BUENOS AIRES (AFP) –
Marcelo Iriarte has the measured voice, confident stride, even the suit and tie, of a lawyer, but every day he dons the fluorescent yellow garb of a street sweeper.
” I had a double life. I left one world to enter another,” explained 41-year-old Iriarte, whose astonishing story bridges the massive gulf between Argentina's urban elite and poor.
” I had to learn another way of speaking, and when to be quiet so as not to offend,” the suave law school graduate with a deep tan told AFP.
Iriarte is something of a media sensation in Buenos Aires after his charming story was dug up and splashed about on the front pages of the newspapers and on the television screens.
In a country of immigrants and widespread poverty, the tale of the ” street sweeper turned lawyer” has great resonance.
The son of a poor Argentinian family, Iriarte began working on the streets at the age of eight, selling newspapers, sweets, brooms and other knick-knacks on buses.
He recalled bitterly how one day, after failing to sell a single broom on the buses, he decided to go door-to-door to every business on the street. ” They bought them out of pity,” he said.
Iriarte became a bus driver about 10 years later and it was thanks to that job and a chance encounter that he ended up resuming his studies.
” In that building worked a girl who changed my life,” he said, pointing to the ruined factory where Laura, a mystery passenger he regards as his fairy godmother, sprung from. ” I never saw her again,” he added.
Following Laura's advice, Iriarte re-enrolled back in high school at the age of 35 and swept streets during the day to fund his legal studies.
Rising every day at 4 am to make it to a 7 am class, he wouldn't get home before midnight due to gruelling night courses.
” Mine was an ant's progress and I lost a bunch of things along the way,” Iriarte confessed, without elaborating on what he had lost.
As he spoke, a woman selling coffee from a cart yelled out: ” Look how good you look! ” We are proud of you!”
Beatriz Rolon, 54, the coffee-seller, offered Iriarte a cup of coffee, as she had when he did his homework seated next to her little cart. ” You deserve it after so many sacrifices,” she said.
After graduating in December, job offers piled in from a host of law firms, but Iriarte is worried that legal companies may not offer the same long-term security as Cliba, the Buenos Aires cleaning company where he still works.
And anyway, Iriarte explained, material wealth does not interest him, except as a means to improve himself. ” Before, I was mute. Studying gives you freedom to think,” he said.
Returning to the imposing university from which he graduated several months ago, he sprinted up the stairs and pointed to a wall where he saw his name inscribed for the first time.
” You were in the newspapers, I saw you on TV. You're famous!,” exclaimed his bearded, blue-jeaned law professor, Adrian Carta.
” He never needed our help,” said his classmate Elizabeth Villanueva, 39. ” To the contrary, we needed his.”
Iriarte's boss back at Cliba, Miguel Noell, said he hoped the street sweeper would take advantage of the opportunity to have a legal career.
” All of a sudden a whole new panorama opens up and it is scary. But we don't want to see him over here any more,” Noell said.
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