Capítulo 1
In the year 2000, my life wasn’t perfect, nor was it out of a movie, but it was peaceful. It had rhythm and meaning. At the time, I was thirty-five years old and working as a physical education teacher at a private high school in Mar del Plata. I taught how to run, how to breathe, how to care for the body. I also tried to instill values—the kind that should come from home, but which some teenagers seemed to have forgotten or never learned at all.
My journey into martial arts began out of pure survival. I was trying to escape an asphyxiating relationship, marked by a physical and psychological violence that had left me without air and without an identity. I started with Krav Maga, strictly looking for self-defense; I needed practical and immediate tools to feel like I could protect myself if fear ever walked through the door again.
However, at that same academy, I decided to try a Jiu-Jitsu class. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but from the very first minute on the mat, something changed. I was fascinated. What started as a desperate search for defense transformed, almost without me noticing, into a lifestyle. I didn’t just learn to defend myself; the art changed the way I thought, moved, and understood my own strength. What was born as a shield to survive became the philosophy that taught me how to live again.
The first time I put on the gi—that armor of stiff cotton—the rough fabric felt strange against my skin. But for the first time in a long time, I felt covered, ready to fight without hiding.
In the city, the discipline was barely spoken of. There were few of us on the mat, and I was the only woman. But my teammates never made me feel different or excluded. I trained right alongside them; they didn’t judge me. On the contrary, they encouraged me and looked out for me, making me feel strong. I fell in love with the discipline, the technique, that powerful feeling of knowing you could fall, but that didn’t mean you had to stay down.
I lived alone in a simple apartment: a kitchen, a dining room, a bathroom, and one bedroom. It was located just a few blocks from the coast. From my bedroom window, you could see a piece of the sky reflecting on the sea. In the summer, I would sleep with the windows open so the sound of the waves crashing against the breakwater would lull me to sleep.
Sundays were sacred at my folks’ house. My dad making asados, always wearing his apron, sneaking little pieces of contraband meat to Mila, our old dog, and Michi, the tortoiseshell cat. My mom slicing the bread as if it were a ritual, preparing the salads. Matías, my younger brother, twenty-seven years old, was in charge of the drinks. He already knew everyone’s preferences. He would spend the afternoon critiquing soccer and talking about his dream of traveling the world. I would arrive with dessert; sometimes ice cream, other times flan or gelatin. I always tried to mix it up.
During the week, after teaching, I would sometimes get together with my lifelong friends. The kind who have known you since you had a runny nose and scraped knees. I had known most of them since kindergarten. We stayed in touch; we were already like family. Even if everyone had their own routine or their partner, there was always time for a get-together, sharing some mates, or a call on the landline.
Other times, I would meet up with a group from the neighborhood to go to the cybercafé. We were too old for that, we knew it, but we didn’t care. We played Counter-Strike on the LAN like we were soldiers on a real mission, shouting strategies at each other while eating bags of potato chips. Afterward, we’d head to someone’s house to keep gaming on consoles, from the old ones to the newest. We’d end up watching horror movies, all sprawled out on mattresses on the floor.
We didn’t live glued to our cell phones. We used MSN to chat, and if we wanted to see each other, we’d swing by each other’s houses or call the landline.
Matías worked as an accountant at a financial firm. Always in a poorly ironed white shirt, wearing ridiculous cartoon ties. He lived in a sort of organized chaos, in an apartment a bit larger than mine, just a few blocks away.
My mother was a homemaker. She took care of everything with a quiet dedication. Sometimes she invested in clothes and went out selling them to friends or acquaintances to make a few extra pesos. My father worked as a delivery driver for a pharmaceutical company. He knew every street, every neighborhood, every corner of Mar del Plata as if they were his own. He complained about the traffic, but he was never late.
I earned a decent salary. It was enough for rent, the academy, the occasional book or CD, and going out with friends. I didn’t need anything more. I felt like life was smiling at me in the simple things, and that was enough. We were happy in our own way.
And then came 2001. And with it... the tremor. December was the beginning of the end. The word corralito started appearing everywhere: on the news, in coffee shop chatter, in the nervous whispers of the supermarket line. It was the middle class’s new nightmare. My parents’ savings, kept in dollars through years of hard work, were frozen. Untouchable and useless.
At first, we barely scraped by. My mother stretched every peso, my father stayed at the pharmaceutical company, Matías and I were still getting paid, we held on. But as the months went by, everything began to crumble.
The first to fall was my old man. The company closed overnight. Thirty years of work, and not a single letter, no severance pay, no explanation. Just a pulled-down shutter and a sixty-year-old man who, suddenly, didn’t know what to do with his drive to work.
Next was Matías, when the financial firm went bankrupt. One morning he went to the office and found a piece of paper taped to the glass: Closed until further notice.
Then, it was me. The school started falling behind on payments. First a few days, then weeks. They asked for our patience, said it was temporary. It wasn’t. By mid-2002, they closed their doors forever.
Matías and I sold whatever we could. We gave up our rentals and moved back into our parents’ house; it was a painful regression, a silent defeat.
My mother started cooking to sell: pastelitos, tarts, empanadas. Whatever she knew how to make with whatever was in the pantry. My father delivered them on an old bicycle he’d dug out from the back of the garage, the same one he had used to take me to school when I was a little girl.
Matías offered freelance accounting advice, dealing with sworn declarations and monotributo taxes for shopkeepers who were in the same boat as us, or worse.
I started giving private physical training classes to neighbors and friends. They paid me however they could: with clothes, with food, or with crumpled bills. I accepted it all.
Despite all the disaster, I kept training in Jiu-Jitsu. It was my only inviolable sanctuary. I progressed and reached blue belt. It was my first triumph in a country that was falling to pieces. It wasn’t money, but it was proof that, on the mat, technique and patience were still worth something. Since I had more free time, I added MMA classes.
My professor, Mariano, offered to let me help him with the kids’ classes. He gave me a little bit of money and, at the same time, made me feel useful. I blended what I knew of martial arts with my experience as a teacher. I taught them how to move, how to fall, how to breathe. But also how to play, how to respect, and how to trust. Sometimes, as I watched them roll on the mat, I thought that at least this wasn’t broken. That the body was still learning, even when everything else was collapsing.
We lived on the edge, but we endured. The way you endure an armbar: without brute force, with technique, bearing the pain, with your body at the brink... but without tapping.
It all started through a friend of a friend. One of those things told in hushed tones, as if they were secrets capable of changing your destiny. She told me they were doing interviews for a waitressing job in London. No experience was required, just basic English and a European passport. I had an Italian passport. I had gotten it years ago, just in case. One of those decisions you make without knowing why, that stay tucked away in a drawer until one day, without warning, they become a key, a salvation.
I went to the interview with more nerves than English. They asked me simple, basic things. I smiled more than I spoke. I answered the little I knew with my best face forward. The next day, the home phone rang: I was in. The ticket and accommodation were covered by them. They told me it was a unique opportunity. And it was. Or, at least, it seemed to be.
Around those same days, Matías also got a call. A friend who had gone to Australia let him know that the farm where he worked needed people for the harvest. It was in the outback, far from everything, but they offered to pay for his ticket and deduct it from his salary. The company covered his stay. Matías didn’t hesitate.
“I have nothing to lose,” he told me while we dried the plates after dinner.
That same night we sat down to talk about it seriously. Him with his elbows resting on the table, crunching numbers on a napkin. Me with a notebook full of doubts that wouldn’t let me sleep. We laughed nervously, talked about what we were going to pack, about what would happen if it didn’t work out. About what would happen if, by some miracle, it actually did.
The next day we told our folks. It wasn’t easy. Mom stayed quiet, her eyes glassy, wringing a dish towel in her hands. Dad rested his forehead in his hands and took a deep breath, as if he needed the air to help him swallow the news. Both children leaving at the same time was a lot. A home suddenly falling silent, an empty nest full of debts. But we knew there was no choice. The mortgage couldn’t be paid anymore. With our jobs, even if they were far away and humble, we would be able to wire money. Support them from a distance. It wasn’t a decision; it was an emergency exit.
When a country starts closing its doors on you, one by one, you don’t just leave: it expels you.
Mom hugged us tight, without saying a word, with the kind of hug that wants to hold onto you forever. Dad just repeated, his voice breaking:
“Take care of yourselves. That’s all. Don’t kill yourselves working. Health first, money second.”
And that was how it all began. With a phone call, a passport, the fear of leaving, and the panic of staying.
