2023-07-23 03:01:00
For any Argentine, Czechoslovakia is Prague, and Prague is, above all, a literary city. If there is a Czechoslovakia for us, who are among the first readers of it -as always, it was Borges who started his cult in the country- it is due to Kafka. And, in recent decades, the recently deceased Milan Kundera. The intermediate stations can be filled with Gustav Meyrink, who, also thanks to Borges, made the myth of the Golem popular. Or with Karel Capek, who gave his name to another myth, a continuation of the previous one, but modern: the Robot. Or with the even lesser known Jan Neruda, who gave the pseudonym to an infatuated trans-Andean poet. Czechoslovakia for us is also a distant spring, that of 1968, which heralded the end of iron socialism. And it is the name of a curious tourist destination where the Gothic past is visual merchandise and Kafkaesque nightmares, as well as Hitlerian horror, are suitable attractions for travel agencies.
Kafka had barely six years to live when the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, towards the end of the Great War, gave rise to Czechoslovakia, a country invented from the difficult forced coexistence of several nations that, seven decades later, would finally divorce with relief. A few months earlier, on May 28, 18, Tibor Gordon was born in Nitra, Slovakia, who would be called to a strange Argentine destiny.
If the sacred geography of the north of the province of Buenos Aires is examined, the predominance of official Catholic cults stands out: the Virgin of Luján, the Milagro chapel in Zelaya, a short distance from Pilar, or a little further away the church of San Patricio in Mercedes, which honors the Pampas Gothic style. However, somewhat neglected by the disciplines that investigate the spiritual formation of the Argentine people, in Manzanares, Pilar district, there is a sacred -and profane- site called Arco Iris. Community created by Tibor Gordon at the end of the fifties, it was for several decades, until his death in 1985, a place of pilgrimage for thousands of suffering souls in search of peace. But before constituting it, almost accidentally, at the end of classical Peronism, Tibor had come a long way.
Owner of a privileged body, of enormous stature, excessive muscles and a Gardelian smile, he combined a passion for sport with intellectual curiosity. Trained in Franciscan schools, from whom he inherited the cult of humility -not without tension with their self-promotion strategies of an extroverted and talkative self- he passionately practiced multiple sports in which, pushing himself beyond limits, he excelled. He practiced swimming, water polo, shot put, jiu jitsu, Swedish gymnastics and horse riding, which prepared him for what would be one of his trades, that of man-show. But before him, his intellectual concerns would follow, centered on the enigma of the powers of the mind over the body.
Having traveled through Africa as a teenager working as a horse handler, he ended up in London with the aim of studying philosophy. It was the year 1939: the war prevented him from being a student of Bertrand Russell and he postulated him, given his physical condition, for the army. Meanwhile, love had arrived -his Eva from him, who will support him throughout his life journey- and a son. Because he was a foreigner, he might choose and chose to conspire in the North American army. He was posted to Ecuador, where a Nazi invasion was expected in the Galapagos Islands. There he became friends with President Galo Plaza, who ended up hiring him as an instructor for the military police. When his mission was over, he left the service and began a new life as a showman: possessing extraordinary charisma, he organized shows of force that had great media impact. He traveled giving exhibitions through Ecuador, Chile and Bolivia, where his second son was born, and in 1944 he arrived in Buenos Aires, where he stayed the first day at the Jaime Torres hotel, his first Argentine sponsor and friend. The war was over; the country, which he loved like few others, dazzled him. It was his instant adoptive homeland.
His career towards stardom then began: Tito Lectoure organized shows for him at Luna Park and he came to fill the San Lorenzo arena with his show, in which he was presented as a new Samson mixed with Tarzan – in fact, he wore deliberate and skimpy leopard-skin loincloths, like Johnny Weissmüller’s character. The newspapers and magazines of the time -Crítica, El Gráfico, Así- show him strapping on twenty men; preventing two planes from taking off that he stops with chains; being stepped on by a truck full of people; or holding up a thousand-five-hundred-pound rock. He even went so far as to knock a bull by the horns and have 150 kilos of cobblestones smashed into his head with a hammer. Life smiled at him. And on top of that he resembled the Leader who smiled from the pink balconies. But deep spiritual concerns ran through him.
Tibor Gordon had quickly incorporated Spanish into the four languages he already spoke, and he had the gift of words with which he managed to captivate and transmit a rare kind of calm to whoever had the privilege of conversing with him. Following his interrupted desire in England to unveil the mystery of the mind, he established a relationship with the then Minister of Health, Ramón Carrillo, who was not only the greatest public health doctor of the period but was also obsessed with problems similar to those that plagued Tibor. In fact, he had hired Raúl Sciarreta, philosopher and future introducer of Lacan’s teaching in the country, as his assistant, in dialogue with whom he outlined a gigantic volume on Philosophical Anthropology; the cure of psychic pain was one of his central concerns. Carrillo, seeing Tibor’s hypnotic skills, recommended him to the leading psychiatrist at the time, Enrique Pichón Riviere. The strong thinker did not take long to become fully involved in one of the first therapeutic communities in which Pichón tested what would be his unique contribution to therapies: social psychology.
Meanwhile, Peronism was eclipsed and Tibor, close to forty, was envisioning the end of his work in show business. His interests, moreover, had shifted. With his savings, he bought an abandoned farm in Pilar, and began his work as a milk producer. But his vocation as his healer was already declared. And his fame did the rest. It didn’t take long for the place to fill with pilgrims who went in search of comforting words and wise advice. And, also, material help. Dressed as a civilian, with a poncho, panties, boots and a hat, he would arrive mounted on a horse, dismount and walk giving comfort. From time to time, especially on May 25, he organized large commemorations with something of a sacred ceremony that generated the suspicion of the governments following 55. He was arrested seven times, accused of illegal practice of medicine, and seven times he was acquitted. The community, which he called Arco Iris, received caravans from all over the country on weekends. In his farm, around the barbecue area, a whole town was formed.
In the sixties the flow of pilgrims is estimated at around fifteen thousand people per day; The community had 650,000 members who paid a modest fee with which all kinds of services were provided. He had a dining room, lawyers, retirement managers, a job bank (he provided labor to large businessmen who also came to him for comfort); there were posts with doctors, a cooperative for the purchase of household items, and a pension system for widows and the homeless. That is to say, a true organized community supported by the kind charismatic leader who dispensed his smiling word left and right and circulated goods.
In addition to the press, which took care of him from time to time, Arco Iris published the Fortaleza de Fe newspaper and the cartoon titled Tibor Gordon -the name of a superhero if there were any- in which his life of adventures was narrated to children. Tibor himself wrote My Life, and several followers gave birth to books such as Tibor Gordon’s Trial or Tibor Gordon Seen by a Doctor. In these texts you can see some keys to its effectiveness. That, as in all charismatic leaders, lay in principle in the strong orality that Tibor professed, in which he shrewdly preached a Christian message -charity, hope and faith, in various forms- and promoted simple, collective ways of life, with an ethic of humility in which, although evident, he did not declare his affiliation. Because Tibor never called himself a Christian, nor a Peronist, although his ways are very clearly such.
Horacio González once told me that in the sixties, attracted by the phenomenon and inquiring into popular communitarianisms, he went to visit the place with Alfredo Moffat, who saw embodied there the experience of what he will name “psychotherapy of the oppressed”. El Hermano Mayor, as Tibor was called by the most fanatical acolytes, unleashed the kind of passion that we often see today in evangelical cults. In the culminating moments of the cult he used to appeal to the ceremonial of the Christian heritage. For example, he wore a seven-color poncho that at the end of the act was cut into pieces and distributed among the faithful. Thus he imitated Saint Martin of Tours, the patron saint of Buenos Aires, who cut his cape to cover a helpless pilgrim from the cold. He also distributed the bread in a kind of secular Eucharist, and gave the faithful a handful of salt: among many indigenous peoples, whoever eats salt with others is already a brother. Although he declared himself apolitical, he was once seen accompanying a UCRI candidate.
The vault that contains his mortal remains in the Pilar cemetery continues to be a place of pilgrimage for his devotees. A Peronist and suburban punk rock band bears his name.
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