Álvaro Hartmann (b. Buenos Aires 1950)
Quite a few things are known about
the Argentine writer Álvaro Hartmann, but very few of them are true. The bare details of his life– that he
was born in 1950 in Buenos Aires to an immigrant German mechanic and his native
wife, that he only had two fingers on his left hand, that he was a fencing
prodigy (with his right hand) who was picked to represent his country at the
Munich Olympics of 1972, that he instead ran away to Paris with a nightclub
singer known on the streets as La Boca, the mouth (a nickname gained through
more than just her singing voice), that he wrote over 20 novels, and that he
returned to Buenos Aires in 1990 alone, sad, and half blind from syphilis - are
all true. But the details of his
involvement with a ring of bicycle thieves, the incident recounted by malicious
gossips that he once showed up at a party in nothing but his socks, and his
supposed love of birds are greatly exaggerated, as I learned first hand.
I met him the first time at the
Jockey Club, ...
