There were going to be five pieces of music, according to rumors from very early on in the Casa Rosada. A small intimate presentation for the host, Javier Milei, and his distinguished guests. The one who had to sing for them was the tenor Andrea Bocelli, awarded that same afternoon with the Order of May. In return, they wanted the Italian to give them an opera gala. The President had even explained his tastes in the field in the talk prior to the award: Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini. Bocelli had a choice.
But, unexpectedly, the idea came to nothing. The tenor told them that he was tired from the recitals he had been giving in Buenos Aires, that he would make a “brutta figura” – a piece of paper – if he improvised and that the best thing was to organize something with more preparation for a distant future occasion. Faced with his host’s disappointed face, Bocelli finally deigned to play a piece on the piano, the Gardelian tango “Por una Cabeza.”
But he didn’t sing opera. He left them without their finery.
The small anecdote, which occurred on Wednesday the 19th, shows an increasingly unknown side of the President. You need to be surrounded by friends, feel accompanied and entertained. The gala at the Casa Rosada for him and his inner circle would surely have worked as a continuation of the music-loving Sundays in which Milei invites trusted officials and journalists to listen to opera in the microcinema of the Quinta de Olivos. The first time, one of the invited journalists believed that he was being summoned for an off the record. No: the President only needed to have a million friends, like Roberto Carlos.
Scenes like these speak of a pathological and deep loneliness. From someone who had his first friend and his first partner just past 30. Someone who as a child suffered beatings from his father at home and bullying from his classmates at school. Someone who emotionally relies almost exclusively on Karina, his sister, and Conan, his deceased English mastiff, of whom Milei continues to speak in the present and whom – only when he speaks in total confidence – does he glimpse sitting at the right hand of God, in Heaven. Conan, in fact, is the one who from that other dimension would have transmitted the message from the “One” – as Milei confidently calls the Creator – that he was destined to become President to save Argentina. The same Conan with whom he spent the holidays alone every New Year’s Eve and to whom he brought a glass of champagne to toast.
In addition to the opera in Olivos and the truncated Bocelli concert in La Rosada, the President also called on his officials to watch a film together, Francella’s latest, “Homo Argentum.” There were two functions, with different guests. And in addition, he sang “El rock del gato” and other rock hits for all of them in his memorable show at the Movistar Arena, broadcast with shame even by the journalists close to him. Furthermore, when “El Gordo Dan” invites him to his Carajo channel streaming, Milei can stay up to six hours and tell his interviewers, already at dawn: “I’m here to continue, eh.”
Sometimes it seems that he persisted until he became President with the sole purpose of being less alone, of being recognized and celebrated. Accepted, in a word. Adequate and timely therapy would surely have helped him resolve these deficiencies, but the truth is that the last psychologist he had died many years ago, and since then he discharged himself.
Milei just wants some affection. He is the loneliest President in the world.
