February 21, 2006
Life trudges on. I feel a little paralyzed these days. I’m on three solid weeks of permanent vacation status and I can’t help but wonder if I might not have cured cancer or ended world hunger at this point. I think the hardest adjustment for me is just to not be working, to be wandering aimlessly, and to have absolutely no idea of a permanent agenda whatsoever.
My sister (Doctor Lynnabelle) assured me that there are lots of people in the world (including her) for whom a day without a schedule sounds like a small miracle. I know how lucky I am, I do. I just can’t help but feel a little anxious, not by being unemployed, but without the prospect of being employed in the near future. Life here continues to be weird and scary and wonderful and fresh and sometimes all of these things at the same time.
Last week I saw a taxi accident near our house. A younger taxi driver rear-ended an older gentleman who stopped his car in the middle of a tiny and gridlocked street rendering it totally unusable and unleashed all hell on the guy that hit him. What a scene. I couldn’t understand much but my limited Spanish allows no room for guesswork on words like puta and pandejo, which were about every second or third word. It was hilarious and suddenly clear to me that while drivers here have absolutely no concern over the sanctity of human life, they clearly understand the value of their cars. Weird? Crossing the street continues to be a daily adventure and always somewhat of a question mark whether or not I’ll make it out.
On Friday evening we went to our first real, actual, in the flesh, professional, Argentinean tango show. It only took us three weeks to figure it out but we did. We went to the tourist-ey but ever-chic Café Tortoni. Café Tortoni was established in 1858 and the place reeks of it. There are clipping of newspaper reports of Carlos Gardel singing there and the service is atrocious in the great style of all great places. I am no tango expect and maybe a year in this place will sophisticate me a little but as far as I could tell, the show was world class. There were two couples that danced (and a clear winner) but I think the highlight was a gentleman singing traditional tango songs – none of which I understood and all of which were really moving. The music was just lovely and the live band was great. It struck me for the first time how all tango music has a hint of sadness. Or maybe I have a hint of sadness. I read a blurb about the history of the dance in El Pinche Lonely Planet that says: “Though the exact origins can’t be pinpointed, the dance is thought to have started in Buenos Aires in the 1880’s. Legions of European immigrants, mostly lower-class men, arrived in the great village of Buenos Aires to seek their fortune in the new country. The settled on the capital’s arrables (fringes), but missing their motherlands and the women they left behind, they sought out cafes and bordellos to ease the loneliness. Here, the men mingled and danced with waitresses and prostitutes.” Suddenly it makes sense that the music as well as the dancing are raw, passionate, sexual, exotic, and never without a hint of sadness. The tango is everywhere here. The stereotypes are true, at least in the city. Every other music store is a tango-specific music store and tango music blares out of our neighbors’ windows, street kiosks, and marketplaces. Last night I stepped out of the darkness of the cinema and my path was blocked by a couple in khakis tangoing under the neon light of a Pizza house.
After Tortoni we walk down Corrientes again. I haven’t been there when the street hasn’t been abuzz. It seems to never stop. It also boast a restaurant called El Palacio de las Papas Fritas (The Palace of French Fries) – my own personal Mecca. I haven’t eaten there yet as I’m saving that experience for a rainy day. We cruise around checking out the sights and sounds (there’s a naked guy, a model Romeo and Juliet hanging from a second floor balcony, people selling mate cups. We stop in at a Heladería (ice cream store) and I order some lemon ice cream and the weirdest thing happens.
When I was a kid we took 2 family vacations to Yugoslavia (the former). We stayed in a little Alpine town called Bovec (spelling?) on the Italian border. As I was young (maybe 7 and then 9) I don’t remember much. I remember a restaurant that served the most humungous pizzas I’d ever seen in my life that we referred to as ‘wagon wheel’ pizzas. I remember my poor father literally pushing reluctant children up the sides of the most gorgeous mountains and being met with nothing but grumbles. I remember white water rafting and nearly drowning. I remember getting swept down the river and being saved by a naked man. The clearest thing I remember though is a little ice cream store in Bovec that had lemon ice cream – a delicacy I’d never encountered in Glasgow. I loved the stuff so much that I think I gorged myself on it every day on both of our trips to Yugoslavia. I’ve never tasted anything so divine either before or since – until Friday night on Corrientes in Buenos Aires. I feel like I’m nine years old. I feel like I’m back in a country that doesn’t exist anymore and that the airport we flew into was never bombed to bits. I feel like the heaven a nine year old feels when they taste the best ice cream of their little lives. So I’ve had 3 more helpings of lemon ice cream since Friday and I don’t think I’m going to quit any time soon. Amazing how the mind tricks.
On Saturday we take a bus an hour out of town to the ‘Feria de los Matadores’, which I believe is a weekly celebration during the summer. The streets of Matadores are filled with artisans selling maté cups, leather belts, bags, handmade clothes, cheeses, liquors, cakes, and every single kind of knick-knack you could stretch your mind around. On every corner there is a giant asado and the whole place smells like the best barbeque in the world. In the middle of it all is a giant stage with Argentinean folk music and dancing. Colorful dresses and songs fill the warm evening. Paul and I eat delicious tamales. They may be the best tamales in the world and I’m a heck of a tamale snob. Paul buys his first maté cup, a beautiful leather belt, three bottles of homemade Argentinean liquor, and declares himself ready to spend a year here having got all of his provisions.
When we get back to the house, Buenos Aires’ wimpy (but lively and loud) version of Brazilian Carnivál has set up shop (literally) in our back yard. It’s a risk you take when your closest cross street is one of the biggest avenues in the world. It’s also kind of fun to never, ever know what you’re coming to. We watch the chaos for a while which mainly consists of drumming and people shooting each other with aerosol foam cans. Good times.
We spent Sunday evening at a restaurant with Paul’s friend Emil and his girlfriend Dana. Emil is a character and it’s almost as fun hearing him talk about getting the meat sweats in Tuscany as it is listening to Paul talk about eating sheep burgers in Syria. Not quite, but almost. It’s still amazing to me that four people can sit around a table for hours and hours drinking wine and sherry, eating bread, pasta, rabbit, goat, and chicken until they have to roll themselves out and the bill for all four of us barely lumbers its way to 23 bucks. Take THAT SoHo, Ca Dario, Bouchon, Lucky’s, and anywhere else I can’t afford to eat in the SBar. Every day is Lilly’s Tacos day in Buenos Aires.
I have been trying to combat loneliness and feeling like a fish without a bicycle by indulging in simple pleasures. This morning I posted up at a café with WiFi and patiently nursed one café con leche until 2 episodes of ‘Lost’ were finished downloading. Yesterday I indulged in paying the most I’ve paid for absolutely anything here to a British bookseller for a book on Argentinean history, literature, and politics and Borges’ final work The Book of Sand, which I immediately took to the café where they claim he wrote it. I’ve seen more horrific American films than I care to recall in the last three weeks just for the sheer stupid pleasure of hearing people speak English for a couple of hours. There is a vet down the street where there are puppies in the window that I visit almost every day just to get my heart warmed a little. Then there are the times that I lose my ATM card, drop my computer, get horrible, hateful emails from Paul’s friend because I put a photo of George Bush on my blog that is a rendering by an Argentinean street artist. Things are up and down. It’s a weird and wonderful city. And, like I said, often all of these feelings come to me simultaneously.
