasmodically about, emitting a choked, high-pitched whistle, like a tropical bird, that agitates the dogs, an agitation you might describe as being playful. At this point,’ he went on, ‘Blue makes as if to leave, running several yards and then coming to a sudden stop. The animal does the same, barking and moving its tail. Then they start off again, and come to another sharp halt. According to the witnesses, they repeat this movement about a dozen times, advancing in a straight line, or in a spiral, until Blue finally takes off running like a demon. And this time, he doesn’t stop. The dog, it goes without saying, doesn’t either.’
“A week later, I saw Tagliaferri in the bar again. This time, he was seriously in the dumps. The investigation, he said, had led to a dead end. One lead after the other had foundered in a muck of misunderstandings and banal coincidences, while in the meantime animals continued vanishing without a trace to the tune of one or two dogs per week. The suspect might as well have been a ghost. Blue visited the parks, performed his canine rituals, and escaped with his hairy haul in broad daylight, without anybody so much as raising a hand to stop him. Even worse, the witnesses had been unable to provide a valid description apart from his clothes, or better yet, the color of his clothes.
“‘A bloody ghost!’ Tagliaferri said. ‘A ghost without any motive, demands, or ransoms. Enlighten me Fritter, my friend, because I don’t understand. Is it a silly joke? A hidden camera or something?’
“I suspected Tagliaferri wasn’t waiting for an answer, so I kept my mouth shut. And after a few seconds, he unwound his terrible ordeal. He was fed up with the investigation. Fed up with spending entire afternoons waiting among the trees in the park for nothing to happen; or for it to happen in another park. Fed up with absurd questionings. Fed up with taking down the breeds of dogs in his notebook. Fed up with dreaming about dogs. Fed up with dreaming he had been transferred to an administrative office and, looking out the window, discovering a line of dogs stretching infinitely into the distance.
“When I suggested he take a vacation, Tagliaferri stared at me with a stricken expression. For an instant, I had the awful feeling that he was going to cry. Instead, he burst out in mocking laughter. ‘A vacation,’ he said, splitting his sides. ‘That’s a good one.’
“I never saw him at the Tortona bar again.”
3.
The remaining customers in the Piquenique crossed the room. They hesitated for an instant in the threshold, scrutinizing the sky for a sign that did not appear, and then, between laughter and festive groans, hurried out the door. They disappeared across the street, three or four grey figures running off in the rain.
The owner uncorked an already opened bottle and served three glasses. He had been following the story of the missing dogs from his side of the counter, tending to matters of the till without much care. Fritter smiled; he rubbed his eyes with both fists, a childlike gesture that hinted at the fat, mischievous boy he must have once been. Raising his glass, he held it between his lips for a moment before resuming his story. Some months later, he explained, in the middle of March, a cousin of his lent him her summer apartment in Camogli, a fishing village which, like most villages along the Ligurian coast, now serve mostly the tourist trade. By then, Fritter’s insomnia had grown worse. After a sleepless night, he would collapse into the chair of the first café he encountered, or at dusk pass out from exhaustion only to awake in the middle of the night.
Tired of tossing and turning in bed, one morning, slightly before dawn, he went down to the village. The fishing boats rested in a corner of the beach, next to a basilica, though a few could be seen outlined against the sky in the middle of the sea. Fritter figured the cafés would open soon, so crossing over towards the port, he sat down to wait. The first rays of light were beginning to appear. At the head of the wharf, some men were talking in a circle. At first, Fritter thought they were fisherman, until he recognized one of them. It was Tagliaferri.
“I riddled him with questions,” Fritter said, smiling. “Where had he been all this time? What was he doing in Camogli? How was the investigation coming along? The inspector glanced at the boats tied to the pier, and said he had a few minutes to spare before pushing off.
We left the wharf and entered a café that had just opened its doors. The inspector had lost weight, or at least it seemed that way to me, and his voice sounded different, as if he were speaking in a different language, or as if he were translating himself from another language, one incomprehensible and remote. One Thursday night, he said, on his way home, his cell phone had rung. It was nine o’clock, an unusual hour for him.
“Who was it?” the owner of the Piquenique urgently wanted to know.
“A colleague,” Fritter said. “To let him know that a guy had just called with information about the kidnappings. An informer, or something like that.”
“What he did he say?” I asked.
“Nothing much really,” Fritter said, shrugging his shoulders. “He left an address: Argelati 42, no, Argelati 44, now I remember. Tagliaferri wasn’t far from there, so he went and had a look. The front door was open, and he went up to the third floor. He didn’t have to knock to realize the door was unlocked. A trap, he said to himself. A bloody trap. Without giving it much thought, he took out his regulation Beretta and stepped through the door, but the apartment was empty.
Fritter did not know exactly how much time Tagliaferri spent inside the apartment. Fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe less. “The inspector checked all the rooms in search of a clue, but found nothing,” Fritter said. “When he was about to leave, he heard a labored screech, and it wasn’t long before he connected it to the whistling sound that the witnesses had attributed to the suspect. The inspector leaned out of the window. On the opposite sidewalk, a man dressed like the Lone Ranger seemed to be challenging him with his gaze. Tagliaferri recognized him at once, and Blue made as if to run, just as he had with the dogs, advancing a few yards and then coming to a stop. Tagliaferri wondered whether he should call for backup or act on his own. He decided to chance it. ‘Hey!’ he shouted out from the third floor. ‘Wait right there! I need to ask you a few questions.’ To his surprise, Blue nodded his head in agreement. The inspector hurried back down into the street, but the suspect was no longer there. Then, a few hundred yards ahead of him, at the corner of Argelati and Fumagalli, he spotted him. After Tagliaferri had run for half of a block, more like trotted really, since any attempt at high speed would have been impaired by his pitiful physical condition, Blue performed two or three playful hops before disappearing around the corner.
“A chase,” the owner of the Piquenique said.
“A game of the pursued and the pursuer,” Fritter corrected him, taking a sip of wine. “The hunt went on for nearly a mile, always in fits and starts. Blue kept a secure distance with grating nimbleness, but the inspector didn’t give up. Bathed in sweat, he left Via Fumagalli behind and found the suspect waiting for him on the other side of Naviglio Grande, leaning against a parapet of the canal. Tagliaferri crossed Naviglio, went past the jam-packed bars on Via Casale, and came to the square of the Porta Genova railway station. Then it started to rain,” Fritter continued. “A real downpour. A thousand times worse than this rebellious shower.”
Fritter indicated the large windows of the restaurant, or rather the water dripping down the panes. “Blue,” he resumed, “had climbed the numerous steps of the pedestrian bridge that spans the railway tracks and connects the centre of the city with Via Tortona. Tagliaferri had done the same, and the two of them now found themselves standing face to face, just eighty yards of wooden plank between them.”
“Two gunslingers in an old Western,” I said.
“Doc Holiday and Johnny Ringo in Tombstone,” the owner added.
“Tagliaferri was thinking exactly the same thing,” Fritter said. ‘When will he draw and shoot me dead.’ Yet his opponent went down the other side, making his way along Via Tortona. For a moment, the inspector feared he was leading him to his own apartment, which was not very far from there. Blue, however, went around the block and doubled back to the bridge. Tagliaferri was confused. To be honest, he could just barely make out a flickering blue ghost going off in the rain, a blue shadow thirty yards ahead that, instead of returning to Naviglio or taking Corso Colombo towards the centre, went down Via Ventimiglia: a dead end street. The inspector repressed a smile and advanced slowly. The rain, in the meantime, had got worse, noisily pounding the cars parked along the railway wall like a bass drum. Tagliaferri became afraid; he sensed his vulnerability. He could barely see through the sheets of rain, and the only thing he could hear was the large persistent drops. For the second time that day, he took out his revolver. He advanced cautiously, crouched down like a cat, or a rat, feeling the ground with every step. Suddenly, a blue figure flashed to his left, just a few steps away, and Tagliaferri squeezed the trigger, three times; he didn’t even hear the shots. Then he began twitching like an obsessive, his mind gone blank, arms dangling at his sides. After an indefinite amount of time, which in the Camogli café Tagliaferri remembered as seeming eternal, he moved closer to his target. When it came into view, the only he could do was smile. It was a poster.”
“A poster?” I asked, disappointed.
“Le Grande Bleu,” Fritter said.
“You mean the Luc Besson film?” the owner said. “Impossible. It came out in 1988.”
“What do you want me to say?” Fritter said. He was annoyed. “It’s what Tagliaferri told me. That he had advanced, almost on tiptoe, to the end of the street and fired at a poster of the Le Grande Bleu. A blue poster, all sea and sky. And in the centre, silhouetted against the turquoise brilliance of the Mediterranean, were the tiny figures of a man, half of his torso sticking out of the water, and a dolphin leaping over his head.
“And then what happened?” the owner asked.
“That’s exactly what I wanted to know,” Fritter said, “but Tagliaferri looked at his watch and said he had to go. On the way back to the wharf, he mentioned the tourist agency. He’d come across it by chance: a small operation devoted to whale and dolphin sighting in the Ligurian Sea. That morning, they were leaving in search of dolphins. If conditions permitted, you could swim with them. A terrible thought gripped me. ‘Is this your first time?’ I asked him. Tagliaferri smiled. ‘It’s not what you think,’ he said. After that, he shook my hand and jumped aboard.
Fritter looked at the owner and me without saying a word. He then explained that five or six other people were on the boat, all dressed in raincoats and sports shoes. Seagulls cawed over their heads, vanishing behind a castle tower. Fritter saw the sky, and thought the morning was shaping up to be a magnificent day. And this thought, for reasons he was still unable to grasp completely, had plunged him into a deep melancholy. He would have liked to learn more about what the inspector had been doing all that time, but by now the motor was spitting out an unbridgeable roar. Tagliaferri waved, and the boat headed out to sea.
4.
Soon it stopped raining, and I went back to work. After that, my life was like a rollercoaster: my first child was born, I published my first novel, and I passed a kidney stone that made me cry like a baby and left me catatonic. For months, I hardly even visited the neighborhood. Nor did I cross paths with Fritter. In a way, I had forgotten altogether about Tagliaferri and the kidnapped dogs.
A few days ago, though, the story hit me like a freight train. I was waiting for the tram, at the stop on the corner of Montevideo and Solari, facing a corner of the park where, set off by a metal fence, dogs relieve themselves. Suddenly, I spotted Fritter behind a large oak, dressed in blue from head to toe: a naked Smurf. He seemed to be lying in wait for the four or five animals chasing each other around the dog park. Despite the distance between us, he appeared to be making a face, his lips pursed. I continued watching as the screeching orange bulk of an old tram appeared. Not a single dog seemed to notice him.
Translated, from the Spanish, by Kevin Krell
Dogs Without Owners
A story by Ernesto Ferrini
Illustration by Xxx
1.
I learned about the kidnappings from Fritter, at the bar of a French restaurant near my house, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the papers had picked the story up, or at least part of it, I would have thought he’d made it up. A fantastic creation, I would have said.
In those days, I ate lunch in the Piquenique every ten or fifteen days, always with my elbows on the bar and a book in my hand. I had just moved to Porta Genova, a working class neighborhood that, after the arrival of several famous designers, had experienced something of a renaissance in the last decade, and the restaurant had appealed to me at once. The furnishings were blonde wood and wrought iron, recreating what I imagined to be a very Norman or Breton atmosphere, while the food tended towards the eclectic, sometimes abandoning French tradition completely. Aside from sporadic conversations with the owner, who stood barricaded behind the counter, most of the time I ate in silence, a fork in one hand, a book in the other.
One day, while I was waiting for my food and looking out the window, Fritter appeared: less than five feet of humanity wrapped in an imitation leopard-skin coat. While we bumped into each other rather frequently in the neighborhood −at the bakery, the café on Via Montevideo, the old butcher shop −it was the first time we had done so at the Piquenique, and we had never spoken. After hanging his coat on a rack in the entrance, Fritter crossed the room and, not without difficulty, climbed up onto one of the stools at the bar. Once he had settled in, his chubby legs dangling above the floor, he ordered an espresso. Outside, a fine mid-autumn rain was falling, licking the elegant, austere face of Milan, a face of stone facades and passers-by in long black coats.
“What dreadful weather!” Fritter said, removing a pink scarf.
The owner, who looked like a pop version of Don Quixote, agreed without turning around. His attention was focused on the stream of black liquid jetting out of the espresso machine, as if the quality of the coffee depended on the intensity of his gaze. When the last drop had fallen he placed the cup on a saucer, between a small bar of chocolate and the obligatory little spoon, and returned to the till, where several customers were waiting in line to pay.
Fritter railed against the weather for a solid minute: the fog, the humidity, winter in general. His voice, harsh and affected, a voice of wasabi and strawberries, was difficult to ignore. After two or three more random comments, he stretched out his hand and introduced himself. By this time, I had closed my book.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m Fritter.”
He never mentioned his real name. Everyone, absolutely everyone, called him Fritter. While I sensed something slightly pejorative in the nickname, I got the impression that Fritter took it in good humor. Maybe he’d always had it, like a mole or an old scar over his eye, and by hearing it so much had got used to it. Whatever the case, it fit him to a tee.
I’ve forgotten how the conversation went or what led us to the subject of our occupations, but, for certain, Fritter was the one who brought it up. He had worked all his life in a cabaret in Porta Venezia, he said, in a transgressive but refined establishment, with music for dancing and live shows.
“In my prime, I had my own show” he said proudly. “Every Thursday, a bit just for me.”
From what I could gather, the act was full of feathers and sequins. Fritter parodied –although “parody” is perhaps a euphemism here −the character played by Michel Serrault in The Birdcage; other nights, he waited tables and helped behind the bar. When he turned fifty, his body no longer obedient to his commands, Fritter had opted for early retirement. In addition, the old guard had been almost entirely relieved, and Fritter had begun to feel out of place. Unable to sleep, he would drag himself through the early morning hours like a bloated fish on the hot pavement.
“The new boys weren’t bad,” he said, “but I missed my friends.”
They, he explained, had either left Milan or died, which for Fritter came to mean one and the same thing. I waited for the moment of silence that normally follows the mention of dead mates, but Fritter didn’t bother paying anyone any respect. Instead, he smiled mischievously and asked me what I did for a living.
I had finished eating and was in a somewhat of a hurry to get back to the office, that is, my apartment. Without going into detail, I told him I was a writer, while at the same time lowering one leg from the stool until the tips of my toes touched the floor. Fritter must have picked up on my attempt at escape. He interrupted a comment about how desperately he wished he knew how to write in order to ask me, looking somewhere between alarmed and surprised, if I wasn’t going have another coffee. And as I took a moment to answer, he turned to the owner and ordered me an espresso.
The owner moved his six-foot-two frame towards the coffee maker, and I settled back down on the stool. The restaurant’s two waiters, an Albanian and an Ecuadorian, fluttered between the tables, carrying the final orders of the day or dirty plates and lipstick-stained glasses, while the rain picked up, thudding against the large windows like an army of suicidal beetles. Fritter resumed his chatter, and I resigned myself to listening until my coffee arrived. Bringing one hand to his chest, he raised the other in the air as if he were carrying an invisible tray, his open palm turned back in a highly affected gesture.
“I must admit, my young friend,” he said, looking as if he were going to pout, “I’ve led a troubled life. A life full of grotesque, entertaining, pathetic, and scandalous moments. A life cleaved by stories. And yet, look at how funny things are: if divine providence were to touch the tip of my nose with his magic wand and grant me the power to write, I would make my debut with a story that had nothing to do with me at all. A story that concerns me only as an observer and a listener. But I’m too old to believe in fairies. Divine providence stuck me with a toad’s body, which after being kissed by the beautiful prince turns into another toad, and after that, disappears forever. This late in the game, waiting for a miracle is a waste of time.”
Fritter shifted uncomfortably in the stool. Keeping the story to himself, he said, would be silly. He’d rather tell it to me, without any obligations, for the simple pleasure of telling a good tale. And then he began to speak.
2.
“You probably never heard about the kidnappings. At that time, we’re talking about October or November of 2001, everything disintegrated in the apocalyptic climate of 11 September and the war in Afghanistan. Anyway, the case wasn’t such a big deal to begin with: local story with no deaths or injuries. Nothing more than an article in the newspaper and one or two mentions on the television news. However, the version that I’m going to tell you isn’t from the press but from Tagliaferri, the policeman who was responsible for the investigation.
“I met Tagliaferri in a bar on Via Tortona that no longer exists. A bar suspended in time. Quite hair-raising, actually. It seemed to have been decorated by a Polish peasant with atrocious tastes. Stuffed ducks hanging from the walls. You add it up. Yet it was nearby, and it stayed open late. I had recently resigned from the cabaret and was paying the price for years of working at night. In order to kill the tedium and combat insomnia, every night I’d polish off half a bottle of red and half a bottle of white; never beer, though, because it makes you fat. At those hours, the faces in the bar were always the same: five or six night owls anxious to exorcise the distressing itch from the cold sheets, up for anything but the return walk home. I, you might say, was the woman of the group. I knew things the rest didn’t, understood things they couldn’t understand. It’s true, I
Spanish to English: A Village Connected To The World
Source text - Spanish Un pueblo conectado al mundo
Juan Pablo Meneses
Benjamín Franklin Silva Donoso es inventor y vive en una pequeña ciudad del norte de Chile. El lugar se llama Salamanca y es, gracias a la tecnología WiFi, el primer poblado de Latinoamérica con internet gratis y para todos. Benjamín Franklin tiene 34 años, es soltero, no está de novio y vive con sus padres. Tiene la piel más clara que el promedio de los habitantes de este pueblo andino, que fue parte del imperio Inca, por eso se protege del sol con anteojos y gorra. Cuando nos conocemos, en la plaza central de la pequeña ciudad, llega vestido con una gorra azul de visera larga, anteojos oscuros y jeans.
-Hola, yo soy Benjamín- y me estira su mano tímidamente.
Desde los primeras horas en Salamanca, varios me han advertido de este Benjamín Franklin y de sus inventos. Logro contactarlo por intermedio de una secretaria de la Municipalidad. Por estos días, llegar a Salamanca como periodista es casi un acontecimiento: las autoridades se ponen a tu disposición y las secretarias de cualquier jefe oficial pasan a ser tus asistentes. Todo gracias a internet.
En sus manos Benjamín Franklin trae su último invento: una antena artesanal que sirve para conectarse mejor a la señal inalámbrica de internet. Por casi veinte dólares, el precio al que vende su invento, promete una significativa mejora a la conexión a la red. En tres meses ha vendido más de diez antenas y ese equivalente a 200 dólares, a dos billetes con la cara del Benjamín Franklin original, le han sido suficiente dinero para vivir exclusivamente de su idea. Todavía no tiene pensado patentar el invento. Por ahora, el tiempo se le va en pensar cómo mejorar su antena.
Orgulloso, cuenta que en los últimos meses lo han entrevistado de varios canales de televisión, en un par de radios locales y en diarios de circulación nacional. No sólo eso, el 12 de octubre de 2006 fue portada principal de “La voz del Choapa”, un pequeño diario que circula por Illapel, la ciudad grande vecina a Salamanca. Internet ha traído cambios a su vida, y no sólo tecnológicos. En un momento casi le digo que lo entiendo, y me dan ganas de explicarle que gracias a internet es que puedo sobrevivir escribiendo historias para diferentes medios de todo el mundo, pero al final me limito a escucharlo
De hablar pausado, Benjamín Franklin dice que siempre le han gustado los inventos. Recuerda que muchos antes que apareciera internet y el wireless, cuando Salamanca era una ciudad aún más plana y aislada del resto del país, él diseñó su primera antena. Eran principios de los años noventa, cuando en Salamanca hablar de una red mundial de comunicación todavía era pensar en ciencia ficción y los computadores parecían robots gigantes propios de ciudades ahogadas entre rascacielos. Una época donde todavía tenía una importancia gravitante la radio. Los primeros inventos de antenas de Benjamín, fueron precisamente para eso, para agarrar ondas de radios de Santiago, la capital del país.
Sentados en la plaza de Salamanca, rodeado de niños que persiguen pelotas de fútbol y de jubilados que ya no persiguen ningún sueño, me dice que en la ciudad la gente escucha mayoritariamente música campesina, cumbias y rancheras:
- No desmerezco ese tipo de música, pero a mi me gusta mucho más lo que es el anglo. Me gustan los clásicos, los Beatles, los Creedence Clearwater Revival, entonces fue por esa necesidad que comencé a inventar las primeras antenas.
Así recuerda, buscando en el pasado una consecuencia lógica para su actual trabajo de inventor de antenas para internet.
La historia de llamarse Benjamín Franklin parte la primera década del 1900, cuando su abuelo, Pedro Silva Contreras, sale a recorrer el mundo como marino del buque escuela de la armada chilena. En uno de esos viajes, de hace cien años, el barco llegó a Nueva York.
-Mi abuelo recorrió cuatro veces la vuelta mundo, pero le gustó Estados Unidos. Siempre hablaba de Nueva York y nos contaba que se subió a la estatua de La Libertad.
Tanto le gustó a su abuelo Estados Unidos, que bautizó a sus hijos con nombres como Washington, Edison y a mi papá le puso Franklin. Y para seguir la tradición, su padre lo bautizó como Benjamín Franklin, como el inventor.
En un momento y en silencio, como una sombra entrada en años, se suma a la conversación el papá de Benjamín. Sus dos padres son artesanos en madera, y venden sus trabajos en la plaza central de Salamanca. Hasta antes que llegara internet a la ciudad, el hijo los acompañaba en el trabajo y en la venta. Ahora, como los viejos buscadores de oro, abandonó todo por la tecnología.
-Siempre fue inventor mi hijo, igual que el otro Benjamín Franklin- dice su padre, Franklin Silva-. Yo no entiendo de internet, no sé nada, pero veo que lo que hace mi hijo es algo muy importante y que puede estar conectado con todo el mundo. Mi padre dio la vuelta al mundo cuatro veces, en barco, y ahora mi hijo lo hace por internet. Desde la casa.
Canoso, de ojos claros y pocos dientes, parece que no ha querido faltar a la cita que su hijo tenía con un reportero. Y mientras interrumpe con sus opiniones, el hijo, el inventor, Benjamín Franklin Silva Donoso, mira hacia los cerros de la cordillera de Los Andes, tal vez pensando en un nuevo experimento. Tal vez pensando en su abuelo marino. Tal vez sorprendido por el orgullo público que le demuestra su padre.
-o-
La vida en Salamanca es apacible, tranquila, con familias en bicicleta, niños que van caminando a la escuela, policías que saludan a los vecinos, perros que se pasean sin sus dueños y autos estacionados con las ventanas abajo. Aquí se ven muy pocos taxis, casi no hay semáforos y los bomberos hace varias semanas que no van a apagar un incendio. Para entretenerse hay una piscina municipal, un estadio, un gimnasio y dos discotecas que abren sólo los fines de semana. Una vieja camioneta amarilla, con parlantes a todo volumen, se pasea anunciando un festival de música ranchera. Un grupo de jóvenes toca guitarra en la plaza. El centro tiene pocas calles. De los dos cajeros automáticos de Salamanca, uno está en una bencinera y otro en la única sucursal bancaria de la ciudad. La mayor parte del tiempo uno tiene la sensación de estar en una ciudad desenchufada. Totalmente acústica. Pese a que se trata de la primera ciudad latinoamericana con conexión total, gratuita e inalámbrica a internet.
Ubicada a 316 kilómetros al norte de Santiago de Chile, los últimos kilómetros antes de llegar a Salamanca son una interminable seguidilla de curvas y contra-curvas, subidas y bajadas empinadas, por una zona de valles precordilleranos estrechos y peligrosos. Con la sensación de estar ingresando a una zona aislada y escondida, a un territorio al que podría caerle encima una bomba radioactiva y el resto del país tal vez ni se enteraría, el bus entra a Salamanca a baja velocidad y con el motor aún forzado. La mayoría de los pasajeros son obreros de “Los pelambres”, un moderno y privado yacimiento de cobre, en el país que es el principal productor de cobre del mundo con el 40% de las reservas mundiales. Paradójicamente, la sostenida alza del cobre los últimos años, se debe al auge mundial del cableado de cobre, negocio que se vendría abajo en un mundo inalámbrico.
Antes de saltar a los medios de comunicación como la primera iluminada con wifi, Salamanca era conocida por la leyenda de ser zona de brujas. Basta llegar a la ciudad para ver dibujos de brujas volando en escobas pintadas en las paredes, en las tiendas, en los anuncios de restaurantes, en las publicidades.
-Siempre se dice que acá hay brujas, pero nunca vi una. De todas maneras, es lo que identifica a la ciudad en el resto del país. Mejor dicho, lo que lo identificaba, porque ahora somos conocidos por el wifi- dice Roxana Pizarro, una joven nacida en la ciudad, que trabaja para la municipalidad y que ahora escucha radios de Santiago por internet.
El proyecto de internet gratuito para esta pequeña y aislada localidad chilena se llamó “Salamanca sale al mundo”, y precisamente, el slogan fue acompañado de una bruja arriba de una escoba.
Si bien los 25 mil habitantes del lugar sabían que la llegada de la tecnología podía traer cambios, tras la instalación de las 11 antenas que distribuyen la señal sin cables, Salamanca siguió con su vida cansina, con una economía dividida entre el trabajo en la minería y la agricultura. Pero la noticia del experimento corrió rápido, y no tardó en salir de Chile. Varios recuerdan que a los pocos días de inaugurada oficialmente la señal libre, el 4 de septiembre de 2006, la información estaba siendo trasmitida por CNN en Español para todo América Latina y Estados Unidos. Desde los estudios instalados en Atlanta, la periodista Carolina Escobar abría la informativo con entusiasmo: “Una pequeña ciudad en Chile, es la primera en Latinoamérica que cuenta con conexión inalámbrica gratuita a internet de banda ancha. El experimento busca potenciar las capacidades de los ciudadanos, con las ventajas de internet: contenidos gratuitos, alfabetización digital, capacidad de subir contenidos, entre otros”.
De ser una perdida ciudad cordillerana del norte de Chile, estaban saliendo al mundo como los primeros de Latinoamérica. Y no había pasado siquiera un mes de comenzado el emprendimiento.
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La Municipalidad de Salamanca está justo frente a la plaza de Armas de la ciudad, y para llegar a la oficina del alcalde hay que atravesar un pasillo oscuro donde se ven varios escritorios con funcionarios que te saludan moviendo las cejas. Fundada en 1844, en sus habitantes se ve la mezcla del pasado prehispánico marcado por los Incas y los indios Diaguitas. Hoy, todos los computadores de la municipalidad están conectados a Internet, y sobre el escritorio del alcalde hay un poderoso notebook inalámbrico.
El despacho de la máxima autoridad de la ciudad es simple, y además de su escritorio repleto de papeles y de algunas sillas, hay una pequeña mesa de reuniones donde están repartidos los planos de lo que será la plaza central después de la remodelación que se tiene planeada. Pese a ser de día, están las luces prendidas. El alcalde se llama Gerardo Rojas, es abogado, y nació en Salamanca hace 43 años. Es calvo, tiene voz aguda, y está recién divorciado, en un país conservador que sólo aprobó la ley de divorcio el 2004.
El alcalde de Salamanca se muestra entusiasmado con el proyecto. Y casi no es necesario hacerle preguntas, para que comience a contar la experiencia.
Así cuenta que el proyecto comenzó cuando estaba leyendo una entrevista, en un diario de circulación nacional, al senador Fernando Flores. Él senador hablaba de los blogs. En la entrevista, planteaba que las comunas que estaban dispuestas a hacer algo en tecnología, lo llamaran a él. La idea quedó dando vuelta en la cabeza del alcalde Salamanca. Algunos días despertaba con ganas de llamarlo, otras veces pensaba que para qué si no le darían mucha ayuda. Así pasaron como dos meses. Hasta que un día:
-Un día dije, voy a llamar. Lo hice pensando a ver si quedaba algún cupo por ahí. Lo llamé, y parece que no lo había llamado nadie. Nadie.
Con entusiasmo, cuenta que el senador los puso en contacto con su fundación, llamada Mercator. A los pocos días llegaba a Salamanca la primera comitiva de técnicos de Mercator y en la primera reunión, sin muchas demoras, lo primero que se conversó fue de iluminar la comuna con WIFI. Eso sucedía en junio del 2006. Tres meses después, la presidenta de Chile estaba inaugurando la señal libre para todo el país.
El propio alcalde de Salamanca dice que su ciudad está de moda. Jura “por Dios”, que el proyecto nunca fue pensado como una competencia con el resto, y que ser los primeros de Latinoamérica los sorprendió a todos. Y aún, confiesa que ser los primeros le ha subido la autoestima a toda la comuna.
Esto de que ser primeros ayuda a la autoestima de la comuna, es algo que hace varios años parece haberlo entendido el resto del país. En Chile es común, y asunto de gran orgullo nacional, las noticias internacionales que ponen a Chile primero en diferentes rankings de Latinoamérica. Atrás, muy atrás, parecen haber quedado los traumáticos años donde viajar con pasaporte chileno, en los años de dictadura militar, equivalía a pasar horas extras en cualquier aeropuerto del mundo. En menos de veinte años, de un país culposo por las violaciones a los derechos humanos, los chilenos han asumido el rol continental del orgullo. De un orgullo basado en la economía.
En los últimos meses, como de costumbre en los últimos años, han aparecido destacadas en titulares de todos los medios nacionales noticias que confirman esta tendencia. “Chile sigue liderando a Latinoamérica en ranking de competitividad”, según el informe anual del Foro Económico Mundial. “Chile sigue liderando a Latinoamérica en clima de inversión”, de acuerdo al informe Doing Business 2007 del Banco Mundial (BM). “Chile lidera ranking de apertura en Latinoamérica”, de acuerdo a un informe solicitado por la firma Federal Express (FedEx) de los países con más fácil la interacción e intercambio entre personas, empresas y naciones. “Chile es líder en la lucha contra la corrupción en Latinoamérica”, según el ranking del Indice de Percepción de la Corrupción 2006 que realiza Transparencia Internacional (TI). Un orgullo nacional que, hace rato, viene generando una enemistad regional hacia el país.
-Ya somos los primeros en Latinoamérica, eso no lo puede negar nadie- dice el Alcalde, mientras nos tomamos un café a media tarde. Buena parte de la ciudad, a esta misma hora, está durmiendo la siesta.
Sin embargo, en un momento de la charla, el alcalde Rojas reconoce que hay que perfeccionar la conexión. Y que el asunto tiene tres patitas. Uno, que es la instalación de las antenas. Dos, un tema que tiene que ver con movilización digital, es decir, capacitación para la gente. Y tres, la creación de un blog municipal. Esas son las tres.
De un cajón de su escritorio saca unas fotocopias, donde me lee que en enero, van a hacer un nuevo curso de alfabetización básica, para 4800 personas. Es básico, es para la gente que no tiene idea de nada. La capacitación ha sido con voluntarios venidos de Santiago, y se realizó en el liceo de Salamanca, que cuenta con 34 computadores, los que se distribuían en tres turnos. Benjamín Franklin fue a uno de ellos, y dice que aprendió bastante, aunque quisiera aprender más.
-Y estamos haciendo un convenio con la Embajada de Estados Unidos por el asunto del inglés- remata orgulloso el alcalde. Tanto como estaba Chile cuando el ex presidente Ricardo Lagos firmó, en 2004, el Primer tratado de Libre Comercio entre Estados Unidos y un país Sudamericano.
Cuando le preguntó al Alcalde qué me diga algún beneficio concreto que traerá la red a Salamanca, pienso en los cambios que la red ha traído en mi vida y que paso la mayor parte de mis días pegado a la red, desde el punto que sea, y con una sola oficina fija, mi correo electrónico. Para el alcalde, en cambio, las transformaciones han sido diferentes. Dice hoy Salamanca existe, ese lado ha sido bueno. Cuenta que hace unos días, en un noticiero nacional, estaban hablando de que Shangai se iba a iluminar completamente con wifi. Y uno de los conductores dijo, “Ah, sí, pero nosotros ya tenemos a Salamanca”.
El proyecto “Salamanca sale al mundo”, si bien es financiado en parte por la Municipalidad de Salamanca, es en alianza con la Fundación Minera Los Pelambres, y el apoyo de los servicios de gestión y movilización digital de Fundación Mercator, que lidera el senador Fernando Flores. Tanto el alcalde, como el senador, son militantes del mismo partido político: El “Partido por la Democracia”, fundado por el ex presidente Lagos los últimos años de la dictadura de Pinochet.
-¿Habrá libertad absoluta para internet, señor Alcalde?
-Hay restricciones para el sexo y la música. Nada más.
Dice que es por un asunto técnico, de que bajar ambos tipos de materiales haría muy pesado el tráfico. Aunque a los pocos minutos dice que, por ahora, los filtros no se han puesto a funcionar. Y vuelve a remarcar que el objetivo es educar, que la comunidad agilice los trámites, que Salamanca salga al mundo. A ese mundo donde lo que más se baja es música y pornografía.
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Para Salamanca no fue un día cualquiera el 4 de septiembre de 2006. Ahora que recorro sus calles eternamente semivacías, cargando un computador portátil para conectarme a WiFi, imagino aquel día de fiestas para la comuna. Aquel día de septiembre y desde temprano, los hombres de seguridad de la presidencia de la nación registraban cada detalle del gimnasio municipal. Los fotógrafos limpiaban sus lentes. Los alumnos miembros de la banda instrumental de la Escuelas pública afinaban los instrumentos para el desfile, en los hoteles de la ciudad se registraban funcionarios y periodistas. En pocas horas, la presidente Michelle Bachelet, la primera presidenta mujer de Chile, inauguraba oficialmente el internet libre para todo Salamanca.
Albert Einstein dijo una vez que la palabra progreso no tiene ningún sentido mientras haya niños infelices. Aquella mañana, mientras desfilaban frente a las autoridades, los niños de Salamanca parecían contentos. Dentro del estadio techado, y desde temprano, las graderías del recinto estaban colmadas de vecinos en espera de los discursos. Los noticieros nacionales despachaban en directo la noticia.
-Fue fundamental para que esto resultara bien que viniera la presidenta, fue un espaldarazo muy fuerte- recuerda el alcalde.
-Yo no fui, pero fue bueno que viniera- dice Benjamín Franklin Silva Donoso,
recuerda todo el alboroto en la ciudad. Las calles cortadas, la policía cercando la zona, y todo un implemento de seguridad para el cuál Salamanca no estaba preparado. Un ajetreo demasiado grande para una personalidad como la de Benjamín Franklin, más bien retraído y silencioso.
El gimnasio estaba repleto cuando la presidenta subió al estrado, y su voz retumbaba por los parlantes del gran salón mientras decía:
-Para mí es claro que el uso de estos instrumentos no pueden quedar centralizados, no pueden limitarse a las grandes ciudades, tienen que extenderse como se esta haciendo aquí, a cada región, a cada ciudad, a cada localidad y rincón del país.
Según la mandataria chilena, si no se garantiza el acceso a la tecnología a todos, “se corre el riesgo de ahondar aún más la desigualdad que existe en nuestro país".
Carl Sagan, el famoso y televisivo científico estadounidense, dijo alguna vez que vivimos en una sociedad profundamente dependiente de la ciencia y la tecnología, y en la que nadie sabe nada de estos temas. Al término de la ceremonia de inauguración, la periodista Scarleth Cardenas iniciaba su despacho en directo, por Televisión Nacional de Chile, al resto del país:
-Antes que París, Nueva York o Buenos Aires, Salamanca vuela con internet.
Por cierto, el riesgo asumido por Salamanca era alto. Un año antes, otra ciudad chilena había hecho el mismo anuncio. Pero había fracasado.
Aunque nadie lo decía públicamente, el día de la inauguración muchos recordaban una ceremonia similar ocurrido el 2005 en otra ciudad de Chile, esa vez en el sur, en Puerto Montt. El protagonista era el anterior presidente, Ricardo Lagos, de la misma coalición de la actual presidenta, quien inauguraba la primera ciudad iluminada por Wifi del país. El portal de la BBC anunciaba al mundo.
Sin embargo, aquella carrera por ser primeros terminó estrellada contra interminables fallas técnicas. Puerto Montt tuvo que abortar su plan de liderazgo. Y esa posta del número uno, en el país más obsesionado por los rankings en América Latina, la tomó Salamanca. Aunque también con problemas.
En la municipalidad de Salamanca recuerdan que al principio hubo un problema porque pusieron antenas omnidireccionales, y tenían que poner unidireccional. Y que hasta el día de hoy no son capaces de cubrir toda la zona. Si bien las autoridades están asustadas por los problemas que presenta el proyecto, y las dificultades que tiene el Wifi para llegar a toda la ciudad los tienen preocupados, una persona de esta historia está feliz con las dificultades. Es la persona que ha logrado dar con una solución a los desperfectos. Esa persona se llama Benjamín Franklin Silva Donoso.
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Si uno no tiene computador, la hora de internet en un cibercafé de Salamanca cuesta un dólar. Frente a la plaza central hay dos, donde la mayoría son niños que juegan en línea a dispararse y acuchillarse con los vecinos de asiento. El resto, los que están lo usan para mandar o leer mails, y para chatear. Rara vez se pasa de ahí. Uno de los que chatea me dice que habla con un compañero de colegio, que está a dos cuadras y que se están poniendo de acuerdo para un trabajo. Al lado está una mujer mayor, que le está mandando un mail a su hermana en Santiago, y dice sólo ve los correos y que para informarse prefiere la radio, que una vez leyó un diario de Santiago, y que nunca entró a un website de un periódico extranjero.
Si bien hay pequeñas tiendas de venta de computadores refaccionados, el fuerte del comercio de computadores se lo lleva la multitienda DIN, perteneciente a un holding de empresas repartidas en todo Chile. La oficina de DIN de Salamanca tiene a la vista bicicletas, lavadoras, televisores y, por cierto, computadores. Un cartel grande, con la sigla wifi, es el gancho comercial para una comuna que se ha tenido que acostumbrar a la fuerza a una sigla que comienza a crecer en el mundo, que promete en corto plazo cubrir las más grandes ciudades del mundo.
En un rincón de la tienda, que en realidad es un galpón repleto de mercadería, está Gonzalo Basualto, el jefe de la sucursal. Nacido en la ciudad de Valparaíso, hace poco más de un año que está en Salamanca. Cuenta que extraña ver el mar todos los días, y que no se acostumbra a ver tantos cerros por todos lados. Tiene 31 años, una mujer que se vino con él, y una hija pequeña que se quedó estudiando en Valparaíso.
No es necesario que Gonzalo lo diga, para ver que los computadores son uno de los productos estrellas de la tienda. Si bien el fenómeno es nacional: en todo Chile el último año subió un 40% la conexión a banda ancha, llegando a casi el millón de inscritos en un país de 16 millones de habitantes, en Salamanca parece mayor la fiebre. No quedan notebboks en toda la ciudad, y en apenas tres semanas se agotaron los 40 que tenían en la tienda. Desde que salió lo del Wifi la gente pide computador, computador, computador.
El jefe de la tienda DIN está peinado con gel, usa camisa blanca y una credencial con su foto. Dice que la mayoría compra a crédito, que para obtener un crédito sólo se necesita cédula de identidad, y que la ciudad es una de las que mejor paga. Según un estudio de una universidad de Santiago, dice que el 12 por ciento de los hogares chilenos debe montos que llegan a 10 veces sus ingresos. Gonzalo Basualdo no se aproblema, y dice que para Salamanca se puso un programa de 24 cuotas por una notebook. Pese a que Salamanca es una pequeña ciudad, la campaña publicitaria fue en grande y exclusiva para la zona: bautizaron los modelos de computadores con nombres como Salamanca, Pelambres o Chalinga.
-De diez computadores que se vende, nueve van con wifi- dice Basualto, y cuenta que a él la instalación de las redes también le trajo sorpresas. Eso ocurrió dos semanas atrás, en Santiago de Chile, a donde viajó a la convención anual de los jefes de tienda de DIN. Ahí estaba Gonzalo, con todos los otros jefes de tienda, en el salón de eventos Palacio Riesco. En un momento de la convención, cuando estaban en uno de los coffe break, cuenta que se acercaban los otros jefes y todos lo felicitaban, una y otra vez, por haber aparecido en televisión: “me decían que era el personaje del año... me dio risa, y me puse súper contento”.
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Estos días en Salamanca me quedo en el Hotel My House, de Avenida Infante 451, y donde generalmente lo alojan ingenieros que vienen a la mina Los Pelambres. Cuando me registro, la recepcionista me pregunta si vengo por la minera. Los que trabajan en la mina son los mas respetados de Salamanca.
En la recepción del hoy hay internet, pero no funciona con wifi, sino que con banda ancha. En los días que me quedo en My House, los que más utilizan la red son los hijos de la dueña, para hacer las tareas. El hotel es nuevo, tiene cortinas de flores, un baño amplio y esta frente al estadio. Cada vez que conecto la maquina, me agarran la señal de dos antenas. Desde la ventana se ven las antenas, que están cerca y no hay interferencia ni árboles. En otras palabras, no es tan difícil que agarre en el hotel.
Según las autoridades los problemas son los árboles, que interfieren la señal. En realidad, dice el alcalde, acá debería instalarse Wi Max, que es más avanzado, pero aún no está del todo desarrollado.
La dueña del hotel sabe que estoy escribiendo esta historia, y siempre que puede me habla del alcalde:
-La verdad es que es mucho ruido todo, pero no ha cambiado tanto internet. Es más la publicidad que lo importante- me dice.
Pese a los problemas, la fiebre continúa. En realidad, en todo Chile persiste esta fiebre por querer ser los primeros en tomar la tecnología para ser “los primeros en Latinoamérica”. En octubre de 2006, dos diputados del Partido por la Democracia, el mismo del alcalde de Salamanca y del Senador Fernando Flores, fundador de Mercator, propusieron una reforma a la Constitución del país para que el acceso a internet sea incluido entre los derechos fundamentales de los ciudadanos. "La conectividad digital debe ser considerado, al igual que el acceso al agua potable o la luz eléctrica, un derecho humano que acorte las brechas sociales en Chile", afirmó el día del lanzamiento de la propuesta Esteban Valenzuela, uno de los gestores de la iniciativa.
-Tengo como meta, para septiembre del proximo año, tener cobertura en todo el sector rural de la comuna- se atreve a pronosticar el Alcalde, a sabiendas de que en muchos sitios la señal no llega.
Golpeo en la puerta de madera de su casa, donde hay un anuncio que dice “antenas artesanales para wifi”. Son las tres de la tarde, y me abre cansado, lo desperté de la siesta.
Esta nueva visita ya no tiene la formalidad de la primera vez que nos vimos en la plaza central, y si bien Benjamín está sin la camisa puesta y en su cara trae muestras de las sábanas, es amable. A los pocos minutos me trae una silla, y frente a mi pela una naranja que compartimos durante la charla.
El tema de internet le gusta y cualquier anécdota tecnológica la escucha atento. Le cuento que durante varios años escribí casi todo mi trabajo de periodista en distintos cibercafé del mundo, sin oficina fija, y que me bastaba entrar a un ciber para estar conectado a las redacciones donde ofrecía mi trabajo de cronista freelance. Cuando le cuento que a ese tipo de periodismo lo llamé periodismo portátil, repite “periodismo portátil”. Como si estuviera registrándolo en su propia memoria.
-La verdad, es que el wifi es intramuros, por eso no funciona bien. Pero con mi antena, queda perfecto- me dice Benjamín, mientras me muestra su taller, donde corta las cañerías de plástico arriba de las cuales pone una caja pintada de plateado, y a la que le cuelga un cable que va conectado a los computadores.
Benjamín Franklin me dice que le gusta internet, pero también me dice que le gustaría tener una novia aunque es muy difícil, porque las mujeres de Salamanca se van en los autos de los trabajadores de la mina. También me cuenta que chatea con una mujer de Santiago, pero que todavía no se encuentran. Me dice que tiene muchas depresiones, que le duele la cabeza, y que a veces está varios días sin salir de casa.
Al rato aparecen sus padres, que siempre están cerca. Mientras ellos hablan al mismo tiempo, sobre Benjamín, él se da vuelta buscando alambres que me muestra como el inventor que revela sus secretos. Al rato me muestra el cuarto donde tiene su computadora, pegada a una cama sin hacer, y donde se ven tres direcciones de sitios para adultos escritos en la pared.
-Ya hay varias zonas donde no se puede escuchar radios, ni bajar música. Ya cortaron eso en algunos lugares- se queja, con el fastidio de quien escucha a Los Beatles en una ciudad dominada por las rancheras.
-o-
Cuando el bus sale de Salamanca, la primera ciudad con internet de todo Latinoamérica, la mayoría son obreros de La Mina los pelambres que vuelven de estar varios días encerrados en el yacimiento. En mi mochila llevo una laptop, diferente a aquella que me compré hace seis años, cuando me fui de Chile a escribir historias por el mundo gracias a que las revistas, los diarios, los bancos, los pasajes de avión y los hoteles están conectados a internet. Seis años en que he visto el cambio del país desde el extranjero, y a donde cada vez que vuelvo, me cuesta varios días enchufarme. Finalmente, no le conté a Benjamín Franklin que internet a mi también me cambió la vida, pero supongo que el lo supuso, cuando me dio un papel con su dirección de email para conectarse a messenger.
Mientras dejamos atrás la ciudad los caminos son de tierra, y al paso del bus vamos levantando tierra que no deja ver hacia fuera. Pero aunque no se vea, afuera del bus está Salamanca, una pequeña ciudad de un país en veloz carrera económica, y donde los índices de desigualdad se disparan tan rápido como las buenas cifras económicas. Un país orgulloso, que a veces parece esclavo, por ser el mejor en términos económicos de la región. El primero de Latinoamérica que tiene tratados de libre comercio firmados con Estados Unidos, con la Unión europea, con Japón y China. Y recuerdo el “Antes que Nueva York, París y Buenos Aires, Salamanca sale al mundo”, y aunque trato de mirar por la ventana, sólo se ve una nube de polvo.
Translation - English A Village Connected To The World
by Juan Pablo Meneses
Benjamin Franklin Silva Donoso is an inventor in Salamanca, a small town in northern Chile which, thanks to Wi-Fi technology, has become the first community in Latin America with free wireless Internet access. Benjamin Franklin is thirty-four, single, does not have a girlfriend, and lives with his parents. His skin is lighter than most of the inhabitants of this Andean town that once formed part of the Incan empire, and he shields himself from the sun with sunglasses and a hat. When we meet in the central square of the town, Benjamin is wearing a blue hat with a projecting peak, dark sunglasses and jeans.
“Hello, I’m Benjamin,” he says, timidly offering me his hand.
Since my arrival in Salamanca, several people have told me about the town’s Benjamin Franklin and his inventions, and I tracked him down through a secretary from City Hall. These days, the arrival of a journalist to Salamanca is practically an event in itself. Local authorities make themselves available to you; secretaries of important officials become your personal assistants. All thanks to the Internet.
In his hands Benjamin Franklin is holding his latest invention: a handcrafted antenna that facilitates connection to a wireless Internet signal. For around twenty dollars, the price of the antenna, Benjamin guarantees marked improvement in connection to the Net. In three months, he has sold more than ten antennas, the equivalent of two hundred dollars – two bills on which the face of the original Benjamin Franklin appears –, which has enabled him to live exclusively from his idea. Benjamin has not considered patenting his invention yet. For now, he spends his time thinking about how to improve it.
Benjamin explains proudly that in the last few months, he has been interviewed by a handful of television channels, two radio stations and newspapers with a national circulation. In addition, on October 12, 2006, he appeared on the cover of “La voz del Choapa,” a small newspaper from Illapel, Salamanca’s large neighboring city. I am about to tell him that I understand, that because of the Internet I too am able to survive writing articles for different media throughout the world, but in the end I decide just to listen.
Benjamin Franklin speaks slowly, recalling how he has always liked inventions. Long before the appearance of the Internet and wireless technology, when Salamanca was still isolated from the rest of the country, he designed his first antenna. This was in the early nineties, when, in Salamanca, the notion of a worldwide web of communication seemed like something out of science fiction, a time when computers were still seen as giant robots typical of big cities suffocated by skyscrapers and the radio still played an important role in people’s lives. In fact, the first antennas Benjamin invented were for capturing radio signals from the capital, Santiago.
In Plaza de Salamanca, surrounded by children chasing soccer balls and old-age pensioners chasing nothing at all, not even their dreams, Benjamin tells me that here people listen mostly to peasant music, cumbias and rancheras.
“I don’t think that kind of music is inferior,” he explains, “it’s just that I like English music much more. I like the classics – The Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival. That’s why I invented my first antennas, so I could listen to them.” Benjamin recalls this as if he were searching in the past for a logical chain of events leading up to his becoming an inventor of Internet antennas.
The story of how he came to be called Benjamin Franklin begins in the first decade of the twentieth century. It was then when Benjamin’s grandfather, Pedro Silva Contreras, set out to see the world as a sailor on a training ship in the Chilean navy. On one of those journeys, a century ago, the ship docked in New York.
“My grandfather sailed around the world four times, but he liked the United States best,” Benjamin tells me. “He always talked about New York, how one time he went up to the top of the Statue of Liberty.”
In fact, Benjamin’s grandfather liked the United States so much that he baptized his sons with names like Washington, Edison, and, in the case of Benjamin’s father, Franklin. Following this tradition, Benjamin’s father christened him Benjamin Franklin, after the famous inventor.
Like a shadow, Benjamin’s elderly father edges up to our conversation. He has gray hair, light-colored eyes, and is nearly toothless. It seems he did not want to miss his son’s appointment with a reporter. Both he and Benjamin’s mother are artisans, woodworkers who sell their wares in the main square. Before the arrival of Internet, Benjamin used to help his parents build and sell their products. But, like the gold miners of old, when the Internet came along he dropped everything for technology.
“My son has always been an inventor, just like the other Benjamin Franklin,” Franklin Silva says. “I don’t understand Internet, I don’t know anything, but I can see what my son is doing is very important because it connects him with the rest of the world. My father went around the world four times on a boat. Now my son is doing the same thing with Internet, only he does it from home.”
While Benjamin’s father shares his opinions, his son, Benjamin Franklin Silva Donoso, looks out toward the mountains of the Andes range thinking, perhaps, of his next experiment. Or maybe he is thinking of his grandfather, the sailor. Or maybe he is simply surprised by his father’s public display of pride.
-o-
Life in Salamanca is peaceful, quiet. Here one can see families on bicycles, children walking to school, police greeting neighbors, dogs walking themselves without their owners, parked cars with the windows left open. There are few taxis, hardly any traffic lights, and it has been several weeks since the services of the local fire department were needed. A municipal swimming pool, an arena, a gym and two discotheques open only at the weekend serve as the town’s entertainment. An old yellow truck with loudspeakers coasts by announcing a ranchera festival at full volume. A group of youths are playing guitar in the square. There are few streets in the center of town, and Salamanca has just two automatic tellers: one at a filling station, the other in the only bank branch in the city. Despite being the first community in Latin America with free wireless Internet access, most of the time Salamanca feels like a completely unconnected, utterly acoustic place.
The last few kilometers before reaching the city, located 316 kilometers north of Santiago, are a seemingly interminable series of curves and switchbacks, of steep rises and falls, through foothills consisting of narrow, dangerous valleys. The bus pulls into town slowly, its motor still straining, and one has the sensation of entering a hidden, isolated region, a forgotten place where a radioactive bomb could go off and the rest of the country would not know the difference. The majority of the bus passengers are workers from Los Pelambres, a modern, privately-owned copper mine. With forty percent of the planet’s copper reserves, Chile is the main producer of the metal in the world. In recent years, copper production has risen sharply due to a global boom in copper wiring, a sector which, paradoxically for Salamanca, would plummet in a wireless world.
Before making news as the first municipality in Latin American with Wi-Fi, Salamanca was legendarily known as a place of witches. And coming into the city, one notices drawings of airborne witches atop brooms painted on walls, in stores, on publicity for restaurants and other advertisements.
“Everyone says there are witches here, but I’ve never seen one,” says Roxana Pizarro, a young woman from Salamanca who works for City Hall and listens to radio stations from Santiago via the Internet. “In any case, it’s what identifies the city in the rest of the country. Or what used to identify it. Now we’re known for having Wi-Fi.”
The free Internet project for this small, isolated Chilean town was called “Salamanca sale al mundo,” which translates roughly as “Salamanca steps out into the world.” A witch straddling a broom appeared alongside the slogan.
Salamanca’s twenty-five thousand inhabitants might have believed the arrival of wireless technology to their little town would bring changes, but following the installation of eleven antennas capable of emitting signals without cables, the city resumed its humdrum life, the economy still neatly divided between mining and agriculture. Yet, news of the experiment traveled fast and, before long, had spread beyond Chile. Several inhabitants recall how several days after the official inauguration of the free signal, on September 4, 2006, news of the event was already being broadcast by CNN en Español throughout Latin America and the United States. From the station’s studio in Atlanta, journalist Carolina Escobar opened the broadcast enthusiastically, informing viewers that “a small city in Chile has become the first place in Latin America with free wireless Internet access. The experiment hopes to boost the capacities of the town’s inhabitants,” she continued, “with such Internet advantages as, among others, free content, digital literacy and the ability to upload material.”
Not even a month after the project’s inauguration, Salamanca, once an invisible Andean town in the north of Chile, was stepping out into the world as a leader in Latin America.
-o-
Salamanca City Hall sits directly in front of the main square. To get to the mayor’s office one must walk down a dimly lit hall, where civil servants occupying several desks greet you by raising their eyebrows. Founded in 1844, Salamanca’s pre-Hispanic past is evident in its inhabitants, partial descendants of the Incans and Diaguita Indians. Today, all the computers in City Hall are connected to the Internet, and on the mayor’s desk is a powerful wireless notebook.
The office of the city’s maximum authority is simple. In addition to the desk brimming over with papers and flanked by several chairs, there is a small conference table. Spread out on top of it are the blueprints for what will be the main square of the town following renovation. Despite its being daytime, the lights in the office are on. Mayor Gerardo Rojas, forty-three, a lawyer, and native of Salamanca, is bald and speaks in a high-pitched voice. He is a recent divorcé in a conservative country which did not pass divorce laws until 2004.
The mayor is openly enthusiastic about the project, and questions are almost unnecessary for him to start talking about it.
It all began, he explains, when he was reading an interview with Senator Fernando Flores in a national newspaper. The senator was talking about blogs, and in the interview said that any town interested in doing something with technology should contact him. The idea kept buzzing around the mayor’s brain. Some mornings he would wake up wanting to call the senator; other times he assumed it was useless, since any help Salamanca would get would be minimal.
Two months passed. Then, one day:
“I said to myself, ‘I’m going to call,’ thinking I’d just see if there were any opportunities left. As it turned out, nobody had phoned. Not a single person.”
The senator put him in contact with his foundation, Mercator, the mayor continues excitedly. Several days later, the first team of Mercator technicians arrived in Salamanca. At the first meeting, and with little delay, they were discussing providing the town with Wi-Fi. This was in June 2006. Three months later, the president of Chile was inaugurating the free signal for the entire country.
The mayor himself says that Salamanca is in fashion, though he insists that the project was never conceived as a competition with rest of the country and that being first in Latin America came as surprise to everyone. And yet, he admits that being number one has raised the self-esteem of the entire town.
That being first is good for a town’s self-esteem is something the rest of the country seems to have understood for several years now. International news placing Chile at the top of different rankings in Latin America is not only commonplace, but a source of national pride in the country. The traumatic years of the military dictatorship, when traveling with a Chilean passport meant having to wait extra hours in airports across the world, seem part of the very, very distant past. In a country guilty of human rights violations, Chileans, in less than twenty years, have assumed the continental role of being the pride of Latin America, a pride based primarily on economics.
In keeping with recent years, headlines in diverse media over the past few months appear to confirm this trend. According to the World Economic Forum’s annual report, “Chile continues to lead Latin America in competitiveness.” In its Doing Business 2007 report, the World Bank states that “Chile continues to lead Latin America in investment climate.” Moreover, a report by Federal Express identifying countries with the easiest interaction and exchange between individuals, companies and other nations notes that “Chile is at the top of the list in Latin American with respect to openness.” And finally, Transparency International’s 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index identifies Chile as the “leader in Latin America in the fight against corruption.”
Yet, the country’s sense of national pride has been generating regional animosity for some time now.
“We’re the first in Latin America, and nobody can deny it,” Mayor Rojas says.
It is after lunch. The mayor and I are drinking coffee while most of the city is taking a siesta. In mid-conversation, Mayor Rojas stops to acknowledge that Salamanca’s wireless connection is not perfect. The question has three parts, he explains, the first being the installation of the antennas. The second matter concerns digital mobility, which is to say, training people to use the technology. The third is the creation of a municipal blog.
From his desk drawer, the mayor removes some photocopies and begins to read from them out loud. In January, a new course in rudimentary literacy will be offered to 4,800 people. The course is basic – for the technologically illiterate. Training had been in the hands of volunteers from Santiago, and courses were offered at the local high school, with thirty-four computers for three distinct sessions. Benjamin Franklin attended one of the sessions, and while he learned a lot, says that he would like to learn more.
“We’re also working on an agreement with the United States Embassy about the matter of learning English,” the mayor says. He is proud of this fact, just as Chile was proud when, in 2004, ex-president Ricardo Lagos signed the first free trade agreement between the United States and a South American country.
When I ask the mayor to name a concrete benefit he thinks the Net will bring to Salamanca, I am thinking of the changes the Internet has brought to my own life, that, for example, I spend most of my days glued to a computer screen, regardless of where I am, with electronic mail as my only permanent office. For the mayor, though, the changes have been of a different character. Today Salamanca is alive, he says, and this aspect of the project has been good. He then recalls how, a few days ago on the national news, they were talking about providing all of Shanghai with Wi-Fi. One of the newscasters commented, “Yes, that’s true, but we have Salamanca.”
The project “Salamanca steps out into the world” might be financed, at least in part, by the municipality of Salamanca, but it would not be possible without an alliance with the Fundación Minera Los Pelambres and the assistance of the management and digital mobilization services of the Mercator Foundation, led by Senator Fernando Flores. The mayor and the senator are active in the same political party, the Partido por la Democracia (Party for Democracy), founded by ex-president Lagos in the final years of the Pinochet dictatorship.
“Will there be absolute freedom on the Internet?” I ask.
“There are restrictions on sex and music,” the mayor answers. “But on nothing else.”
It is a technical matter, he explains, as downloading this type of material would result in heavy Internet traffic. Yet, a few minutes later, the mayor concedes that, for now, the filters are not working. He then repeats that the aims of the project are to educate, speed up processing procedures and for Salamanca to step out into the world – a world in which music and pornography are downloaded more than anything else.
-o-
July 4, 2006 was not just any other day for the town of Salamanca. Walking its eternally semi-vacant streets, with a portable computer in tow to be able connect to Wi-Fi, I imagine what that festive day must have been like. Early that September morning, the president’s security team was already registering every detail of the municipal gym. Photographers cleaned their lenses. Members of the public school marching band tuned their instruments for the parade. Officials and journalists checked into hotels. In a few hours, President Michelle Bachelet, the first female president of Chile, would officially inaugurate free Internet access for all of Salamanca.
Albert Einstein once said that the word “progress” has no meaning while there are still unhappy children in the world. That morning, as they marched past the authorities, the children of Salamanca certainly seemed happy. Inside the arena, the stands were packed with people anxious to hear the programmed speeches. The national news was broadcasting the event live.
“The president’s coming was vital in making this a success. It really brought us a lot of recognition,” the mayor recalls.
“I didn’t go, but it was good that she came,” says Benjamin Franklin Silva Donoso. He remembers the excitement that descended upon the town that day: the blocked-off streets, the police cordoning off the area, the security apparatus for which Salamanca was not prepared. For a withdrawn, quiet person like Benjamin Franklin, it was too much.
When the president took the stage, the room was packed.
“It is clear to me these tools cannot remain centralized,” the president began, her voice booming out of the speakers of the large space. “They must not remain limited to the large cities but must spread, as we are seeing here, to every region, city, town and corner of the country.”
To the president’s mind, if access to technology is not guaranteed to everyone “we run the risk of deepening the inequalities that already exist in our country.”
Carl Sagan, the famous television scientist from the United States, once said we live in a society heavily dependent on science and technology, yet nobody knows a thing about them.
At the close of the inauguration ceremony, journalist Scarleth Cardenas, of Televisión Nacional de Chile, began her live broadcast to the rest of the country.
“Before Paris, New York, or Buenos Aires,” she reported, “Salamanca is soaring with free Internet.”
In being first, Salamanca was taking a big risk. Just a year earlier, another Chilean city had made the same announcement and the project had failed. And while no one mentioned it publicly on the day of the inauguration, many people recalled a similar ceremony, in 2005, in another town, this time in the southern city of Puerto Montt. That day, the star attraction had been former president Ricardo Lagos, a member of the same political party as the current president, who inaugurated Puerto Montt as the first city with Wi-Fi in the country. The BBC portal announced the news to the world.
Yet, one technical mishap after the other brought that undertaking to an abrupt halt, quashing Puerto Montt’s hopes to be “number one.” So, in the country most obsessed with rankings in all of Latin America, Salamanca stepped in to take the disappointed city’s place, though not without its own share of difficulties.
People in Salamanca recall that, at first, the problem concerned the use of omnidirectional antennas instead of unidirectional ones, and even today the antennas do not cover the entire zone. While problems related to the project may have the authorities worried (Wi-Fi, for instance, is still not universally accessible in the city), there is at least one person in this story who is happy about the troubles Salamanca is having. This is because he has been able to offer a solution to the flaws in the system. His name, of course, is Benjamin Franklin Silva Donoso.
-o-
If you don’t own a computer in Salamanca, one dollar will get you an hour’s worth of Internet in one of the two cyber cafes situated in front of the main square. The majority of the customers are children playing online at shooting and stabbing the person sitting next to them. The rest of the clientele send or read e-mails or chat, and rarely use the Web for anything else. One of them is chatting with a friend from school, two blocks away, about their homework. Next to me, an elderly woman is writing an email to her sister in Santiago. She says she uses the computer only to consult her email and prefers listening to the radio to keep informed. She has read a newspaper from Santiago online only once and has never visited the website of a foreign-language paper.
Small shops in Salamanca sell refurbished computers, but the bulk of computer sales are made by DIN, a department store that is part of a holding company with branches throughout the country. On display at the Salamanca branch are bicycles, washing machines, televisions, and, of course, computers. A large poster advertising Wi-Fi serves as the sales hook in Salamanca. Here residents have had to get used to the powerful influence of a technology that is growing worldwide and soon promises to cover the biggest cities in the world.
In a corner of the shop – really just a storehouse stuffed with merchandise – is the director of the branch, Gonzalo Basualto. Born in Valparaíso, Gonzalo is thirty-one and has been living in Salamanca for little over a year. Not being able to see the ocean every day is disconcerting for him, and he still has not grown accustomed to the sight of so many mountains in all directions. His wife accompanied him to Salamanca, while their young daughter stayed behind in Valparaíso because of her studies.
Gonzalo does not have to say it for one to realize that computers are one of the store’s star items. The phenomena may be national (last year, broadband connection in Chile rose 40%, reaching nearly one million subscribers in a country with a population of 16 million), but, in Salamanca, the obsession with technology seems to have reached a feverish pitch. There are no notebooks left in the city, the forty in stock at the store having sold out in less than three weeks. Ever since the appearance of Wi-Fi, customers seem to be interested in one thing only – computers, computers, computers.
Gonzalo Basualto’s has slicked-back hair and is wearing a white shirt with a name tag bearing his photograph. He tells me that the majority of his customers buy on credit, that to get credit all one needs is an identity card, and that Salamanca is among the cities with the best salaries in the country. A study made by a university in Santiago found that twelve percent of Chilean households owe ten times more than they earn. For Gonzalo Basualdo, however, this is not a cause for concern, and he points out that a notebook can be purchased in Salamanca on a twenty-four payment installment plan. Although Salamanca is a small city, the store’s marketing campaign was carried out on a grand scale. The campaign was exclusive to the municipality, and computer models were christened with names like Salamanca, Pelambres and Chalinga.
“Nine out of ten computers that we sell come equipped with Wi-Fi,” Gonzalo says, adding that the installation of the wireless network in Salamanca has brought surprises for him as well.
He is referring to what happened two weeks ago while attending the annual convention of DIN branch directors at the Palacio Riesco Convention Center in Santiago. Gonzalo and some other directors were taking a coffee break when several colleagues came over and, one after another, began congratulating him for having appeared on television. “They told me I was the Man of the Year,” he recalls. “It made me laugh, and it also made me feel very happy.”
-o-
I am staying at the Hotel My House, on Avenida Infante 451. Here engineers who come to work in Las Pelambres often stay, and when I check in the receptionist asks if my visit is related to the mine. In Salamanca, working for the mine commands particular respect.
The front desk does not have Wi-Fi, but it does have wideband Internet connection. During my stay, the Internet is used mostly by the owner’s children to do their homework. The hotel is new, with floral curtains and a spacious bathroom, and it sits in front of the arena. Whenever I turn my computer on, two antennas pick up the signal. I can see them through the window, close by, and there is no interference or any trees in sight; which is to say, connecting to a wireless Internet from the hotel should not be difficult.
According to the municipal authorities, trees are the main problem in Salamanca because they interfere with the signal. What is really needed, the mayor says, is Wi-Max. Wi-Max is more advanced than Wi-Fi, yet the technology is still being developed.
The owner of Hotel My House knows I am writing this story and whenever she can tries to slip in a word about the mayor.
“All of this has caused a lot of fuss, but the truth is, things haven’t really changed much because of Internet,” she says. “What really matters is all the publicity.”
Despite all the problems, the fever persists. In fact, the obsession with being the first to adopt Internet technology, and thus to be “first” in Latin America, is still prevalent throughout the country. In 2006, two representatives of the Partido por la Democracia, the political party of the mayor of Salamanca and Mercator founder Senator Fernando Flores, proposed reforming the Constitution to include Internet access among the fundamental rights of citizens. “The same as access to drinking water and electricity, digital connectivity must be viewed as a basic human right which can narrow social divisions in Chile,” said Esteban Valenzuela, one of the promoters of the initiative, the day the proposal was launched.
“By next September, my goal is for the entire rural sector of the municipality to have coverage,” the mayor ventures. He says this knowing full well that the signal still does not reach many places in the town.
I knock at the wooden door of a house advertising “Handcrafted antennas for Wi-Fi”. It’s three o’clock, and Benjamin looks sleepy when he opens the door. Apparently, I have interrupted his siesta.
This new visit lacks the formality of our first encounter in the main square. Benjamin is shirtless, his face bearing the marks of the bed sheets, but he is nonetheless courteous. Shortly he brings me a chair; then he peels an orange which we share during our conversation.
Benjamin likes the topic of the Internet, and he listens attentively to anything having to do with technology. I tell him that for years I did almost all of my work as a journalist in different cyber cafes throughout the world, without any permanent office. All I had to do was enter a cyber café and contact the publications to whom I offered my work as a freelance reporter. When I tell him I’ve dubbed this kind of journalism “portable journalism,” Benjamin repeats the words as if he were memorizing them.
“The truth is,” Benjamin says, “Wi-Fi coverage is wall-to-wall, which is why it doesn’t function the way it should. But with my antenna, it works like a dream.”
Benjamin says this while showing me his workshop. It is here where he cuts plastic pipes and encases them in a silver-painted box. From the box he then hangs a cable which will ultimately connect to a computer.
Benjamin Franklin enjoys the Internet, but he would also like to have a girlfriend, though this is not so easy, he explains, because the women in Salamanca are always going off in the cars of the mineworkers. He’s been chatting with a woman from Santiago, but they haven’t met yet. He is often depressed, and suffers from bad headaches. Sometimes he does not leave the house for days at a time.
Always close by, Benjamin’s parents soon appear. While they speak, simultaneously, about their son, Benjamin turns, locates some wires and presents them to me like an inventor revealing his secrets. He then takes me to the room where he keeps his computer. The machine sits next to an unmade bed, and the addresses of three adult websites are written on the wall.
“There are already places where you can’t listen to the radio or download music,” he gripes. “They cut the connections there.” In Benjamin’s words one detects the annoyance of a person who listens to the Beatles in a town where rancheras hold absolute sway.
On the bus out of the first city with free wireless Internet access in all of Latin America, most of the passengers are workers from Las Pelambres who have just spent the last few days shut away in the mine. The laptop in my bag is different from the one I bought six years ago when I left Chile to travel the world and write articles, something which would not have been possible if many magazines, newspapers, banks, airplanes and hotels were not connected to the Internet. These six years, I have seen the country change from afar, and each time I return it takes me several days to adapt. In the end, I did not tell Benjamin Franklin that the Internet has changed my life too, though I suspect he knew this already when he handed me a piece of paper with his email address on it so we could communicate via Messenger.
Dirt roads lead out of Salamanca. As the bus advances, leaving the city behind, it kicks up earth, making it impossible to see outside. Yet Salamanca is there – a small city in a country on a fast economic track; a country where the rates of inequality are rising as quickly as its sunny economic figures; a proud country which, at times, seems enslaved to its desire to be, in economic terms, number one in the region. This is Chile: the first Latin American country to sign free trade agreements with the United States, the European Union, Japan and China. Before New York, Paris and Buenos Aires, Salamanca steps out into the world. I try looking out the window, but all I see is a cloud of dust.
Translated, from the Spanish, by Kevin Krell
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Years of experience: 25. Registered at ProZ.com: Sep 2007. Became a member: Sep 2007.
I am a Spanish-English translator with 20 years experience. I work for publishing companies, literary journals, magazines, and literary agencies. I also specialize in legal translations. Prior to becoming a translator, I worked as a financial reporter for Standard & Poor's, and before that, as a bilingual project editor with The McGraw-Hill Companies. I hold an M.A. in English/American Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing.
Keywords: essays, short stories, novels, literary translations, literary agencies
Member since Sep '07
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