I moved back to Buenos Aires in January 1998: merely 2 days before I boarded the last Swissair flight I would ever take, my girlfriend at the time (and, needless to say, one of the major reasons I had decided to move back to Buenos Aires for) called to tell me that she had unilaterally decided to break up with me.
She and I had hooked up during that fateful 1996 trip to Argentina. We dated “remotely” during 1997, a year in which I traveled twice to Buenos Aires to be with her: 2 weeks in June, and a full month in October, precisely as I started working for FIS.
So I took that plane, landed in the sunny and scorching Porteño summer of 1998, moved into an apartment that my father had in the microcentro (at the corner of Talcahuano and Sarmiento streets, if you’re curious) and got down to work from home in my first job ever in the IT industry. I later enrolled at the Universidad de Buenos Aires to try to land a degree in management of IT systems at the Faculty of Economics. (Spoiler alert: didn’t happen.)
I had also sent some of my belongings (mostly books) on a maritime freight container, and quite astonishingly, the shipping company provided me with the URL of a web page, where I could follow in almost real time the path said container took, from Geneva, to Rotterdam, and then to Buenos Aires. That was quite futuristic for 1997.
It took me years to get closure from the relationship with that girl, who, by the way, never really told me face-to-face why she decided to break up. Of course, I learned that later on, as I saw her with another guy shortly after.
So yeah, I remember sitting in that single-room apartment, whose window thankfully did not overlook the over-the-top-noisy Sarmiento street, which meant I could open my windows in summer, and hear the rumor of the city bustling in between buildings. I sipped liters of mate, feeling the vibrations and noise of the rushing colectivos filled with people at rush hour; tangos playing in nearby stores; faraway radio transmissions of football matches on Sundays; and even the screams of some couples having sex at select hours, day and night (I would learn a few months later that there was a brothel 3 floors above mine, a story for another time).
One day, using the monies of one of my first paychecks as a web developer, I bought a small CD and cassette player (this was the 1990s, after all), and a copy of the recently released masterpiece album “Urban Hymns” by this monument of Brit rock called The Verve, led by the larger-than-nature Richard Ashcroft.
In that album, beyond the usual “Bitter Sweet Symphony” that sounded everywhere, there is a song that struck me the most; it was number 9, and it had lyrics that hit my heart like a missile. Today, almost 30 years later, they still take me back to that time in my life.
Happiness, more or less
It’s just a change in me, something in my liberty
That song is “Lucky Man”. It even has its own Wikipedia page about it, as it should.
Because, let’s be honest, it was a lucky time for me: I was 24 years old. I was very fit after 2 and half years of swinging luggage into an aircraft for a living. I had a great job writing VBScript and T-SQL code on EditPlus before the dot-com meltdown. I was living on my own in an apartment where I didn’t have to pay rent, located close to the heart of that beast that is Buenos Aires, and I was no longer doing that handling of luggage in the airport of Genève-Cointrin. I was dating girls from college, not as many as you might think, but having your own secluded corner of the city at that age it’s an incredible bonus. To top it off, in Uni I had the best grades I could wish for.
And even better, just a few months later, I met a girl named Valeria (another story for another time), and right after that, I bought my first car, a cherished white first generation Ford Ka that my friends nicknamed “Gutiérrez” for an elementary reason: it was a moniker much simpler to pronounce than my own family name.
And how many corners do I have to turn?
How many times do I have to learn
All the love I have is in my mind?
I was a very lucky man in 1998, despite the girlfriend letdown, and despite what was to come later in 2001. I still am.
But damn, this song hits hard every single time I hear it.