“Los sábados entre la 1 y las 6 de la mañana: el horario en el que Charly García mezclaba sus discos y Kirchner y Alberto Fernández preparan la lista de sus próximos enemigos.”

Roberto Petinatto, Duro de domar, Canal 13

Jeff: -Do you remember the other night when you called your wife “Hitler”? My parents, you know, were in the back?

Larry: -Yeah.

Jeff: -We had a gay cousin that escaped Nazi Germany, so my parents are very sensitive to it…

Larry: -Talk me about being ostracized. Gay jew in Nazi Germany? He must’ve had a hard time. What a combo!

Larry David y Jeff Garlin en Curb your enthusiasm (2000)

Ya lo saben: los aviones me dan terror. La última vez que volé fue en el año 2001, y aunque fue de cabotaje, la pasé fatal. Leyendo Sábado, de Ian MacEwan, me encontré con dos párrafos que ilustran de manera casi perfecta lo que me pasa con los aviones (más allá de la alusión al 11-S).

Henry observa por la ventana de su departamento un avión incendiándose a lo lejos.

“In fact, the spectacle has the familiarity of a recurrent dream. Like most passengers, outwardly subdued by the monotony of air travel, he often lets his thoughts range across the possibilities while sitting, strapped down and docile, in front of a packaged meal. Outside, beyond a wall of thin steel and cheerful creaking plastic, it’s minus sixty degrees and forty thousand feet to the ground. Flung across the Atlantic at five hundred feet a second, you submit to the folly because everyone else does. Your fellow passengers are reassured because you and the others around you
appear calm. Looked at a certain way – deaths per passenger mile – the statistics are consoling. And how else attend a conference in southern California? Air travel is a stock market, a trick of mirrored perceptions, a fragile alliance of pooled belief; so long as nerves hold steady and no bombs or wreckers are on board, everybody prospers. When there’s failure, there will be no half measures. Seen another way – deaths per journey – the figures aren’t so good. The market could plunge.

Plastic fork in hand, he often wonders how it might go: the screaming in the cabin partly muffled by that deadening acoustic, the fumbling in bags for phones and last words, the airline staff in their terror clinging to remembered fragments of procedure, the levelling smell of shit. But the scene construed from the outside, from afar like this, is also familiar. It’s already almost eighteen months since half the planet watched, and watched again the unseen captives driven through the sky to the slaughter, at which time there gathered round the innocent silhouette of any jet plane a novel association. Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed.”