When the Buenos Aires subway closes at night, Enrique Ferrari goes underground to mop the platforms — and to polish his next thriller.
The Argentine station cleaner, 44, with bags under his eyes, is also a prize-winning crime novelist.
He has been published in several countries, but it is the nighttime cleaning job that puts food on the table for his three children.
“Live off writing? The money isn’t good enough,” he said.
A representative for cleaning and other unskilled staff in the subway workers’ union, he is seen as a curiosity: a decorated writer who has never been to university.
The author — and his gritty, succinct prose — has caught the media’s eye, appearing on television, radio and in news reports, where he has been dubbed the “subway writer.”
However, he is fed up with the sobriquet.
“I understand that people find it surprising, but I am not a strange creature. There are lots of we laborers who write, paint or play music,” said Ferrari.
“It is a peculiarity of capitalists and the bourgeoisie to think that we workers have no culture,” added the novelist, whose many tattoos include one of Karl Marx on his left arm.
Ferrari, known as Kike, has published five novels and two collections of short stories.
His murder mystery Que de lejos parecen moscas (“They Look Like Flies From A Distance”) won a prize at the prestigious Gijon crime writing festival in Spain in 2012. That got him published in France, Mexico and Italy.
Previously, he won a prize in Cuba for Lo Que No Fue (“What Was Not”), a political thriller set in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war.
DARK SETTINGS
In the subway, he clears up commuters’ rubbish in an environment that reflects the dark settings of his crime fiction.
“I work in an abandoned city. In a universe which is always overpopulated, I come along after the party,” he said.
In the brief breaks during his cleaning shift, he switches on an old laptop and polishes his manuscripts.
“I write whenever I can, wherever I can,” he said. “Although during the day, I’m most interested in finding time to sleep.”
His other work space is a little table piled with books in a corner of his apartment in Once district, Buenos Aires.
He spent three years living illegally in the US before being deported, but came back home with his first novel under his belt: Operation Bukowski, published in Buenos Aires in 2004.
A fan of the River Plate soccer club, Kike grew up in a modest home.
When he was eight, his father gave him a book of Sandokan, from a series of classic pirate adventure novels by the early 20th-century Italian writer Emilio Salgari.
“Instead of dreaming of being a pirate, I dreamed of writing without stopping, like Salgari,” he said.
However, he does not want to go the same way as his literary hero.
“Salgari ended up committing suicide. He was tired of the publishers sucking his blood,” he said.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese