By Mariana De Leo
In Reta [2] everyone knew Arturo. Or rather: everyone knew Arturo and his things. When we were kids, we'd arrive at the summer house and run to ask for tools, to install the gas cylinder, tidy up the patio, or fix something. Always kind and helpful.
Arturo had started out as a mechanic. A serious, hardworking mechanic, one of those who could fix engines, sand buggies, just by listening to them breathe. A skill and knowledge that he would later pass on to the "Car Mona" workshop, because when Chola died, something strange happened inside him.
He was sad, but then he became a craftsman. An inventor, a kind of unskilled inventor.
As if the grief, instead of breaking him, had disrupted his imagination.
La Chola had been a striking, funny, politically astute woman, a great ravioli maker, and possessed of a character capable of handling any argument with smiles or verbal slaps. While she lived, Arturo still retained some connection to logic.
But then the challenge began. He started the era of accumulating objects to transform them into strange figures of nuts and bolts, into figurative works, like the illuminated church of Reta with musical sounds, plans and paintings of cobblestone towers and iron suns, imagining an entrance to Reta. He used La Chola's oilcloth tablecloths to create Berni-style assemblage works, breaking all the molds of art, with extravagant paintings and expressions of the daily life of his world.
Until one day the interior of his house was overflowing with works and crafts, and the Mermaid appeared.
I saw her born from my house. One morning, Arturo set out with iron bars, cement, paint, an old clock, and that inventor's gleam in his eye that men have when nothing can stop them.
Without blueprints. Without permission. Without any explanation, he began, and for weeks he hammered away in the sea breeze until he erected a mermaid in front of his house. The statue, bolted to the wall, held a clock on its head, like some kind of maritime goddess of railway timetables.
It was magnificent. At first.
Because the structure slowly began to crumble. The poor mermaid wouldn't set and lost her neck day by day, as if time itself were crushing her. It took Arturo a while to notice. And when he finally realized that the head was sinking toward the shoulders, he solved the problem with some DIY engineering: he put a stick in her nose to prop up the head and prevent the clock from giving way.
And so it remained. The Mermaid ended up half-shriveled, with a flattened nose, without a neck. But she continued to tell the time for us seafaring folk for years, like a defeated queen, and what's more, she gave her name to Arturo's museum: "The Mermaid."
That's where it all began. Then came the inventions.
Arturo made all sorts of things: tiny ships in bottles, absurd mechanisms, movable sculptures, and objects that no one understood, but everyone stared at.
Until one day he won a prize for a microscopic violin carved from bone. A violin so small it looked like it was made for a melancholy flea.
The prize included a trip to Spain.
And Arturo, overcome with excitement, committed the most perfectly Arturo-esque feat of his life: he went without a bag.
A whole week in Europe with the same clothes, his wallet in his pocket, and a comb. Nothing else. According to him, traveling light "cleared his head." No one ever knew if it was philosophy or just a distraction.
It was during that trip, at a technology exhibition in the 1990s, that the episode occurred that history still hesitates to officially acknowledge.
Arturo met a young, thin, quiet American engineer who looked like he never slept. His name was Elon Musk.
The young man was fascinated listening to the stories of the craftsman from Reta, who spoke in a blend of mechanics, science fiction, and coastal delusion.
Because Arturo didn't just make sculptures. He had also built a futuristic vehicle. He had constructed it with a Citroën engine, galvanized sheet metal, and an unbridled faith in the future.
It had geometric lines, an aerodynamic shape, and such sharp forms that it looked like it had been designed by a depressed alien.
Arturo christened it ORNI: Unidentified Rolling Object.
He said it wasn't a car but "a futuristic idea." And it really seemed like one.
Minimalist. Strange. Metallic. It only had one small problem. Arturo had forgotten to put a fuel tank on it. So the vehicle ran with a small gasoline can strapped to the roof. He didn't think it was a big deal.
According to Arturo, "NASA also corrects things on the fly." The young Elon listened to all of this with wide eyes and took notes.
He looked at a photo Arturo carried in his wallet among the pictures of La Chola and his friends. He listened to the explanation about the shapes and angles of the ORNI.
And there, probably there, the heist of the century occurred.
Because many years later, when Arturo was no longer around, the famous Tesla Cybertruck appeared: Silver. Geometric. Sharp. Minimalist.
Looking like a spaceship improvised by a visionary mechanic.
Too many coincidences, I thought.
In Reta, no one doubts the truth. Elon Musk didn't invent the Cybertruck that the Jujuy congressman is showing off. He stole the idea from our craftsman.
Luckily, Arturo never found out. Because, even with his smile and composure, he would have taken the first flight to the United States, without a bag, carrying a can of gasoline, some cables, and a napkin covered in drawings to rightfully claim international authorship of the ORNI.
Notes:
1. With this story, we begin a space dedicated to short, unpublished texts.
2. A seaside resort located on the Atlantic coast, in the district of Tres Arroyos, Buenos Aires Province.