Dentist

It’s fair to say that my new life has substantially changed my outlook on the world in which I live. For one thing, I feel more connected with this country, with this city. The office environment I used to inhabit was fine, up to a point, and the perspective and objectivity I learned while working there will be invaluable to me for the rest of my life. However, my office colleagues, with their wildly contrasting beliefs and ideas but ever-present respect for the opinions of others, would have long debates about things to do with this culture that I could never fully grasp. The argument itself, fine; but as I had no connection with what they were talking about, did not understand the basic facts, I could not offer an opinion and was therefore isolated. Again I learned that my understanding of this country and this people would always be limited – detailed, but still superficial.

My new job not only expects that I lack knowledge about a lot to do with this city and this country, but it demands that I work hard to learn. To fill in my own gaps. This is a fantastic experience for me. I’m told to cover a story, and I realize that in order to do so effectively I have to understand more about where the parties involved are coming from. I am forced to expand what I know about pretty much everything. The difference is that in my previous job there were buffers, cotton wool walls that allowed me to bounce gently off ideas; in my new place of work, opinions have to be formed and facts have to be learned in the blink of an eye in order to be able to work effectively.

There is also a great deal of focus on individuals and what they represent. No politician is just a politician – they are the current incarnation of an ever-changing thought process. Each person that we write about is important because of what has come before them and what they might do in the future. Our trade is the present, but the present is only given as much value as we put into it.

I have also found myself learning things that nobody would ever have thought to tell me. This week I have learned a lot about brutal murders. The reason for this is simple: an individual who has spent a lot of time in the news for a lot of reasons (the list includes potential money laundering, which bounces into state responsibility of public funds, the role of civil rights movements in contemporary Argentina, and so on) is also a convicted murderer. Nobody seems to care. This may be an indictment of the dark past that is sometimes eluded to in shadowy references, a past that nobody wants to talk about because touching on it produces such a confused explosion of emotion – but that’s nothing to do with this one individual. He and his brother were convicted of a horrific murder, and a murder of no less than their parents; last week he ‘resigned’ as the funds manager for a massive civil rights organization. One simply couldn’t make this up.

Last week an elderly gentleman was being interviewed by one of the major TV stations, so I enquired as to his identity. Who’s the gent in the specs? Ah, that’s what’s-his-name, the dentist who got so fed up of living with his wife, mother-in-law and nagging daughters that he blew them all away with a shotgun. He’s just got out of prison. I saw him the other day buying a newspaper, pipes up a colleague.

[That sound in the back of your mind is your mental jaw dropping. I know what it sounds like, believe me.]

And there he is, on TV, breezily chatting about what it feels like to be out and how he’d happily have done the same thing again. There is nothing terrifying about him as a person, except for what he’s capable of and has done as a person. It’s hard to fear him; many people empathize with him. I can’t, just yet.

And then there were the two boys who… Actually, as I’m starting to discover, the list is endless. And each case individually reveals particular aspects of Argentine society that you won’t see written about in guidebooks or even talked about in films or on TV. This is an extremely complicated country. I feel like I’m just scratching the surface.

On a final note, this morning I was in a shop, when I saw a little old man with specs walking by clutching a document wallet. From the back he looked identical to the killer dentist. Without realizing what I was doing, I was suddenly following him, walking behind, trying to guess where he was going so I could get in front of him, and when I did, what I’d say to him. And I stopped. Of course I had nothing to say to him. I just wanted to see, to touch him, to make sure that he was real.