The Big White Smudge | Translation

The Big White Smudge | Translation

12/09/2025

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The following English translation was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Hello, Ambulantes.

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OK, here’s the episode. Before we begin, a warning. This episode contains explicit language. This is Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón.

[Imanol Subiela Salvo]: Like, this isn’t the story of the poor gay kid who was discriminated against in the town and didn’t triumph in the city either. I mean, zero, it was never about that. For me it has more to do with other things…

[Daniel]: And he, the protagonist of this story, is Imanol Subiela Salvo.

Imanol was born in 1994, in Trelew, a city near the sea, in southern Argentina. His was a typical middle-class family: dad an employee, mom a biochemist, and three children. Ima, the youngest. A quiet, intelligent, somewhat shy boy.

[Imanol]: I wasn’t much for playing ball or playing with other boys, I was more feminine, like more of an inner world, let’s say. And then I quickly became very much a reader and spent many hours reading.

[Daniel]: He started with some classics of literature in summary form: William Tell, Frankenstein, Moby Dick, books that his dad read to him at first before bedtime.

Then came Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings. Imanol liked fantasy. And solitude.

[Imanol]: Reading was an activity that allowed me not to talk to people. Uninterruptedly. Playing on the computer, for example, also made me not talk to people. But it was frowned upon to spend a lot of time in front of the computer. Reading, on the other hand, was like: Oh, look how studious, look how he reads, what a reader Imanol is.

[Daniel]: Reading was also a way to abstract himself from the things happening in his family. Because by 2002, when Imanol was seven years old, not only was Argentina going through one of its many economic turbulences. At home there was also a major crisis taking shape.

One February night his parents sat down in front of Imanol and his siblings after dinner…

[Imanol]: The typical scene like from a Channel 13 movie on Sunday: we have something to tell you. And there they announce that they’re going to separate. Drama. Drama like everyone crying…

And for me it was terrible. Because I didn’t understand it. My education was Disney and love was supposed to be for life until death do you part, blah, blah, blah. I couldn’t understand how it was possible for my dad to leave my house. It was like something from another world. And that’s when the spots appeared.

[Daniel]: And with those spots began a sort of family misunderstanding that is the center of our story today. Our producer Emilia Erbetta tells us the story.

[Emilia Erbetta]: I met Imanol ten years ago in a journalistic chronicle workshop. He, of course, was no longer a kid, but a 20-year-old boy, funny and somewhat insolent, who had just arrived in Buenos Aires and was starting to take his first steps as a journalist.

It was in that workshop, surrounded by other future chroniclers, that I heard for the first time the story of some spots that appeared on his pubis after his parents’ divorce: I have a two-colored dick, he said laughing, and I wondered who was this boy who could tell something so intimate in front of a group of strangers without blushing.

Then the years passed, we became friends and we didn’t talk about his spots again until a few months ago, for this episode.

[Emilia]: How were they, do you remember how they were? Or how the spots really are?

[Imanol]: Yeah, basically it’s like a piece of extended white skin. Like a somewhat deformed cloud. I have them on my waist and a little on my dick. I can show you if you want… I mean not the dick, but the waist.

[Emilia]: But you’re white.

[Imanol]: No, no, but it’s 100% white. I mean, I’m going to show you.

[Emilia]: He shows me. And what I see is how his skin, which I would have always defined as white, is actually a very light brown color. And it begins to fade below the navel. First toward a soft pink and then, toward another type of whiteness, a whiter, more brilliant and definitive white.

[Imanol]: And then I have some on my right leg. And I have another… ha, ha, like where the butt crack ends.

[Emilia]: Ima doesn’t remember how those spots appeared or who saw them first. He was eight years old, so it’s possible it was his mom when she was helping him change or drying him after a shower.

[Imanol]: My mom is a biochemist, so she has like a general knowledge of the medical universe and I think she must have immediately seen or must have known that it was vitiligo and forgot about the matter.

[Emilia]: What Ima’s mom knew was that vitiligo is not a clinically serious disease. It’s not contagious, doesn’t affect other organs, doesn’t cause pain. It’s an autoimmune, chronic disease that has no cure and whose exact cause is unknown. It consists, simply, of the death of cells that produce melanin, that is, the pigment that gives color to the skin. That’s why the white spots that, in some people, can occupy various parts of the body, like the face, elbows or knees, and in others, like Imanol, only appear in a focused area.

The greatest impact of vitiligo is usually emotional. That’s why often the most urgent treatment is not medical but psychological, because some people need therapy to cope with the changes in their skin. But that wasn’t Ima’s case, perhaps because he was still young or for something simpler: all his spots were in an area that stays covered by clothing.

But his dad, Jorge, didn’t take it as calmly as his mom.

[Imanol]: My dad saw it and was like What is that that my son has? I mean. Why does my son have a spotted dick?

[Emilia]: Jorge consulted with some dermatologists in the city, but didn’t find any who treated vitiligo. So for almost two years, he couldn’t do much with that worry. Only in 2004 did someone tell him about a dermatologist from La Plata, a city almost 16 hours from Trelew, who traveled there once a month to see patients.

Imanol didn’t want to go. The spots didn’t matter to him, after all nobody saw them. They weren’t even noticeable with a bathing suit. But it was obvious that his dad did care about them. So he went without complaining.

[Imanol]: I think unconsciously there must have been something about satisfying my father, you know? With whom I felt quite at fault, being honest… a little because I didn’t pay him much attention which is always like that dilemma that appears to the child of separated parents like who you spend more or less time with, how much you go to one house or the other house.

[Emilia]: The dermatologist saw patients in an old remodeled house, with walls painted light yellow and light blue. A place more like an aesthetic center than a doctor’s office.

[Imanol]: We arrived at the place. She was very kind. Very loving. Very flirtatious too, like straight hair, with that Argentine obsession of wanting to be blonde. And a small, round face…

Well, then my old man tells her that I had this problem and she tells me well, yes, that it was vitiligo, that generally vitiligo expanded, expanded, expanded and at some point stopped. And that it can be reversed.

[Emilia]: She didn’t promise them a cure but she did tell them that some treatments could help repigment the white area, at least partially. They would start with a cream called Betnovate, which Imanol would have to apply every day to the spotted area. But there was a problem.

[Imanol]: I lived with my mom. I didn’t live with my dad. So the adult responsible for the treatment was going to be my mother, because obviously you can’t ask a 7, 8-year-old boy to take charge of remembering, of putting on a cream every day, blah…

[Emilia]: And his mom wasn’t entirely in agreement with him doing a treatment for vitiligo. It’s not that she was against it, but that it seemed unnecessary to her. So much so that when Ima returned home with the cream…

[Imanol]: My mother sees me and says What are you doing with that shit? And I didn’t understand why that thing I had there was something bad. And my mom says Don’t you realize this has corticosteroids? Imagine, I was eight years old what did I know what a corticosteroid was. I don’t know what a corticosteroid is today.

[Emilia]: Ok, Ima, let’s google: corticosteroids are anti-inflammatory medications that are usually used to treat autoimmune diseases, like vitiligo, but also for respiratory diseases like asthma or severe pneumonia, for example.

Corticosteroids are effective, but they’re usually prescribed in low doses and for short periods, because they increase the risk of infections, interfere with hormonal functioning and can cause bone weakness, mood changes, insomnia and weight gain, among other things.

In a quick internet search about Betnovate I found that it’s a cream whose main active ingredient is betamethasone, a corticosteroid that doctors prescribe for all kinds of skin alterations: eczema, bites, dermatitis, psoriasis, and, yes… also vitiligo. The same publications warned that it shouldn’t be used on sensitive areas like the face or genitals, except under medical instruction.

[Imanol]: I was quite irregular in using that cream because well, I don’t know, I was a kid. No idea. I forgot to put it on.

[Emilia]: So he did the treatment with the cream like any 10-year-old would do without supervision: more poorly than well. He used the cream when he remembered, applied it as he could. And the months passed without seeing results. Every time Ima and his dad went to see the doctor the big white spot was still there. Imperturbable.

The doctor, then, proposed that they try a more potent treatment. It was nothing other than the same cream but with one more ingredient. It was called Betnovate N, because in addition to betamethasone it had an antibiotic called neomycin, which is used for bacterial skin infections.

Although Imanol wasn’t much more diligent with this cream, this time there were some results: very slowly some small circles of darker pigment appeared on the white spot.

[Imanol]: Little dots I called the little colored spots to my dad and it was very funny because while he was obsessed with the color, my mom looked at me and said: How annoying your dad is, how dense…

[Emilia]: Dad checked the little dots, reviewed if they had changed size, or if some new ones had appeared. And every time they went to the doctor, he showed them enthusiastically.

And that kind of obsession made him impatient. That’s why he started trying some methods, let’s say, less… orthodox.

[Imanol]: In the summers a very bizarre thing happened where he made me pull down my swimsuit a little and put on like self-tanning creams, to stimulate even more that my skin would take pigment which again seemed ridiculous to me.

[Emilia]: And besides it wasn’t going to work because skin affected by vitiligo doesn’t tan. In fact, it’s more sensitive to sunburn. But Ima was too little to think about burns. He simply felt that his dad was exaggerating a little.

Still, he didn’t complain. He didn’t cry, didn’t throw tantrums, didn’t even tell his dad that he didn’t want to go to the doctor anymore, or that he was too lazy to put on the creams. And as time passed and the visits to the doctor repeated, Ima felt like he was trapped in a sort of misunderstanding.

[Imanol]: I didn’t understand why we were doing it. To this day I don’t know why my dad was so obsessed with that.

[Emilia]: He doesn’t know, but he has a theory. Rather, a hypothesis.

[Imanol]: I was very gay when I was little, I was like very effeminate and like my old man must have freaked out something like: ah, since he turned out to be a fag, his… dick got spotted, ha, ha, you know?

[Emilia]: In other words, Ima has been supposing for many years that his dad’s obsession with his spots had to do with his masculinity.

[Imanol]: Of course it’s uncheckable. And if I ask him now he would tell me “no, nothing to do with it”. But maybe there was something of that fantasy there, that those spots had to do with my sensitive and effeminate way of moving through the world. Added to the fact that I grew up among women and had no male friends.

[Emilia]: But it’s not so uncheckable. It’s just that Ima never asked him. And he didn’t want us to do it together for this episode either…

[Imanol]: I don’t know if I want to have that conversation with him. I don’t know if I want to talk to him in those terms. Because somehow what you’re saying is “you’re a homophobe, or you were a homophobe”. That theory at the moment I invented it hid a whiff of accusation. Like “ah you can’t stand this”.

[Emilia]: He didn’t want… doesn’t want… his dad to feel accused or uncomfortable. Still I asked him to call him together, but to talk about the treatment, without prejudices. To see if from that conversation we could get some clue about why his obsession with the spots.

After some technical problems, the three of us connected by Zoom one June afternoon.

[Imanol]: Hi, dad. How are you?

[Jorge]: How are you? Good. What happens is that I usually use Meet.

[Emilia]: The two of us in Buenos Aires, Jorge in Trelew.

[Imanol]: One thing I didn’t remember, dad… Was, if you remember when the spots appeared.

[Jorge]: The vitiligo spots started appearing when your mom and I separated, you weren’t born with them.

[Emilia]: Jorge told us that at first it didn’t occur to him that those two things, the separation and the spots, could be related. Until in the first consultation, the doctor told him that vitiligo has physiological causes but that, in some cases, it can be triggered by a traumatic event. And there, of course, he immediately made the connection.

[Jorge]: That this could have affected Ima, that really of the three when we separated I felt he was the one who felt it most, because besides he was the youngest. So, when they tell you that you want to kill yourself, you say I’m a son of a bitch, you see? But one tries to lessen the guilt by saying, hey, I’m not going to leave him hanging. Let’s see what we can do so that this doesn’t spread more so that he doesn’t keep having more spots.

[Emilia]: What scared him most was that the spots would spread to other parts of the body, more visible ones.

[Jorge]: Let’s see, let’s also agree that kids at a certain age are quite cruel. So, if a classmate saw him who had a spot there he would tease him, you see? And I wanted to spare him that.

[Emilia]: But, the truth is, he thought everything was going to be a bit faster.

[Jorge]: I thought we were going to put the cream on him and that’s it, in two months it would be done, you see? And since in the first sessions there was some indication of regeneration of pigmentation, and I had gotten happy, but then it didn’t advance much more…

[Imanol]: Hey, dad, did you ever think, well, forget it… like not paying attention to it?

[Jorge]: No. I didn’t there, that’s why I insisted on continuing with the treatment. I know it annoyed you.

[Emilia]: And in that insistence more than two years passed like that, with very few results. Only those few little dots. Ima didn’t care, but he remembers his dad’s feeling of frustration. It was like desperation. He needed it to be a little faster.

[Imanol]: And there if a miraculous tonic really appeared…

[Emilia]: A kind of syrup that they prepared especially for him at the pharmacy with the ingredients indicated by the doctor. Imanol doesn’t remember what it had exactly, it’s possible he never knew, but what he could never forget was the taste.

[Imanol]: It was very ugly, very very ugly… and it made me gag and I vomited it. It tasted like, I don’t know, the most unpleasant thing you can imagine. And there, yes I started to feel bad because I felt it was kind… it was torture that.

[Emilia]: And Jorge insisted and insisted that he take it.

[Jorge]: And I got really angry. You see? Because I wanted him to take it so he would be cured. And he didn’t want to take it. I say, it can’t be that you can’t take one. Because besides it was one measure. You see?, it was tiny. I say, look how I take it And I took it and it was horrible. And he cried… And I say “Well, that’s it. He doesn’t want to take it, that’s it, he doesn’t take it”.

[Emilia]: On the next visit, they announced to the doctor that they would no longer continue with the syrup. Imanol thought that was the end. No more consultations, no more creams, no more checking little dots. But the doctor proposed one more treatment. An experimental therapy that could bring very good results.

[Imanol]: Well, I thought I had known hell, but hell came after. That was a blessing compared to the other thing…

[Daniel]: That other thing, after the break. We’ll be right back.

[Daniel]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante. Emilia continues telling us.

[Emilia]: Imanol didn’t like the idea of an experimental treatment too much. They had already tried the creams, with the syrup. Sometimes he felt like a hamster in a laboratory.

[Imanol]: And I think what horror! I don’t want to put anything experimental and novel on myself. I mean, give me classic science, sister. Like something that’s already tested…

[Emilia]: The technique was called mesotherapy and it wasn’t experimental per se. What was unusual was using it to treat vitiligo, because it’s a procedure that’s generally used in aesthetic medicine to treat cellulite, hair loss or wrinkles.

[Imanol]: I really, really 25 years later, I say, that lady was a sadist because how did she lend herself to doing that. That would be the following, colon: she put in a little bottle like those for vaccines, a micro needle, loaded the bottle with the micro needle in a plastic gun and shot up my entire waist and dick. Ta, ta, ta, ta…

[Emilia]: That’s how mesotherapy works: applying microinjections, in this case of corticosteroid, over the affected area. The waist, the pubis, the thighs.

[Imanol]: I still remember clearly how she loaded the gun with the little bottle and the needle.

[Emilia]: Lying on the stretcher, with his gaze fixed on the ceiling, Ima saw her advance like a gunslinger and didn’t understand what he had done to be like that, in that situation.

[Imanol]: Because it’s not like I already had advanced skin cancer and that was the only remedy. No… it was a pigmentation problem… It was an aesthetic thing.

[Emilia]: And after each mesotherapy session, it took several days for him to feel well again.

[Imanol]: It hurt me a lot, and my skin was left like damaged, like when you’re in the sea a lot and your hands get like raisins. Well, like that, but on the pubis and waist. I mean imagine, disgusting And it’s not even like I had a reward, it’s not like they gave me a lollipop or a toy after that, it was gratuitous suffering.

[Emilia]: But Jorge didn’t realize. Talking with him, we had the feeling that he had no record of how badly Ima had had it with that part of the treatment. In his memory mesotherapy was something minor, almost harmless.

[Jorge]: They were little pricks, they were barely because it was, you’ve seen water guns? You see that you pull the trigger and a stream comes out. So, when he pulled the trigger, what did it do? The little needle hit the skin and the little piece of dose came out with that trigger…

[Emilia]: Memory against memory.

One day, after one of those sessions, standing in front of the mirror, Ima discovered that he had his entire waist and pubis full of small bruises, a purple mark at each point where he had received an injection.

[Imanol]: And it gave me a little impression, like I understood that what we were doing was kind of borderline or that what we had done had hurt me.

[Imanol]: And after that I told my dad Hey, I don’t want to do this anymore.

[Emilia]: Not just the injections, not the creams either, the syrup, the visits to the doctor. He was fed up. He was no longer a kid. At 13, he had left Harry Potter books to listen to Argentine rock in his room. And besides he felt very embarrassed taking off his pants in front of the doctor…

[Imanol]: You see?, that transition moment where the body is a horrible thing because it’s like you’re a dwarf, but you have long arms and a mustache is coming out that’s horrible, you have a horrible mustache. Like the body is a disaster and you’re very embarrassed to show yourself…

[Emilia]: Before deciding whether to interrupt the treatment or not, Jorge consulted with the doctor.

[Jorge]: And I asked the doctor: Look, he doesn’t want to do it anymore, but is there a possibility of advancing, of improving or already… “And no, except if something new comes out”, the doctor tells me. Today there’s nothing more to do. Well, then that’s it, let’s not do it anymore. Why am I going to make him suffer if I already know I have no more possibilities of closing the spots he had.

[Emilia]: When we finished talking with his dad, I asked Ima what he thought about what he had told us. I couldn’t stop thinking how the relationship with our parents always has something of a misunderstanding.

[Imanol]: My dad and I thought many things from very different perspectives and in very different terms. So, that which for me was obvious had to do with being gay, with identity, for my old man nothing to do with it. I mean, it was something else.

[Emilia]: That’s how the misunderstanding works: there are many things that they don’t say, and we, the children, don’t ask.

[Imanol]: It’s a bit about myths that one invents about oneself. Because for my dad it was never an issue who I was. I invented that later, I suppose, to give a little sense to something that well, still seems a bit ridiculous to me.

[Emilia]: And now, after having talked with his dad, Ima understands it differently.

[Imanol]: And yes, what I can agree with, is that it was a way of being with me, taking care of me after having left my house. He could have also taken me for walks and to buy clothes. No idea. But well, he found that way of taking care…

[Emilia]: It was four years. And, after that, they didn’t talk about the subject again. With the treatments finished, vitiligo entered oblivion for a good time. Until…

[Imanol]: I never had any doubt that I liked boys. Let’s say. Said in a simpler way: I never liked women. Period. The adolescent sexual awakening was 100% gay. The first time I kissed someone it was a boy… The first time I had sex with someone it was a boy…

[Emilia]: And it was there, when he started undressing in front of the boys he liked, that the spots did become a problem for Imanol.

[Imanol]: Like it embarrassed me a little the issue of the spots, because it always came accompanied by a series of questions like What do you have? Is it contagious? How did you do that to yourself? Did you burn yourself?

[Emilia]: They were questions he didn’t want to hear at that moment, in that situation. Like before, the spots themselves didn’t bother him. In those years they hadn’t changed size, didn’t hurt him, he didn’t think they were ugly either. But nobody wants the prelude to sex to be a dermatology class. Especially at 17.

[Imanol]: I think it’s quite, like, anticlimactic and unkind to start explaining a clinical history at the moment when the energy is focused on something else, right?

[Emilia]: The whole situation made him tense. Even from before he started thinking what he was going to say, how he was going to explain it. He didn’t want to mention the word “disease” two minutes before going to bed with someone.

[Imanol]: So, for example, one very silly thing I did was try to make the moment of intimacy happen in a completely dark room, because if the other person doesn’t see you, there are no spots to explain.

[Emilia]: But there always came a moment when he had to turn on the light. And when the spots were finally visible, the questions were never as terrible as he expected.

[Imanol]: Generally the questions they asked me came more from the side of curiosity. The one who was afraid and paranoid, above all, was me.

[Emilia]: It wasn’t just because of the spots. Everything that had to do with sex he experienced like that, with a certain sense of danger. He couldn’t help it, although he knew it was an inherited fear that didn’t come from his own experience but from a history prior to him…

[Imanol]: Being gay is like growing up familiar with that world that has to do with sexually transmitted infection. So you grow up with the idea that they can transmit something to you at the moment of having sexual relations.

[Emilia]: It wasn’t an idea that came from nowhere. On the contrary: it has to do with an entire gay cultural heritage, that is crossed by the AIDS and HIV crisis in the 80s and 90s.

[Imanol]: Vitiligo, let’s say, was like it mixed everything somehow. It had nothing to do with HIV, but it implied a medical conversation.

[Emilia]: And that medical conversation put him in a state of vulnerability that he didn’t really know how to deal with.

[Imanol]: You know that little shame that you have and that you hide? A very much like that sensation.

[Emilia]: He hid it even from himself. He couldn’t allow himself to do that. Because it had been a long time since Ima had stopped being the shy and solitary kid who didn’t dare confront his dad. In those years he had discovered new books and records, and, above all, he had made his own the ferocity with which his maximum idol, an unexpected secondary character in this story, came out to the world…

[Emilia]: … Charly García.

[Daniel]: A pause and we’ll be back.

[Daniel]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante. I leave you with Emilia…

[Emilia]: Before the break, I said that Charly García was Ima’s maximum idol. I correct myself: for Imanol, Charly is, rather, a kind of personal hero.

[Imanol]: I love him so much. I swear it’s like… it’s a passion. It’s Argentina. I don’t know how to explain it.

[Emilia]: Almost everything we told before, his parents’ divorce, the vitiligo treatments, and later his first sexual experiences, could have Charly García’s music in the background.

He heard him for the first time in 2002. His parents had just divorced and he was watching MTV while having lunch after school.

He was eight years old and on TV, Charly was installing himself in the ranking with his song Influence.

[Imanol]: In the Influence video, Charly appears dressed in women’s clothes and paints his lips and paints his nails like with a very androgynous thing. And I remember that I was eight years old, nine, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I couldn’t believe that there existed a guy dressed as a woman and putting on makeup on TV and that he was being recognized for that.

[Emilia]: The Charly of that era was very thin, with a body broken by consumption. He came from a decade of cocaine and lack of control, of throwing himself into a pool from a ninth floor and abandoning concerts after a couple of songs.

But the child Imanol didn’t know any of that yet, he just fell under the spell of that man with a bicolor mustache and long fingers who looked at him from the television.

[Imanol]: And there was something about that attitude of Charly who was also an older guy doing that on TV, like that bravery, that changed my life.

[Emilia]: He heard him again some summers later, walking around Buenos Aires with his uncles, who were fans of Argentine national rock, and had an mp3 compilation of the different bands that Charly was part of between the 70s and 80s: Sui Generis, La máquina de hacer pájaros, Serú Girán…

[Imanol]: It captivated me a lot. And I start getting obsessed with the character.

[Emilia]: If a CD couldn’t be found in Trelew, he asked someone who was traveling to bring it to him. A boyfriend, for example, brought him the MTV Unplugged one as a gift from a vacation.

[Charly]: Ok, we’re going to do something from Seru Giran now. A little compact. Please, cry.

[Emilia]: But it wasn’t just the music. In addition to spending hours listening to his records, Ima also immersed himself entire afternoons and nights on YouTube looking for some interview with Charly that he hadn’t seen yet.

[Susana]: Are you romantic?

[Charly]: Yes, very much.

[Susana]: My love… Really? Do you like for example a dinner with candles, by moonlight with someone…

[Charly]: I’m romantic, not stupid..

[Susana]: Ha, ha, ha,

[Emilia]: Locked in his room, hypnotized in front of the computer screen, Ima studied Charly’s gestures and memorized each of his responses in front of journalists and television hosts.

The material on the Internet was enormous: Charly angry leaving a show, Charly swimming in the pool he threw himself into, Charly wandering furiously down an avenue while insulting a journalist…

[Imanol]: I did a very silly thing which was to forge my personality based on my idol and I tried to look like him, at all costs. So all the time I tried to have quick responses, catchphrases, and ironic comments. Being verbose and above all training this thing of quick response, which for me is like a very Charly thing…

[Charly]: Do you know what it is to freeze?

[Lanata]: No, I don’t know what art is.

[Charly]: Yes, to be freezing cold.

[Lanata]: No, there’s much…

[Charly]: Pffffff ay, ay, ay..

[Imanol]: For me Charly was like a kind of survival manual. And there was something about his rabid and frenetic and eloquent and acidic personality that I tried to copy all the time because I didn’t want to be in school the weak little fag that they could bully. I, in any case, was the fierce, rocker little fag who listened to Charly García. I was difficult and I was difficult because I wanted to be like him.

[Emilia]: At 18, when he finished high school, Ima moved to Buenos Aires to study journalism. It was 2013 and Charly was going through a calmer moment. After a decade going in and out of rehabilitation clinics, he was preparing a concert at the Teatro Colón, the most important in Argentina, a place dedicated to ballet and classical music.

Ima tried to go to that concert. He stood in line for hours at the theater door and when he got to the box office only the most expensive tickets were left, about 370 dollars at the time. He couldn’t pay that.

But although he couldn’t be there, he did take advantage to read, watch, listen, and absorb all the journalistic material that was generated from the show. Interviews with Charly on TV, in newspapers, on the radio. He knew everything about him. Or so he thought. Because around that same time, in a biography that a friend gave him, he found an anecdote about his childhood that he didn’t know.

[Imanol]: When Charly was very little, his parents went on a trip to Europe like if I told you a month, two months. The child is left abandoned or he interprets that he’s left abandoned at seven years old. So, what happens to him? He gets vitiligo on his face. So. Charly’s bicolor mustache… it’s not that Charly put dye on for 50 years.

[Emilia]: But rather that he has from under his nose to his cheek, a large white spot. That coincidence between the two of them, even though it was tiny, drove him crazy.

[Imanol]: I like freaked out there because suddenly Charly had had at the same moment as me, spots appeared due to a similar trauma, which is believing that your parents abandon you and he for a long time was very embarrassed by that spot he had until he ends up using it to his advantage, right? And somehow converts the bicolor mustache into a sort of icon, like an identity brand and makes this song, which is on Modern Clicks. Deal with that defect…

[Emilia]: That piece of information, the one about the song, Ima read it in an interview they did with Charly in the Clarín newspaper. There, when journalist Alfredo Rosso asked him what had inspired him to compose it, Charly said: “Well look…I have a defect: vitiligo; when I was a kid I had almost half my face white. Now I have the mustache left. I didn’t dare use it, until one day I looked in the mirror and said: ‘dude, deal with that defect’. You have to use the defect in your favor”.

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The Big White Smudge | Translation