That morning Gutiérrez awoke with a melancholy stabbing in his throat at having left the island. The contract with the nanotechnology company had come to an end. During the last five years of his two decades in Hong Kong, he had been anxiously waiting to be expelled by the communist hierarchs of the continent, when they forced England to return sovereignty to them.
I feared that shift from the Commonwealth umbrella to the Maoist dictatorship of the market. But he had kept his position, and the passage of time simply canceled his deal with the company. Time was an indestructible system.
During his childhood in Buenos Aires, his surname had been the subject of slight ridicule among his classmates: it was the same as the driver of Oaky, son of Gold Silver, both characters from Hijitus, The creation of Garcia Ferré.
But as an adult in Hong Kong, that satirical reference to his surname had mutated into a series of virtuosic musings. He no longer felt the desire to share a surname with a nefarious character, but he maintained his interest in Superhijitus.
The power of Superman it stemmed from its origin in another planet, whose natives could fly and display prodigious activities for the earthlings. He was just an alien. Batman she disguised herself and found strength in her personal tragedy. Spiderman he had been bitten by a radioactive spider and the unbelievable Hulk It came from an atomic accident.
But Hijitus became Superhijitus by going through his own hat. There were no traumas, no accidents, no interplanetary explanations., nor stilted. Sombreritus hat, turn me into Superhijitus. It was enough.
Of course, some phony could appear who wanted to explain the metamorphosis, to deduce from that enigma a constellation of meanings, to question, aloud, the hidden genesis of Hijitus’ superpowers. Moderation has never been lacking.
But the reasonable viewer has accepted the fictitious tautology: Hijitus was Superhijitus; if he went through sombreritus, he gained powers over humans. He flew, he put an unbeatable strength at the service of Good, he combined cunning with audacity. Things happened; not always explanations.
He finished writing down these ideas and decided to share them with Mariana when she picked him up. They would travel together to the airport and also to Buenos Aires. The flight, via Paris, departed Hong Kong at 4pm. What if he gives Mariana a night in Paris as a surprise?
His meeting with Mariana had been providential.
Mariana was from Buenos Aires, granddaughter of a famous guerrilla poet, an Argentine Jew. The author had soon renounced his Jewish identity, but throughout his life he remained close to his “revolutionary” beliefs.
Previously he had been a member of the Argentine CP loyal to Stalin; then, when the CP was moving away from the bloody legacy of the Russian dictator, he and a good part of the Party’s youth had moved to a Maoist sect: as if what they were looking for was a living criminal tyrant, because Not only had Stalin died on them, but Khrushchev had denounced him.
Mao fulfilled all the conditions of the ruthless madmanto be adored by the poet and his colleagues, the sons of hardworking and generally level-headed immigrants.
Subsequently he had joined the ranks of Jorge Masetti, the “secondary commander” and founder of the EGP, the Popular Guerrilla Army, the psychopathic group that had rebelled against the government of Arturo Illia, in the mountains of Salta, and had murdered the only two Jewish members of the organization itself.
He had finally landed at Montoneros, where he could kill in bulk and deal more damage than in all of his previous outings. In that organization of armed but heartless madmen, he did not avoid allying himself with the Nazi Galimberti.
Until his last days he idolized the endless satrapy of the Middle Kingdom in the Far East; but whenever he could he launched into diatribes against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.
His first passage through Maoism had placed him in front of a dilemma whose outcome, due to a series of collateral chains or the butterfly effect, would lead to the meeting between Mariana and Gutiérrez half a century later.
The poet was invited to China in the 1960s; her school-age daughter, to whom she paid little attention, ran to greet him in front of the doorway of his house in Buenos Aires. As he did not turn to greet her, Jacinta crossed without looking.. She was hit by a car. The poet had to decide whether to continue his journey to China or accompany his daughter’s mother to the hospital.
Infatuated with his role in the “prolonged people’s war” (Latin American version: paying tribute to Mao and killing unarmed people) and other fantasies, he did not want to delay his trip. The individual who boasted of being willing to give his life and kill for a cause, he preferred not to postpone a plane trip for a couple of days. Jacinta, her daughter, was paralyzed until old age.
Gutiérrez has never ceased to be amazed at the cruelty of humanity’s supposed redeemers.
But over time, his invention – a marrow-repairing nanodetector – ended up being applied to Mariana’s aunt, Jacinta, as a volunteer. The experiment worked.
Shortly before her death, Jacinta was able to take a walk with Mariana. Mariana owed her Aunt Jacinta more than she could express. That crippled woman had accompanied her since she was a child, and had guided her in surviving the early period of her youth (of which almost all of us survived in one way or another, Gutiérrez thought).
Mariana moved heaven and earth until she found the innovator who had restored Jacinta’s mobility. The architect of the miracle (which had never set out to transform the world, but thanks to which hundreds of thousands of people have regained the ability to walk).
Their meeting, in Hong Kong, was ultimately romantic.
“Candijelas,” Gutiérrez told Mariana, recalling the film in which Chaplin helps a stranded dancer recover the art of dancing.
They found themselves, in the Hong Kong night, in an improbable skyscraper, listening to that song in Roberto Carlos’ version. They had spent two more extraordinary nights and were going back to Buenos Aires together. Gutiérrez was a little older than Mariana; but gratitude has decanted itself into passion, suffocating all differences.
However, as it was noon and he had to be at the airport by one, Mariana’s lateness began to worry him. “I’m still alone via Roma”, she wrote him fatally. “Three wonderful nights. In part you gave me life back, in part I have another life. Thanks thanks thanks”.
Gutiérrez it was said that in Lights of the scene, the dancer didn’t even address the romance with Calvero. “You came to me when I leave; You are the April light, I am the gray afternoon.
After being Superhijitus, Hijitus became Hijitus again; inexplicably as he gained his powers, he lost them. Why was he going back to being Hijitus? There was no explanation for that either.
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Source: Clarin
