In 1975 he delivered his next collection of poetry to the printer. Entitled Like Wild Bulls, it has a gaucho-like tone, which can reasonably be attributed to the influence of Hernández, Giraldes and Carriego. In it, Schiaffino recounts, sometimes in great detail, how he led the gang on excursions to various places in the province of Buenos Aires, as well as on two trips to Córdoba and Rosario, which resulted in victories for the visiting team and their hoarse supporters as well as sundry skirmishes, none of which degenerated into street battles, although a number of lessons were administered to isolated elements of the “enemy forces.” In spite of its eminently bellicose tone, Like Wild Bulls is Schiaffino’s most successful work. Exhibiting a degree of freedom and spontaneity unmatched elsewhere in his writing, it gives the reader a clear sense of the young poet’s character and his bond with “the virginal spaces of the Fatherland.”
In 1975, after the fusion of his gang with those of Honesto García and Juan Carlos Lentini, Schiaffino launched the triennial magazine With Boca, which thenceforth was to serve as a mouthpiece for the expression and diffusion of his ideas. In the first number of 1976, he published “Jews Out”: out of the soccer stadiums naturally, not out of Argentina, but the essay was widely misunderstood and earned him many enemies. As did “Memoirs of a Malcontent Fan,” published in the third number of 1976, in which Schiaffino, pretending to be a River Plate fan, pokes fun at the players and supporters of Boca’s traditional rival. Parts II, III and IV of the “Memoirs” followed in the first and third numbers of 1977 and the first number of 1978. Unanimously acclaimed by the readers of With Boca, they were quoted by Colonel (retired) Persio de la Fuente in an article on the idiom of the Latin American picaresque in the University of Buenos Aires Semiotics Review.
1978 was Schiaffino’s year of glory. Argentina won the World Cup for the first time and the gang celebrated in the streets, which were transformed for the occasion into a vast parade ground. It was the year of “A Toast to the Boys,” an excessive, allegorical poem, in which Schiaffino imagines a country setting forth to meet its destiny, united like one huge soccer gang. It was also the year in which “respectable,” “adult” avenues opened up for him: his poem was widely reviewed, and not just in sports magazines. A Buenos Aires radio station offered him a job as a commentator; a newspaper with close links to the government offered him a weekly column on youth issues. Schiaffino accepted all the offers but before long his impetuous pen had alienated everyone. At the radio station and the newspaper it soon became clear that leading the Boca boys was more important to Schiaffino than being on any payroll. Broken ribs and windows resulted from the conflict, and the first of a long series of prison terms.
Without the support of his benefactors, Schiaffino’s lyric inspiration seems to have dried up. From 1978 to 1982, he devoted himself almost exclusively to the gang and to bringing out With Boca, in which he continued to rail against the ills besetting soccer and Argentina.
His authority over the fan base remained undiminished. Under his leadership the Boca gang grew in numbers and strength as never before. His prestige, albeit obscure and secret, was unrivalled: the family album still contains photos of Schiaffino with players and club officials.
He died of a heart attack in 1982, while listening to one of the last reports on the Falklands War.
ARGENTINO (“FATSO”) SCHIAFFINO
Buenos Aires, 1956–Detroit, 2015
The arc of Argentino Schiaffino’s life has prompted comparisons, over the years, with varied and often incompatible figures from the worlds of literature and sports. Thus, in 1978, a certain Palito Kruger, writing in the third number of With Boca, asserted that Schiaffino’s life and work were comparable to those of Rimbaud. In 1982, in a different number of the same magazine, Argentino Schiaffino was referred to as the Latin American equivalent of Dionisio Ridruejo. In the preface to his 1995 anthology Occult Poets of Argentina, Professor González Irujo put him on a par with Baldomero Fernández, and with his own personal friends. Letters to Buenos Aires newspapers hailed him as the only civic figure in the same league as Maradona. And in 2015, a short death notice written by John Castellano for a newspaper in Selma (Alabama) coupled him with the tragic figure of Ringo Bonavena.
All the comparisons are justified, to a certain degree, by the ups and downs of Argentino Schiaffino’s life and work.
We know that he grew up in the shadow of his brother, who taught him to love soccer, recruited him as a Boca fan, and interested him in the mysteries of poetry. The two brothers were, however, notably different. Italo Schiaffino was tall, well built, authoritarian, unemotional and unimaginative. He cut an imposing figure: wiry, angular, with a slightly cadaverous air, although from the age of twenty-eight, perhaps because of a hormonal imbalance, he began to grow dangerously fat, eventually reaching a fatal degree of obesity. Argentino Schiaffino was on the shorter side of average, plump (thence the affectionate nickname “Fatso,” by which he was known until the day he died), sociable and bold by nature, charismatic though hardly authoritarian.
He began to write poetry at the age of thirteen. At sixteen, while his elder brother was making his name with The Path to Glory, he produced fifty mimeographed copies of his first book, at his own expense and risk. It was a series of thirty epigrams entitled Anthology of the Best Argentinean Jokes; over one weekend he personally sold all the copies to members of the Boca gangs. In April 1973, employing the same editorial strategy, he published his story “The Invasion of Chile,” an exercise in black humor (some passages resemble a splatter movie script) about a hypothetical war between the two republics. In December of the same year he published the manifesto We’re Not Going to Take It, in which he attacked the league’s umpires, whom he accused of bias, lack of physical fitness, and, in some cases, of drug use.
He began the year 1974 by publishing the collection Iron Youth (fifty mimeographed copies): dense, militaristic poems with marching-song rhythms, which, if nothing else, obliged Schiaffino to venture beyond the bounds of his natural thematic domains: soccer and humor. He followed up with a play, The Presidential Summit, or What Can We Do to Turn This Around? In this five-act farce, heads of state and diplomats from various Latin American nations meet in a hotel room somewhere in Germany to discuss options for restoring the natural and traditional supremacy of Latin American soccer, which is under threat from the European total-football approach. The play, which is extremely long, recalls a certain strain of avant-garde theater, from Adamov, Genet and Grotowski to Copi and Savary, although it is unlikely (though not impossible) that Fatso ever set foot in the sort of establishment given to the production of such plays. The following are only a few of the scenes: 1. A monologue about the etymology of the words “peace” and “art” delivered by the Venezuelan cultural attaché. 2. The rape of the Nicaraguan ambassador in one of the hotel bathrooms by the presidents of Nicaragua, Colombia and Haiti. 3. A tango danced by the presidents of Argentina and Chile. 4. The Uruguayan ambassador’s peculiar interpretation of the prophecies of Nostradamus. 5. A masturbation contest organized by the presidents, with three categories: thickness (won by the Ecuadorian ambassador); length (won by the Brazilian ambassador); and, most importantly, distance covered by semen (won by the Argentinean ambassador). 6. The president of Costa Rica’s subsequent irritation and condemnation of such contests as “scatology in the poorest taste.” 7. The arrival of the German whores. 8. Mass brawling, chaos and exhaustion. 9. The arrival of the dawn, a “pink dawn that intensifies the fatigue of the bigwigs who finally come to understand their defeat.” 10. The president of Argentina’s solitary breakfast, after which he lets off a series of resounding farts, then climbs into bed and falls asleep.
In the same year, 1974, Argentino Schiaffino managed to publish two more works. A short manifesto in With Boca, entitled “Satisfactory Solutions,” which is, in a sense, a sequel to The Presidential Summit (Latin America should respond to total football, he suggests, by physically eliminating its finest exponents, that i
s to say, assassinating Cruyf, Beckenbauer, et cetera). And a new collection of poems (a hundred mimeographed copies): Spectacle in the Sky, a series of short, light—one might almost say winged—poems about the stars of Boca Juniors down through the years, not unlike Italo Schiaffino’s famous book The Path to Glory. The theme is the same, the technique is similar, some metaphors are identical, yet where the elder brother’s work is ruled by rigor and the determination to record a history of striving, the younger brother yields to the pleasure of discovering images and rhymes, treats the old legends humorously but not without affection, applies a light touch where Italo was grave, and mounts a powerful and occasionally opulent verbal display. This book probably contains the best of Argentino Schiaffino’s work.
Some years of literary silence followed. In 1975 he got married and started working in an auto repair shop. After which he is said to have hitch-hiked to Patagonia, read everything he could lay his hands on, submerged himself in the study of the history of the Americas, and experimented with psychotropic drugs, but what we know for certain is that he was there with his brother’s gang every week, whether the game was at home or away, cheering with the best of them. During this period he is also said to have participated in the activities of Captain Antonio Lacouture’s death squad, driving and repairing a small fleet of cars kept at a villa on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, but of this there is no proof.
During the 1978 World Cup, which was hosted by Argentina, Fatso resurfaced with a long poem entitled Champions (1,000 mimeographed copies, which he sold himself at the stadium’s entrances and exits): a rather difficult and occasionally muddled text, which jumps abruptly from free verse to alexandrines, to distichs, to rhyming couplets and sometimes even to catalectics (when exploring the ins and outs of the Argentinean selection it adopts the tone of Lorca’s Romancero gitano, and when examining the rival teams it veers between the devious advice of old Vizcacha in Martin Fierro and Manrique’s straightforward predictions in the “Coplas”). The book sold out in two weeks.
Then there was another long period of literary silence. In 1982, as he was to reveal in his autobiography, he tried to enlist as a volunteer to fight the British in the Falklands. He was unsuccessful. Shortly afterward, he traveled to Spain for the World Cup with a group of die-hard fans. After the defeat of the Argentinean team by Italy, he was arrested in a Barcelona hotel, on charges of assault, attempted homicide, robbery and disorderly conduct. He spent three months in Barcelona’s Model Prison along with five other Argentinean soccer fans, before being released for want of evidence. On his return, the Boca gang hailed him as their new leader, but uninspired by this promotion he generously delegated the role to Dr. Morazán and the contractor Scotti Cabello. Nevertheless, his moral authority over the followers of his late brother would remain undiminished to the end of his life, a life that for many of the younger fans had begun to take on the aura of legend.
With Boca folded in 1983, despite the best efforts of Dr. Morazán, thus depriving Fatso of his sole means of public expression; the deprivation, however, would prove beneficial in the long term. In 1984, a small politico-literary publisher, Black & White, brought out a volume entitled Impenitent Memoirs, Argentino Schiaffino’s first venture beyond the realm of self-publication, which was greeted with indifference by the literary set. It is a small volume of stories in a decidedly naturalistic mode. In less than four pages, the longest story evokes mornings and evenings spent playing soccer in a working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The characters are four children who call themselves the Four Gauchos of the Apocalypse, and a number of hagiographers have taken their experiences to reflect the childhood of the Schiaffino brothers. The shortest story occupies less than half a page: jocular in tone and larded with Buenos Aires slang, it describes a sickness or a heart attack or perhaps simply a bout of melancholy afflicting some nameless, distant person in the course of an ordinary afternoon.
In 1985, the collection of stories Crazy Blunders appeared under the same imprint. At only 56 pages, it was even slimmer than its predecessor, to which, at first glance, it appeared to be an epilogue. This book did, however, attract some critical attention. One review summarily dispatched it as cretinous. One tore it to shreds, but without impugning Schiaffino’s feel for language. Two other reviewers (there were only four in all) were forthright and more or less enthusiastic in their praise.
Black & White went bankrupt soon afterwards, and Schiaffino seems to have lapsed not only into silence, as on previous occasions, but also into anonymity. It was suggested that his disappearance could be explained by the fact that he owned half or at least a significant proportion of the shares in Black & White. How Schiaffino got hold of enough money to have a substantial stake in a publishing company remains a mystery. There was some talk of funds obtained during the dictatorship, wealth stolen and secreted, undisclosed sources of income, but nothing could be proved.
In 1987 Argentino Schiaffino reappeared at the helm of the Boca gang. He had separated from his wife and was working as a waiter in a downtown restaurant on Corrientes, where his proverbial good humor soon made him one of the neighborhood’s favorite characters. At the end of the year he published three stories, none of which exceeded seven pages, in a mimeographed collection entitled The Great Buenos Aires Restaurant Novel, which he sold without compunction to his clients. The first story is about a Lebanese who arrives in Buenos Aires and looks for a solid business in which to invest his savings. He falls in love with an Argentinean woman who works as a butcher, and together they decide to open a restaurant specializing in meat of all kinds. Everything goes well until the Lebanese man’s poor relatives start turning up. In the end the butcher solves the problem by liquidating the relatives one by one, with the help of her kitchen hand and lover, nicknamed Monkey. The story ends with an apparently bucolic scene: the butcher, her husband and Monkey set off to spend a day in the country and prepare a barbecue under the wide open skies of the Fatherland. The second story is about an old magnate in the Buenos Aires restaurant business who wants to find his last love, and with that objective scours nightclubs, brothels, the houses of friends with grown-up daughters, et cetera. He finally discovers the woman of his dreams in his first restaurant: a twenty-year-old tango singer, blind since birth. The third story is about a group of friends dining in a restaurant which belongs to one of them and has been closed to the public for the evening. At first the occasion seems to be a stag night, then a celebration of something one of the friends has achieved, then a wake, then a gastronomical gathering with no other purpose than to enjoy good Argentinean cooking, and finally appears to be a trap set for a traitor by all or almost all the others, although, beyond vague mentions of trust, eternal friendship, loyalty and honor, we never learn what the supposed traitor has betrayed. The story is ambiguous and based entirely on the conversation of the diners at the table, whose number declines as the evening wears on, while their words become increasingly pompous and cruel, or, on the contrary, clipped, laconic and sharp. Regrettably, the story comes to a predictable, not to say gratuitously violent, end: the traitor is hacked to pieces in the restaurant bathroom.
Nineteen eighty-seven was also the year in which Schiaffino’s long poem “Solitude” (640 lines) was published at the expense of Dr. Morazán, who penned a preface illustrated by his niece Miss Bertha Macchio Morazán with four India-ink drawings. Solitude is an odd, desperate, turbulent text, which casts some light on obscure stretches of its author’s biography. The events take place during the 1986 World Cup, both in the host nation, Mexico, and in Argentina. Schiaffino, who is the poem’s unrivaled protagonist, reflects on the “solitude of the champions” in a seedy, out-of-the-way hotel in Buenos Aires, which sometimes seems to be an abandoned ranch far out on the vast pampas. Then we see him flying to Mexico on Aerolineas Argentinas, accompanied by “two black guards,” members of his gang, perhaps, or threatening figures. His time in Mexico is largely divided between bars of the most disreputable variety, where he is abl
e to verify in situ the devastating effects of miscegenation (although he generally gets on well with “Mexican drunks,” who see in him a “snail prince, master of a ruined tower”) and the provincial boarding houses where he finds lodging as he follows the movements of the boys in blue and white. The final victory of the Argentinean team is an apotheosis: Schiaffino sees an enormous light hovering over Aztec stadium like a flying saucer and transparent figures emerging from the light, accompanied by little dogs with human faces and flaming fur, restrained on metallic leashes by the transparent beings. He also sees a finger, “roughly thirty yards long,” perhaps ominously pointing the way, perhaps simply indicating a cloud in the vast sky. The party continues in the “flood-locked” streets of the Mexican capital, and ends with an exhausted Fatso returning to the solitude of his boarding-house room and passing out.
In 1988, having adopted photocopying, he published a story entitled “The Ostrich” in an edition of fifty booklets. It is, at least in principle, a homage to the soldiers of the military coup, yet in spite of the Schiaffino’s evident admiration for order, the family and the Fatherland, he was unable to refrain from sallies of caustic, cruel, scatologically humorous sallies, intemperate, caricatural, parodic, irreverent outbursts—the Schiaffino trademark in short. The following year The Best of Argentino Schiaffino appeared, without a publisher’s imprint or date: a selection of his poems, stories and political writings. The cognoscenti were quick to surmise that the book had been produced by The Fourth Reich in Argentina, a mystagogically inspired venture, which kept popping up and then vanishing again in Buenos Aires publishing between 1965 and 2000.
Gradually Schiaffino began to acquire something of a media profile. He took part in a television program on soccer gangs, and was the first to defend their right to violence, on grounds such as honor, self-defense, group solidarity, and the pure and simple pleasure of street fighting. Invited as a defendant, he assumed the role of prosecutor. He participated in radio and television debates on all sorts of subjects: fiscal policy, the decadence of the young Latin American democracies, the future of the tango on the European music scene, the state of opera in Buenos Aires, the exorbitant prices of couture fashion, public education in the provinces, widespread ignorance about the nation’s extent and borders, Argentinean wine, the privatization of the country’s leading industries, the Formula One Grand Prix, tennis and chess, the work of Borges, Bioy Casares, Cortázar and Mújica Lainez (about whose work he made bold pronouncements, although he swore he had never read it), the life of Roberto Arlt (for whom he professed his admiration, although the novelist had “belonged to the enemy camp”), border incidents, how to end unemployment, white-collar crime and street crime, the inventiveness of the Argentineans, the sawmills of the Andes, and the works of Shakespeare.