“I like it here.” I find or rediscover that phrase by Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos in El coso, the latest documentary by Néstor Frenkel, fabulous like all of his. “I like it here”: it might sound like a declaration of principles, but it really dispenses with the high-sounding of the genre and replaces it with the modesty of the tone of someone who utters just a personal preference. There is no morality or mandate in this, nor a “you have to go” or a “you have to stay”, but only the discretion of a taste: “I like it here”.
“Here”. There is nothing more concrete than a deictic, as long as it is put in context; but there is nothing more diffuse than a deictic, if instead one dispenses with it. Here? What here? Which of all the possible ones here? A country like Argentina? A city, like Buenos Aires? A neighborhood, like Retiro? Or a bar, like the Florida Garden, which is where Peralta Ramos once talked and came up with that phrase?
Here it is all of that, or it is none of that. Here is neither more nor less than the place where you are. It does not arouse a patriotism, neither of a big country nor of a small country, nor some local fervor, nor some neighborhood or cafetín tango mythology. It is just the expression of an attachment, regardless of attachment to what; it is the expression of an entire happiness of being, no matter exactly where. Isn’t there a formulation of essential discomfort that manifests itself as a desire to leave, without needing to say where? Why then could not a formulation of essential well-being be verified that consists neither more nor less than the pure taste of a “here”?
The phrase takes on a greater force, in any case, said by the one who said it: Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos. Because it was said by a Peralta Ramos, lineage of founders, lineage of real estate owners, producers of fixed assets. But Federico Manuel said it, the dislocated, the misguided, the lost, the lost family genius, who even in the family home (where he still lived when he grew up) occupied a displaced, incongruous, lateral place.
The one who said: “I like it here” had the power to alter any “here”, because he lived outside of himself, because he was outstanding.