Argentino Schiaffino, alias Fatso
Buenos Aires, 1956 – Detroit, 2015
The trajectory of Argentino Schiaffino has at various times been compared to those of a range of contrasting figures in literature and sport: in 1978, in the third issue of ‘With Boca’ one Palito Kruger claimed that his life and work were comparable to those of Rimbaud, in 1982 in another issue of the same magazine he was described as the Argentine equivalent of Dionysius Ridruejo, in his prologue to the anthology ‘The Hidden Poets of Argentina’ Professor Gonzaléz Irujo placed him on the same level as Baldomero Fernandéz and his own friends, in letters to the Buenos Aires press he was exalted as the only public figure comparable to Maradona and in an obituary published in Selma, Alabama John Castellano compared him to the tragic figure of Ringo Bonavena. The twists and turns of his life and work validate all of these comparisons to some degree.
It is a fact that he grew up in the shadow of a brother who gave him a love of football, made him a fan of Boca and interested him in the mysteries of poetry. The differences between them were however, notable. Italo Schiaffino was tall, strong and authoritarian, dry in character and with little imagination. With a physique that commanded respect; sinewy, angular and a somewhat funereal air, from the age of 28 he started to grow dangerously fat - perhaps due to hormonal problems – to a degree that would eventually prove fatal.
Argentino Schiaffino by contrast was more of medium height, bordering on the short, a bit fat (hence the affectionate nickname Fatso which he carried to his death), with an overflowing imagination, an audacious, sociable character and charismatic too though with little of the authoritarian.
He started writing poetry at the age of 13. At 16, while his brother triumphed with ‘The Road to Glory’, at his own expense he published a mimeographed edition of fifty copies of his first book, a collection of thirty epigrams titled ‘Anthology of the Best Argentine Jokes’. He distributed them himself to the hardcore fans of Boca and it sold out over a weekend. Following the same method of publication his story ‘The Invasion of Chile’ appeared in 1973. Striking a note of black humour (in places it resembles the script of a slasher movie) it tells of a supposed war between the two republics. In December of the same year he brought out the manifesto ‘We’ve Had It up To Here’, which sets upon the refereeing class whom it accuses of partiality, lack of fitness and in some cases, drug consumption.
He began 1974 with the publication of ‘Iron Youth’ (mimeographed edition of 50 copies), a collection consisting of dense poems or military marches whose sole virtue was to move him away for the first time from his natural expressive framework; football and humour. He followed it with a play ‘The Council of the Presidents or What Do We Have To Do To Get Out Of This Hole?’, a farce in five acts in which the most important leaders from various American nations meeting in a German hotel room deliberate on various ways of giving back to Latin American football its natural and historic preponderance now under threat from European total football. This extremely long play brings to mind scenes from certain elements of the theatrical vanguard; from Adamov, Genet and Grotowski to Copi and Savary. It is doubtful however (though not impossible) that Fatso himself ever set foot in a place showing this kind of work.
Let us mention some scenes: 1. The monologue by the Venezuelan cultural attaché on the etymology of the words ‘peace’ and ‘art’. 2. The rape of the Nicaraguan ambassador by Nicaraguan, Colombian and Haitian presidents in the hotel bathroom. 3. The tango danced by the presidents of Argentina and Chile. 4. The Uruguayan ambassador’s peculiar interpretation of the prophecies of Nostrodamus. 5. The masturbation competition organised by the presidents with its three categories: one for thickness, won by the ambassador of Ecuador, one for length, won by the ambassador of Brazil and one for semen distance – the supreme test – won by the ambassador of Argentina. 6. The subsequent rage of the president of Costa Rica who describes such events as “scatologies in bad taste”. 7. The arrival of the German whores. 8. The fighting, the din, the exhaustion. 9. The coming of dawn “a pale red dawn which accentuated the tiredness of the bosses who finally understand their defeat”. 10. The solitary breakfast of the Argentine president who, after loosing off a series of sonorous farts, goes to bed and sleeps.
In 1974 he still had time to publish two more works: a little manifesto in ‘With Boca’ titled ‘Satisfactory Solutions’, which to some extent continued the discourse of ‘The Council of the Presidents’ in which he proposes, as a Latin-American response to the threat of total football, the liquidation of its finest exponents, that is to say the assassination of Cruyff, Beckenbauer and the rest as well as a collection of poetry in a mimeographed edition of 100 examples ‘The Spectacle in the Sky’; short, light poems winging their way over some of the greatest players in the history of Boca Juniors and in which it is possible to find some resemblances to ‘The Road to Glory’ that celebrated work by Italo Schiaffino. The subject is the same, the shaping of the poems is similar and some of the metaphors are identical. Nevertheless, that which in the older brother is rigour, the desire to capture a story of struggle, in the younger is discovery of images and rhyme, humor not devoid of affection for the old legends, lightness as opposed to weight, verbal power and sometimes luxuriance. The best of Argentino Schiaffino is probably to be found in this book.
The years that followed brought creative silence. In 1975 he married and started working in a garage. It is said that in this period he hitchhiked to Patagonia, read everything he could get his hands on, submerged himself in the study of the history of America and experimented with psychotropic drugs though the truth is that he did not miss a single Sunday with Boca, home or away, cheering with the best of them, in his brother’s gang among whom he was held in ever higher esteem. It is also said that during these years he participated in Captain Antonio Lacouture’s death squad as a driver and mechanic for its small fleet of cars which were kept on an estate on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, but there is no proof of this.
In 1978 Fatso turned up again at the World Cup in Argentina with a long poem titled ‘Champions’ (mimeographed edition of a 1000 copies which he sold himself at the entrance to the stadiums) a somewhat difficult and sometimes confusing text; it passes abruptly from free verse to alexandrines to distiches to rhyming couplets and sometimes even to cataphora (when he gets into the twists and turns of the Argentine side he adopts the tone of Lorca in ‘Gypsy Ballads’ and when he studies rival teams he can go from the astute warnings of the old Vizcacha to the clear predictions of Manrique in his ‘Songs’). The book sold out in two weeks.
Once more a long creative silence. In 1982, as he himself tells us in his autobiography, he tried to enlist as a volunteer for the Malvinas war. He was not accepted. A short time late he traveled to Spain with a group of hardcore fans to be at the World Cup. After the Argentine team was defeated by Italy he was arrested in his hotel and charged with assault with intent to kill, robbery and disorder on the public highway. Along with five other Argentine fans he was detained for the three months in Barcelona’s Modelo prison. He was released for lack of evidence. Upon his return he was acclaimed as their new leader by the hardcore fans. This position did little to enthuse him and he generously delegated it to Dr. Morazán and Scotti Cabello, a quantity surveyor. His moral ascendancy over his brother’s old followers maintained itself throughout his life, a life that for many fans was starting to acquire shades of legend.
In spite of the best efforts of Dr. Morazán the magazine ‘With Boca’ disappeared in 1983 thus depriving Fatso of his only outlet but benefiting him in the long run. In 1984 a small Buenos Aires literary-political publisher, Black and White Publications, brought out a volume entitled ‘Memoirs of an Irredentist’. Though received with indifference by the literary world it constituted Schiaffino’s first incursion into the world beyond self-publication. It was a slim volume of short stories markedly naturalistic in character. The longest, of no more than four pages, evokes the mornings and nights of football in a working-class district of Buenos Aires. The protagonists are four boys who call themselves “The Four Gauchos of the Apocalypse” and more than one hagiographer has seen reflections of the young Schiaffino brothers in them. The shortest story does not even reach half a page and describes in a joking tone and with the use of plenty of Buenos Aires slang the illness or the heart attack or perhaps just the melancholy of someone, some afternoon, somewhere far away.
In 1985 the same publisher brought out ‘Ravings of the Mad’, a collection of stories even slighter than its predecessor (56 pages) and on the face of it merely an appendix to it. On this occasion he managed to attract the attention of some reviewers. One simply branded him a cretin, another conscientiously tore him to pieces but without daring to take issue with his use of language. The other two (there were no more) openly praised him, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Shortly afterwards Black and White Publications went bankrupt and Schiaffino seemed to sink not only into silence as on previous occasions but into anonymity as well. There were those who said that half the firm’s shares or at least a significant quantity of them belonged to Schiaffino and that this explained his disappearance. From where he might have got the money to set up a publishing firm remains a mystery. There was talk of funds obtained during the military dictatorship, of treasures robbed and hidden, of financing mysterious and unspeakable but nothing was ever proved.
In 1987 Argentino Schiaffino reappeared as leader of the hardcore fans of Boca. He had separated from his wife and was working as a waiter in a city-centre restaurant on Corrientes where his proverbial good humour made him a well loved figure. At the end of the year he published a mimeographed edition of three stories, each no more than seven pages in length, which he entitled ‘The Great Buenos Aires Restaurant Novel’ and which he managed to sell to his clients without having to beg them. The first story concerns a Lebanese who arrives in Buenos Aires and wants to invest his savings in a reliable business. He falls in love with a female butcher and together they decide to set up a restaurant specialising in all kinds of meat. All goes well until the poor relatives of the Lebanese start to appear. The butcher decides to solve this problem by murdering them, one at a time, assisted by her kitchen porter (nicknamed ‘Little Monkey’) with whom she is having an affair. The story ends with an apparently bucolic scene: the butcher, her husband and Little Monkey go on a trip to the countryside for the day and prepare a barbecue under the free skies of the motherland. The second story deals with an ageing potentate of the restaurant trade who wants to find the final love of his life and searches for her in night clubs, brothels and the houses of friends with grown up children only to discover that the woman of his dreams is to be found in his first restaurant, is a tango singer and blind from birth. The third story concerns a group of friends and a dinner they have in a restaurant, a restaurant that belongs to one of them and that has been closed for the occasion. The dinner at first seems to be a stag party, later a celebration of something that one of the diners has managed to obtain, later a funeral dinner for someone who has died, later a gastronomic encounter with no other purpose than to enjoy the pleasures of the Argentine table and finally a trap that all or almost all have prepared for a traitor though what the traitor betrayed is never revealed. Some vague mentions of the words confidence, eternal friendship, loyalty and honour are made however. The story is ambiguous, sustained only by the dialogues of the diners which as time passes become tense turning pompous and cruel or the contrary, short, laconic and cutting. Unfortunately the story has a predictable ending which, as well as being unnecessary is excessively violent: the dismemberment of the traitor in the toilets of the restaurant.
1987 was also the year of his long poem Solitude (640 lines) the publication of which was paid for by Dr. Morazán who also wrote the prologue and illustrated it with four drawings in Indian ink by his niece Miss Berta Macchio Morazán. A strange desperate, turbulent poem, it contributes to the filling in of some gaps in the biography of our author. It moves between Argentina and Mexico and takes place during the 1986 World Cup held in the latter country. Schiaffino, the supreme protagonist of the poem, reflects on the “the solitude of champions” in a rundown hotel in a Buenos Aires that at times seems like an estancia lost in the middle of the pampas,. Later we see him flying to Mexico with Aerolíneas Argentinas accompanied by “two black guards’” who could be members of his gang or two threatening figures. His time in Mexico was spent in bars of the worse sort, where he was able to verify at first hand the devastating effects of miscegenation though he generally got on well with the “Mexican drunks” who saw in him a “prince with his tower destroyed’’, and the pensions and cities through which he moves as he follows the national team. The victory of the Argentine side is an apotheosis. Schiaffino sees an enormous light like a flying saucer cruise over the Aztec Stadium and transparent figures that come out of the light accompanied by little dogs with human faces and plumage of fire that the transparent beings control with metallic leads. He also sees a finger “of about thirty metres in length” which points in warning in a particular direction or perhaps only at a cloud in the vast sky. The celebrations continue in the streets “of frozen flood” of the Mexican capital and finish with Fatso collapsed, worn out and restored in the solitude of his Mexican pension.
In 1988 he published, this time in a photocopied edition of 50 copies, a story titled ‘The Ostrich’, a kind of homage to the soldiers who led the 1976 coup and in which, in spite of his declared admiration for order, the family and the nation he cannot avoid a few brushstrokes of humour, a humour corrosive and scatological that at the same parodies, caricatures and is irreverent; in short, Schiaffino’s style. The following year a selection of his poems stories and political writings titled ‘The Best of Argentino Schiaffino’ appeared undated and without an imprint. Those in the know did not hesitate to attribute its publication to The Argentine Fourth Reich, a firm devoted to the revelation of hidden truth, which appeared and disappeared several times in the Buenos Aires publishing world several times between 1965 and 2000.
He gradually acquired a certain degree of notoriety in the national media. He participated in television programmes dealing with the hard-core fans in which he is the first to justify their violence for reasons such as honour, legitimate self-defence, the necessities of comradeship and enjoyment pure and simple of street fights. From defence he turned to attack. In radio debates and more television programmes he spoke on the widest variety of topics: fiscal policy, the young Latin American democracies, the future of tango in the European musical scene, the state of opera in Buenos Aires, the inaccessibility of fashion, education in the provinces, the lack of knowledge of the nation’s boundaries on the part of the vast majority of Argentines, Argentine wine, the privatisation of leading industries, the Formula 1 Grand Prix, tennis and chess, the work of Borges, Bioy Casares, Cortázar and Mujica Lainez, which he swore never to have read in his life but about whom he advanced the most daring conclusions, the work of Roberto Arlt, whom he said he admires even though “they fight on ferociously opposed sides”, the waverings on the frontiers, the solution which will put an end to unemployment, white collar crime, street crime, the natural inventiveness of the Argentines, mountain woodcutters and the works of Shakespeare.
In 1990 he went to Italy for the World Cup where he was considered, along with thirty other Argentine fans, to be a potentially dangerous visitor. Fatso had previously declared his intention to meet with English hooligans in an act of reconciliation which was to consist of a Mass for the fallen of the Malvinas followed by an open air barbecue. In spite of the fact that none of this went beyond a statement of intentions the news went around the world and on his return to Argentina Schiaffino found his notoriety greatly increased.
In 1991 he published two books of poems: ‘Chimichurri’ (self-published, 40 pages, 100 copies) - an unfortunate imitation of Lugones and Darío which at certain points amounts to no more than outright plagiarism and which no one could explain the writing or, above all, the publication of - and ‘The Iron Boat’ (Chestnut Publications, 50 pages, 500 copies) a series of 30 prose poems with the phenomenon of friendship between men as its central theme. The commonplace that friendship is forged in danger seems to anticipate the course of Fatso’s life in the years that were to come. In 1992, at the head of a large group from his gang, he set an ambush on the public highway for a carload of River Plate supporters, an ambush that produced two dead from gunshot wounds and numerous wounded. Subject to an order for his capture Argentino Schiaffino disappeared. In telephone calls to radio programmes he loudly proclaimed his innocence though without condemning, quite the contrary, the ambush suffered by the River Plate fans. Numerous witnesses however, among them more than one repentant member of his own gang placed him close to the scene of the attack. The media wasted no time in identifying him as the brains and instigator behind the events. Here began his life in the shadows, the aptest period for every class of speculation and mystification.
A fugitive from justice, it was known from photographs that he himself had taken that he was present in stadiums supporting his team just like any other fan. The hardcore, the inner circle of his group, those that were with him and his brother from the earliest days protected him with fanatical dedication. His life on the run aroused admiration among the young; a few read him, others imitated him and followed his literary path but Fatso was inimitable.
In 1994, during the World Cup in the United Sates he gave an interview to a Buenos Aires sport magazine. Where was Fatso to be found? In Boston. The subsequent scandal was on a grand scale. The Argentine journalists, harassed by the security measures of which they are the object and which, according to them, represented an attack on their professional dignity made a mockery of the efforts of the North American police. The rest of the Latin American journalists as well as some Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese all joined in. The story, one more anecdote among the many produced by the event, traveled around the world. The Boston Police and the FBI sprang into action but Schiaffino had disappeared.
For a long time nothing was known of his whereabouts. In public his gang denied all knowledge of their leader’s fate until the imprisoned Scotti Cabello received a long letter-poem from Fatso titled ‘Terra autem erat inanis’ with an Orlando, Florida postmark. This letter-poem, which Dr. Morazán quickly published by way of obligatory subscription to the fans of Boca, opens with a cadenced comparison in free verse between the open spaces of North America and Argentina at opposite ends of the continent. It continues with a detailed memoir of the prisons which “enthusiasm and innocence” have caused “the author and his friends” to know, a clear reference to the two year sentence being served by Cabello at the time and ends in chaos with a mixture of threats, idyllic visions of a recovered childhood (his mother, the smell of fresh pasta, the smiles of the brothers around the table, the patches of waste ground converted into football pitches where they play with a plastic ball until nightfall) and irreverent plodding jokes, the hallmark of Schiaffino’s late poetry.
Nothing further was heard from him until 1999. His gang maintained an absolute, perhaps sincere silence. In spite of the hints dropped by Dr. Morazán, the deliberately enigmatic phrases and words with double meanings, it is likely that no one in Argentina really knew anything about the fate of Fatso, all was supposition. Even so, in 1998, the most recalcitrant set off for the World Cup in France sure in the knowledge that they would find him giving encouragement to the team in blue and white. The truth was very different. During this period Fatso cut his connections with the first of his passions and threw himself wholeheartedly into the second. He read everything he could get his hands on, particularly history, crime novels and best-sellers, learned an English which would never rise above the rudimentary and married María Teresa Greco of New Jersey, who was twenty years older than him. This allowed him to obtain American citizenship. He lived in Beresford, a small city in the south of Florida and worked as head barman in a restaurant owned by a Cuban. He also worked without haste on what was to become his first novel, a thriller of some 500 pages which is set in various countries over a period of several years. His habits changed, now he was living a more ordered life and to some extent even a monkish one.
In 1999, as has already been said, he started to produce some signs of life. Scotti Cabello, out of prison and almost retired from the turbulence of football and hardcore fans, received this time not a letter but a telephone call from Fatso. Scotti’s surprise was considerable. Fatso’s voice, untouched by time, poured out plans, projects and schemes for vengeance with the enthusiasm of the early years intact - and the thing that really terrified Scotti - as if time had stood still. The revelation that he was no longer the leader of the hardcore fans did not seem to bother Schiaffino. He had orders and expected Scotti to obey them: first to let the boys know that he was alive, second to announce, with the greatest fanfare, his return home and third, to find a Spanish language publisher for his great American novel…
Scotti Cabello complied with all the orders, except for the last; in Argentina there was nobody interested in Fatso’s work. The one who did not carry out his commitments was Schiaffino. After the expectation created by the prospect of his return, even if only among his relatively few followers, he fell into a stubborn silence once more.
During the World Cup in Japan in 2002, some fans who scanned the stadium in Osaka with binoculars believed they saw him near the southern end. They went to look for him, doubting but happy. However, when they got there they did not find him. Three years later Tampa Buccaneers Publications brought ‘Memoirs of an Argentine’ (350 pages), a book full of gangsters, car chases, stunning women, unsolved murders, bars where honest police and private detectives meet, adventures in black ghettos, corrupt politicians, film stars threatened, voodoo, industrial espionage and suchlike. The book enjoyed a relative degree of success, at least in the Spanish-speaking community in the south of the United States.
Around this time Schiaffino became a widower and married again. According to some sources he got involved with the Ku Klux Klan, the American Christian Movement and the American Rebirth group. The truth is that he dedicated himself to business and literature. He had two steak-houses in the Miami area and continued to develop a major ‘work in progress’ about which he released not a jot of information.
In 2007 he himself published a volume of prose poems ‘The Knights of Penitence’, in which he tells, in a confused or deliberately hermetic style, of some of his adventures on American soil from his arrival as a fugitive, until his meeting with Elizabeth Monroe, his third wife to whom the book is dedicated.
Finally, in 2010, the long-awaited novel appeared. The title is brief and suggestive: ‘The Treasure’ Its plot barely disguises the memoirs of Argentino Schiaffino who speaks of his own life, analyses it, takes it apart, considers its pros and cons, looks for and finds justifications. Throughout its 535 pages the reader discovers hitherto unknown aspects of the author’s life, some of them truly surprising although in general Schiaffino’s revelations are confined to the domestic arena. We learn for example that he and Elizabeth being unable to have children themselves decided to adopt a little Irish boy of six called Tommy and a little Mexican girl of four called Cynthia to whom was given, at Fatso’s wish, the second name Elizabeth. There is more in the same vein. In terms of politics he set out everything clearly, to himself at any rate. He was neither of the right nor of the left. He had black friends and friends in the Ku Klux Klan (among the photographs in the book there is one of a barbecue in a back garden in which everyone is wearing Klan robes and hoods except Schiaffino who is dressed as a chef with a spare white hood around his neck to absorb the sweat). He was against monopolies, especially the monopoly of culture. He believed in the family but also in the sort of entertainment ‘natural and proper for men’. He believed in the United States, whose nationality he had acquired, though he enumerates - the list is long and trivial - the things it has to improve.
The chapters dedicated to his life in Argentina and especially to his distinguished participation in the life of the gangs of hardcore fans are insignificant in comparison to those dealing with his experience in America. He commits some historical falsehoods but perhaps these, like distorted metaphors, disguise certain truths. For example, he claims to have participated in the Malvinas war as a private and to have been awarded both the San Martín Medal for Valor and a sergeant’s stripes for his participation in various actions. His description of the Battle of Goose Green abounds in elements of black humour but sins in its want of verisimilitude on the strictly military level. Of his long trajectory as leader of Boca’s fans he barely speaks. He does complain though of the lack of attention received by his books in Argentina. His life in the United States, by contrast, is related with vigour and in great detail. The book abounds in chapters dedicated to women, among which his second wife, his ‘loved and longed for comrade’ who opened the doors ‘of her personal library’ to him has pride of place. The only sport that interests him is boxing and the people who move in the world of boxing constitute one of his basic raw materials: Cubans, Italians and sad old black men, they are all his friends and he has them talk profusely and tell stories.
After the publication of ‘The Treasure’ his life seemed to be definitively on track but it was not to be. Bad management or bad friends lead to bankruptcy and he lost his restaurants. Divorce was not long in coming. In 2013 he left Florida and installed himself in New Orleans where he worked as the director of a restaurant called ‘El Chacarero Argentino’. Towards the end of the same year he published his last book of poems ‘Stories Heard in the Delta’ a bunch of jokes no less excessive for their melancholy just like his finest Boca verses. In 2015 he left New Orleans for unknown reasons and a few months later he was killed at the back of a gambling den in Detroit by one or more unknown assailants.
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A fragment of La Literatura Nazi en América by Roberto Bolaño which I translated a couple years ago just to pass the time.
