My brother Roque had learned through his years of unemployment that
“everything you can do today, you can do better tomorrow.” He lived in my mother’s
house, with my mother, her two cats, and a palm tree in the backyard.
Roque was a good guy, a restless soul with multiple facets in his fragmented
personality, an adult multitasker who spent money on subscriptions to porn sites
(because he hoped to find the love of his life in some video, get her email address, write
to her, have her reply, start a longdistance relationship with the actress, seduce her, fall
in love, travel to the United States, knock on her door, marry her, have five children,
force her to quit pornography, divorce in a violent fight, return to Recreo, and move
back in with my mother), a broken Peugeot 504 without wheels or engine (Roque said
he was into classic cars, wanted to rebuild old ones, attend collector meetups, maybe
sell it for thousands of dollars or buy another and start his own collection), online piano
lessons (though he didn’t own a piano, he wanted to become a pianist in a cuarteto
band, even though he didn’t know anyone in a local cuarteto group), a Nikon camera
(he didn’t know how to use it, never read the manual, it wasn’t just about clicking, but
he liked to imagine bringing beautiful women to photograph them naked in his room
next to my mother’s, and then holding exhibitions at the library), pots and kitchen
utensils (though he couldn’t cook rice, never cooked, my mother always cooked for
him), canvases and paints (Roque didn’t understand drawing, only made stick figures),
smart calculators (because he dreamed of being a prestigious mathematician, though
numbers never fascinated him), ballet shoes (yes, he bought them at a flea market in the
Mataderos neighborhood, from a law student who thought she could dance ballet while
studying in Córdoba), wood, screws, varnish (he had the idea of building a house for the
cats but forgot), a Latin dictionary (someone told him we were Latinos and he thought it
was good to learn Latin), a microphone with a Bluetooth speaker and a twentyinch
screen for karaoke (Roque, “The Singer of the Hills,” that’s what he wanted his fans to
call him, but his voice was a disaster, I don’t remember him ever finishing a song with
the microphone on in my mother’s living room), a pole vault (because he imagined that
with his 130 kilos, short and fat, he could vault and set an Olympic record), a diving
helmet and wetsuit (I saw him myself, sticking his head into a bucket with the helmet
and an oxygen tank, he only tried it once), a parachute (thankfully he never used it, he
wanted to jump off the roof). And all this at fortyfive years old, just that year, at that age.
But you already know what he did in the end with all those things. No, he didn’t sell
them or donate them to the church.
Roque believed that one morning he would wake up and fulfill a goal, one of his
many vital projects, in the coming days or weeks, months or years…
You never know when you might stumble in the middle of Néstor Kirchner Boulevard
while going to buy marijuana seeds to become a smalltime dealer after watching a

Netflix series, fall onto the dirt road, and have a speeding truck run you over. You never
know…
Because everything you can do today, do it better tomorrow.