My childhood in the barbaric Southern Cone

The first memories from my childhood redirect me to a singular scenery:

our house was like a turd alone in the middle of Patagonia, no light, no gas, no water, no nothing, I was sure a witch would come running across the steppe, enter through the window of my room and attack me, or eat me alive, at least.

Actually it wasn't "my room", but the room, because we were family of 8, and had one only bed.

The walls were made of this thing, carton, so when the Antarctic blizzards blew wild and free in the middle of the godless winter the house waved like a fucking flag, we all family, who were inside, were shaken with the house like puppets hanging at a carromato of circus.

The roof was blew off by the wind 3.008 times in the course of 5 or 6 years, I counted them.
The only TV channels we could watch on our Stromberg Carlson were TV2 Tierra del Fuego and a rural channel from the Falkland Islands, mostly documentaries about sheep in robotic British English and "western films" in black & white with subtitles in Selk'nam.
All the apparatuses had to be connected to an engine called telestabilizador, fueled with kerosene.

Siblings and I went to school walking once a week, if there wasn't much ice. School was at 1 kilometre, in the middle of the desert, teacher was actually insane, her name was Cesarea Menotti, she didn't teach us shit, but forced us to drink liqueur and see the photographs of her family during 8 hours.

Mom was a housewife, but we could see dad once a month only, because he lived in town, and he worked as municipal waker. He walked all over town early every morning with a long stick, knocking at every window with it, and shouting until everybody was awake.
This very useful service of municipal wakers was decreed in 1.950 by Juan PERON.

Our daily dinner consisted of a plate of raw macaroni and a large cup of steam, sometimes when we could defrost the door and bicycle 15 km through the 90 cm of snow that covered the road, we went to town and had rancid bread for a week.
The bathroom was out of the house, at 50 metres, it was a vertical cabinet or latrine dedicated to the defecation. Mom told us to call it lavabo, but we called it cloaca, orinal or retrete.

When we were ill, Dr. Meringue visited our domicile and prepared a magical beverage with hot curdled milk and coagulated sugar called emplasto.

Unfortunately, the service that offered transport to town hauled by ñandu was too expensive and we couldn't afford it.

As we hadn't much entertainment, we diverted ourselves with energizing sessions of kicks in the ass from May to October, because the temperature outdoors oscillated from -30ºc to -50ºc approximately.

During the inclement month of July, especially, we dedicated the days to hibernate and accumulate a thick patina of subcutaneous lard in order to endure the sub-polar and insistent atmospheric element.


While the abbreviated and yet icy summer allowed us (first half of January), we commerced with the natives, mostly Mapuche, reason why we had to learn Mapudungun, a language saturated with fricative spasms and brusque interdental sounds

we gave them dynamite, astrolabes, heavy water and triquitraques
they gave us papa, llamas anus soup, ñame and cheese of tree.

Those were in fact the only weeks when we properly ate, no matter what.
The answer to our permanent question "Mom, will we dine today?" was invariably the same: "Eat that question".

This is when mom chased a penguin, we named it "Cucusita", mom trained the intelligent palmiped to catch balls and shoes and paparruchas in the air, in order to take it to the TV and get some money out of the animal, but finally "Cucusita" -surely envisioning our terrible intentions- escaped in advanced state of denutrition while we prepared the oven to roast it.

In spite of these mutual transactions, the natives regarded us with displeasure, antipathy and aversion, this is why they used to throw compact boluses of crap on our roof, and painted the front of our house with derogatory words of insult and abuse using pintura Albalatex.

Fortunately in 1.970 mom won the lottery and we could buy a Torino (also called Torinacho), 900 kilos of Terrabusi cookies and 1300 litres of Toddy. With these victuals we survived three years.

To get some money I was engaged -against my will- to work for a local clown, Firulete, we formed the duet Firulete & Cañito, and we performed our routine in different circuses of Río Gallegos, Fitz Roy, Alto Río Senguerr, and other phantasmal towns, but Firulete was alcoholic and fetishist and tried to pervert me, so I ran away through the pipeline of the toilet.

Still, one of my fondest memories is when, in summer, mom and dad entertained us playing international danceable rhythms from any country, say, Polka, Tango, Cajun, Cha-Cha-Cha, Pasodoble, Ranchera, Chamamé, Boogie-Woogie, Tarantella, Reggae, Muiñeira and other amenities. We tried to dance to it, to no avail, due to our ill-nurtured contexture and constant loss of consciousnesses.[sic]

And all this happened before we endeavored the hardest endeavor (precisely): traveling to the Spanish Sahara in our Torino, also using amphibious dispositives to cross the ocean, like escafandra and tubo de oxígeno. 


But that's another historia, Gloria.