The fun is over for you

At one end of the underground corridor, under the Miter Railway tracks, a man is singing a chacarera by Horacio Guarany, out of the corner of his eye he looks at the burlap cloth bag where some passengers leave twenty, one hundred peso bills (there is one of five hundred). Almost all passersby speed up when they pass, even those who collaborated, as if they wanted to get the charity off their backs. It’s just that their train is leaving, or they just got off the subway, and they can’t just get out of that maelstrom. The decibels reached by the performer don’t help either.

Two men – one is in charge of an improvised stall selling cherries and cherry tomatoes; the other is a police officer – they argue at the other end of the underground passage. People also speed up when they pass by, just in case, but many stop, now safely on the stairs, and turn their heads to gossip about what is happening.

It’s happening that the policeman wants to kick out the seller and the seller doesn’t want to leave, of course. The discussion is brief and intense. The uniformed man, a man of about 30 years old, dark-skinned and with a northern Argentine tune, had started with an argument that was difficult to contrast from the logic of the contravention code: “you know well that you can’t sell here.” The kid, in his mid-twenties, also dark-skinned, with a Peruvian tune, had started with another argument that was also incontrovertible: “all I want is to work, I have two children, where do you want me to go?”

The thing seems tied but the outcome is in sight. In the middle of the discussion, each one appeals to a “superior” third party to unblock the matter. The police officer requests reinforcements by radio and the seller sends WhatsApp audios to who knows who, probably someone with contacts in areas less exposed to the inclemencies of urban life. Among the human tide that comes and goes, a woman arrives very resolutely from the D subway and it is clear that she is craving because she, indifferent to the scene that is happening before her eyes, asks: “How much are the cherries?” Nobody answers her and she leaves, half offended.

At an indefinite moment of the verbal conflict, and after the police officer recommends the boy take his three boxes of fruit to other places in the public space (where control is, apparently, more lax), the seller brandishes the word “freedom.” “. He says it more or less like this: “you are taking away my freedom to work wherever I want.” A few seconds later, he adds, now in a higher tone of voice: “that thing about not letting us work is over.” The policeman feels touched and replies, somewhere between threatening and prophetic: “nothing’s over, the fun is over for you!”

We know nothing about them beyond this handful of spicy phrases, the roles they play at this precise moment and the body language they involuntarily interpret. The asymmetry of power is evident but from the outside, with “neutral” eyes, two empowered guys are seen.

The policeman knows that he has the upper hand, as he almost always does, but the street vendor rebukes him in a way that seems to exceed the typical defense against repressive authority.

Perhaps he has embraced “the ideas of freedom.” Perhaps the same kid who in another era would have seen in that police officer the executing arm of an economic system that oppressed him, today sees him as the representative of a State that prevents him from progressing in his endeavor. Perhaps he dreams that the State – and this police officer who is, for him, the closest and most everyday face of it – is also “going to end the joke.”

You must have heard that trade regulations are a socialist disease and that tax obligations are a crime of populism. The police must have heard that these street vendors are all idiots, who make up a mafia of foreigners who dirty the city. That is not the freedom that you were entrusted to guard.

In this dispute, however, both must believe that the joke has to end with the other.

But in fact, for now, only one of them is finished: the seller’s increasingly desperate phone calls do not give results and finally only a strong man comes to help him lift the stand and load the drawers into a cart waiting for you upstairs, in the Miguel Abuelo square. There are now four police officers and they fill out forms.

“Hurry up, come on, I’m grateful that you got it cheap,” says one of the uniformed men who arrived as a deterrent reinforcement or as a matter of bureaucratic protocol, who knows.

The kid leaves in silence. Neither the word “injustice” nor the expression “violated rights” comes out of his mouth. Surely they are not on your radar these days.

The people flowing through the underground passage no longer know what happened a minute ago. At the other end, the singer persists in stopping time, now with one from Cafrune.