I remember Lorenzo Sigaut. But I remember it because of his famous phrase and nothing else: “He who bets on the dollar, he loses.” Admirably wrong prediction, but at the same time admitting that, in this supposedly scientific field, a component of chance intervenes (bet: win, lose; the same as in front of a roulette wheel. Was there already talk at that time of the “timba financial?). Of the rest of Sigaut, I do not remember.
I remember Dagnino Pastore, but only because I kept hearing in the name, as it may have happened to others, an effect of homophony that made it appear “harmful”. I remember Jorge Wehbe only because of a cover of Humor magazine, that is, because of a caricature of him more than because of him, without being more precise about what he did or what his name was Jorge.
I remember Juan Carlos Pugliese, but not his tenure in office, except for an equally famous phrase: “I spoke to their hearts and they answered with their pockets” (what if, due to a phenomenon of cardiological displacement, they no longer had heart, more heartbeat and feeling, than the pocket or the pockets?). I remember Jesús Rodríguez, but not his time in the ministry. The same thing happens to me with Erman González.
I remember Miguel Roig and Rapanelli, but only in relation to oblivion: for sensing, already at that time, a destiny of not being remembered (remembering Rapanelli’s son is not the same as remembering him). I mostly don’t remember the day or two days of Nicolás Gallo. Of Miguel Peirano yes, but because we were schoolmates (I in the tenth, he in the seventh. From the time we beat them 1-0 at the Sports Field, the newspaper already reported Clarion). I don’t remember Carlos Fernández. I remember Hernán Lorenzino, the same as that other Hernán, Hernan Lacunzabut I suspect that someday they will forget me.
That’s how it happens with time. When the present gets thick, when it stuns you with always the same thing, when it overwhelms you with a kind of Nietzschean eternal return with no chance of Hegel-like dialectical overcoming, when the past seems to come crashing down on top of any illusion of the future, it gives me relief to verify that memory is also made up of forgetfulness, that even the past is partially pierced and enables possible backwaters, that history can change someday, that things will someday become different.
And so, on days like these, in the gaps of memory, not to escape, but to take a breather. The one that, as is often cited, Ireneo Funes did not have.
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