In the south, in the wild pampas where I live, there are still gauchos (argentine cowboys) that when hungry, guide the horse towards some particularly clueless cow, one of those distracted ones that deviate from the herd and are left alone, ten or fifteen meters away from the main group. They get down at the exact distance so not to frighten the cow, walk slowly towards it, muttering, humming some syllables that just repeat the word vaca (cow), with the "a" more elongated, interspersing other words like "quieeeetaaaa... ", "aacaaaa..." (saying vaca, but in a more guttural way, without the letter v). As if the animal understood the language. At one point the cow stops grazing and looks into his eyes. It thinks. It processes the situation and trusts. It stays still, as if hypnotized. The gaucho strokes the center of the head with the left hand, he stands firm, with gaping legs, knees slightly bent, one leg forward gripping the ground firmly and the other one, well supported, and in one motion grabs it by the ear, and with the other hand pulls his knife from his waist, and in one motion stabs his knife into its neck. He buries it to the hilt, and makes a sound with his voice, drawing the energy of the lower stomach, which sounds like an orgasm moan and the sound they make when they break the karate wood or when they fight, and kick like foolish dolls.
The cow falls over and bleeds to death. The bullfighter does almost the same thing, but with a substantial difference: the ´gaucho´ betrays the cow. In the final situation, in the outcome where the bull and the bullfighter stand face to face, there are a couple of seconds where they look each other in the eye. The gaucho looks at an angle. He disguises himself. He takes advantage of the trust.
Then, he ties up the horse making a knot with the reins twisted in a sprig of grass. Paja brava. He looks for a tree. He gathers branches. Some thicker trunk while he lets out shouts of triumph to notify friends.
They gather in a circle (I imagine them squatting, in the same way prehistoric men did), make a fire, eat pieces of charred, undercooked flesh like beasts, and leave the rest to the vultures. While eating, they take long sips of rum with half-chewed food still in their mouths. They swish it around. They spit. They laugh. They get drunk. They talk through their hats. They enjoy themselves. They talk about women... about dead people... about ghosts.
That's the first image that embodies me when I think of the word homeland. Soon after comes the smell, the texture, the scene where I find erotic, sensual, primary, deeply beautiful pleasure surrounding miscegenation. Deep America. Almost india: a maid, Odolina, who finishes bathing in the background, in a little bath that was in the yard, in the house of my early childhood in Gálvez. She was combing her hair, untangling her jet black straight hair, with her head down, forward, legs slightly apart and in flip flops.
I remember – as if it were yesterday - the smell of cheap shampoo, of the countryside, of a morning in the summer vacations and it fascinates me. Then I connect with a very humid afternoon, autumn heat in Santa Fe, more or less at sixteen years of age, leaving an art cinema named Chaplin, the only cinema club in Santa Fe. It was at the bottom of a dark, depressing shopping arcade, where I went to see Stalker, the Andrei Tarkovsky zone. I left the cinema on a high.
Surely smoking Parisiennes.
In those blocks, from the center (San Martin Street) to my house in Guemes Street, I think was the moment where I had the idea - a messy spurt of blurry images where I surely connected with a state of paranormal consciousness, different from everyday reasoning and I realized I wanted to be an artist. Or that I was already an artist: someone who is in dire need of talking all the time about how they feel, about oneself, about surroundings: that foggy street, the sticky cinema, the waterfront, the lagoon...
About how frustrating it is confirming day after day the impossibility of building a, more just, more caring, more dignified country.
The need to leave a record, to exorcise, to leave proof.
Marcos López
