Where are we now? We have entered the city, and we are on the streets of some district.
Which city? Continental, it could be Rome or Istanbul, Berlin or Buenos Aires, Rio or Kalikut. It could even be New York or Boston. Even London… (at times on a clear night and in certain places).
And we think we are on the streets, in a happy-go-lucky way setting up shop with our news-stands ready in wait for passing trade.
Except that – NO! – we are not quite on the street, the district where we are located appears to be more complicated than that. Although close to the city centre, it is more fluid than pavement and hard concrete: it is fluid, watery and floundering like “Tripe Stew” (virgin yellow mud, or Mondongo, as it is called in the lunfardo local Buenos Aires tongue). We’ve set up close to the main outlet for the city sewers, the cloaca maxima – the same areas as the rubbish tips and landfills – and the “unplanned settlements”, favellas.
Nor are our wordstall racks exactly brimming with the latest copy from the glossy magazines – just the gleanings (or vaguenings) from off the tips, or rescued out of the pits and brown yellow waters. We sift the rubbish for something that could be of value, sorting out what is recyclable in the hope of making a few pennies. It is hard work for all the uncertainty.
Here at the the endings of the issues, we spend most of the time watching what is floating past. We’ve located in this Villa Miseria close to the main drain (not the sort of noxious place to fall in). So we say we are “On the Streets”, but it is incorrect, an exaggeration, we are not quite in fact. We are off them, if only a little way, but it is another world.
But here at least we can show ourselves to be partizan – “I am partizan,” wrote Antonio Gramsci, “I hate those who don’t take sides. I hate the indifferent.”