"Our future", Cristian Alarcón's article that served as a germ for the Alfaguara Prize

Beside me a beautiful man has nightmares.Does he dream with monsters?Does he dream of an abyss in which he falls?When he is coming to the deep of his dream, when his long and bony body, carved tattoos, is about to fall into the final rocks of the precipice I imagine, he wakes up from a shock and the fear that I can smell it is so close.The look outside of itself, the eyes in a spectral brightness, the wet temples.He is a boy.I hug him, I reassured him, I tell him that everything is fine, that there is nothing to fear, that he sleeps, that he sleeps, that he sleeps.And he does it, he returns to his dream.A few days after weeks, fear becomes similar.I usually see it from time to time, we are at some point at night, on electronic tracks, at parties of Perreo, in corners, in After Hours.He is my friend, we love each other.And sometimes he stays at my house and sometimes he is afraid and I protect him.

My friend knew that it was beautiful too late, after a hard adolescence living in houses taken and convent, going to schools where they discriminated against him black, poor, to dance like none, for curly hair, for clothes.But thanks to pop he knew not only that he was beautiful, in a disturbing way, but he knew of music, rhythm, beats, incredible letters.And he learned to dance, to move like nobody with those steps in which the body is governed before the mind, and to touch, to sing, to rhyme the prose of the Dub, the poetry of the last century that was ended then.And when he knew that he disturbed with his shy silence and with his artistic power he became a model and posed for artists, and had his band, and one day he fell in love and left everything to the chingada.

My friend has memories and in the night of the quarantine, which by chance finalempty, confusion and errors.And of his dreams, of those who dream awake to think about the future.But it seems that I don't know how to listen enough and I don't understand what he wants, what he dreams.It seems that a thousand years will spend until I can meet my friend.Maybe ever.Maybe tomorrow.My friend has memories and a present in pause.And in this present viral he is afraid.So, when there were no pandemics and we could get together on the busy dance and noise, he was afraid of his childhood ghosts.He was afraid of what he could return from that dark area.It's normal, I try to tell you.We usually fear the past.To which we cannot even remember of our past.

Now, these days of pandemic, my friend is afraid of the future.

How to build a possible future in the face of global uncertainty, the most intangible and complex slope to disarm pandemic?We have no other alternative than to think about the elaboration of the future on multiple devices born in the recent past, which will be reviewed again and again to capture what is essential.The essentials as the new order of politics in our lives: to essentially see, appreciate the essential, share the essential.A kind of global curatorship map with intimate and local root, where those who produced culture, ideas, metaphors and interpretations of reality again visit them, now with the awareness of a massive finitude.We are going to die.Many are going to die.Some are going to die.The awareness of the enormous vulnerability of the human.

My friend, for example, could have stayed at their parents' house, who had to leave the one they occupied in a neighborhood to move to that of a relative. That is why that meeting was providential, days before the announcement of quarantine, and then that night that now seems so far away, when we saw the president together asking us to stay in our homes. There were little for twelve, and we said why not until Sunday. And a month passed and my friend at home and I without knowing him. In that difficulty of mine I read badly, maybe I'm still wrong, but I thought about my friend in that house with others with another ten, and I thought I needed to be calm and my house is great, and in my family's house there was always a place to Travelers, for friends. Then later I thought that the only reason for him to endure an impossible coexistence was to put the machines, his machines, his precious capital. With them he has manufactured and maintained in recent years a clothing brand. I have seen how the inhabitants of an club in Palermo fought through those garments. I have seen newborn stars fight for those garments in Buenos Aires night. I bought those amazing clothes for my son, for his friends, I have given what my friend does with the pride that a friend does. My friend is one of those people with multiple talents and from those talents he has entered and left, but he always returns to two who have given brightness and money: music and design. Of course who makes a party, a recital, a festival, a pogo these days.

And who is going to make clothes on the days that run, on the following days.My friend does not doubt it: he must then ask for emergency help.It is logical.It is what corresponds.Like millions of other entrepreneurs there is no way to get income, there is no way of moving or selling anything.

The future is suddenly those ten thousand pesos that could be fuel for machines, to return to productivity.But only, right now, in this saint, that minimal breath of air is suspended and does not reach the lungs, and my friend, from the other end of our confinement tells me with a message that I read, like everything elseDamn, on the screen: your application has been denied.

How will my friend be afraid of the future?

Even so, he and millions of informal workers who already endured the four years of losses and recession, and that passed through 2001 in the street and gas, on the street and indebted, on the street and dancing thriller, despite everything,You have the dream that goes beyond the nightmare: design and make the clothes you like, pass the music that passionate, organize the parties you know, compose songs, write lyrics, dance.It is only about resisting this quarantine, crossing the extemporaneous time threshold that proposes us, and starting again.Founding everything again?It is perhaps to take care of the partialities that we rebuild and survive in the middle of the collapse without regretting how the chips that fall as a result of an invisible cheese fall.The future as a more arbitrary assembly of what in principle offered you a promising capitalism in which they swore that you were the one that chose.

If there is a way of imagining the future, it is with a awareness in which the dispensation of energy in general will be key to a re -foundation of any kind.We must choose between affections and loves, works and pleasures, be much less pretentious, while efficient in what of survival.How we will learn the amount of energy we spend in material and symbolic terms.Money.Objects.Enjoyment.Weather.Look.Listen.Our disposition towards them.Probably we must keep some, as my friend says, not for altruism if not for survival.

Suddenly the spaces of being with others, of being socially, in the scene, disappear during quarantine.They are diluted in the near future.At the same time that the agora of the social scene contracts or impliosupport in the coming months.Before the pandemic the networks that would supposedly guarantee in their factual function human contact fail: the non -existent of the loop makes them liars and toxic.There is more and more a replication, and an ironic use takes control of what was built happiness.Between the rising modesty and the distance from the experience of the other, irony is all that remains.Except for the literals, which will always have where to express themselves.

Those that until now by class mandate pass through the university or we have minimal artistic, intellectual, professionals, emancipatory trajectories, holistic efforts, aspirational ambitions- sum, good intentions- it has been difficult for us to subtract us from a protocapitalist and binary imperative:exist or survive.The imperative of existence, in our desire-from the most psychoanalytic claim-, in our identity-to give us an ego's blow in the idea of the singular since the obvious difference of the contemporary human-, in our urban neurosis made ofgestures and scenes.Or the imperative of survival: "do" to win and pay.Is there anything wrong about it?

Thanks to the virus, this false moral dilemma of the subject merchandise will be withdrawn from us. Let's be ready for a dilemma that will summon us as no other crisis summoned us before. Not even dictatorships, because then there was nothing to escape, hide, endure torture and confinement, survive. Not even coup attempts. Nor the cyclic crises of our economies. Nor natural catastrophes. Nor all the neoliberalism of the planet producing poverty and looting the richness of each nation. Neither the worst of music, nor the most frightening of theaters, nor the series ruined in their endless seasons, nor bad poetry, nor packaged literature, nor the lack of sexual desire. What will put us again against the wall and what we will not have escape will be the other and the body. Alone or with others? Safe, or all at risk? Matter, body or mind? Body and thought. In a single movement made of all movements: massive, universal, national and revolutionary.

In the southern village of which I came there was a day when many believed that the world was over.My grandmother Aura happened.To top it off, at that time, and for pure refuge from the usual drunkenness and the palm palm of my grandfather Isaiah, the socialist worker, Aura had witnessed Jehovah: what better for a witness than the end of the world?At the lowest of the town, beyond the peasant village of my ancestors, next to the river, a linen factory was actually burning.The fire razed with machines and fabrics, threads and bencinas.The chemicals of the laboratory, the engines, the warehouse exploded as programmed by the demon.And in her small wooden house my grandmother put her in her, almost ten kids of her to pray to a last voice in a last attempt to make eternal life before the Armageddon.

During these days I can't stop thinking about it. Aura was born in the field of Fabiana, a mother who had the color, the body, the land of a Mapuche woman, but with a Spanish or Portuguese surname: Carballo. The genealogies of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were lost in time because the surnames mutated when at the beginning of the twentieth girls like her were given to the patterns of funds, abandoned in diasporas by invasion of land, married to men who did not love , like Don Julio Carrasco, my great grandfather. Fabiana stepped on a city for the first time when she was already old and threatened cancer. She was accompanied by my aunt Ivonne, the youngest daughter of Aura, Melliza de Iván; She used to represent a comic number in which the grandmother looked at each other in front of the great mirrors of a metropolitan commercial gallery without knowing it, ignoring herself: pass woman, pass, what porfed by God this woman. She told that stranger with an Indian face that imitated her in each movement on the other side, in that world in which the image of oneself was worth little, because she lived alone in her plot, surrounded by animals and trees , with the earth.

I grew up with my mother repeating: this is the end of the world.Each tragic event in the family, the end of the world.A man abandons his woman's wife.A woman to a man, the end of the world.Him's eldest son.World's End.The Berlin wall falls, the end of the world.The youngest son of him gay.World's End.Aura dies of a stroke, too young, just when she stopped suffering.World's End.She divorces her heterosexual son.World's End.Two planes crash against the twin towers.World's End.A tsunami sweeps the peoples of fishermen, the end of the world.The youngest son of her divorces.World's End.Chile explodes and sets fire.World's End.It falls from a ladder and fractures the wrist, the end of the world.A virus encloses humanity and kills tens of thousands.That, the end of the world.

And instantly that pile of intelligence that has been and is my mother rebels.She always says: To begin with, after all, the virus is not so idiot;It is logical that we will die first the old ones.Then: locking ourselves and that the world changes forever when we have returned is not a misfortune either.Let's not exaggerate.She says.Resist, we have resisted and we know how to do it.She says.She was able to leave the town, from the countryside, of the hill, of the river, of the night.She was able to cross the mountain range and save himself.She could forget.She could remember from time to time.And at every step she could assume that the world does not end.That the future is the only inescapable.

My grandmother did not know when she fought for forgiveness for her sins - which sins could commit a peasant who spent the day in water boots buried in the earth growing strawberries, currants, beans, potatoes and flowers, in the eternal rain of the southern southeries , perhaps hitting the children - that while he did, while asking God to reserve a place in paradise, she and all her children and my mother resisted. Something similar we do these days of confinement: we pray, although agnostics, although atheists, although mundane and abúlicos, although depressed. Why is it but to pray that internal journey to which sooner or later forces us the imminence of infection? What is but a preaching that stir of old photo boxes looking for us carefully in the future we were? What if not a prayer that selective dialog It ends?

The nightmare of the disappearance of the world is not the one that prevents us from sleeping some nights, like my friend.In our dreams, things, houses, cars, clothes, cell phones, travel, birthdays, televisions, objects.I don't know if people disappear, that would be a repeated dream, the real nightmare of the past.The tangible disappears.Parties.Pieces.The whole does not disappear.The whole becomes rather chaotic.On the horizon the future threat with its disappearance, but it is like the challenge of a permissive father: it never becomes true, it operates as a weak and inefficient ghost.That's the worst;We know that the future steps on our heels and we don't know what it is like, what face it has, what is called, how it will allow us to survive, how it will affect everything we ignore it in our risky existences.

These days the philosophers who risk more or less insurgent hypotheses about our future, almost always European, usually cite Walter Benjamin, the German who wrote in the Paris of resistance with an anti-gas mask within reach. The philosophers, almost always male, discuss this historical moment: which is like a war, which in no way is a war. In those days in the world, Benjamin was clear: “If the enemy wins they will not be safe or the dead. And it is that enemy that does not cease to win. We are not in a war, we are far from being. But perhaps we should think that we are for the first time in two hundred years before a clear enemy. And that enemy is not the coronavirus. But at the same time the confusion queen when the structures are barely begins to collapse in their foundations. Faced with this tremor of which we barely listen to a slight and buzz the buildings of the economic system prefigure the fracture of its pillars. Societies already know that democracy is not enough and crosses as the best known system to improve the lives of citizens. What can be thought about the future when we only have a hacking diagnosis that we denied everything we can as dying whose pain is mitigated by the trade of morphine.

Rethinking the future then implies an unthinkable effort of imagination and creation, cyclopean, collective. Rethinking and re -founding the future is much more than getting out of this crisis that is already known to have at least two years to stop breathing and pre -ancient a world so much more complicated and to top it off by the presence of microorganisms that show their intelligent power. Distinguish between the smoke from bombs of meaning launched by the super powers by disputing the natural resource, the markets, the possession of the data of millions of citizens, the routes, the lithium, the oil, the water, is at least difficult. In that confusion activists, political leaders, opinion, fighters of all kinds, can enter swamps if they get carried away by the first impressions. Perhaps the greatest confusion is around the function, mission and the dominant character of technology. Its demonic condition, such as that of the virus itself, does nothing but leave it in the hands of corporations that hold the creation and use of algorithmic neuronal networks whose functioning and logic we do not know as much as the infinitesimal world of bacteria and viruses.

The viral condition as a significant time will continue to go through. In a world dominated by humans, the end is pressed as a hand of humans. The supremacy of the human can be the end of the human. In that cruel paradox, fate is played after pandemic. The preservation of what remains, the environmental struggles fed by the humanistic vision of feminism and non -binary policies - beyond the gender issue even - come to give us some food today to start thinking: it only remains pending what construction which construction can Do that theory in dance and that activist praxis for curbing the destruction of the planet with an economy that protects the weakest and puts a brake on pornographic accumulation and financial capital. This thought for the first time in a long time requires intercontinental exchange, and must have the south as a crucial axis for true innovation: particular cases will make more and more sense to international thought. It is unfortunate to read Wuhan's soup engaged in a dispute over the philosophical Batacazo when applying their theories with forceps on the real happened to humanity.

The world, we have seen it in lost news and in some fast documentary, has suffered pandemics in a cyclical way. The black plague, which hit Europe between 1347 and 1353 until decimating cities and fields, kingdoms and states had only been preceded by one of equal virulence, at the time of Emperor Justiniano, 6th century. That plague that was born in the black rats and moved through fleas traveled by boat, and spread around the old world from the East to the West thanks to trade: he entered through the ports and advanced mercilessly on cities first, on hamlets later . Produced a flow of dead that shudders: there is talk of 60 percent of the entire population of the Iberian Peninsula. Only in the nineteenth century the first scientific researchers discovered that it was a bacterium: it inflamed English and armpits, attacked ganglia quickly, and in some it became septicemic, that is, it entered the blood at full speed rotting the organism. He had a second way to kill: the pneumonic plague, more similar to our coronavirus, produced a cough that infected with the air.

In Argentina, yellow fever attacked between 1852 and 1871 and only in Buenos Aires killed 8 percent of Buenos Aires, about 14 thousand throughout the country. He arrived from Paraguay and then by boat from Brazil. He divided the city into two: the south of the poor, the north of the rich. Later influenza came from Europe in 1918 and hit three waves to 1920 leaving about 20 thousand dead. Although at the beginning he did not distinguish between poor and rich ended up cornering the most unprotected, especially in the northern provinces where he showed a health system between precarious and non -existent. Known as the Spanish influenza, influenza was perhaps the engine of the first great concealment of the powers embarked in World War I. Millions of dead hidden in military trucks and buried in common graves. That pandemia inaugurates a notion of global world. A historian of the time spoke of "the unification of the world for the disease." He also made it clear that the industrial city implied death and illness. The Coronavirus has reached our homes by plane, a thousand kilometers per hour. Our virus is inserted into that modern pandemic lineage. Science faces them since then, that fight is a battle that the world has given, knows. It is not a war.

Since we exiled and took refuge in Argentina, my defenses went down and my body almost had no truce.I was a sick child.I was sick because I was a child too feminine and that's why they treated me with hormones.But for the doubts my body was in charge of confirming it: extirpted angina, hepatitis, measles, convulsive cough, flu, inexplicable fevers frequently took me to the hospital.As a child I wanted to be a doctor, it was the most romantic that I could think of being an adult.In those long convalescences I became a writer.I listened without remedy to my mother tell her life as a proletarian girl.Two scenes taught me what it was about being poor.Our social ascent thanks to my father's success as an inventor did not deprive me of the awareness of that vulnerability.

When my mother was still a girl in the town in the south, a shortage outbreak arrived. Last estate of an ancient plague, which disappeared from Latin America only in the eighties. The plague attacked their parents and to protect them they had to distribute the boys in relatives and relatives. She sent her to her grandmother's field. There she suffered the abuse of one of her relatives, that isolation of her broke her innocence and signed her the rest of her life. When she was already twelve, my mother had to attend the childbirth of the twins who were born in her house. The boy, Ivan, was born without problems. The girl, Ivonne, was crossed. She was dying. My mother had to go to catch a black chicken with which the midwife made a ceremony and saved the life of the creature. Days later the largest earthquake in history shook all Chile. In the south an immense tsunami took villages and sank cities. The family left the house, everyone ran to save. But in the fascination with the girl, they forgot the boy. My mother entered the bamboleante house and went out with him in her arms. She ran desperate when the earth opened under her feet like a hot bread that we just took out of the oven. My mother then knew how to survive: she opened her legs, like playing the rayuela until the earth closed again. At around her her neighbors died, swallowed by the enraged land.

How was the future for that surviving girl? What was the future of a girl who was saved from the end of the world? Can we think about this stage of the global plague in the possible future? The question for the future that an economy holds in extreme crisis, the idea of ​​a post war in which states re -enhanc their ability to order and organize societies does not leave even a place for the question for the individual and their role as a collective builder. We have not thought about that future together, it is for now a chimera. How to think about the future when we haven't seen the dead yet? That will be what ends up confronting the structural, which is subjective and political in a way that we could never embody. Extreme vulnerability is that, the massive and capriciously selective death of the virus. Death is announced, the disease is declined. The image of hundreds of beds in emergency hospitals, hundreds of empty beds that await us. We live the stress of what to come, we are not owners of the future, we fail to become locked in our intimate spaces.

After yellow fever in Buenos Aires there was a picture of the Uruguayan painter Juan Manuel Blanes who said everything when photography did not exist.The journalist María Paula Zacharías describes it in an article in the nation: “Two men open a door and find a man's body in bed in a dreary room, the body already broken from a beautiful woman on the ground and a baby tryingto feed on her. ”And she quotes the art historian Laura Malosetti: “Blanes made the spectators cry for that mother.And those who are behind the scene with a handkerchief in the nose are the one that is afraid and yet is responsible.The effect is disturbing: Blanes opens the door and paints that woman, a fallen angel.Compassion, shock: a shared piety. "The painting was exhibited at the old Colón Theater and the Buenos Aires made very long ranks paying a solidarity entrance to see it. It was a collective funeral ritual.

How will we do to say goodbye to our future dead?As much as we responsibly assume isolation as the best way to resist pandemic it is difficult to imagine a gradual, slow, progressive return.In our Argentine imagination honor has always been a massive ceremony.Will we have a party at the end?Will there be ceremonies to celebrate the end of the pandemic?What will replace the Blanes painting?

I miss the dead time that of this Holy Week that at least allows us to think of uncertainty. Thus we can hear that we are not victims of confinement. Because we are not victims of confinement. But we cannot settle for being just isolation actors. What can make us victims is to believe that all we should do is stay at home. The future is in the strength and ability we have to rethink the world without the nostalgia of the past for more revolutionary it has been. In the courage to look at the virus as an inherent part of a nature that speaks to us without metaphors of the end of an era in which the human has exceeded until the future exploded. If I can hug something tonight, it is the image of Aura cultivating the earth. We will save ourselves from the virus. Of the world as it is, as governed by corporations and financial capitalism no. I keep that minimal portion of cultivated land, with the notion of space, geography, border, I keep the body that is not splitting from technology, garbage. The sea, the mountain, the desert is what remains. Almost the only thing we can look and feel to seek calm these days is the sun that enters through our windows, a corner comes from our enclosures and fills the lungs of extreme vitality moving away from the nightmares, taking away fear. The resistance is just beginning. And in its DNA it is viral and revolutionary. The future is what happens to us today and nobody can prevent our future from being.

Buenos Aires, April 12, 2020.

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*Illustrations by Damián Lluvero, in Ig @pint0rcito

**Este texto forma parte del libro El futuro después del COVID-19, una publicación del programa Argentina Futura y fue publicado en la revista Anfibia

*** was published in Infobae Cultura on May 10, 2020

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