That’s my work.
Just imagine, my father, being Pope, has to confront the problems of man today with the obsolete weapons of the old Church. It’s like defending yourself against Jedi light sabers or assault drones with bows and arrows. Robin Hood versus Darth Vader, you know what I mean? That’s my father’s courage and that’s why he doesn’t mind leaving the plush surroundings of the Vatican, going out into the world, and stopping on the street to talk about the rights of women and homosexuals and divorced people, and to fight for the planet, which we have to protect and keep clean. He’s obsessed with cleanliness because he knows it’s something that will settle on the spirit. You’ll have seen him during Holy Week, washing the feet of Muslim drug addicts, and prostitutes. I think he overdoes it a little, but anyway. The old man is fighting a monster that has two thousand years of history behind it, and he has to take changes on board. Basically, I understand him. The Church has committed crimes and that’s why I criticize it, but it has to be admitted that thanks to it the vast mass of Catholics are able to experience and practice some kind of spirituality, and that’s no small thing, is it? It’s a very strong need, like feeding ourselves or procreating.
You on the other hand, Consul, have culture, but how many people are like you? how many experience and practice what they’ve learned, if they’ve learned anything at all? Not many. A select minority, and I tell you this right now: what I do, in principle, is not addressed to the privileged, although it doesn’t exclude them either. To use the language of marketing, I would say they aren’t my target audience. The masses are my most urgent raw material, not those who have access, through their professions or their advantages, to other regions of the spirit. You say that today the world has lost its gods and that man is left to his own devices, but I tell you something else: those who follow me aren’t alone. The citizens of my Republic can depend on the word of the elder brothers of the Earth and the water which I pass on to them, because I have ears for all that echoes from a long time ago.
I’ve always known who I was and what my path was. I grew up in the mystery of life, but I grew up alone; don’t go believing that just because I was an only child I was privileged. Not a bit of it. I always had the barest minimum. My mother is a proud woman and she would have died before asking for anything from Bergoglio, who in those years was still provincial superior. I still respect him and even love him, in his distant way. He doesn’t know about my existence, I can assure you of that. But perhaps he will know of me soon. Old Bergoglio will find out and say, I’m proud of him, he’s my son and he’s fighting at my side, as sons should do, except that his is a fight I can’t wage openly.
When I think about that, I feel moved, but it’ll pass. I’m talking about my life, wait and I’ll tell you exactly how it was. My mother brought me up by herself, which I think saved her life, because her desire to look after me took her away from her militant activities. I wasn’t born yet and already I’d saved someone’s life! But my mother, what a fighter she was! She wasn’t poor, she was middle class. The daughter of a German immigrant, her name was Susana Melinger.
My real name is Carlitos Melinger. The son of Susana.
I was born strong, it may be my father’s Piedmontese inheritance, who knows? My mother filled my feeding bottle with calcium and soy milk. That’s why I’ve never broken a bone, though God knows I’ve taken plenty of blows. Once, when I was eighteen, I was knocked down by a motorcycle. Nothing happened to me. I got up from the ground and went to assist the motorcyclist, who’d broken three ribs, can you imagine? The motorcycle was completely ruined.
My mother saw my potential and from when I was a child she had me playing rugby. In Argentina only the rich play rugby, it’s a prestigious game. I was allowed to join in because my mother was respected among the Germans and my grandfather had a decent farm and sowed soya and cereals. I studied medicine to understand real men and their physical pains. I read philosophy and history.
My grandparents had money, though not much.
Once, after a match, a hulk named Casciari insulted me. I let it pass, but the guy just went on and on, as if he was looking to pick a fight. For a while I didn’t take any notice, but he was really angry because I’d tackled him about twenty times during the match. I told him to leave me alone, that what you did on the field was something else, and he should go home quietly. But he just kept on bothering me and even mentioned my mother. I felt as if a bolt of lightning was going down my spine and lodging in my balls. I grabbed him by the shoulder and said, do you want to repeat that? The guy smiled and spat in my face.
Poor guy, the least of his worries was the punch I gave him on his nose. He was flung backwards and hit the lockers, and two of them fell on top of him. Nobody said anything because they’d all seen him provoking me, and what I learned that day was how fast my arm was. The guy didn’t even see the punch coming and when I hit him I felt several teeth being knocked loose from his gums. When I helped him to his feet, he spat them out and I said to him, don’t talk about my mother again, because the next time I hit you I’ll knock your nose inside your face, would you like that? He was already starting to bruise when he limped over to the sink and threw cold water over his face. He apologized and I said to him, come on, let’s hug, I forgive you and I’d like you to forgive me, too. You hit yourself by being so stupid, you took my fist out of my pocket. It was you and nobody else.
That day I earned everybody’s respect, or fear. And that helped me. When I got back home I lay down on the bed and moved my arm about. It really was fast. What if I became a boxer? I thought about it, then told myself that maybe I’d been given that strength for something else. And I was right.
I won’t bore you with details. I’ll be brief. I grew up in Córdoba, partly at home, with my mother, and partly on my grandfather’s farm. I learned to love that land as if it was my own. I’m not like so many Argentinians who want to get hold of a European passport and leave, not be Latin Americans anymore. I understand them, but I think they’re wrong. The future of the planet is here, in America. Europe is the past. It’s worth coming to Europe to understand and see it with your own eyes, nothing more. I did it myself: at the age of nineteen I went to Germany to continue my medical studies, I was a fool! There for the first time I found out about the movements whose aim was the cleansing of the territory. I got to know the skinhead world in Berlin. They were incredibly angry people, but in many cases they didn’t even know why. They’d been humiliated, they came from working-class families, they thought their conflicts had something to do with the humiliation of Germany after the war. They weren’t completely wrong. They were nostalgic for a greatness they hadn’t experienced and they blamed neoliberal politics and democracy, which, according to them, gave power to the ignorant masses. The thing about the Jews was something I never shared. Wasn’t Jesus Christ a Jew? He was an amazing guy, even if he wasn’t the son of God. What happened in Germany, as I’m sure you know, was an economic problem. The Jews had money when the country was in a mess and people didn’t have anything to eat. Yes, the bourgeoisie were sons of bitches, but not because they were Jews! They were like that because they were rich and selfish. The rich are like that in every country.
These skinheads had good intentions and no culture. They didn’t even understand the things that were important to them, which really drew my attention. I started reading history. I devoured books on the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I studied them all the way back, I think, until the Trojan war. And I understood why they’d happened. It’s nothing to do with morality. They all start from the same things: money, land, or religion. Call it politics, call it independence, call it holy war. Call it what you want, it comes to the same thing in the end. It’s always for one of those reasons. Do you know one that wasn’t?
I realized that these guys were nostalgics, and that what they hated was their own situation. Their own lives. Deep down, they hated themselves. It’s a
lways more comfortable to go out and beat up a Jew than look at yourself in the mirror and accept that you aren’t worth shit, isn’t it? They’re losers. They’re wrong because they don’t have a plan that might be viable or have any chance of victory. It’s just gut feeling, pure emotion. They cling to violence because it makes them feel important. They’re such losers that they get their struggle mixed up with soccer. That’s how confused they are.
I spent time with them in the Lichtenberg area, in the bars near the S-Bahn station, drinking beer, looking at their black jackets and their tattoos and that kind of thing, and to be honest I learned a lot. Things that were useful to me later. I never got involved in their wars. Only once did I go with them to scare away a group of Arabs who were selling drugs. I threw a few punches and I don’t deny I enjoyed it, but I didn’t stay to the end. It helped me to understand how the mechanism of hatred worked and to what extent it was important in life and in political activism.
I left Lichtenberg for good after they grabbed a couple of Vietnamese and beat them up for no reason. They were left on the street, bleeding and with broken bones. One of them lost an eye. It was a scandal. Their soccer team had lost by three goals and they just wanted an outlet for their anger. It’s true I did nothing to protect the Vietnamese, I didn’t do anything, but I decided to get out of there for good. I realized they would never get anywhere, wasting their strength like that.
I came across other better structured and more interesting groups, although they were small. The first was the Old School Society, in Berlin, which attacked mosques, shelters for Arabs, and hard-line Salafists. With them, there was more of a method. They knew what they wanted and they started with modest objectives. I had already realized something, which was that the world could no longer continue on the same path. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Nazi. The fact that I approve of certain things doesn’t make me a murderer or a defender of genocide. No, words have to mean something. I was with the skinheads, yes. I met people who were violent because their ideas were very poor. But what made them rough people wasn’t ideology: they were and are that way because they’re people, because they have feelings and the world hurts them in a way that it doesn’t hurt anybody else, and there are certain kinds of pain, man, that can only be relieved by blows, something that today’s reality forbids you. Because history and ideas and human collectives have messed everything up.
That’s the way it is.
We have animal impulses that seek relief.
The people you see on the streets, who do you think they are? Not everybody is a recognized and respected bourgeois. No, man, for most people, life is a terrible struggle. This is the African jungle! While some live in air-conditioned homes others have their feet buried in shit, but it’s precisely there, in those sordid places, that the future of the world is being defined. Who’s going to survive a nuclear war? You tell me. The bourgeois who has his shoelaces tied for him or the lowlife who kills rats with his teeth? It’s easy, man. I’ve read the Bible, too, and I know we’ve already lost paradise; that’s why those who are down here continue to fight. The man who feels comfortable is screwed, because those who come from Arabia and Africa and India will swallow him up, you know what I mean? They’re going to fuck us all up the ass, and without cream!
They have the strength that comes from hunger and humiliation and pain. What can you do against that? fight back? how? Call in a professor from the Sorbonne to explain it all to them? will anyone listen to him? In spite of everything, we have to understand that the sense of historical guilt is useless. You can’t say they have the right to shit on Europe because Europe took their countries and colonized them. No, man, that’s not the way it is. If you say that, you have to accept that the only morality is resentment and that we Latin Americans have the right to destroy Spain, to shit on her when we feel like it, and the gringos on England, and do they do it? Of course not! They’re allies. Look at the Jews. If the logic of history was resentment, Israel would be firing missiles at Germany, not at the Palestinians! The lives of countries are like the lives of men. I’m not going to beat up my mother on the pretext that she hit me when I was a child. There are periods that should be shut down, stuck in a box, and left there. You have the memory of what happened, but you keep moving forward, right? That’s why I say to you: things can’t go on like this. The world can’t and mustn’t continue with this enforced mixing. Some here and others there. That’s nature, which should be our example. Have you ever seen a hen going to live in a treetop in order to find food, or a tree growing at the bottom of a river? No! Nature should be our example.
It was in those days, in Berlin, that it happened to me for the first time. First I felt that the sky was darkening in the middle of the day and that people were gesticulating in silence. A weird kind of eclipse. I wasn’t capable of going out on the street so I stayed in bed and turned out the light. I spent three days without eating. Just water, Coca-Cola, chips, and beer. All that was left in the refrigerator.
I don’t even know how to describe it.
As if a light had suddenly been switched off, but without my knowing what it was for, without knowing that damned switch was even there! Imagine a flock of crows flapping about in slow motion, completely blocking out the sunlight, and coming toward you. When I got up in my underwear to take a leak or drink a little water, my legs felt heavy, my bones hurt, I was dizzy. I was a total mess, and I didn’t know why! The following Monday, I summoned up the strength to go out to the pharmacy. When the assistant saw me, she let go of what she was holding in her hand and pressed the emergency button. She thought I was a drug addict having withdrawal symptoms.
I said to her, don’t worry, I’m only here to ask for help. I feel this way and that way. She took out some painkillers, put them on the counter, and advised me to see a doctor. I asked her if she knew where there was one and she said, yes, you go out of here, turn right, then right again, so I went there and when I arrived, I sat down in the waiting room; when it was almost my turn, I remembered that I didn’t have any papers, or any money either.
I was incapable of moving.
When it was my turn I got up from my chair, but my legs gave way and I collapsed. A nurse helped me into the consultation room. When the doctor asked me who I was and what was wrong I could hardly speak. I didn’t know anything, that’s what was wrong. I was in a cold sweat. The same doctor called an ambulance and I was taken to the hospital, where I spent a couple of days. When they moved me from the detention ward I passed a mirror and saw my face. What I saw was my own corpse looking at me. After three days they ruled that I had severe depression. I had to rest and take Tofranil. When the doctors saw the chart, they shit their pants. I realized something elementary, man, which is that life doesn’t have the slightest meaning, and instead of being liberating, that produced in me an anguish and a fear that paralyzed me; it even gave me hallucinations. To stop this suffering, you’d throw yourself from an eighth-floor window, wouldn’t you? I thought of that several times, but the fear protected me. Did you know it’s one of the best weapons of defense that we have? Fear makes you grab hold of something, fall on the ground, or duck your head when the bullet comes. Without fear we’d be dead. The doctor preferred to keep me going with Tofranil. My dear friend, he said to me, you have a biological disorder that, I’m sorry to say, will never leave you. He asked me about my family background and I said nothing. If I’d told him that my father was the provincial superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina he’d have put me in an asylum.
I said yes to everything and thanked him.
Auf Wiedersehen!
With those psychiatric drugs, the world turned into something that was happening in the distance, on the other side of a very dirty, opaque window. They allowed me to choose between electroconvulsive therapy and taking antidepressants. The therapy seemed too mechanical to be useful. Do I look like a Peugeot? The pills would be fine. After two weeks, when they stopped feedi
ng me intravenously, I stopped seeing birds. My relationship with drugs was only just starting, and I looked up and said, what is this? I thought about my masters and about the kingdom of voices and asked myself, isn’t this part of the illness? In that case, nothing would have any meaning. What was I to understand through this illness? I started to think, there in the psychiatric hospital, until I reached various conclusions:
Someone wanted to show me pain, in order to make me understand the truth of the world.
Or he wanted my brain to abandon all logic because the task he gave me escapes human reason, and understanding might be a burden or an obstacle.
Or he wanted to tell me that my life wasn’t completely mine, but belonged to something deeper and more permanent than me, which tries to communicate through the hallucinations of illness.
This was very possible, I told myself, because illness takes you out of the predictable current of the world. You’re sitting on the edge, unable to move, and you see everyone else pass by. As if they were in a canoe, you know what I mean? The flow of life doesn’t mix with your own time, where martyrdom and the past of man and hallucination are. Imagine you could remember all your pains and they came back to life. The anguish of birth, for example, passing through the narrow channel of delivery and coming out into the world. If someone could remember that, he wouldn’t be like other people.
Nor does humanity remember when it walked the land naked, pursued by dinosaurs with sharp teeth and massive paws; that savage period has been left behind, lost in memory, because if we remembered it we would still be paralyzed in a fetal position, unable to leave our caves. Forgetting is as necessary as hope, man; only he who forgets can believe in something and keep going.
I left the hospital emaciated, with a bag of pills and the conviction that from now on my life was going to be that of a stranger. I went home, sat down in front of the TV set and observed what was happening in the world:
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