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Santa Evita by Tomás Eloy Martínez
Book to read.
The Honored Society knows that every man is weak, depraved, vain. It knows that people don’t change; that’s why rules are everything.
You can run from the law but not from the organization. You can even run from God, ’cause God can wait forever for the fugitive.
An animal senses cowardice. And respects fear. Fear is the more vital instinct, and deserves more respect. Cowardice is a choice, fear is a state of mind.
Beasts have courage and know what it means to defend life. Men boast about courage, but all they know how to do is obey, crawl, get by.
But you’ve probably never heard the screams of a man hit by a bullet, his bones shattered by a submachine gun or shrapnel, his arm or half his face ripped off. Those are real cries, the only ones memory cannot forget. Our memory of sounds is fleeting; memories are linked to actions, contexts. But the cries of war never go away. Veterans and reporters, doctors and career soldiers all wake up to those cries. If you’ve heard the screams of a dying man, or one lying wounded in the middle of a battlefield, there’s no point spending money on psychoanalysts or seeking comfort. You’ll never forget
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To profit from everyone without becoming anyone’s enemy is a difficult praxis in life,
It’s not heroin, which turns you into a zombie. And it’s not pot, which mellows you and makes your eyes bloodshot. Coke is a performance-enhancing drug. On coke you can do anything. Before it explodes your heart and turns your brain to mush, before your dick goes soft forever and your stomach starts oozing pus—before all this happens, you’ll work more, fuck more, play more. Coke is the comprehensive answer to the most pressing concern of our day: the absence of limits. On coke, you’ll live more. You’ll network more—the first commandment of modern life. And the more you network, the happier
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This is where coke comes in. It inhibits the reabsorption of neurotransmitters, so your cells are always turned on; it’s like Christmas all year long, lights twinkling 365 days a year.
Cocaine is the body’s fuel. It is life cubed. That is, before it consumes you, destroys you. The extra life that coke seems to have given you, you’ll pay for later, at loan-shark interest rates. But later doesn’t count. It’s all here and now.
“In the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.”
Sometimes I think I’m obsessed. Other times I’m convinced these stories are a way of measuring the truth. Maybe that’s the secret. Not for others. Secret for me. Hidden from myself. Left out of my public pronouncements.
While the world is clearly heading in one direction, everything seems focused on something else, something banal even, superficial. Some government minister’s statement, some tiny, insignificant event, some piece of gossip. But everything is really being decided by something else. This intuition is at the base of every romantic choice.
The danger is in believing that reality—that real, pulsating, decisive reality—is completely hidden.
To square the circle of the world in your own interpretations is the onset of shortsightedness in an eye that thinks it has perfect vision.
A wounded animal usually attacks: He’s the one who’s lying, he’s doing it to throw people off, because he’s corrupt, because he wants fame, or money.
Ferocity is learned. Ferocity works by its own rules. Ferocity spreads, like an invading army.
Invisible, like almost everyone who pays with silence for words offered in the name of justice.
For example: Chella ca guarda ’nterra, she who looks at the ground, which means cunt,
’O pate d”e criature, the father of babies, or penis,
’O totaro dint’ ’a chitarra, a fish inside a guitar, which...
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’o muort’ acciso, death by murder.
Thoreau said: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
