To my sister Mare… again.
—Tomorrow they give The Ranger.
In the daily uncertainty of poverty, television was the only certain thing. The songs at the beginning, the voices of the translators announcing the title and the protagonists of the canned gringo were one of the few certainties for people who lived from day to day and with a prayer in their mouths: “God will provide.”
“What are they giving?” Asked the one who arrived.
I don’t know if it is correct (in this country it is no longer known with the conjugation of the words), but the children in the neighborhoods conjugated the verb “to give”.
“Run, they are giving The Ranger! Someone shouted from the door of his house to the neighbor in front or to the brother who was playing on the corner.
Give, wait … like someone waiting for food, a toy or new shoes. The certainty was there, with the high fidelity of a black and white television: “A spirited horse fast as light, a cloud of dust and the cry hi-yo, Silver! … The Lone Ranger”. “Mr. McGee, don’t provoke me; It’s not me when I’m upset. “The plane, the plane!” … They were mantras against poverty or perhaps to be happy despite poverty. In the neighborhood the television was in black and white, but the daily ropes to survive were a troupe of colors. Sometimes, as a friend told me, someone became a school hero for a few weeks because they discovered the colors of the clothes most used by the protagonists or of the cars they were driving. Once he himself had been because he knew, thanks to an old TV guide from The viewer, that the car of Los Dukes de HazzardWhen there was still no conscience around here to go for something that represented General Lee, it was orange.
In the novel Soldiers of Salamis, by Javier Cercas, a character says that those who disdain television are cretins. I don’t get to that much, but I think it’s a fairly cheap review and as commonplace as a Ricardo Arjona rhyme. In any case, making this comparison is also commonplace. Maybe there are people who have become morons from watching television, but I must say that I know many morons who brag about not watching television.
I had forgotten that once in the neighborhood a boy said that Lynda Carter, Wonder WomanShe was the daughter of Jimmy Carter, President of the United States, and we all believed her. We believed it because it was on television, because we wanted to believe, because we needed to believe.
I grew up. I left the neighborhood and watched less television. Studied. I wrote some things. But one day, I don’t know why the hell, in a party conversation in Bogotá I said that Lynda Carter was Jimmy Carter’s daughter and everyone, including the girl I was dating, especially her, burst out laughing. I laughed, but it wasn’t there. I was looking for why I had stayed with that, why in a conversation of these, with people who spoke of the school of the Subalterns and of Gramsci, of the linguistic turn in which the last generation of the French school of the Annales, people who were smart even talking shit, I had dared to say what I said. He had had all the time and wherewithal to find out that this was not so. I knew it was not so. But that night of drinks was my way of returning to the certainty of the neighborhood.
Tomorrow give The Ranger…
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