However, let’s return here to our Cervantes, “in reality he liked symmetries”. Much as the somber author of Being and Time found the dawn and the hope in a new historical happening, our thin and sad bard, our man who only knew how to find refuge in shady places, destructive with alcohol, found the dawn in a smiling, populist, military demagogue, that wanted, contrariwise, the poor, and came to use them, I don’t know, who handed out access with more generosity than anyone in that southern country, who intertwined himself with a passionate woman, with an obscure history, with an actress, with a resentful and ambitious woman who dedicated her life to avenge herself on the rich and to protect the poor until cancer caught up with her and delivered her over to the myth of those that die young. The bard was the frayed and popular philosopher of the colonel of the people. They handed him the radio and he spoke over it overflowing with infinite ingenuity. He believes, Professor Heidegger, he believed and wanted to believe. He believed so much, that later, too late, he realized that only he alone spoke on the radio. No one answered him. No one could answer him, because the colonel was authoritarian. On his people spoke and no one else. When, with the fall of the colonel, the others spoke, what a spectacle, Professor Heidegger, the festival of vengeance, the macabre dance of hatred. They forbade the name of the colonel and made his wife’s cadaver disappear. Discépolo they left alone. He died in 1951, barely after his enlightening chats. But, isn’t it noticeable? The poet believed and when he believed he didn’t imagine a single question. Enthusiastic, vital like never before, he made himself the chatterbox of a regime that persecuted dissidents. The dissidents – who were ferocious – killed him: they sent him threatening letters, with his records broken in pieces, insulting him, and they even spat on him in the street. He believed and believed wrongly. He came out of the shadows, out of anxiety, out of alcohol and being towards death. He put himself in front of a microphone, which someone handed him, and he spoke of social triumphs, public housing, new homes for workers, paid vacations, of the beautiful music of a good meal. But the man that handed him the microphone was a wretch, the Secretary of the Press and Media, the little Goebbels of the regime. And every truth that wretch enshrined turned to poison. That poison killed the poet of our great tangos.

You too were mistaken when you believed you’d seen the light, when a faith was born in you, when you sheltered your terrors under a great historical movement. Do you know the alleged absolute of error? Action. You and Discépolo – in 1927 – didn’t act; you weren’t militants for any cause, except for anxiety, about death, or about nothing. When you believed seeing the light, you dressed your lives in mourning forever. Discépolo died. You chose silence. Isn’t silence a form of death? Doesn’t your silence create an opening, Master, and immense territory from which your words will be forever absent?

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:57 AM