This evening I went out for dinner with my friends Tom and Geraldine at a nice spot in Palermo called Las Cabras. We met at 9, had a lovely meal together, and left around 11. Tom and Geraldine took a cab and, having firmed up plans to meet Tom in the morning for a final run before he and Geraldine depart Buenos Aires tomorrow evening, I started towards home, about a 1.5 mile walk through a very safe neighborhood, most of it along Avenida Santa Fe, one of the main arteries of the city.
As I rounded the corner from Fitz Roy onto Santa Fe, I saw a couple running towards me, pushing a shopping cart between them, and laughing. They were youngish, and the woman was carrying a baby under her arm. They were accompanied by a scrawny looking dog. They were obviously pretty poor, and what many here in the city might refer to as negros de mierda. The term "negro" in Argentina has no real racial connotation, but there certainly are undertones of classism involved. Anyway, I remember thinking that their childcare skills needed some serious help, as the bouncing up and down as they ran along could not have been doing this poor baby any good, and it looked pretty distressed and bewildered. So was I, I guess.
When I say the woman was carrying the baby, I mean to say she was carrying it the way a running back might carry a football, though with significantly less protection. I rather suspected that if she had "fumbled the ball" she'd have been more than happy to let the opposing team take it and run it in for a touchdown, or wherever else they might want to take it. Although I count myself among the left leaning of the world, I recognize that this kind of criticism is likely to invite a knee-jerk reaction from a lot of those who believe any criticism of a "subaltern" group is absolute sacrilege, and that whatever kind of destructive behavior those people might exhibit is surely the fault of some privileged white male sitting somewhere, and not the fault of the underprivileged individual in question. To some degree, and in many cases, I can get onboard with that...to some degree. Life is complex, social problems are complex, cause-and-effect-and-cause-and-effect is complex. I get it. I, however, choose to assign the lion's share of this woman treating her child like a ragdoll to the woman herself.
Anyway, it was a disturbing sight, and I wondered what could possibly have been the hurry, and assumed they were probably trying to catch a train or something. In other words, I gave them the most possible benefit of the doubt I could with a good conscience. And then I saw Fernando come around the corner.
Of course, at the time I did not know this stranger's name was Fernando. All I knew was that he was covered in blood, it looked to be coming from a gash on his head, and he was shouting, "Which way did they go? Which way did that cowardly little bitch go?" Suddenly, I realized the two parent-of-the-year candidates were not running for the train, but had instead just committed an assault and were fleeing the scene. I yelled, "They just ran past, there they go!" and, as I am wont to do (and much to the chagrin of...everyone?) I joined in the chase.
This is the way I look at it: This is a city full of people who, understandably, abide by the mantra "no te metas" (don't get involved). Just a couple days ago I had seen a typical display of this as people walked past a boy beating and robbing another boy on the street. Let me reiterate that, intellectually, I absolutely understand this approach. The city, while not that dangerous, certainly has enough dangerous people lurking around to make it a real risk to "get involved." So I really can't criticize those who prioritize their own personal safety in the face of potential danger. I'm just not one of those people.
What's more, I think that if we let those who are willing to do harm to others have their way without putting up a fight, we're all doomed to be victims of those who are more willing to do violence. And that idea sickens me. Put aside the more global ramifications of that statement for now (and I'm well aware of them, trust me). I'm talking about on a person-by-person basis. If we're all willing to roll over and play dead when those aggressive individuals prey on us, and if we're all willing to turn the other way when someone else is being preyed upon, we're essentially giving up. Again, I get it. I understand the value of personal safety, and by no means am I trying to say that I don't value my own. What I am saying, however, is that I'm not willing to be a victim, and if I can, I want those would-be predators to understand that there are those of us out there who will, if struck, strike back. And there are those of us who, should we perceive a situation in which an innocent individual is being victimized, are willing to step in.
In this case, when I saw Fernando, covered in blood, running after his assailant, I thought, "Here's a man after my own heart." We chased this guy a solid couple of blocks (Fernando lagging behind, being injured, older, and slightly heavier) when I saw him pick up a glass bottle and turn back to threaten us. I was quickly gaining on him (the street punks who can outrun me, I imagine, are few and far between), but when I saw this, fell back a little. He continued running, and I continued running after him, but at a safer distance while I looked for my own weapon. After a couple blocks of winding west, north, west through Palermo, I found an empty wine bottle, and picked up the pace, closing the distance. Fernando was quite a ways behind, yelling at the "fucking coward" to stop and face the music. The guy rounded a corner, I rounded the same corner a few seconds later, but he had disappeared. Fernando caught up, panting, exhausted, and bleeding like a stuck pig. We walked together back to Avenida Santa Fe, and then back the way we had come. We crossed his attacker's "mujer", and Fernando informed her that she was living with a little piece of shit coward, and that when she was 40 years old, she could remember this night, and tell her child what a pussy his father was. Pussy in all capital letters, he clarified.
We walked together for a few blocks, and he filled me in on what had happened. He was standing, waiting for the bus and talking to his wife on the phone, when the young man and woman had approached him to ask him for some money, the man holding the baby. He told them he didn't have any, at which point the man sucker punched him, and an unseen assailant hit him over the head with a stick, opening the gash. Fernando, an ex-Marine, did not go down, but instead hit back, causing one of the brave young heroes to run away, and then delivered a kick to the other's kidney, causing him to hand the baby off to the woman (yes, he had punched Fernando WHILE holding the baby) and run. Ostensibly, the woman took off beside him and that is, more or less, where I entered the story.
Fernando was absolutely incredulous that anyone had helped him at all, and was extremely grateful, inviting me a coffee with him after he changed shirts and washed up. I gladly accepted. When he found out I was an American on vacation, he was even more flabbergasted, and showed his appreciation with a pretty manly hug. We sat for about an hour at a cafe and talked.
Like most Argentines that I know, he was very conscious of his heritage, and came from Dutch blood on his mother's side and Arabic on his father's. He had dropped out of high school and joined the marines, serving 5 years as an infantryman before getting out. He now worked as a waiter at a restaurant in Belgrano, and was just on his way home from work when he was attacked. We talked for quite a while about Argentine history, and I was surprised (but at the same time, not so surprised) by his grasp of both 19th and 20th century immigration history, and different conflicts the country had been involved in. This conversation branched into a discussion of various aspects of Argentine culture, child-rearing, and the economic interests of the British in Las Islas Malvinas, all of which he had very interesting and well-informed perspectives on. It was a fascinating conversation, one that you couldn't have with many high-school dropout waiters. But, you know, this is Buenos Aires.
As we left the cafe and walked back to his bus stop, he thanked me again, pointing out that in this city, it is a rare thing that a complete stranger comes to your aid. He invited me to go eat at the restaurant he works in tomorrow night, which I'll be sure to take him up on. I thanked him for the coffee, and told him I was glad to meet him. It's not every day, I said, that you meet such a nice guy under those kinds of circumstances. He laughed, gave me another hug, got on the bus, and said he'd see me tomorrow, and maybe after we got off work, we could see if those fucking cowards weren't lurking around the neighborhood again.
No comments:
Post a Comment