There are people who don’t hold back their tears. And there are people who will do anything to help you close the emotional floodgates for the person next to you. Even if it is a stranger whom we passed on the street on any given day.
It happened one of these spring mornings in the Congreso neighborhood. Tall, thin, in his fifties, the man was crying like a child right in front of the house. I sense that he is a neighbor – maybe he lives on the other block, or around the corner – because he always shows himself around the same time with a milk tea dog on his leash.
The day of crying he walked alone, well dressed, with his eyes buried in the tiles and a cell phone to his ear. As if accidentally, I gave him two encouraging taps on the arm and continued on my way to the garage. With some naivety, I felt that with that visceral reaction of entering his privacy without warning I saved him little less than his life. And that the gender gap in crying is definitely in the past.
This week, without going any further, Rafa Nadal’s eyes watered when he announced his retirement from tennis. Who doesn’t also remember Roger Federer when he went on stage during an Andrea Bocelli concert and burst into tears? And Scaloni’s in the Qatar final? And the tears of that grandfather from Chaco who went viral when his grandson finished primary school? And those of the protagonist of Aftersun who breaks down in the room of a resort where he spends the summer with his daughter? That cry justifies the entire film that was nominated for an Oscar in 2023. A cry that is not even shown on the screen because Paul Mescal is on his back, sitting on his bed. And yet no one has ever told a scene like this better without showing a tear. And without revealing why that big man cries while his daughter plays in the hotel pool.
The idea that men should hide their tears is very old. In The RepublicPlato said that in a healthy society Men should be masters of grief and anguish and not their slaves.. Seneca expressed similar ideas, which were taken up by Renaissance thinkers and, later, by Victorian Puritans. For them, crying was a feeling primitive and irrational, cowardly and unbecoming of a man.
However, there is some historical and literary evidence to indicate that in the past not only did men cry in public, but no one saw it as feminine or shameful.
In the Iliad From Homer, for example, the entire Greek army bursts into unanimous tears in several passages. And in the Bible there are also references to the demonstrative crying of kings and entire peoples.
Anyway, that thing about men not crying is a wandering legend. The first French romantic, Alphonse de Lamartine, already said it in the mid-1800s: “After his own blood, the best thing that man can give of himself is a tear.”
Although we have no idea why the skinny, tall, well-dressed fifty-year-old from Congress chose to spill his right on my tile.
