Due to debts he lost his grandmother’s apartment

I never did the math, but I guess I will have lost the value of about… three apartmentsput it”, sports journalist Nicolás Cajg thinks out loud.

Known as Cayetano, these days he has just published a book titled It doesn’t go any further in which he tells of his disastrous experience due to his gambling addiction.

He started with betting in a bar in Villa Crespo where he met with friends. She won and lost. With those friends he later frequented casinos: the one in Puerto Madero or one on the coast. They even went to Mar del Plata just to gamble. And they came back with empty pockets.

“Then came sports betting,” he says. “Which are the ones that really ruin you,” she adds. And she fell apart. The breakup, she says, was the loss of an apartment in the Villa Crespo neighborhood inherited from his grandmother, a survivor of Auschwitz.

“The guilt that gives me is tremendous,” he says. She still doesn’t remember if it was appraised at 60 or 80 thousand dollars. What she does not forget is that he owed the same amount as the property was worth. So instead of putting it up for sale he gave the keys to his creditor. And bye.

There he hit rock bottom. Until then He hid in bathrooms to bet on the phone during family gatherings. Or he had lunch with a girlfriend who was talking to him while he was at another: at the result of Liverpool in England or Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata.

When he gambled in casinos, he worried about being recognized. His level of exposure did not help him. Or if she worked on the radio show, she wasn’t on the radio show at all. It was in the sports result. Volleyball in China or soccer in Chile, it didn’t matter.

He lost couples due to the game. One of them He reproached him for hiding his addiction from him. and ended the relationship. So, when she hit rock bottom, she gathered her family in the inherited apartment and told them everything. “I cried, we cried together,” she clarifies to Viva.

“My old man took charge of the negotiation with the guy a little bit. He wanted us to pay the debt in installments. I wanted to pay off the debt as soon as possible and for that I had to hand over the apartment. All I wanted was to start from scratch. I needed to get rid of that pressure, that anguish.. I didn’t even sell it. I handed over the keys and that was it.”

His parents took the lead in his life. They started by managing the money. His mother paid his bills and gave him a necessary amount to cover essential expenses. They closed their bank accounts and cut off their credit cards.

They also erased the names and telephone numbers of the bet-takers from their agendas. It was literally starting over. “As if I were a child,” she sighs: “I am grateful for the family that I had.”

His life continued in Gamblers Anonymous. “I’m not playing today,” they taught him as a mantra. Tomorrow, who knows. Always is today. “It cost me a lot: I thought I wouldn’t be able to. But one day I realized that he had achieved it.”

Six, seven or eight years went by without playing. And he started writing a book. Here is a coincidence that causes him, Cayetano, something that he does not know how to define, but that makes him think that the book had to be written by Mauro Libertella, who finally wrote it based on interviews he did with him for months.

“There was a crazy story with Mauro. I studied Literature with a teacher who died in the pandemic. When I undertook this book project, Hernán Casciari (its editor) suggested that Mauro Libertella, whom I did not know, write it. I thought he was good, because I am not a writer, but that he did it in the first person. The thing is that Mauro knew my story. That’s the strange thing: my teacher was Mauro’s mother, the writer Tamara Kamenszain, and I didn’t know it. That coincidence was an indication that the book had to be written by Mauro.”

“What this book teaches me is very hard. When we started it, it had more to do with a personal concern to tell my story and help those who were going through something similar. But had a disproportionate impact. People with the same problem write to me on social networks. The other day a woman wrote to me on Instagram to tell me that she was going to buy my book because her son committed suicide due to gambling debts. I got excited. I didn’t know what to answer him. “I have no answers,” says Cayetano.

He defines gambling addiction as “silent,” but warns that among those who gamble there are symptoms to recognize: “One day I was having lunch with an athlete and I realized that I was betting because I was constantly watching a game that no one was interested in. He was looking at the phone, going to the bathroom, he was tense. I recognize them because I was there. I asked him, he told me no, but I insisted and he told me yes.”

From a distance, Cayetano can laugh at things he did for the game, “but while I was living them they weren’t funny at all for me. A drama, a place I couldn’t leave. Something sad. “Sometimes I remember that with laughter because of my way of being, but the subject is something to cry about.”

Now as a couple, with two children (1 and 4 years old), they look forward. But sometimes Memories of his past as a player return and what comes up is regret, or guilt, a word that he will repeat at various times during the talk.

“My partner, my parents, my friends tell me to look forward. I look forward but I also look back. I know it’s already happened, and yet that is a shadow that haunts me. I deal with that as best I can. One way to deal with it was to write this book.”

“Telling it, giving a talk, are ways that I find, perhaps, to feel less guilt for the shit I did to myself. It doesn’t change anything, but If I can help some people not reach what I reached, at least I empathize”, dice.

Cayetano does not define himself as recovered: “There is no such thing as recovery. Exists the permanent fight not to relapse”. For some reason it is read in It doesn’t go any further: “I will be a gambler all my life.”

He changed partners, had children, added or left friends along the way. He changed jobs and cars and colleagues. But there is something that did not change: his fanaticism for Atlanta, whose field is very close to the apartment that belonged to his grandmother and that now belongs to who knows who. From what he found out, he was sold several times.

That department is his obsession, as much as Atlanta. Sometime, he says, he will buy it again.. For now, every time you pass through the area, you can detour and go through the door.

He looks at it and thinks that at some point it will be his again. “I don’t want a four-bedroom with a pool. I don’t want a dream house: I want that apartment. I’m going to give it to my children. It is mine, it is part of my blood, of my history,” reads It doesn’t go any further.

“I tell myself I’m going to buy it. For me it would be closing the story. I want to make a copy of the keys and take them to my grandmother’s grave.. There is a lot of guilt in that,” she says.

Then, with the interviewer-interviewee trust more consolidated, the parting question arises: Atlanta champion in First Division or that department?

Cayetano’s response is barely understandable because he is so whispery, but his perplexed smilelike that of someone left between a rock and a hard place, is perfectly understood.