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With Breakfast
Goldstein was 21 in 1943, when he was deported to a
concentration camp for the triple motive of being Jewish,
Communist, and a member of the Resistance. He was not
killed, for it is common knowledge that the Nazi camps were, in
theory, labor camps, and the Germans hoped to win the war
thanks to the efforts of their more robust enemies. Useless
peoplechildren, the sick, the elderlywere murdered
immediately, but they put the young to work. In a way, thinks
Goldstein, given the manner in which they organized the
prisoners work, the Nazi camps represent an example avant la
lettre of what may well have been the final stage of the so-
called deregulation of the labor market. Consequently,
Goldstein is convinced that it was his status as cheap labor that
saved his life.
Just when the Nazis were about to have him shot for
attempting to escape, the allies arrived (they didnt find a
single German soldier in the entire camp), so that this morning,
while he eats breakfast in the Tobas caf, at the corner of
Crdoba and Pueyrredon, he is 76 years old and still goes to his
office supplies store every day, more to distract himself than
anything else, since five years ago he left the business to his
two employees, who pay him rent each month. His wife died
three years ago. His oldest daughter, who had to leave the
country after the military coup of 1976, married a Catalan and
moved to Barcelona. The younger daughter, a psychoanalyst,
has little free time during the week, and so only on occasional
nights, and occasional Sundays, do they manage to meet up for
dinner, but in any event, due to some political differences, his
relationship with her is a bit more difficult than with the older
one. Every Thursday night he has a meeting with the Human
Rights group, and every Friday, his weekly poker game.
Consequently, the daylight hours, from early morning when he
wakes up until dusk, are the most difficult to occupy.
Following the indecision of the early morning, and
preceding the interminable hours to come, the breakfast that,
as it includes the reading of the newspaper, lasts for some time,
is a moment of activity, primarily of the interior sort, since



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now his memory and his intelligence, revived by the hours of
sleep and the lukewarm shower that relaxes his body and
tempers the little muscle and bone aches that will tug at him
for the rest of the day, can more easily concentrate and take in
images and thoughts with greater clarity. For the last twelve
years, more or less, his breakfast has been the same:
sweetened coffee with milk, orange juice, two croissants, and, a
bit later, after having read a good part of the newspaper, a shot
of espresso, dark and strong, and a glass of water. The table is
almost always the same; coming in and heading towards the
right, the last one next to the window looking out onto
Pueyrredon Avenue. Every morning, when he enters the caf,
he greets the owner, who is behind the cash register, and heads
for his spot, seating himself in the corner facing the door, right
beneath the unplugged television.
Grinning and bearing it as always this morning, don
Goldstein? says the waiter from Catamarca, depositing the
croissants and the yellow juice upon the table, without waiting
for the order, while the owner, behind the bar, has begun to
prepare the coffee. A half hour later, more or less, an almost
imperceptible gesture from Goldstein towards the register will
bring the carefully prepared espresso, accompanied by the
glass of water, to alight upon the table. For now, unfolding the
newspaper, he responds to the waiter with distracted joviality
and with the slight accent of an old Buenos Aires Jew from the
Once or Balvanera neighborhood.
What can you do, buddy? Its better than rotting away
in bed.
The fresh juice, just squeezed, sweet and tart at the same time,
gives him a little jolt of optimism when he takes the first sip,
which might just prove, since the vitamins would not yet have
had time to produce their energizing effects, that in life,
pleasure itself is a stimulant. Dipping his croissants in the
coffee, absorbing it little by little, makes it difficult to read the
newspaper, compelling him to quickly gulp down the pastries,
not out of greed, but rather because he wants to keep his hands
free in order to better handle the large sheets of printed paper
that, cumbersome and noisy, fold and unfold of their own



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accord. At last he dominates the paper, and turns his attention
to Politics (national and international), Economy, and the Arts,
glances at the sports section and the weather report, and ends
with Entertainment. Then he goes back, and carefully reads
the letters from the readers, the editorials, and the regular
columnists, some of whom he knows personally because they
are clients of his store. From time to time he takes little sips of
juice or coffee, until hes finished, and finally, when only a few
minutes of reading remain, he signals for the espresso and the
glass of water.
This ceremony, repeated every morning for years, is
actually the preamble to the minutes of meditation that will
follow. But perhaps calling this state a meditation is
something of a poetic license, since meditation presupposes a
certain conscious will to think about particular subjects, and in
his case, there are only autonomous, associative mechanisms,
almost mechanical, which install themselves in his interior
every morning, after breakfast, and completely occupy his
attention for some time. To all appearances he is a serene and
tidy old man who dresses with simplicity and who, like so
many other inhabitants of the city, eats breakfast in a Buenos
Aires caf. On the inside, however, every morning, for several
minutes, due to that unconscious association to whose
punctual repetition he has already, after many years, resigned
himself, in an empty corner of his mind there arrives, on cue,
every massacre of the century. He counts them, and whenever
new ones appear, he adds them to the list, so that when he
evokes and enumerates them, he cannot avoid recalling the
verses of Dante:
vena si lunga tratta
di gente, chi non averei credutto
que morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.


So many people, I would not have believed that death had
undone so many: and even this multitude of ghosts did not take
into account all those who had died on the field of battle, or by
accident, or because of sickness, or killed themselves, or even
those executed for committing crimes. No: he was only



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counting people who had been exterminated, not because they
posed any threat, real or imaginary, but rather because, for
some reason that only their murderers considered legitimate,
it was decided that a specific group of people must not live, e.g.:
for the Turks, this group was the Armenians (1,300,000), for
the Hutus it was the Tutsis (800,000), for the Nazis it was the
Jews (6,000,000), the gypsies (600,000) and the mentally
handicapped (number unknown). For the Americans, this
group was the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
(300,000), those who opposed Suharto in Indonesia (500,000)
or the Iraqis during the Gulf War (170,000). For Stalin, who
saw the entire Exterior as a threat, this group encompassed the
several millions of specters that, he claimed, lay in wait for him
out there. And then there were those local massacres, in which,
in a single afternoon, in a single week, various dozens or
hundreds or thousands of people died at the hands of their
executioners, who, for inexplicable reasons in which no
rational interest came into play, could not tolerate their
existence in this world: Indians, Blacks, Bosnians, Serbians,
Christians, Muslims, the elderly, women (a serial killer had
murdered close to sixty in the U.S.; all of them blonde, of a
certain weight, a certain body type , certain haircut, between
twenty and thirty years old). Truth to be told, they were all
serial killings, since, for the murderers, the victims always had
something in common, and it was only because of this that they
killed them: for the Turks, the Armenians were all Armenians
and only Armenians, and only because they were Armenians
did they exterminate them, in the same manner in which the
American serial killer murdered blondes, and only blondes,
and only because they were blondes did he kill them.
Although he considered himself an atheist and a
materialist, and often took pride in being so, Goldstein also
thought that the gods did not escape unscathed from that
carnival that paraded across his mind every morning, with
breakfast, and most of the time, whether the worshippers were
on the side of the victims or the executioners, who changed
roles many times according to the circumstances, the gods
suffered the perverse effects of these butcheries. Many of them
disappeared or, as their followers changed, they changed their



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sign, losing their identity or their most important attributes,
revealing hidden traits that no one had ever noticed before.
They had probably fled in terror many times, which would
almost have been preferable, since the indifference with which
they had abandoned their followers was, to tell the truth,
abominable. In other instances, when the murderers invoked
them as a pretext for their massacres, it was either to distort
them or unmask them altogether: no other explanation was
possible. On the other hand, with every series that vanished
such-and-such Amazonian tribe at the hands of the big
landowners, for example lots of gods, gods who had
conceived, begat and organized the universe in order to offer it
up as a gift to mankind, were forever wiped out, together with
the universe that they had created and all the creatures that
inhabited it. And if the survivors, after what had happened to
the overwhelming majority of the series to which they
belonged, continued worshipping the gods who had permitted
such things to happen, they not only profaned the memory of
those who had disappeared, but also made themselves
ridiculous and, for the same reason, appeared ridiculous before
their gods.
Theyre better not be any eternity, and if there is, at the
very least it better not have any associations!, repeated
Goldstein to himself, during the first months in which this
unconscious and autonomous association, whose precise cause
(the first term of the association) he could not discover,
overpowered him every morning, with breakfast, and did not
abandon him until he went out into the street where, merging
with the tumult of the present, he let himself be enveloped by
the bustle of the street. Mental Association as Hell: for
Goldstein, during those first months, this expression ought to
have been the title of a major treatise. His thoughts were
agitated by the most absurd calculations, and he considered all
of those crimes not from a compassionate or ethical point of
view, but rather in terms of the quantity of victims in relation
to the extension of time of the massacres, as if it were an
algebraic formula. But this stubborn obsession, this odious
early morning theater, had endured for so many months, so
many years, that he had become accustomed to its presence, to



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the point that the anxiety that accompanied it was exhausted,
and, resigned, one fine morning he finally understood: the
first term of the association is my life. His initial anxiety was
replaced by a strange impression that still persists, and
terminates the episode every morning: the incredible
sensation of being alive in the face of that interminable parade
of ghosts. The fact seemed improbable, fictitious, extremely
fragile, and for a fraction of a second, its very precariousness
sets the universe dancing on the edge of an abyss.
The two years he spent in the concentration camp were,
at the time, an unbearable nightmare, but soon after leaving,
Goldstein, incredible as it may seem, began thinking of them as
a positive experience in his life. His argument is the following:
at the age of 21, his vision of the world was too optimistic. If
the war had ended without him having that experience, his
optimistic prejudices would have continued to distort his
perception of reality. Crime, torture, and massacres define the
human species far more accurately than art, science, or
institutions. Before his perplexed interlocutors, Goldstein
(whom some considered rather eccentric in his opinions, if not
a little senile) affirmed that, as a man, his body and his mind
had suffered in the concentration camp, but that, as a thinker,
for him those two years represented his diploma with highest
honors in anthropology.
When he finishes the coffee and folds up the paper,
Goldstein leaves enough money on the table for the breakfast
plus tip, and, calling out a sweeping and affable See you
tomorrow!, he ventures out into the sunny street and the
rumbling intersection of the two avenues: for the passers-by,
who observe him with fleeting curiosity, he is a tidy and jovial
old man, well-preserved despite the years, probably older than
he appears, and who, judging by his energetic and satisfied air,
doesnt seem to have had it so bad in life.
Juan Jos Saer