Gabriella Ballarini

 

Their name is “hogares”, “houses” in Spanish, there are hundreds just in Buenos Aires. The family house is a busy place, a narrow, short passage, a brief challenge. But for 28 small men and women it's home, the real one, where they wake up each morning to get dressed and go out into a world that tests you out, as if no one cares for the tests you must pass.
Argentina and clouds. Twenty-eight are the names, 28 the stories, 28 the beating hearts and a whole lot the needs, hundreds the unspoken words. Like in all the true stories also this one has its princes and princesses, its small cinderellas folding other people's private college uniforms, its never-healing wounds and words digging down into the deep until even hunger fades away.
There are precise, unwritten rules in the house, there is the untouchable with the right to smash a dish on the floor without even being scolded, and there is who cannot even ask the salt to his neighbour at lunch because he risks the usual public humiliation, a quite recurrent custom hereabouts.
There are poor children more important than others, of the like “before we need to help our Argentine needy children, then we'll talk about those Bolivian niggers”.

Like a film. You may witness episodes of verbal rough justice, perfectly aware that all accusations are groundless as you witnessed the opposite, but you've got hands tied, your mouth stays closed because “don't deceive yourself, people outside can't do anything at all to help you”. You end up apologising for having made the little untouchable princess cry because otherwise nobody else would talk to you any longer for all evening, and the boys look at you showing solidarity, later admitting that this happened to all of them and “for us it is normal, I've suffered these injustices for 13 years, I am looking forward to going away”.

The house is the exact projection of a society where the strongest, the most cunning and the luckiest survive. It looks like that some of them have been stolen their childhood twice, as if coming from a wrong, inadequate family were not enough, as if having an alcoholic father in Bolivia were worth less than having one in Buenos Aires.

Few certainties. Poor little L. cries frightened and suffering in front of the bathroom door with her wounds worsening for all week, not cured because she doesn't go to school anyway and therefore she gets a bath just once in a while. She has a bad limp because under one feet the blood soils her pink flip-flop and the infection crawls between her dirty toes.
Opening G.'s journal one finds and infinite sequel of reprimands and notes to the family, never-done homework, unanswered questions from the school, but G. runs away because L. is calling her: “She knows she has to find the time to study, but now she must help me”. The only certainty is that a 14 years old girl will repeat the 5th primary grade because someone forgot about her childhood and now is also stealing her teens: “Nobody loves me here, during all these years there's always been someone more important than me, but I have done something good, too, why nobody admits it?”. What answer could I give?

Sometimes it is a struggle to survive in your own house. If M.'s never-crying eyes would once  burst into an unrestrained weeping she would free her heart from that stone too large for such a small thing. Instead you hear the cries of a one year old baby that should tumble in her bed with mummy and instead is sitting snotty-nosed on the step just needing protection.

That place where I had the privilege to live will remain an incredible place of which I would have liked to tell the children's laughters and playing until everyone was worn out, but that I will remember for the images, the breath-taking hugs, the eye-straining tears, the terrace offering shelter when it is too much, when it seems you can't bear another word... Yet if the small house next to the rail crossing did not exist their home would be the street.