The truth is that I don’t remember being born. What I can definitely claim is that what “El Bicho” states in his memoirs is not true, “Marcelo was born in a day when the sun didn’t even show up” because, aside the mundane connotations that this evokes, I want to confirm that the day I was born the sun not only shined bright high- causing the contrasts that later on would be represented in my paintings – but it was a beautiful day as well, one of the few that were remembered in my home town Villa Bosch. This was a very picturesque and cute little town and not a scarce town as “Bicho” also declared. The story that I have decided to tell will put in perspective some of my childhood memories, so far long distant – specially now that I live over 3,000 miles away (I couldn’t help but chuckle as I wrote that gringo metric, if my dad saw me writing that he would’ve said “don’t be like that you dolt, distance is always measured in kilometers and not in miles)... okay, that I live over 4800 kilometers away.

But, as Big Feet said, let’s take it one step at a time. As I previously revealed, I don’t remember being born. But I am sure that it was at Villa Bosch, Buenos Aires, Argentina around the 60’s. As you can tell, my manly vanity keeps me from revealing my real age completely. Now that I think it through, if I say that I was born in the sixties, I could be from 38 to 47 years old. And that is unacceptable! On a second thought I better say the year I was born in, it was in 1965. Let’s better keep things straight to avoid misunderstandings.

Now, the year is not really as important as the series of events that happened the next ten years after that and definitely marked my way. My childhood was completely happy and full of adventures. Nevertheless, for this project I have decided to choose a chapter that reveals not only a lot about me but also about the placed I used to live. As any good Argentinean, Soccer is not just a part of my memories, but is also a part of my entire life. I will not start unnecessary arguments with El Bicho, who dared to say that Kempes was better than Maradona. ¡Give me a break, such a lame comment! God bless (and I am not talking about God Maradona, but the real God from above) anyone who dares to say, cause it means that he doesn’t know anything about soccer, but to discuss that I would need a whole book. It’s enough to say that I grew up like any good Argentinean “pibe” with the faith and belief that football was everything. In fact it was, for several years during my childhood and early adulthood. This story I am about to tell you not only reflects the passion that I lived as a young man for the kicking sport, but also shows the determination and contrast that you could see in my future paintings. Out of pure literary reasons, this story is called Revancha Gaucha (Gaucho Revenge) (a name that if Jorge Luis Borges had heard during his life would’ve for sure used for one of his own stories.) What a name! I thought of it one day, that already a little drunk in a bar, I found a guy that not only tried to steal my fling for the night but also had the nerves to drink from my beer. That is why I started beating him after crying “Revancha Gaucha!”. The man was stunned, not only for the place I hit him first but also because I don’t think he spoke a word of Spanish. Ok, let’s get back on track; this is the story of the Revengeful Gauchos:

Gaucho Revenge.

In Argentina, who doesn’t like football is not a “Pibe”. Who is not a “Pibe” is not a kid. It seems like we are born with the blue and white t-shirt already on and ready to score a couple of goals immediately after coming out of the womb. My childhood, like many Argentineans, was marked by the desire of playing football at all times. This story narrates the episode in which during a summer we were decided to construct- to later destruct-, a football field. In order to make these plans go through, El Bicho and I, who were always together, took all decisions for the rest of the group. We chose a field 300 meters away from the house and by the railroad tracks. It was the perfect size for a football field, but it came with the gigantic task of cleaning it and get rid of a couple of trees that happened to be inside of what later would become the Small Area. So, with a lot of excitement and plenty of free afternoons – to be honest, when we are kids, what else do we have but free time? – That summer we dedicated all of our time to fix that land so that we could have our very own football field. Besides Bicho, his brother Alejandro and sister Nenina worked hard on this place too. We were like the fantastic four because we were inseparable. We also convinced the neighbors next door, the Goicochea brothers to help, in a very selfish way I must admit. They were three little brothers who lived next door and went from being enemies to being friends according to the adventure we were living at that moment. Thus, one summer day we began the cleaning endeavors. This phase went by without major incidents, nothing special to remember aside Nenina slapping one of the Goicochea brothers because he implied that she couldn’t carry a stone that needed to be taken out of the field. Immediately after this happened, she proceeded not only to carry the stone but also tried to throw it at this Goicochea brother’s head. This caused an incident that almost ended the small alliance we had just formed. However, the wish we all had to finish the field kept us together until the end. The cleaning chores lasted over a month: remove garbage, cut little trees, flatten the field, and cover ant holes. Towards the end of the second month, the field resembled more to a football field and we started painting the white lines of the Small and Big Areas, and some other as well. This is when the second incident with the Goicochea brother happened. It is well known that these stripes are painted with calcium oxide and that you need to use some sort of mouth covering device so that you don’t breath the dust that comes out when you are painting everywhere around the small Area and the Corner kick. Turns out that this brother was so determined to paint a perfect penalty kick that ended up creating a dust cloud that looked like somebody was cooking an Argentinean beefsteak “Las Pampas” style, but with white smoke instead of black! The “Pibito” (small boy) Goicochea ended up with a terrible cough attack he couldn’t get over of no matter how much we tapped on his back. Bicho thought that throwing a water bucket on him would make him get over the coughing, but this only made things worse because it formed a construction paste on his face that almost made him choke to death! Nenina aggravated the whole situation by saying “If only you weren’t so stupid! This can only happen to a Goicochea!” This remark wasn’t easy on the ears of the other two brothers who at that point were very close to ending the alliance once again and start punching everybody. Nothing happened at the end. Deep down inside, everything found its way to being resolved because despite making believe that they hated her, the three Goicochea brothers were secretly in love with Nenina. She was always a mystery to me. She would sometimes be running up and down as if she were one of the boys and then spend three days in a dress playing with dolls. She had really bright black eyes and luscious curls that could barely fit inside the baseball cap she wore when we played football or baseball on the street. Sometimes she didn’t say a word and some other times she would tell you things that would make you want to choke her. I think she never surprised me as much as when she held my hand and took me to the back of her house to tell me point-blank: “Marcelo, teach me how to kiss!” The surprise was not about the unusual petition, but because at my age I surely knew less than her about this. Regarding to kisses, I only knew that princesses gave them to toads to turn them into princes. She looked like a princess, but I was not a toad. My first impulse was to run, I don’t know if to run away from her or to ask somebody how to kiss. When I dared to look her into her eyes I realized she had already closed hers. She was standing in front of me, with her puckered mouth and her curls covering her shoulders. Even if I didn’t know what a kiss was at that moment, I realized what beauty was. I was paralyzed. She was waiting for a kiss and doing nothing more than to pucker her lips and lean forward looking for my lips. I was biting myself on despair. If I only knew at that moment what I know today, I would’ve given her a big old movie kiss, the ones that you even hear music in the background and always end up on a take that slowly moves away from the kiss and ends up on a lamp that is moving rhythmically. When I reacted and decided to do it, as I was leaning towards her I heard a voiced that said: “Marcelo and Nenina sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G”, “Marcelo and Nenina sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G.” It was the stupid Goicochea little brother that appeared from nowhere to ruin everything. Nenina, transforming again passed in half a second from being a princess to a warrior and chased him to knock on his head until the poor boy begged for mercy. After that she seemed to have forgotten everything related to kisses. Well, not forever, but I can’t talk about that because gentlemen have no memory.

Back to the original story, the field was almost ready for its grand opening, but Bicho and I had decided that our field would have nets for the goal areas. This is because a goal that doesn’t sound in the nets is not a real goal. Due to everybody coming from families in which the money funds were always scarce; we didn’t have any choice but to become go getters to collect the funds. Go getters always find a way to get money or the means to get what they want. So, we started looking for old things to exchange at Don Chanito’s store or sitting at the railroad station and waiting for the visitors offering them magazines in exchange of a small amount of money. Sometimes we went to Doña Sarita’s restaurant to clean here and there and earn some pesos. A very time consuming activity was to separate the aluminum paper from the cigarette boxes to sell it to the drugstore. This required finding the cigarette box, take out the paper it had inside and very carefully separate the cellophane paper from the aluminum. We would spend entire afternoons doing this, but it gave us a decent amount of money in exchange. By being go getters for two weeks we earned enough money to buy a net for the goal area. Now we needed to find a way to go buy it to the town of Palermo. This took us back to our roles as go getters in the trashcans looking for tickets that travelers had bought and thrown away without being punched by the ticket clerk. We also had a plan B that was to travel without paying making sure that the ticket clerk didn’t notice, which involved us having to go off the train at the next station and wait for the next train.

It was a Tuesday morning when we could finally use the field with its brand new nets. I remember that I even cleaned my shoes that day with special devotion. Yes, those same shoes that my mommy asked me to clean so many times. She swore that the shoes were so dirty that they could start walking by themselves one day. I have to confess the day my shoes disappeared, I hesitated for a moment thinking that the shoes had gone away on their own, but later I realized that my Mom, who was already fed up with them, had thrown them away without telling me. I dressed up, with my blue and white t-shirt of course, and headed towards the field. Ever since that first game what I remember the most is my willing to be the first one to ever score a goal, but the one that ended up doing that was Bicho. Nevertheless I want to be very clear that the one that had the strategy and moves was me, fooling three enemies and shooting for the goal that ended up deviating and becoming a perfect pass for whoever just kicked it to the left. There were other goals, and of course one of them was mine (by the way it is not true that I used my hand to do it, like Bicho declares in his Memoirs; If there were a video of that game, you could clearly witness that I stopped the ball with the upper part of my arm, almost my shoulder, and not with my hand.) When the goalie was distracted yelling that I had cheated, I took the opportunity to kick a lefty to the upper right corner of the goal area, scoring the best goal of the day. Next I started running to celebrate like the big ones do and ignored the screams from the rival team that demanded for that goal to be ruled out. This ended up in a giant argument. This only made me confirm that I have always been a person that because of its own natural talent and special style, always creates controversy. The goal was valid because I said so and because I refused to rule it out, even though they didn’t add it to the score. The thing is that the kick was so perfect and so well planned that it should have counted without even taking into consideration that I did used my hand a little bit. I know that the good Diego (Maradona) and some of the other big ones would’ve agreed with me.

During the next three weeks we had daily soccer meetings. This frenetic activity was interrupted only by the arrival of the circus into town. That was a big occasion. That was definitely, the only thing that could part me from football at the time. I think I had never been as young as when I was at the circus. There was something magical that involved all the pilgrimage of people and animals going from city to city juggling and presenting tricks with wild animals. The circus with all its hustle and mystery was arriving to Villa Bosch and transforming it completely.

With great devotion, as an anxious father waiting for his first born to arrive, I sat to admire how the circus would slowly pull together. A trammel here, a hole there, some really big ropes over here, a new world was slowly forming before my eyes and being trapped inside a giant tent. From that moment on, like a Pee Wee Herman’s adventure, the mission became to find a way to enter the circus without paying for a ticket. Go getter. My entry techniques included: faking that my parents were already inside and I had been left behind; offer myself for any job in exchange of a free entry; making believe I was just another kid from a family that had just came in – in one occasion I glued myself to the skirt of a lady insisting that she was my mom and I didn’t let go her legs until we were already inside.
But this year, the ticket clerk was a guy named “El Burrito” (the little donkey). I don’t think that is the name his mom gave him, but that is how everybody knew him. El Burrito made a special effort to deny my entrance, and I don’t think it really helped me when I came up to him and said:
“Burrito don’t be a dolt and let me in, it doesn’t cost you a thing anyway” His answer was: “If you want to come in, buy your ticket, and my name is Adriano, not Burrito.” He said this with such a straight face that almost made me believe that his real name wasn’t Burrito after all. This finally gave me a great idea. Since that day was a Sunday, I decided to take my portable radio and hear it near the ticket booth. Burrito, as any good Argentinean, was a faithful football fan, so I immediately noticed how he was trying to pay attention to what was happening in the game. With malice aforethought, I would turn the volume down every time there was a big exciting moment. I could almost see Burrito trying to stretch his ears to be able to hear what was happening without leaving his spot. My tactics finally worked when I heard him say: “Come over here boy, you can come in if you leave the radio here and let me hear the game.” Inside I found Nenina, who also loved the circus and told me that she had found a hole in the fence behind the circus and had used it to come in without any hassle.

As soon as the circus had left town, the football activity picked up fully. We felt like we owned the world, and we almost did by owning our very own field. We had control of those who we invited to play and when they could come. Most of the players lived at Villa Bosch too. Everything was going great until one day Bicho, with his wide loose mouth, made a comment at Villa Urquiza about our little football field. The very next day a boy from that town came to our field wanting to play with us. I can’t remember his name, but we named him “El Patotas” (big feet) because he was wearing a pair of shoes that were so old and full of holes that you could almost see all of his toes (we could also tell that he probably didn’t know what a nail clipper was.) This apparently funny event should have worried us, because if one was arriving from Villa Urquiza, with big feet or not, could mean that some more could also come.
That was exactly what happened. By the end of the next week, we were full of Urquizians wanting to play. Later on people from Saavedra and Colegialas came. In less than two weeks we had people coming over from Palermo. To make it worse, the new players were older, so we lost the control of the field and we ended up being able to play only when the grownups let us. I was willing to put up with all that to be able to play in our field even if it was for just a little bit. But when I knew everything was going to hell was when Nenina had decided to quit playing and spend all her time looking at other boys playing. She had even changed those blue shorts she always wore to play (by the way I don’t know when she washed those shorts, not because they were dirty but because they always looked pristine. I am never going to know if she was washing them at midnight everyday or if she had 100 pairs of blue shorts) and that specific day she was wearing a dress! To make it worse she was giggling with some knuckleheads from Palermo that aside of being ugly, had skinnier legs than Bicho. That is a lot to say giving that he got that nickname for having mosquito legs. You can imagine how thin the legs of those Palermo dudes were.

When we lost the control of the field because it was being used by 15 to 20 year old guys at all times and we were not allowed to play, we decided to do something about it. They could’ve have taken the field from us, but now they were also taking our women and we were not going to allow that by any means. Bicho and I sat down to come up with ideas. We knew that if we did anything that would affect the field like destroying the goal areas or the nets could be easily resolved by the invaders and they would still be enjoying a free field. Of course the best and most intelligent options were given by me, but nothing compared to the Gaucho Revenge proposed by Nenina, who was wearing her jeans again and had forgotten about the Palermo guys. The Gaucho Revenge was an evil plan to end the fun of all those opportunists who invaded our ground and didn’t spend two months of hard work getting the field ready. So, with maliciousness that was hard to believe came from kids, we came up with a plan that guaranteed success.

Our first step was to go house by house at Villa Bosch asking for bottles and other glass articles. My job, maybe influenced by my taste for different colors and patterns, was to get several color glass bottles. Bicho collected everything he found that was made out of glass disregarding the color. Truth being told is that he had always been a little dull. At the end of a couple of days we had over 25 canisters full of bottles and other glass articles. I think Nenina even broke three dishes in her house at dinner time so that she could use them. Her mom was not very happy about it. That night, very silently and using flashlights, we all went: Bicho, Alejandro, the Goicochea brothers (who were allies once again and not enemies) and me, towards the football field to put our Gaucho Revenge into action. We didn’t come back until several hours afterwards, with dust coming out even from the inside of our clothes but smiling as wide as we could and shining under the new moon night.

Epilogue

Some days after that, Doctor Ortega told us that he had received in his office a young man from Palermo with several glass cuts in his right butt cheek. Apparently, he had been playing in a field near the railroad tracks. He was playing as a defensive player and during one of the first moves of the game; he decided to sweep away on his left side to stop the guy who had the ball. He only felt a terrible burn in the top part of his leg. He stood up just to realize he had several wounds. He said that he didn’t realize that in that part of the field there were a lot of broken glasses underneath the soil. Doctor Ortega told us that the same afternoon two other boys came to see him with similar stories. He said that somebody had been filling the field with millions of pieces of broken glass, and that the pieces were covered with soil so that they could be seen at the first glance. He said that the field was unusable because it was impossible to get rid of all the glass. Doctor Ortega gave us the final report: in only one day there were six injured people, two flat balls, a destroyed field and Gaucho Revenge.