He seems expert at inventing lives and creating parallel (but possible) universes. In his childhood, for example, he set up a television studio in the patio of his house in Córdoba and he was the most similar news presenter he could be to his beloved Mónica and César. Meanwhile, around them there were deficiencies and distressing situations.
Another example, in 2012, he felt that his place in TN was creaking and he chose to train as an ontological coach. It was the key to opening a new facet of him, for which today he presents his fourth book in five years, “What do we do with complaints?” (El Ateneo), and which he plans to also take to the theater.
News: With the first book, did you imagine that with your colleague, the psychologist Patricia Daleiro, they would work as such a successful duo?
Massaccesi: It was all surprise, all uncertainty and a bit of daring because we are not writers. We are very far from literature. But we have four books published, the first is in its tenth edition. We have found a way through a choral proposal, two voices, we do not necessarily think alike, but we can agree on opening questions and telling stories so that people can identify and, above all, that it can be useful to them. If books serve people, we are done.
A few years ago, as he was leaving a theater in Pergamino, a woman approached him. Almost in a whisper, she told him that after reading it she was finding the courage to tell her husband that she had been abused by her father. “It moved me,” he remembers, “to think that, after fifty years sleeping in the same bed, I would not have been able to share such a painful truth. I will never forget that story.” Maybe, he says, because he saw himself reflected in that woman’s silence; perhaps because there he also recognized the end of his own mother, who died of throat cancer without daring to reveal that the aunt he knew was, in fact, his older sister. He found out years after his death. That discovery was the trigger to start therapy and encourage him, in turn, to put into words another secret that he had been carrying for a long time. How not to be moved, then, by that Pergamino reader.
News: In the book he says that after feeling left out on TV, he made the decision to train as a coach, which opened an immense door for him.
Massaccesi: Without knowing it at the time. It was a choice between either I complain or do something about this situation, and I decided to do something. I realized that I could also walk on another path, so that the effect of feeling chilled at work would not chill me in life. When I sit at the bottom of the well, the only thing I think I have left to do is, as the Spanish say, climb forward, it is the only escape I allow myself. Not to escape like cowards, but to flee bravely forward to seek what else is there for me. Many times what is there for you is not given to you by the person or the place where you are and there are other hands that are waiting for you with something that is even surprising.
News: When was all this?
Massaccesi: It wasn’t noticed and I didn’t come out to say it either, but it was a comment following a note in NOTICIAS, in 2012, in which, in the middle of the crack, I said that I was a non-crack militant. The note was able to find two very surgical points: the thing about the non-crack militant and the famous secret that Mirtha Legrand is still trying to find out what it is. But going back to the moment of being frozen, it was a boss who didn’t like (that phrase) and left me there with my beard soaking for a while. I realized it and instead of complaining or going to complain, I decided that it could also help me to realize that we have to go find things elsewhere. Thank goodness I went out to look for them.
News: I wrote down one of his phrases: “I don’t want to be who I am”; Although it may seem obvious, life is about learning to be who you are, right?
Massaccesi: Yes, we live by putting on not only masks, but armor, so it is being able to transcend those armors and say goodbye to them thanking them, because there are times when we need armor and it is functional, but living with one all the time is very suffocating. Saying goodbye to them and living from authenticity is very relieving, very liberating and inspiring because once you do it, you want to live in freedom. Freedom is a permanent exercise.
News: Despite that, it is still on the channel and with a different space.
Massaccesi: Yes, more fully, the two or three job proposals that I have received within the same channel have been through this friendly place of no crack. They called me to do TN Central at the time, because they needed something that wasn’t so extreme. Now they called me to do the morning news because they needed someone friendly with the news. Kind does not mean being submissive, it means being kind. And I said: “Wow, what was previously seen as criticism now creates a possible space in the same place where it was uncomfortable at the time.”
News: Still, socially the climate remains cracked.
Massaccesi: Yes, I would tell you that there is a good basis that Argentines are culturally that: River-Boca, Braden or Perón; There is something in the Argentine DNA that, after so many years of rift, has already become flesh to us. And on the other hand, there are petty interests for whom it suits; not only political interests, journalistic, commercial, personal interests. The division is still a big business, but it is a big business for a few and I think that is where the challenge lies. The challenge is to start generating messages and spaces for inclusion and conversation.
News: How do the ontological coach and the journalist who inhabit it talk to each other?
Massaccesi: The journalist asks the coach if it is necessary to continue being a journalist, because apparently they are very different worlds. And the coach tells him yes, that is precisely the challenge. The journalist asks him if he is listening compromised. And the coach advises the journalist not to give too much opinion. There is a phrase by Eduardo Galeano that I really like about our work and that is to be clear that I am not the flower that smells, I am the chronicler of the aroma. That does not mean that I am prohibited from expressing my opinion, what I do is control it in a much more responsible way. And it works for me. I am more nourished when I listen to others, even if they don’t think like me.
News: Looking back, how do you feel about the life you have today?
Massaccesi: Of relief, very comforting, with the pleasure of being able to enjoy what I wanted to do. I always have room for improvement, but now I enjoy who I am. A college classmate had a birthday the other day and told me “I’m already in my 30s plus 30, I’m getting into my teens”, that is, it’s a little difficult to say 60. And I kept thinking and I answered that I think we should invent a term to say “I’m very happy”. And he asked me why and I told him that maybe I have the same problems – that I sleep less and something different hurts every day – but he felt the pleasure of life done. So, where do I put my gaze: on the small daily pains, which I will inevitably have because I am reaching 60, or on the pleasure of a life made, having been reborn several times?
News: Do you feel like you already have your life made up?
Massaccesi: No, no, I want more, but what I needed I already have.
News: It is not focusing on what is missing, which would be the area of complaint.
Massaccesi: Exactly. Instead, I am in the details of life which is the most beautiful part. It’s like having the house made and starting to see what to put on that wall and the other. Look for beautiful things that make you better, functional, practical things, some eccentricity. I kind of got the house and now I turn it into a home.
He says that if he received the news that he had hours left, he would have a party of gratitude for what he had experienced. Like Victor Frankl, when he was in a Nazi concentration camp, he asked another prisoner that if he was taken to the gas chamber, he should look for his wife and tell her: “I left happy because the love we have had for each other has compensated for this suffering, the love was so much that what came after was already paid for.”
News: At what moment did the chips come down on you to say: “There, I was happy”?
Massaccesi: I think at 50, when I gave myself two luxuries. Bring together all the people who had been part of my life and whom I wanted to thank, because in the eyes of others were my years and in each look, a paragraph of my life. And when I asked my brothers to take a photo with my dad who was 95 years old. They don’t see each other much because of family issues and things that have happened, and I wanted my dad to take that photo, to be a witness that beyond the differences, because of him, we could be living together in the same space. So when I talk about the non-rift, I talk about family, friends, the consortium – I have been part of the board of directors and my great job was to generate tranquility -, not only about politics.
