Uruguay: The Country of Round Lines

Let's face it: airports are the worst invention of humankind, right after school parent chat groups (those digital hellscapes I know nothing about firsthand, but whose horror stories have reached me). I was in São Paulo's airport, which is the archetype of all gray, soulless airports, or at least its older terminals are.

My back was in knots, and not just from the seat. I was in the foul mood of a dog whose tail has been stepped on, courtesy of LATAM, an airline that sometimes feels like a sociological experiment to see how much human dignity can be pulverized before takeoff. They’d made me miss my connection, and in the process, reminded me that some livestock travel with more rights. But that story, my holy war against them, is for another day.

The point is, your body goes into idiot mode: a mix of jet lag, boredom, and resignation. My plan for the next ten hours was simple: stare at a pillar until it was time to board.

And in the midst of that existential nothingness, a word appeared on the departures screen: Montevideo.

At first, the boarding area was like all the others. A wax museum of tired people. Each person in their own bubble, respecting an invisible, stupid distance, as if the person next to them had a contagious disease. Civilization, I suppose. Everyone buried in their phones, pretending we had something more important to do than just sit there, tossed around like luggage.

But then, it happened.

It started with a sound that doesn't belong in airports. A sharp THWACK! A guy who looked like a bear in a jacket had just slapped another guy on the back from five meters away. The guy who got hit, instead of calling security, turned around and laughed his ass off. And right there, in that instant, the São Paulo airport began to glitch.

Because after the slapper came a woman carrying the holy grail under her arm. And no, it wasn't one of those pastel-colored Stanley thermoses that influencers use for the 'gram. It was its antithesis: a veteran steel thermos, chipped at the edges, with the kind of dents that tell a thousand stories of road trips and beach days. I swear to you, people started getting up as if they’d just seen Messi. A kid from the other side of the room walked over and asked, "Need hot water?" And the woman, as if she'd known him her whole life, said, "Pour it for me, che!"

In five minutes, these people began to desecrate the sanctity of the rows of seats. They moved chairs to form a circle. A circle, do you get it? The least meritocratic geometric shape of all. Where there were once individuals, there was now a tribe. From a backpack emerged a bag of greasy biscuits, which began to circulate even faster than the mate.

And I, the Argentine, watched them from my civilized cell ten meters away. And I felt a pang of envy. Because I wasn't so far from that, from that custom, from that code. But at the same time, I was on the outside. I didn't have a cousin in common with them; I didn't know the defender for Peñarol from '93. I wanted to be part of that circle, but I didn't have the password. In that moment, I understood the subtle yet infinite distance between "che" and "bo."

Because what was happening was a chain reaction of recognition. A constant murmur that grew with each new Uruguayan who arrived and repeated the same phrase, the one that's half-greeting, half-surprise: "¡Bo, por acá!" (Hey, you're here!). The theory of six degrees of separation is a scam in Uruguay. There are no degrees. Uruguay isn't a country; it's a handkerchief: you shake it a bit and sooner or later everyone ends up in the same corner.

And what killed me wasn't the mate or the biscuits. It was the joy. A genuine, at-home joy in a space designed for transit, not for tenderness. They told jokes, they caught up, they argued about soccer. They had turned a boarding gate into a Sunday backyard barbecue. They had hacked the system with the most dangerous weapon of all: trust.

A day will come when you'll be in an airport in Frankfurt, or Houston, or wherever. And everything will be silent, efficient, sterile, and terribly sad. No one will look you in the eye. And you'll remember that beautiful chaos at the boarding gate to Montevideo.

And you will understand that the world is divided in two: those who wait alone in a line, and the Uruguayans, who always find a way to form a circle.