Vivir afuera (Living Abroad) is the title of one of Fogwill’s most famous books.1 I confess I haven’t read it yet. And I understand it has nothing to do with “living abroad”. But I don’t care. Because for me, obstinately, this novel connotes Argentina at a distance.
Soon after the book was reprinted in the late 2000s I visited Buenos Aires, that place that was never mine but that I borrowed for a while in the 90s. I remember buying it in a bookshop in calle Corrientes, before ransacking a DVD store in the opposite corner. Fogwill’s book ended up under dozens of pirated Argentine films, first in my suitcase, and then on my shelves. Every now and then — when I have an OCD episode — I tidy up my books and bump into it. I remind myself I have to read it but I don’t. I’m disappointed that this book isn’t about living abroad. The book ends up lost in my library again.
*
I have been living abroad since 2002, when I left Argentina slamming the door, after being unemployed or badly employed for years. I left with the few savings I managed to salvage from the bank before the Argentine currency collapsed. The money was barely enough for a ticket and to see me for some weeks. I left for Dublin, where I had friends, and where I could crash for free for a while. My only Irish references were James Joyce (who I hadn’t read and won’t read), U2 (who I’ve never been really into), and Sinead O’Connor (idem). If I’d had friends in Berlin, Reykjavik, Rome, Madrid, or Oslo I would have ended up somewhere else. Anywhere. Because the only thing I wanted was living abroad. And if possible, never stepping on Argentina again. Many of my generation left for self-exile angry, with the feeling we had been monumentally shat all over. Maybe it’s us who shat all over those who came after. Perhaps we should have stayed and put up a fight. But we didn’t. And that’s another story.
*
The day after I started living abroad — thanks to chance and those friends that welcomed me in Dublin — I started washing dishes. I counted the dishes for some time but I don’t really know how many dishes I really washed. There were many dishes, that I know, because I washed dishes for months. Going from a hopeless but still comfortable middle-class unemployment to washing dishes for a living was a bit of a shock. But it was also the beginning of something new: something had come unstuck. And suddenly I could pay my bills, buy a round of drinks.
I recall the start of the Millennium and the months before leaving Argentina with a knot in my stomach. That sensation that everything was rotten and that nothing was moving in any direction; checking the papers each Sunday, searching for work; the few adds: mobile phones seller, commission only; the eternal queues for a single vacancy; the same neoliberal economics of the previous decade, now eternalised, tattooed on the national DNA. After all this, washing dishes and getting paid in € every Friday afternoon, religiously, seemed like a dream.
Would I have washed dishes in Argentina? Maybe not. To wash dishes you have to be living abroad. You have to cut with those networks of solidarity that both keep you out of the gutter and hold you back. And when those networks are no longer there, you have to realise how privileged you actually were.
*
Living abroad also meant the beginning of something else: asking myself what it means to be Argentinean. This is a question that more precisely started with the first passport control in Dublin. A question that was in the back of my mind when I first called back home using an international dialling code. A question that I haven’t been able to answer during visits to Argentine consulates in Ireland, France, the UK. Over several precarious jobs. While completing visa applications and equal opportunities forms.
Like many other Argentines I had been sold the lie that Argentines are a bit European. I thought I’d be received with open arms (and open legs). Nothing further from the truth. Living abroad is paid for in many ways, and one of these is by losing your certainties. Perhaps not by losing them, but by coming to realise that your certainties were shit. Epiphanies are great but living without certainties — not matter how wrong these were — can be hard some days.
I still don’t know what it means to be Argentinean. Perhaps it’s better that way.
*
A while back I visited the Argentine embassy in London for the first time. I started talking to an old lady, who happened to be from my same city, Rosario. She told me that after 45 years in the UK she had decided to go back, that she no longer had reasons for living abroad. “Do you visit the embassy often?” I asked. She said “the last time I was here was when the protests”.2 “The 2001 ones?” I asked, feeling time and space collapse. “No, boy! The protests from last year!” she said. “What were those about?” I asked. “I can’t remember now,” she said. I guess that when you are living abroad the images, the places, the protests all blend into one.
I sometimes wonder if Fogwill’s book also isn’t about this.3
Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill (1941-2010) was an Argentine writer. His fantastic Los pichiciegos (translated into English by Amanda Hoskins and Nick Caistor as Malvinas Requiem) remains in my opinion the best fiction book about the Malvinas War (1982). I had the luck of exchanging a few emails with Fogwill, from 2008 till his death. I sent him my first book and he promised to read it; I live in hope he didn’t.
I don’t know how it was before social media but in recent years Argentines living in London have gathered outside of the embassy to protest about different things, mirroring protests in Argentina.
Originally published in Spanish in 2015, in Nota al pie, now out of print. Translated and adapted by the author, who therefore deserves a credit as the author, one as the translator, and double pay. I have since read the novel, but I went along with the “I have not read the book” to capture the spirit of the original piece. That Vivir afuera remains untranslated into English is a tragedy. Or not. Books exist in other languages too. Perhaps we need language tutors more than we need translators.
Don't be such a snob, and read “Ulysses”. You know it's the sensible thing to do.
This is how good it is: https://thegreatestbooks.org/items/122
I read it with the help of a companion text, understood only half of it, and still think it's moving and awe-some (literally): https://tripu.medium.com/ulysses-f470b92406f7
(U2 isn't — or rather, wasn't — bad, either!)
this is very moving. Except for refusing to read Joyce, I guess because the cult is so annoying. Joyce is fabulous. You can read him without telling anyone.