20: "To the country: Part 2"

Sole and I slept in til noon on Saturday. We were going to the country, to a farm outside Maciá that her uncle José takes care of.

It was hot and windy and humid. We left her grandma’s house and walked down the main street. We stopped at a kiosk to see if they had El Uno, one of Paraná’s daily newspapers. An article of mine was going to be in it. I had been writing what I called portraits of contemporary U.S. culture. This week’s was going to be on David Foster Wallace.

We didn’t see an Uno. We asked the lady and she said it doesn’t come to Maciá.

We passed an office building, the only one on the street. It had black tinted windows and was surrounded by a tall dark fence. There were delivery trucks in the parking lot.

This was the headquarters of Huevo Campo (“Country Egg”), which is one of biggest egg distributors in MercoSur. The Roths are the family that own the company. They’re the richest people in Maciá and their son went to Harvard. They own a school, and an evangelical church, too.

On the website of Huevo Campo it says "producido por familias que creen en el Poder y Amor de Dios" (made by families that believe in the power and love of God).

We got to the edge of town after walking a few more blocks. We passed some speed bumps. A warning sign called them donkey humps (lomo de burro).

We walked under a tree, to wait in the shade and try to hitch a ride to the farm. Sole’s aunt, Dioni, and José were cooking an asado for us, with chicken and sábalo, a big river fish. The food was almost done and we should’ve been there already.

A couple of cars and trucks came by on the gravel road. Sole stood up and put out her thumb but they just looked at us and pointed down the road and kept going.

They were going to work at a recycling plant, she said. The plant was a quarter mile down the highway. You could see it from where we sat.

I took some pictures and Sole and I drank from a bottle of Sprite she’d bought. We drank with a straw. That’s usually how they drink from plastic bottles in Argentina.

She called her aunt and they came and picked us up in her uncle’s new used car.

We got in. They told us we should’ve gotten up earlier, that no one’d be headed out this way so late in the day.

We drove along the highway. A guy on a horse was coming in the other direction. He was wearing baggy brown pants and a white shirt and a flat brimmed hat. He had a knife hanging from his belt.

I asked if that was a gaucho. I said it was the first real one I’d seen.

That’s José’s son, Sole told me. José’s a gaucho, too, she said. José was wearing an aqua blue polo and khaki slacks and moccasins and glasses.

We got to the farm. We pulled up to the house and got out and a pack of dogs came up and barked at us.

In the yard of the house was a cage with a couple of parakeets. They were squawking and screeching when we got close. Dioni said they do that with strangers. She came over and talked to them and they quieted down. She got them to repeat what she’d say.

Behind the parakeet cage was a big pen with ducks and roosters and chickens.

Sole went inside and got a plastic pitcher and we went to a big mulberry tree in the front yard to pick berries.

She stood on a plastic chair and I held the pitcher. The ripe ones fell from a touch. The juice stained our fingers and hands.

The food was ready and we went inside and sat down to eat.

The sábalo had a lot of bones and you had to feel the meat in the front of your mouth, with your tongue and your teeth, carefully, so you didn’t swallow any.

There was a tomato and onion salad, squash, and homemade bread. We drank a knock-off lemon lime soda.

Dioni served fruit salad for dessert.

After lunch Sole and I left the farm and walked on a path through the monte, to a creek.

There were cows grazing in the forests along the way. We walked past an electric fence that wrapped around another field.

We saw the nest of a bird up in the trees. It’s made of dried mud and is called an hornillo, which means little oven. It’s got an entrance on one side, like a cave.

There were ducks in the creek. They had a blue in their feathers that glowed in the sunlight.

When we headed back the cows stopped and turned and stared at us. We stopped, then walked ahead, slowly. The cows relaxed and some turned away and some kept looking, but none of them moved.

We got back to the farm in the late afternoon.

We sat down at a picnic table under a portico, in the backyard, to eat some more fruit salad.

José took a sheep from a pen and brought it close by and strung it up by one leg from the mulberry tree.

Sole got nervous and started breathing hard and telling José no. She turned away and covered her eyes.

I kept eating the fruit salad and turned to look at what José was doing.

He cut the sheep’s neck and let the blood pour onto the ground. It was thick and steaming and splashing into the dirt and the grass and the fallen berries.

The dogs came close and waited with their tongues out.

The sheep kept kicking after the blood had drained.

José began butchering it. He cut off the hoofs and tossed them to the dogs. You could hear the crunch while they chewed them. There was blood and wool on their snouts.

I was taking pictures. I had never seen this before.

Dioni called me over. She was posing with one of the dogs. It was up on its hind legs and had a cap on its head. I took a picture then turned back to the sheep.

José stripped and pull off the wool, then split the stomach.

José was talking to Sole and I. He took out the kidney. It was bright blue and wet. It’s the kidney, he said, just like you have. He tossed it into the grass and a dog went for it.

He pulled out the rest of the organs in one big bundle – the stomach and intestines and all that – and threw them onto the lawn.

The dogs ran for them and chewed and ripped them apart.

A black cat came by and tried to nibble at the organs but a collie growled and it backed away and had to watch.

Each dog took different parts. The collie took the stomach. It split it open and green mush oozed out and didn’t smell good. It was partially-digested grass, José said.

A tiny black lab was eating the small intestine. The stuff inside was splattered on its paws. It pulled at them like spaghetti.

The dogs looked happy and focused.

José was wearing the same clothes as earlier. There were big dark stains on his pants now.

Dioni took me and Sole into the barn, past big tractors, past sacks of feed and fertilizer. We went into one part that was dark and stuffy. There was a cardboard box on the ground. It had a half-dozen puppies in it. They were feeding on its mom.

We shined a flashlight inside and the mom – a tiny, short-haired dog – looked up at us. Sole took one of the puppies out of the box. It fit in her hand. She put it back and we left.

We walked into the chicken coop and Dioni and Sole collected the eggs. José came by and threw seed to the birds and they all came by and started pecking and fighting.

The day was getting late and we were going to head back into town. José had butchered the sheep for somebody and had to drop off the meat.

Dioni took the parakeets out and put them into a tiny cage to bring them with. They´ll bite everyone but her, she said.

We got into the car and drove down the road to the gate. I got out and opened it up. José drove ahead but then Sole shouted that I’d left my door open. They stopped and shut the door, then I closed and locked the gate.

Well, I did something on the farm, Sole said.

We got into town and walked to Sole’s mom’s house. She made empanadas for us. Sole didn’t like them much and got out the leftover perdix from the night before.

We went back to Toni’s for ice cream afterwards. Toni served us again.

We went home and changed and then went to one of the two social clubs in town and had a couple drinks with some of Sole’s old high school friends.

* * *
Sunday we slept in again then got up and walked to Dioni’s house for lunch. José made tallerines, which are a pasta like spaghetti, from scratch.

We got there late and they and Jose’s son - the gaucho - had already finished eating. They served us plates and we sat and ate while they had seconds.

José´s son didn´t speak much. Sole said he´s studying biology in Paraná and hitchhikes back and forth from Maciá every week. He works on the farm on the weekends. His hands were so big the fingers looked swollen.

We finished and left and stopped by to see Sole’s friend Diana. She was working at an ice cream parlor. Along the way we passed a nice two-story house that had the same black fence around it as the Huevo Campo office. Sole said it was one of the Roth homes.

We got to the ice cream parlor. It was connected to the house of an old couple, who own the store and make the ice cream there.

When we went up to the counter I could see through into the living room. The curtains were drawn and an old man was sleeping in a recliner.

We got two-scoop cones and played a card game. Nobody came in. I did a magic trick that I’d learned when I was in middle school by taping and studying a David Blaine TV special. He’d done it for villagers in the Amazon.

Diana’s shift ended and we walked together to go see another old high school friend. She was with her baby – a boy who was about a year old. We drank tereré, which is mate served cold with fruit juice.

The sky was getting dark and we headed back to Sole’s grandparents’ house to pack our bags. We had to buy bus tickets to go back to Paraná. Since it was Sunday we had to wait for the station attendant to show up at 7:00 PM. The bus was coming at 7:40 and we had to meet it at a highway junction 10 miles outside Maciá.

José and Dioni came by to say goodbye and take the key to the house. One of the dogs came with them in the car.

Another dog came up and got into a fight with José’s and he threw a rock and it ran off.

Sole and I said bye and left and got to the bus station. Her brother Pepe was going to give us a ride to the junction. He had to get up at 3:00 AM the next day to do his mail route.

The bus station attendant wasn’t there at 7:00. We waited as the sun set and the sky looked stormy towards where we were headed.

The guy finally showed up. He was bald and sweating. He got the computer turned on and we asked for the tickets. He said there were three seats left. We bought the tickets as Pepe showed up in his station wagon.

I rode shotgun and Sole sat in back. When we got up to speed he asked me if I wanted to put on my seatbelt. Argentine’s don’t wear seatbelts.

We got onto the highway. It was a two-lane road. There was no shoulder, just a strip of grass and then fields. It was windy and Pepe went into the grass a couple times. There was lightning up ahead and it smelled like rain.

We got to the exchange. A couple other cars and a couple other people were there, waiting for the same bus.

We got out and it was breezy and cool and you could see the storm close-by but it never started raining. I took a few more pictures while Sole talked to her brother.

The bus showed up and we got on. Our seats were in the way back. We drove into the storm and the rain and lightning.

We got back to Paraná around 10:30.

19: "To the country: Part 1"

My friend Sole is from a farm town in the middle of Entre Ríos province. It’s called Maciá. It’s got a population of 10,000 and is surrounded by soy and sorghum fields, and pasture. Sole said the population´s really not quite 10,000, but they like to round-up.

The land there is rolling and green and dry. It’s called monte, which is a mix of prairie grasses and bushes and creeks and rivers. There’s palm trees, and a lot of thorn trees called espinillos.

Sole is short for Soledad, which means solitude. She moved out of town after high school. She left to go to Córdoba with her then-boyfriend who was finishing a thesis on Amartya Sen. Córdoba’s the second biggest city in the country, and is hundreds of miles west of Maciá.

She moved to Paraná this year, a few months ago. She’d been studying law at the University of Córdoba, which was founded in the early 1500’s. She’s dropped that major and is looking for a new one, to study here. The way Argentine university’s work is you have to start over, from the beginning, if you change majors.

She’s been looking for work since she moved here. Her mom got her a job working for an ambulance company, selling their emergency service to businesses in town. She had been working for a law firm, but her old roommate was dating the boss, as well as dating a guy who was also going out with Sole’s cousin. Sole told her cousin. The roommate told the boss to get rid of Sole.

She moved away from that roommate and lives in a girls’ boarding house with Flor, an old friend from Maciá.

She has a lot of free time now. She does gymnastics. She sleeps a lot, and reads a lot. She likes Ray Carver and Charles Bukowski and John Cheever.

She sprays her books with perfume so they smell nice when she turns the page. Her Ray Carver anthology smells like lilac and bubble gum.

* * *

Spring is ending here. The days are longer than the nights. We went to Maciá during a heat wave, when it was humid and breezy and near 100º at midday.

We left Friday afternoon. It was a three-and-a-half hour bus ride. We stopped in a few other small towns, including one where people still speak German. They call the Germans here Rusos, which means Russian.

Sole and I got off at a highway junction. The buses don’t stop at her town in the afternoon.

You could see the horizon in every direction. There were some barns nearby, and others far off. I felt like I was in Champaign, in Illinois. It was late afternoon and mellow and quiet.

We walked down a highway. She called her brother, who lives in town. He said his kidney hurt and he couldn’t come pick us up. A puppy came up and played with Sole while she smoked a cigarette.

We waved down a cattle truck that had stopped at the junction. The cattle had plastic tags on their ears. Some of them looked at us as we walked to the cab.

Sole asked the driver if he´d take us down the road, to the turnoff to her town.

Sole threw her bag in the back of the cab and climbed up and then took my backpack and I got in and we pulled out.

The driver’s name was Omar. He had Gauchito Gil stickers and Virgin Mary prayer cards stuck to the dash, and red Chinese tassels dangling from the ceiling. There were cases of CDs and a pack of cigarettes and a lighter by the steering wheel. He was 21 he said, and started trucking after high school, because his dad did it.

We got up to speed. There were stripped cowhides in a ditch on the side of the road.

We got to the turnoff and he stopped and we climbed down and said thanks.

We waited a few more minutes. A lady got dropped off at the corner. She was waiting for a ride in the direction we came from.

I took some pictures. One car drove past without stopping. Sole said that’s bad manners. A lumber truck stopped and the lady got in and it drove away.

Another car turned the corner and came past us. They stopped.

It was a girl Sole knew from high school. They hadn’t seen each other since.

We got in. They had a German shepherd in back that barked and put its teeth against the glass as we got close. It won’t bite her mom said. Her dad was driving.

I sat in front while Sole was in back saying what she’d done since high school. The other girl had spent a year working in New Zealand picking kiwis and apples and studying English.

We drove past barns and houses as the sun was getting lower and the green of the trees and fields was glowing.

We got dropped off in the downtown, which is one street that runs for five or six blocks. The dog hits its face against the window and growled again when we got out of the car.

We walked towards her grandparents’ house, which is empty now that both of them have passed away. Sole found 20 pesos on the ground, on the sidewalk. For the beer, she said.

A lot of people were sitting outside on the sidewalk, in lawn chairs, in front of their homes or stores. Some were drinking mate, others beer. Some of them stared at us. Sole said adios or chau to most of them.

Her aunt and uncle were waiting for us at the house to give us the keys.

Her aunt married late because her father was protective and jealous. She married a man named José, a few years ago, whose wife had died. He’s a tenant farmer and works on a piece of property outside the town that’s owned by somebody else. The owner’s called the patron.

The property’s got both pasture – for sheep and cows – and farmland. José also has some chickens and geese for himself and his wife and sons.

I sat in the living room with José while Sole’s aunt was showing her the house and the room she made up for us. We were watching TV.

They were showing clips of a school employee getting punched and slapped by parents and other people standing and looking. He had touched some of the kids, apparently. They interviewed him with his face bleeding. He went inside the school and a woman shut the door behind him and kept the camera out.

Sole’s aunt gave me a glass of water. It tasted like something and had white flakes floating in the bottom. Sole said the town’s water’s been contaminated, that it’s got a bunch of minerals and other stuff in it and they buy bottled water mostly now.

Her uncle asked if we wanted to shower. Sole opened her bag and touched-up her makeup and sprayed deodorant. Her uncle looked at her and raised his voice and said just take a shower. We’re just going to keep sweating, she said.

We all left the house and got into José’s car that he’d just bought used. We drove to Sole’s brother’s house. His name’s Pepe and he works for the Argentine post office. There was a white Correo Argentino pick-up in the driveway. We got out and walked around to their backyard.

His little daughter was there with a friend, and a couple big dogs, and he and his wife were sitting in lawn chairs. Pepe had his shirt off. They were drinking mate. You could see big grain silos off beyond their brick fence.

Pepe´s brother talks like Marlon Brando. He called me maestro.

His wife used to teach Italian, but just stopped. She’d been to Italy, too. She also teaches in an elementary school in a village outside of Maciá. It was too much work doing both.

She said the elementary school doesn’t have running water, so the teachers have to bring it with them each day. She said it was a disaster that day, with the heat, and they had to ration it for the kids.

There’s not even running water for the bathrooms, she said.

Sole and I left and said bye. We walked along gravel roads, then paved roads. The sun had set and it was getting dark.

We passed a slaughterhouse, where Sole said you can hear the braying at night when the cows are lined up and killed. She said they were taken there in elementary school once, to see how it works.

We went to Sole’s mom’s house. She lives by herself. Her ex-, Sole’s dad, lives in Paraná, now.

Her mom said there’s a lot of discontented women in Maciá, and that she’s a threat because she’s so active. She has a green belt in Tae Kwon Do and does Arabian dancing and works with the women’s national basketball team, which she played for a long time ago.

We left and walked back downtown.

We went to Dani’s, an ice cream parlor. There’s three on main street. One’s corporate, but Dani’s and the other are local and have homemade ice cream made with fresh local milk.

We got ice cream cones. I got dulce de leche and white chocolate. Dani served us. A cone with two big scoops cost less than a dollar. Sole said you could tell the ice cream was fresh because it was so smooth. She asked and Dani said it was made that morning.

We sat outside and ate and then went back in and washed our hands at a little plastic fountain by the bathroom.

Clouds were blowing in and the moon had a halo around it. We thought it might rain.

Sole’s roommate Flor was back home, visiting, too. Her boyfriend lives in Maciá and owns a clothes shop. We went there and Flor came out with a shirt she’d tried on and they shared a cigarette.

Sole and I went back to her mom’s house. She’s turned her house into a medical office, for specialists to come to from outside of town. A doctor from Rosario was doing an exam and we had to be quiet so we walked to the backyard and waited for dinner.

There was an old empty concrete swimming pool. There were weeds growing in it. We sat on the edge and talked. She said spiders and scorpions live in the pool, now. I told her about how there was a scorpion in the shower with me right after I got to Paraná, in the professor’s house I’d been living in.

I said I didn’t really know it was so poisonous when I saw it and just sprayed water on it, which seemed to do it. But then I came back after I dried off and it was still alive and killed it with a squeegee and washed it down the drain. She said I shouldn’t have washed it down the drain.

Sole’s mom made perdix for dinner, which is a partridge that lives in the monte and is common to eat. It was marinated in a vinegar sauce and served with carrots and onions.

Perdix is Spanish are called perdiz, or perdices, plural. Children´s stories end with the line "Vivieron felices y comieron perdices", which means "They lived happily and ate perdix".

Sole’s mom has three phones, which were on the table while we ate. One is a cordless landline. The other two are cell phones.

We finished and left and went home to shower and change.

We went back out and walked along main street.

There’s two big bars in town. They’re called social clubs and are wide, bare halls with pool tables and a bar and tables on the sidewalks out front.

I saw her uncle sitting at a table drinking with a few other people as we walked by on the other side of the street.

Kids cruise around back and forth on the main drag at night. The rich boys have expensive new pick-up trucks and call girls to give them the privilege of going for a spin.

We bought two bottles of beer at a corner store with the money from the sidewalk.

We walked to her friend Nigel’s house, who she went to high school with. He and a few other friends had barbequed and were watching concert DVDs of Pink Floyd and the Traveling Wilburys and Rammstein.

We sat on the driveway and passed around bottles of beer and Nigel and another friend called Fausto played guitars and sang John Lennon and Ray Orbison songs. Fausto played an acoustic and Nigel an electric. The amp was in the living room but he played outside.

Fausto asked me if I like rock and roll. I said yes.

He’s about 30 and is tall and has curly, fluffy hair and teaches music in an elementary school in town.

He was pretty drunk and telling me about the fundamental basis of life in the country; that being surrounded by so much green calms people down, that the people are hardworking, and so on.

He said the U.S. has got something in that the states don’t fight with each other, the way the provinces do here.

I went inside and took a sausage and a bun and made a choripan. The meat had been sitting for a while and was dry, and the bread was dry. It was tough to chew but it was OK.

The breeze was steady and the night got cool. We got up around 2 and said bye and Sole and I walked back to her grandparent’s house.

The next day we were going to the country, she said.

18: "To the north, to the jungle: Part 2"

I got up at 7:45, before my alarm. I left my dorm and went to the hostel lounge and ate breakfast. There was no one else there. I took a couple of trips to the buffet and filled up on sweet bread and coffee.

I packed up and left and walked to the plaza to take a bus north to Puerto Iguazu. There were parents walking their kids to school, carrying their miniature backpacks for them, holding their hands.

I got to the plaza and saw the same kid as the day before. He was sipping a mate. He waved to me and raised his head. I waved back.

I sat in front of the souvenir stand and waited with some locals for the bus. I saw a man greet an old lady and give her two kisses, one on each cheek. I’d never seen that before in Argentina.

They didn’t show any movies on the four-hour ride. It was quiet and bumpy and relaxing. We drove through rolling, green countryside. We passed yerba mate factories and pine tree farms. Misiones used to be famous for its jungle. It’s got a subtropical climate. Now, most of the forests near the highway have been clear-cut, scorched.

We got into Puerto Iguazu, where the ground was orange clay, like in Georgia.

I got off the bus and walked around a few blocks looking for a hostel.

It was too late in the day to try to go to a national park and see Iguazu Falls, so I walked down through town to the river, to the Paraná. It was overcast and humid.

Down at the port of the river there’s boats that go downstream to Paraguay. Across the river is Brazil.

I walked past the port, across a creek, to a grassy corner near the bank. There was a picnic table under a tin shelter. There was a big boat rusting, grown-over, in the weeds.

I sat down under the shelter and it started to rain.

I listened to an Entitled Opinions on Kurt Weill and wrote postcards for friends in Canada and Israel, for my grandmas in the U.S. I read some more of Brief Interviews. I took pictures as the rain stopped and the sky lightened. There was an empty, rusting oil drum in front of the shelter, in the grass. It was Shell; red and yellow.

I walked back up the hill, to town. I looked up the addresses I hadn’t brought with me and walked back down the hill, downtown, and mailed my postcards just before the post office closed. I stopped at a tourist restaurant and ordered a pizza and a Coke. I was the only one in there.

I came back to the hostel and wrote a blog entry. There was a girl at the computer next to me looking at her pictures from Machu Picchu. The Internet wasn’t working and every few minutes someone would come in, check, see it wasn’t working and leave.

I sat out on the patio lounge and read and borrowed a cigarette from a girl sitting across from me and wrote. There were only a couple other people sleeping in my 10-person dorm. They left before I woke up the next morning.

* * *
I got up late. My alarm didn’t go off.

I went to the bathroom. The toilet wasn’t flushing.

I went down to eat and sat and was reading. They served coca tea and buns and toast with dulce de leche and jam. The girl I borrowed a cigarette from the night before came down to the kitchen and took her plate of food and looked for a seat. She sat at my table.

She’s from Asturias, in Spain, but lives in Barcelona and is a civil engineer. This was her first time in South America. She pronounced her s’s and c’s with a lisp.

I left. I took a bus to Foz de Iguazu, to Brazil. We crossed the Argentine border and we all had to get off and get our passports stamped. We crossed the Brazilian border and some people got off but most stayed on and I stayed on. We drove into the city, which is bigger and more cosmopolitan than Puerto Iguazu.

I got to the bus station and bought a ticket to the national park. I didn’t have any Brazilian reales, and didn’t have any small peso bills. The guy at the gate converted the bus ticket for me. I think he ripped me off.

We drove back out of town, back past the road to the border crossing, and down to the park entrance. I got off the bus and bought my entrance and a salami sandwich. I said obligado like I learned in Sao Paolo.

I got on a double-decker bus and went to the upper level where the plastic drape windows were pulled back. We drove to the waterfalls. The breeze made people zip up their coats and cross their arms and tuck their chins.

We got off. I could see a glimpse of the falls down through the trees. I followed the path to the first overlook. I stopped, stared. I leaned against the railing, gazed. The waterfalls were coming from everywhere, from the forest, from cliffs. The part I was looking at wasn’t even half of all there was.

I continued on along the concrete path, stopping and staring, looking at other people looking. The din from the falling water would fade away then come back again when you realized how loud it was.

I walked onto a concrete overlook. I saw a pair of pants floating down the river, away from the biggest, most violent falls.

They were black, fanned out. They looked like slacks or maybe cargos. No one else seemed to notice. They bobbed around, were turned in the currents, and kept going down the river, through the rapids. I didn’t see anything come after them.

I walked along the trail to an overlook that stretches out over the crest of a waterfall. You can look right down on top of the void. The railings seemed well-built, but had gaps in between each other. People were posing for pictures, getting soaked by the mist from other falls higher up. Others stood off on the main trail, looking nervous and waiting for their friends or family to come back from out over the water.

Some people had plastic ponchos on. I zipped up my coat up all the way.

It was nice to be so close to something so dangerous, to something loud and old and that would destroy you in an instant. I felt like the narrator in a Poe story, like in Descent into the Maelstrom, awestruck before some terrible, enormous thing.

I walked back to the main path. There was a concession stand and a gift shop and photo booth, and an elevator to go to another observation deck. The employees had that amusement park employee stare.

I left the trail and walked to the park restaurant. There were coatis wandering around everywhere. They look like armadillo mixed with raccoon. They say they’ll bite if you feed them. Some people were feeding them. The park employees would chase them away when they’d creep towards the picnic tables.

I ate a sandwich and drank some water. The day was overcast and cool.

I walked on the waterfall trail again. The clouds were parting and the sun came out and there were rainbows, like they say there’s supposed to be, and butterflies.

I took a bus back to the main gate and listened to an Entitled Opinions with Paul Ehrlich on the fate of the earth in the 21st century. It was finally sunny and bright while he was talking about population disaster and the earth’s carrying capacity.

I got back to the bus station and got on to go back to Argentina and Puerto Iguazu. When we got off at Brazilian customs they stopped me and said I hadn’t gotten a stamp when I crossed that morning. I told them I’d read that one-day visitors didn’t need visas. I was speaking Spanish. They were speaking Portuguese. I couldn’t follow them.

The girls stamping the passports called for a manager. He was a young guy, probably 20 years old. He said they’d let me go just today but don’t do it again or there’ll be a fine. I said tudo bem and tried to give a thumbs up and left. I waited in the late afternoon with some Australians for another bus to come by.

I got back into town. As I walked to my hostel I saw the Spanish girl with her backpack heading to the terminal. We didn’t say anything to each other as we passed.

I ate pizza again at a different tourist restaurant, then came back and wrote and read. The Internet still wasn’t working.

I went to bed.

The next day my alarm worked and I got up and ate breakfast and packed my bags and stored them in a closet and then headed out. I bought cheese and bread and a tray of fruit and took a bus to the Argentine side of the falls.

It was a clear, warm day. I walked along all the catwalks and trails and stairways that wind through the jungle and over and around the falls. I saw monkeys and coatis and a toucan. The highlight of the Argentine side is something called the Devil’s Throat, which is an overlook above the most intense part of the falls.

There’s a miniature train that takes people out to that point. I walked along the train tracks, on a mud service road, to get there. It was a mile or so and quiet, except when a pickup truck or a train would come by. There were all sorts of butterflies along the way. A few other people were walking on the trail. I saw a big bullfrog squished flat. Its body was in the trail of a tire.

The Devil’s Throat is this big half-circle waterfall that’s probably a couple hundred feet high and wide. The overlook is a concrete platform with two sections to it. There’s photographers who stand-up on ladders and wear ponchos and take portraits with the falls in the background. They have clipboards for you to fill out forms and a poster board showing examples.

Big clouds of mist fall down on the platform every minute, soaking everybody. It’s like standing on the walkway over a flume ride at a theme park.

You can’t see to the bottom of the falls, there’s so much steam and mist. It’s an abyss, I guess. I thought about that Nietzsche quote of looking down into the abyss and only seeing yourself.

I took some pictures when the mist cloud wasn’t there so my camera wouldn’t get wet. I left the platform all wet and dried off in the sun and walked back to the park entrance. I took a bus back to town, grabbed my bag, and headed to the bus station.

The only bus going back overnight to Paraná was a luxury busline called Espreso. I bought the ticket anyway. It was about 40 pesos more than usual.

After we’d gotten out of town we were stopped at a police blockade. Some national guard people got on the bus. One guy came up, looked down at me. He asked to look through my bag, then see my passport.

I gave it to him.

He looked at it, then me. He was about to hand it back, then took it and sniffed it and looked at it again. He gave it back and said thanks and left.

I listened to a radio show about the historical Jesus as the sun went down over the Misiones hills and tree farms and what’s left of the jungle. Flocks of white birds were flying around and glowing in the twilight.

I got back into Paraná early in the morning.

17: "To the north, to the jungle: Part 1"

I had another week off school because of board exams. Sunday night I’d gone to the Paraná Costume Party, dressed as Tintin. I was writing an article about the party for 054, a travel magazine from Buenos Aires.

I’d gotten back at 3:00 in the morning and went to bed. I woke up Monday, wrote my article, packed my backpack, and went to the bus station for an overnight ride northeast, to Posadas, the small capital of Misiones province.

They served us dinner after the sun went down. First they gave us a plastic-wrapped Styrofoam tray. Inside were a plastic knife and fork, wrapped with a single-ply napkin; a toothpick, wrapped and sealed in plastic; a roll; a chocolate alfajor snack cake; crackers; and a lemon-flavored lozenge. Next they brought out tiny foil trays with our main course.

Inside were steamed rice and chicken rolled up with hard-boiled egg and vegetables. The windows on the bus steamed-up when we opened our foil trays.

The steward poured us Pepsi in little plastic cups, like they have at the dentist.

I was listening to old episodes of Entitled Opinions. First one about Proust, then one on Thoreau, then one on Virgil.

They started playing a Kevin Bacon movie on the overhead TVs. I think it was called Death Sentence. He played a vengeful father. There was a lot of stabbing and beating and running people over with cars deliberately and swearing, too. The TVs were turned way up.

A guy sitting up front had a loud message alert on his phone that you could hear through the whole bus. It played the first half-dozen notes of a Cumbia song; a trumpet and an accordion and a shaker all starting-up.

That guy kept getting messages every few minutes.

It was hard to listen to the radio show.

My seat was in front of the coffee and water dispenser, which is in front of the stairs down to the lower level. After they’d turned the lights out and most people were covered with blankets, a guy came up to the console and leaned against it to steady himself. He took a plastic cup from the cup dispenser, had a drink of water, then put the cup back into the bottom of the dispenser. He returned to his seat.

The guy with the noisy phone sneezed three times in a row up into the air. His phone stopped making so much noise, at some point.

* * *

We got into Posadas at 7:00 in the morning. It was gray and cool and drizzling. I sat in the bus station café and had a cup of tea and a croissant. I bought a bus ticket for San Ignacio, a village north of Posadas that’s got some Jesuit mission ruins and the old home of Horacio Quiroga. It’s along the highway to Puerto Iguazu.

I got into San Ignacio by 8:30. I got off the bus with a couple other people in the main plaza. It was humid and cool and still overcast. There were only a few people out.

A pasty blond-haired kid came up to me, carrying a mate and a notepad. He asked if I was looking for a place to stay. He told me about a hotel down the road, his brother-in-law’s place. He said they can sell me bus tickets there, and watch my bags, too. I asked him the bus schedule for the next day.

He seemed nice, like he wasn’t trying to take something from me.

I left him and walked toward where a Hostelling International place was supposed to be.

An old man was standing on the porch of a souvenir shop and stopped me and asked where I was headed.

He said that there was a cheap, nice hotel in the other direction. 25 pesos he said. I asked him how much the Hostelling International place cost.

He looked aside. 100 pesos, he told me.

I said no thanks and got to the HI place. It was 35 a night. I had a four-person dorm and a private bathroom all to myself.

I dropped off my bag and walked back to the plaza and bought some bread and cheese and apples. I walked to the Jesuit ruins. The site’s called San Ignacio Mini.

It was the middle of the week, and the end of winter. Most of the souvenir stalls were shuttered. It was quiet and damp. I sat on a bench under a tree and made a sandwich and ate a mandarin orange.

I entered the ruins.

A tour had just started so I hurried and caught up with them. The site was one of several in the region that was founded by Spanish Jesuits. The missions were havens for the Guaraní, havens from the other Spanish who wanted to kill them, make them leave, etc.

They say it was a flourishing a project, for the few decades it lasted. That the Guarní mixed their culture and style with that of the Catholics, and in exchange for a few not-so-bad compromises, got to live in pretty well-built, well-run, mostly-autonomous communities.

You can see that in the façade of the church, that’s got Catholic figures sculpted in a pre-Colombian style.

After the tour ended I hung around the ruins some more. There weren’t more than a couple dozen people in the whole overgrown, spread-out site. The main plaza - now just a grassy field - would´ve been a good spot to throw a Frisbee, I thought.

I went to the souvenir shop in the main plaza, where they were selling a lot of Guaraní-style wood carvings. The lady working there liked my hat, one with a knit llama pattern I’d gotten in Jujuy, in the northwest. Her son was sitting there listening to his MP3 player the whole time, not talking.

I walked out of the town, past an army base and down a flooded mud road to get to Quiroga’s old house.

Horacio Quiroga is one of the best-known Latin American writers. He was born in Uruguay in the 1870´s, but spent most of his life in Argentina, and especially in the Misiones jungle.

His best stuff is short stories. He’s influenced a lot by Poe and Maupassant.

It started raining as I got to his house. After you buy your entrance you have to walk down a narrow path through the forest, through a lot of bamboo, to get to the house. There’s signs that explain Quiroga’s life and have quotes of things he’s said about writing and art.

One of his best short story collections is called Tales of Love, Madness, and Death.

Quiroga’s father was killed in a hunting accident when he (Quiroga) was a little boy. Quiroga’s step-father, who he got along well with, committed suicide when he (Quiroga) was a teenager. Quiroga found the body.

When he was a bit older, he killed one of his best friends in a hunting accident like what killed his father.

He married a couple of times. The first wife he brought out to this house in the jungle in San Ignacio, where they were raising their kids. She couldn’t stand the isolation, the heat, everything, and swallowed poison and killed herself.

Quiroga committed suicide when he was in his late 50´s after he was diagnosed with cancer.

There were two houses Quiroga built, by himself, at this place in San Ignacio. The first house has been re-built, but the second is original. The lot is up on a cliff that used to look down to the Paraná River, the same river I live on further south in Entre Ríos province.

Now the trees and bushes have grown and blocked the view.

Inside the house there’s a lot of Quiroga’s actual stuff – his writing desk, his insect collection, a big snakeskin, his radio, his tools and workshop.

There wasn’t anyone else there when I went through the house. I thought I heard people coming along the path but they never showed up. I took some photos, walked around, tried to conjure the atmosphere. There was a sign in one corner of the yard that said “Place of Inspiration”. Next to it was a trail leading into the forest.

I followed the path. I thought there might be a lookout to the river. It got overgrown quickly and I had to turn back.

I left and walked back to my hostel. When I got back into the town a horse-drawn cart came down a sidestreet and turned a corner in front of me. A fat man was driving. He whipped the horse on the side to make it go faster. He keep hitting it on its leg. The horse tried to hurry and trot down the street. There were no traffic, no cars. It was empty, quiet. He drove on down the road and I turned a corner to another street.

I slept a few hours then got up, walked to town, ate a milanesa sandwich at a big empty tourist restaurant. There were some French girls at one table, but they left. Then it was just me and the waiters, standing around. I was reading an article in Ñ by JM Coetzee on an anthology of early Beckett letters. I came back after dark. There weren’t many streetlights and it was hard to see the road.

I read some of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, then went to bed early, about 9:00 PM.

16: "To the north, to the desert: Part 5"

Lucy and I got into La Serena just before sunrise, Saturday morning. We took a cab to her house up on a hill high up in the city. You can see a peninsula in the distance lit with hundreds of street and house lights. Next to that is the ocean. It was the first time I saw the Pacific.

A lot of Fulbrighters were coming to visit Lucy that weekend. There was Sam and her boyfriend Lucas, who were already there when we got there and asleep in bed. There was Andra and her boyfriend Andy, who were staying in a nearby apartment. There was Matt, who got into town just after us. The next day more would be coming.

We slept a few more hours then got up for breakfast.

Sam cooked eggs. I had some cheese leftover from the day before. The paper it was wrapped in had gotten wet and stuck to it. I peeled off the paper and washed the cheese and threw it into the skillet.

Andra and Andy brought Nutella and mandarin oranges and bread.

We sat and ate and drank tea and juice.

Matt showed up. After he got into town he took a shower at the bus station and was feeling good and decided to walk around town and try to find a Laundromat. He’d just gotten back from Peru and a village in the Andes and his clothes smelled.

After breakfast, Andra and Andy took a bus out of town to a valley, to visit a vineyard.

The rest of us walked down through town to the beach. I felt like I was in southern Spain. The sidewalks were continuous and unbroken. There were big clean chain superstores and big smooth parking lots and a lot of cars. There were billboards for luxury apartments and luxury apartments being built in a field near the ocean.

We got to the beach and stopped to eat at a Lebanese stand. I got falafel and an empanada and a Pepsi and a Nestle ice cream cone. Sam and Lucas got a schwarma sandwich.

We went to the beach. It was sunny and clear out on the water, but misty down the beach and to the mountains in the distance. The silhouettes of horses and their riders were coming to us out of the haze.

We walked along the sand and I was talking to Lucas about the University of Illinois and its Chief mascot and how I’ve been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace recently who grew up near Champaign and how I identify myself with him through that.

Lucas looked at me and said, “Dude, I went to Pomona.”

DFW had been teaching at Pomona College in California until he hung himself last year.

Lucas said he’d thought of taking one of his classes but they were hard to get into and he didn’t want to take a spot away from someone actually studying writing. He had studied geology.

Lucas said he was actually in the middle of reading Infinite Jest, and that him and Sam had a couple DFW anthologies down here with them that they’d been reading.

We sat down on a circle of boulders and talked about DFW and sports journalism and Dostoevsky and 9-11. You could see snow in the peaks of the Andes from where we were on the beach. It was warm and breezy and the sun was getting low and mellow and orange.

We left the beach and walked to a big mall. I said this reminded me of southern Spain. Lucas said southern California. We stopped to check our mail then walked back up into town to Lucy’s place. I explained to Matt a long essay I’d just written, about wonder and interpretation and how it’s all based on this Walt Whitman poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”.

We stopped for ice cream cones and I kept going on about this essay and the point I was trying to make about interpretation and wonder not being opposed to each other.

Andra and Andy came back and we went to an Italian and Sushi restaurant for dinner. I got spicy tuna rolls.

We came back. I packed my bags and said goodbye and walked to the bus station. I got on an overnight bus to Santiago.

* * *

I got into Santiago just before sunrise, Sunday morning.

I sat in the bus station café and read and drank coffee and ate a pastry until it was light out.

I walked along Alameda – the main boulevard – to get to a hostel that Sam and Lucas had stayed at a couple days earlier.

Nobody was out. Everything was shut and locked. It was grey and quiet and cool.

I got to the hostel. It’s in an old, preserved medieval-looking courtyard. There’s no sign on the door, just one for a café upstairs.

I rang the bell.

Nobody came to the door.

I turned away, thinking I’d walk around for a while.

A man opened the door. He was bald and thin and wore gym shirts and a fleece and looked tired and impassive and annoyed. He spoke quietly and asked what I wanted.

A woman was standing back in the foyer, looking at him and me.

I said I’d called the night before for a bed.

He let me in and showed me a bed in a dorm. He walked with a hard, slow limp. I tossed my backpack on the bed. He told me don’t put my backpack on the bed. It’ll make the sheets dirty. We left the room and he gave me a map of the city and told me some things to do and see.

I left.

I got to the center of the city and walked into the cathedral and stood by the entrance to a chapel and watched the mass. A priest was at the altar blessing the Eucharist and chanting his prayers. There were Chilean flags behind him.

I left and sat on a bench and finished reading A Scanner Darkly until the Pre-Columbian museum opened up.

The museums are free on Sunday in Santiago. The Pre-Columbian one has just one floor of cases and displays, but it’s got good interesting stuff from almost every early culture from Mexico south.

I spent a few hours there then walked back to the hostel.

There was a group of French kids sitting around the table in the lounge, cooking breakfast, talking, stepping outside to smoke.

I went to a computer and checked my e-mail. I finally got a response from Frithjof Bergmann, a philosopher I’d been trying to get in touch with. I’m trying to go to South Africa in January and spend some time with him there and see these community projects he’s working on.

A couple of French kids were having sex and making noise in the bedroom across from the computers. The door was cracked open.

A hunched old lady came out of another bedroom and said her watch was missing, that she’d gone to take a shower and put her watch down on the bed and now it’s gone. She was telling this in English to a French girl who tried to help her look for it.

I sat down in the lounge and talked to Paola, who was the woman in the foyer when I arrived.

She had made a dessert of rice mixed with raisins and cream and apples and cinnamon. She scooped me a bowl and warmed it in the microwave and we sat and ate from our bowls on the sofa while the French kids took all the seats at the table.

She’s from Santiago but has spent a couple years in Europe. She’d met an Italian guy at an airport. He was a figure skater who was performing in Peter Pan/Magic on Ice all through the continent. They met and fell for each other and she got to go with him to Turkey, to the Netherlands (she hated Amsterdam and all the bikes), to Venice (she hated it there in the winter, too humid).

Now she’s back here and working at the hostel and living with Scott, the owner, who’s an ex-pat from Minnesota. He was the one who answered the door.

She said he’s in a bad mood because the French kids were up ‘til six the night before playing music and drinking and partying, and because he’s got gout in his leg.

Paola said she has seasonal affective disorder and in the winter takes medicine for it.

A lot of French and Japanese tourists have been showing up lately. Too many. She told me how she asked a Japanese girl if she’d ever seen her parents kiss and how embarrassed the girl got.

I finished my bowl and got up and left.

I walked back downtown to a cinema at the Catholic University and saw Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring. I’d seen Time, another one of his movies, at an art cinema in Granada two years earlier.

I stopped at a diner and read and had a cup of coffee.

I walked back to the hostel.

The French kids were sitting all around the table, making dinner, chopping onions, slicing potatoes. There were big liter bottles of red wine and sausages boiling in the kitchen. They stepped outside for cigarettes. They were talking and laughing.

I made sandwiches with bread and avocado and salami and cheese.

Scott, the owner, was sitting in a chair in the lounge, next to a gas space heater, telling people to please shut the door so that the warm air in there wouldn’t go out.

I sat down and tried to talk to him.

He said he hasn’t been to the U.S. in ten years. Even when his dad died a few years ago he didn’t have the money to fly home so he didn’t go back.

He’s always owned a hostel in Santiago, though he just moved to this building a year ago.

In the U.S. he’d been a carpenter, working in the South, taking winters off so he could be mobile and move around and travel when he wanted.

He’s got a brother who just retired from the State Department. He had done the Peace Corps in Brazil, then was in Vietnam for several years, then went to Africa.

Now his brother owns a flower shop in the U.S. with his wife, but his health is bad and he has to takes pills every day for diseases he got in other countries.

Scott’s got two little girls growing up here in Santiago. They live with their mother.

Someone came in and left the door open. Scott pulled himself up and limped to the door and shut it and limped back to the chair.

He said being a hostel owner’s not for everyone, that you have to be a giving person. He nodded his head towards the French kids.

He said with this hostel he only made $3000 profit, last year. He just wants to have enough money to get his teeth fixed before they all fall out.

Even the clothes he wears – a black fleece, yellow t-shirt, nylon shorts, hiking shoes, wool socks – are left-behinds from backpackers.

A French girl asked us if we’d like some of their food. I said no, I’d already eaten. Scott said no, he couldn’t, because of his leg, the gout.

The girl asked him that he couldn’t eat because of his leg?

No thanks, he said.

I was telling him about Frithjof Bergmann and his philosophies of freedom and working and these New Work centers he’s started around the world and how their ideal is that people can work less, divide their work, so they have more time to pursue what really matters to them.

Scott said that if people were working less they’d be more selfish and lazy and all the progress and development that’s been made in the past century would disappear. That the last thing anyone needs is more time off to indulge themselves and take vacations and be selfish.

That all any person wants is pleasure, which is really equal to power, which is really equal to freedom, the freedom he felt when he would be on a plane leaving the U.S. to get away and travel and he could breathe deep and know his time traveling was only beginning.

A French kid turned his head and looked at us talking.

Scott said everybody’s instinct is to be selfish, that that’s biology, that’s machismo and power – like in the Middle East where the travelers say everyone’s so hospitable and caring but that’s really just them men protecting their egos in front of other men – that that and wanting to have sex and enjoy yourself and be happy is all we care about. That there used to be community in the U.S. but money ruined it and more vacation time would just indulge people even more. That Ghandhi or Mother Teresa have such simple and true messages no one can deny but no one wants to follow. That kids down here idolize Che Guevara but Che wanted to kills tens of thousands of people and is disgusting for that.

Scott said his carbon footprint is one-third to one-fourth less than the typical Chilean’s, and one-twentieth than the typical American’s. He doesn’t own a car. He shops at a farmer’s market that he walks to. He recycles. He used to have a compost pile at the other hostel.

These Europeans that come here burn as much fossil fuel flying to Easter Island way out in the Pacific as they did crossing the Atlantic to come here. Maybe he’d go to Easter Island if he were already traveling west to Asia. But it’s all a huge disaster for the flora and fauna of the island, people just going there to see these statues that are a testament to human ignorance.

He could be kind of impressed by a cathedral, but couldn’t help but think of all the people who died building it.

The U.S. is headed for disaster, downfall. He’s got no desire to go back.

He could show me the good hiking routes through Patagonia in Chile and then into Argentina, the next morning, Monday, before I left, if I wanted.

Maybe, I said.

It was 10PM. I got up and left the room and went to the computer. It’s clock said Tuesday, February 24th, 4:54PM.

Scott had put me in the same room as the old lady.

She came in the front entrance, hobbling, wearing a beret, with a man who called her mom, who dropped her off and said he’d be back in the morning.

I went into the room to get my toothbrush. She saw we were in the same room and said in other hostels the women are in one room and the men in another. She had several pairs of low-heeled shoes lined under her bunk.

I went back to the computer. She walked out then returned with Scott. She said I was a stranger to both of them.

Scott winked at me and helped move her bags to a new room.

I brushed my teeth and washed my face and went to sleep by myself in the six-bed dorm.

I woke up at 9 the next morning. The hostel was dead. The computers were off and the wine bottles were empty. The hot water hadn’t been turned on.

I ate bread and an orange and drank tea and read.

The phone rang. Scott limped into the kitchen and picked it up and said “Good day” in Spanish. Nobody was there and he hung up.

He came into the lounge and told me to please shut the door so that the warm air wouldn’t go out. The space heater wasn’t on. I got up and shut the door.

I was thinking of leaving without paying. I put my backpack on and was double-checking my room. Scott showed up again.

I paid him the 5000 pesos. He asked didn’t I want to hear about the hiking routes in Patagonia? I said I had to get going.

He brought me over to a map on the wall and told me about a route he took, that the Chilean side is beautiful and the Argentine side is ugly and has got nothing until you get far south.

He gave me fliers for the hostel and told me to e-mail him about Frithjof Bergmann.

I left and walked to the bus station and drank a Nescafé. I got on a bus to cross the Andes again and pass near Aconcagua and then get to Mendoza. From Mendoza we went to Cordoba. We got in before dawn. I got off the bus, bought a ticket to Parana, drank a cortado, then got on another bus to get home by midday.

It was cold and grey and raining when I got into Parana.

My trip north had been a big right triangle. It lasted two weeks. I covered 3,000 miles.

15: "To the north, to the desert: Part 4"

Lucy and I got up and went to a café. I got coffee and pancakes with manjar, which is the Chilean dulce de leche. In Chile the coffee is almost always Nescafé. Nobody seems to no why. I said maybe it’s got something to do with Pinochet.

We went and bought some groceries then stopped at a tour agency and booked a 6,000 peso sunset visit to the Valle de la Luna. The town of San Pedro is a few small blocks of tour agencies, restaurants, cafes, hostels, and souvenir shops. The population’s supposed to be a few thousand, but you see tourists – from Europe and North America and South America and Asia and Australia – before you see Chileans.

We went to the archeology museum, which is devoted to the Atacaman culture that lived here before the Europeans came. It’s a nice museum in the shape of a wheel – with a central hub and spokes that extend out.

Because the desert’s so dry a lot of things survived that would’ve rotted in other climates – tapestries, pipes, baskets.

We walked out of town and sat down near a creek. There was a lot of trash - bottles and wrappers - but we found a clean spot. We made sandwiches with avocado – of which there are dozens of varieties in Chile – and cheese and tomato, and ate oranges for dessert.

We came back to town and called Brad – who’s also a Fulbrighter in Chile and whom we bumped into the day before in San Pedro – and he said he’d come with on the sunset visit.

I ran back to the museum and its outdoor market and bought an ocarina and a decorative tray. Shamans used the tray to gather ground-up cebil seeds and snort them into their noses and hallucinate. The vendor asked me if I knew coca and he gave me a few leaves from his pouch.

I put them in my cheek and we got into the van for the sunset visit.

There were a dozen of us in the van. The driver and the guide were Chilean.

We floored it out of the city and stopped off the highway at the edge of a valley. The mountains near San Pedro are made of soft rock. With sandy wind and thousands of years, they get shaped into ragged and strange ways.

We had ten minutes, the guide said.

We got out and took pictures and he explained some things.

We got back into the van and went to the Valle de la Muerte, where there’s a couple tall rock walls that come so close together a wind tunnel was formed. The European who named this valley originally called it Valle de Martes, which means Mars Valley. There was some confusion and it became Valle de la Muerte, Death Valley.

We squinted and covered our faces and hiked around there, keeping the sand out of our eyes.

We got back into the van and drove to the Valley de la Luna.

We got out and looked at some rocks that looked like people praying. There’s a border around them so you can’t get too close. A few years ago a lady walked up to one of them and put her arms around the neck of the rock to take a picture. The head fell off.

The rocks are at the top of a plain. There’s no plants or shrubs or trees. Just red rocks and white salt that looks like snow. Clean, smooth sand dunes are in the distance.

We got back into the van and drove to a cave. We walked through the cave then climbed out and walked on the side of a hill then came back down and got back into the van.

We drove to the famous spot at the Valle de la Luna. We had thirty minutes ‘til sunset. We had to get back into the van by 7:00PM.

We hiked up a sand dune to the lookout spot. There were dozens of groups up there, taking pictures, looking, walking around, turning about. One guy was dressed up as Superman and, as Brad pointed out, took it very seriously.

We watched the sunset and zipped up our coats as the shadows came down on the sand and the mountains. We took pictures. We got back into the van.

The driver had taped a piece of paper to one of the dome lights saying they appreciate tips. He turned on the light and the piece of paper was lit up and glowing as we drove back to town.

We said bye to Brad. Lucy and I left a tip for the guide and the driver and got dinner and went to bed.

* * *
The next day we went sand-boarding.

We rented the boards and some bikes and packed a picnic and rode out of town to dunes near the Valle de la Muerte.

There were a few other people there, sand-boarding.

We stood at the base of the dune and watched.

It wasn’t going well. They could go a bit, then fall. Then get up and try to get going again but fall down again.

One guy hiked way up high on the dune and waxed his board a long time. He looked like he knew what he was doing.

He got up, jumped into position, got going, then lost his balance and fell into the sand. He got up, then fell again. It took him a few minutes to get to the bottom. He tried to get going one more time, but there wasn’t any momentum left.

We took off our shoes and hiked the dune. We waxed our boards then tried it. We fell down. We got up. We fell down again.

We ate the same picnic as the day before, then walked down the other side of the dune and found a flat spot and threw the Frisbee. There were big volcanoes and big clouds and the desert and blue sky off in the distance.

We rode back to town and booked a 15,000 peso sunrise visit to the geysers. We bought a bus ticket for the next day – Friday afternoon – to head south to La Serena, where Lucy’s working and living.

We ate dinner and went to bed.

* * *
The next day we had to get up at 4 for the sunrise visit. Lucy’s alarm didn’t go off but she woke up anyway and we got up and went to the front entrance of the hostel to wait for the van.

We got picked up and the driver said it’s a two-hour drive to the mountains so go back to sleep and relax. We would be going up to 4,300 meters elevation.

Lucy and I went back to sleep.

We got up to the mountains and the geyser fields. The moon was out and the sky was just blue. It was below freezing.

We got out of the van and the driver said don´t run around and don´t smoke. Everybody went to the bathrooms.

We got to the geysers and the sun rose up over the bare fields and we looked at the steam vents and the bubbling water and the weird colorful bacteria that grow around them. It’s the third biggest geyser field in the world, behind Yellowstone in the U.S. and another park in New Zealand.

The geysers only work early in the morning, before it gets too warm. We walked around and took pictures and then huddled around a plastic table and ate biscuits and drank coca tea for breakfast.

We got in the van and drove to other geysers and a thermal pool.

We took off our clothes and hustled into the pool and kneeled down and scooted around in the water. It was lukewarm and hot. Some spots burned you and others made you shiver.

I was wearing the boxer shorts with the big ink stain from that night in Salta.

We got out and toweled off. I laid my boxers on rocks to dry while we looked at more geysers. When we headed back I grabbed my underwear. The big stain was gone. I wondered if the water was special.

We got in the van and were driven around the high plateau and stopped to look at animals. There were rabbits and llamas and alpacas and vicuñas and some ducks by a pond. We’d shout stop when we saw something and the driver would stop and we’d slide open the windows and stick out our digital cameras and take pictures and then look at the animals.

We got out a couple times to take pictures of the ducks or the llamas and walk around and look at the big empty plateau and the volcanoes in the distance. We stopped at an Atacaman village where they sell food and there are their houses and a tiny chapel they built. The driver said don’t take pictures of the Atacamans. They think it’ll steal their souls.

I went into the house where they were selling fried bread and tea. The driver said the tea is an aphrodisiac. He made a joke about two guys in our group drinking it. An Atacaman girl was working and had headphones in her ears, listening to an iPod. I wondered if that would steal her soul, too.

We drove back to town. Lucy and I waited around a couple hours then got on our overnight bus to La Serena. I started reading A Scanner Darkly as we left San Pedro. I was hoping I could finish it before morning.

13: "Party: Part 1"

Saturday morning the doorbell rang at 8. It was Pablo, from Buenos Aires. He’d come to work at the Howard Johnson and wanted to shower and leave his bags at our house.

I let him in and went back to bed. I gave him the key to let himself out. I heard him trying to slide the key back under the door when he was leaving. Sounded like it didn’t fit.

I feel back asleep.

* * *

That afternoon I was sitting in the kitchen, writing an article for Barriletes about my university and how it has to share space with primary schools and the plans to construct a new building and campus outside the city. My dictionaries, a news clip, my notebook, were spread on the table.

Daniel came home with a few men. They stomped up to the terrace. They came back down and hustled out. Did I know we’re cooking tonight, Daniel told me.

Daniel was running a big event at UNER – the annual conference for the National Network of Alternative Media (RNMA). It started Friday but people started showing up the day before. Some would stick around Paraná and our house ‘til Monday.

Claudio had gone home for the weekend.

I walked downtown in the evening to a bakery. I finished my article and mailed it off. I was thinking of going to see I’ve Loved You So Long, which was playing at 9:00PM at the big cinema.

I went back home to drop off my laptop. There was a stack of wine boxes and beer crates and a big bag of rolls in the corner by the computer. In the kitchen the fridge was filled with beer and soda and wine and dozens of sausages.

I decided to stick around.

The same men came back, this time without Daniel. They were going to get the fire going and start cooking. The others were coming around 10. 40 people were coming.

Three guys had come over, including a (“the”) Cuban. The Cuban took off and I stayed in my room awhile listening to a Kings of Convenience album I’d just gotten from the owner of Elefante Multiespacio.

I went up to the roof to see how things were going. One of the guys was coming down the stairs, his shirt off, his pants hitched high, his chest thin with a lot of white hair. He was sweating and looking for a bowl.

Another guy was at the grill, turning over the sausages. He had a shaved head and a white goatee and a calm voice. This was Pablo, a writer from Buenos Aires. He showed me a couple of his books in Daniel’s room. He had his shirt on.

The other guy came back up. This was Roberto, also from the capital, where he’s a host of a morning radio show.

We got to talking. They said it must be easy to get girls here, being the blond American. I said not quite, and started talking about love and relationships and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

Pablo took some sausages off the grill and one of them burst and squirted grease on his pants.

He asked for salt.

I said there was salt downstairs.

We went downstairs and he took the box of fine salt and dumped some on his pants and the floor.

He said salt helps, but only when it´s grease.

I reached under the sink for the dustpan. He turned around and went for the broom.

We went back upstairs. The neighbors were on their terrace. The dad had his shirt off. He was lighting newspaper under a pile of kindling in the grill. A grandpa was up there and the little quiet girl I see up there sometimes, too. The men were smoking.

I held a flashlight for Pablo as he grilled the meat. We drank wine and waited for the others to come.

They came at 10:30, just as the sausages were finished. The roof was slick near the grill, so much grease had been squirting and leaking.

Pablo said two sausages per person, until everybody’s served.

I got my sausage and re-filled my cup of wine. I recognized some girls I’d met the day before, who came to our house to meet Daniel. One was from Tucuman, one from Santiago del Estero, both in the northwest. They had come in together on an overnight train. The train’s cheap, they said, but slow and awkward and your seat’s a plastic bench.

I started talking to a janitor from Cordoba. When I said I was from the U.S. he asked if I could bring home some messages for Obama. He turned to somebody else and said the messages would be very clear and not so nice.

This was the first time he’d come to the conference. He said the presentations we’re too tied up in theoretical points, which is a rather Argentine tendency.

I said I was trying to write a blog that doesn’t give any opinions, any prognostications. I mentioned Hemingway and trying to write with nouns and verbs and getting rid of elaborate language.

He said but one should know that a message has to be tailored to its audience and if the message isn’t proper for the audience there can be a misinterpretation and misunderstanding. He asked if I got him.

I said something about the autonomy of the text.

He said he had to get some wine and walked away.

Some of Daniel’s friends that I’d met in Santa Fe awhile back had come to the party. I bummed a cigarette from Martin and asked how things have been.

I saw Emilia, who Daniel’s in love with and who has a friend who’s going to Granada, Spain, in a couple months. We’ve been trying to get in touch so I can talk to her friend and tell her about Spain and calm her down. It’ll be the first time she’s left the country.

Emilia asked me about Obama and about “the famous crisis”. I told her what I thought, that I’d just read an article in The Point that said we could believe in progress again, as if the 18th or 19th century. She asked if electing a black president was real progress.

I went for more wine. We were all out but they were passing a hat to buy more.

I talked to a guy named Diego, who´s also from Buenos Aires, who also hosts a radio show. He works for a station called “El Colectivo”. I asked what kind of programming they’ve got. He said they have one show about subway workers, who have a bad rap because they fought for and earned a six-hour workday and because they have so much control over the city when they strike.

Subway workers come on and talk about the things they do with their two extra hours. Some of them are musicians, artists, writers. The show’s called “Two Hours Less”.

Diego was wearing a black t-shirt with a bus on it and the name of his radio station.

The Cuban came back. He was wearing a soccer jersey with a Cuban flag on it.

They brought more wine and Coke and Fernet – an Italian herbal liquor. There weren’t enough cups to go around so some kids took knives and sliced the Coke bottles and filled the tops and bottoms with Fernet and Coke.

There were a couple guys and a girl near the drink table. I told one short, curly-haired kid I was from the U.S.

His eyes widened and he craned his neck and looked at the crowd and said something about me and coming from somewhere and imperialism and this gathering of people.

I started talking to the girl. She gave me a cup of Fernet and Coke. I asked if she was a student. She said she’s a psychologist.

Psychoanalysis? I asked. Pretty much, she said. I said I’d studied it a bit, but more as philosophy. I asked if she knew of Zizek. She said no.

I was telling her about how I think it’s interesting, psychology in Argentina, that at the University of Illinois there’s an important and big and well-funded psych department yet it’s impossible to find a class that teaches Lacan.

She turned and refilled her cup and stopped listening.

I had put my flashlight near the stairs to the roof, to light them up a bit. I went to the stairwell. The flashlight had been moved, the back taken off, the three batteries out. I took it down to my bedroom. Daniel came into my room to get a chair and told me to bring it back, that it helps.

I put it in a different place.

People now were singing and chanting and shoving each other around. A lot of songs from the seventies, about Peron. I recognized some from that night in Santa Fe.

I stood to the side and watched.

Somebody brought out a guitar and started playing folklore songs and girls and women began dancing, stalking around each other, bobbing, snapping their fingers in the air.

A couple UADER students, a guy and a girl, showed up, ones I hadn’t seen in a couple months. They remembered my name.

The guy was talking and pulled up his shirt. He had a bloody gash along his side.

Dog bite, he said.

I asked if it was one of the street dogs.

No, belonged to somebody. Ran out of a house. He put his shirt back down.

I asked Roberto if this is how parties are in Buenos Aires.

Yeah, he said, but sadder. You know, tango, everything.

More melancholy? I asked.

Yes, more melancholy. He said.

I started talking to a girl. She’s a documentary filmmaker from the capital, though she´s only made short films ‘til now.

She just made one about Patagonia and the land problems there, that there’s a few people and groups that own most of the land, that the residents and natives are oppressed.

She mentioned Benetton and the thousands of acres they own there.

Then she mentioned Marcelo Tinelli and how he’s been buying land there recently.

I asked who Marcelo Tinelli is.

She laughed and looked at me when I asked and said I don’t know anything about Argentina if I don’t know who Marcelo Tinelli is.

He’s a media mogul and TV star in Argentina. He started these popular TV shows called Videomatch and Showmatch. Now he hosts the Argentine version of Dancing with Stars (which is a national disaster, she said). He’s been getting into real estate and buying a lot of land and forcing people off it.

She asked if went to the conference.

I said no, nobody invited me, nor gave me the schedule.

She said that was a waste, that this conference is only once a year and here it was in Paraná and I didn’t even go.

I said that is sad, that I live with somebody who does a lot of the same work I do, yet it’s like we´re in parallel worlds, sometimes, and don’t share our stuff and what we’re up to.

A girl was offering candies from a plastic bag. I took one and sucked on it ‘til it was gone then drank more wine.

There was more singing and dancing.

During the day it’d been hot, near 70 degrees. Warm air blown in from the north.

The winds had switched and were chilly and from the south. They were putting on coats and sweaters.

Some kids were shouting about going to Santa Fe, that it’s boring in Parana. One of these kids got in my face and kept asking me if I understood. Down below a few others were leaving and somebody dropped a bottle and it shattered in the street. A car was coming but drove just right and missed the shards.

I went down the stairs. The flashlight was on the ground, shining into the wall. I went to my room to listen to music. Other people were coming downstairs to head out and go back to the hotel.

I stood outside my room as the crowd filed out. That one kid came down and got in my face again and kept asking if I understood. I said you can’t keep asking these black-and-white questions, that it’s all shades of grey.

A lady told him to take it easy. She put her hand up to her mouth and made the drinkie-drinke motion. The Fabulous Cadillacs were playing on the stereo.

There were kisses and hugs and handshakes and everybody left.

I went to the bathroom. Somebody had messed-up the flusher and the toilet wouldn´t stop running. There was vomit on the floor. A cockroach was on its back, its legs squirming trying to push itself against the wall and flip over.

I took a long-handled squeegee and hit it a few times.

I brushed my teeth, drank water, and went to bed.

The kid tried to come back in the house and punch me and fight me. They held him back and he didn’t get in.

The next day Daniel said what a great thing it was to get all those people together, what a space of possibilities there is when you can bring so much talent to one place.

Next year’s conference will be in Tucuman.

12: "Dinners with Élo: Part 2"

I sent an e-mail to Élo after I got back from my trip north, just before the new semester was starting.

I asked if she was staying in Paraná.

A few days went by. No word. I told Daniel I thought, maybe, she’d split and gone away with her boyfriend.

She wrote back, saying she was still in town, and that her friend was visiting, and that we should go canoeing on the river sometime soon. I said we should make dinner and make plans.

I went over to her apartment Tuesday night. She lives on the first floor of a rehabbed colonial building. Her tall and narrow front windows open to street. You could stick your head in from the sidewalk, if you wanted. The first floor’s got the kitchen and a living room. There are maps of France and Torres del Paine and Bariloche on the wall. The bedrooms and the bathroom are on the second floor, up a spiral staircase.

Mónica was over, one of her students from the French department. Eva was there, too, her friend from France. Her roommate Martin was upstairs studying.

Eva´s from Lyon. She speaks a little Spanish and no English, so Mónica and Élo were going back and forth to French, telling her what we were talking about.

Eva had just quit a job in a bronze workshop. The job was too heavy – the fumes and the dust and the noise. She’s going back to school after this trip, to study art therapy.

This was her first long trip. She’d visited Spain, England, Switzerland, but never anything far away, nor more than a few days. She was spending three weeks in South America.

Élo had gone to Peru for the break. She took a bus from Paraná to Lima – 40 hours direct. She had an awful headache when she got into the capital. The bus had gone from sea-level to 10,000 feet without stopping.

Her and her boyfriend and some others hiked through the jungle and visited Machu Picchu and were in Lima during a big public holiday. She said they got three bottles of rum and three bottles of Coke for just a few dollars. They drink hard in Peru, she said. The hangover’s awful when you’re that high up.

She went to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Said it looks like the ocean. Water to the horizon. You can’t see Peru on the far side.

Martin came downstairs.

He’s at the end of his university work. He’s passed all the classes and just has to finish his thesis to graduate. He studies bioengineering at the national university. He said, ideally, he’d like to work in hospital administration, in managing technology. But he said the government’s not giving enough money and support for medical development and it’s hard to get jobs like that if you don’t know the right person.

Élo was frying broccoli and onions and carrots and garlic in a wok. She grated nuez moscada – a walnut that smells like ginger – into it. Potatoes were boiling in a pot. She was going to soften the potatoes, split them down the middle, stuff the fried vegetables into them, sprinkle cheese on top, bake it all in the oven.

Martin was serving cold leftover asado, putting a bite of beef on a fork and passing it to the table, taking back the empty fork, sticking on more and passing it back.

He said he’s hyper-carnivorous. That and he loves sleeping the siesta.

We were drinking beer and Coke Light and listening to Marvin Gaye and smoking cigarettes. Élo doesn’t smoke. Neither do I. We say.

It was a warm night. The front window was wide open and Élo and Eva were in short sleeves. Martin said it’s unusual to be so warm this time of year – the equivalent of February in the north.

Dinner was served and we ate, sprinkling oil and salt and crushed peppers onto the potatoes.

Mónica told me she’d spent a year in France as a language assistant.

Her and Élo got into an argument about the price of things in France and Argentina, that you could buy four bottles of beer and a bottle of coke and vegetables, in Argentina, for the same price as just a couple bottles of beer in Europe. Mónica was saying that but, in nominal terms, 1000 pesos would be worth a lot less than 1000 Euros. Élo and I looked at each other. I said it’s a question of purchasing power. Martin agreed.

We got to talking about clothes. Élo said sometimes she uses the microwave to dry her underwear. As long as there’s nothing synthetic in them, you can put them in, five seconds, whatever, and they’re dry and warm and nice to slip on right there. It’s good at hostels, if they have a microwave, instead of hanging your clothes on the line and waiting all afternoon for it to dry.

We finished up. Another helping of potatoes was served. Eva made coffee on the stove. We talked about canoeing on the weekend. Mónica said it’s better to go with a guide. The currents on the river can be strong and unreliable and hard to navigate. Élo said, Saturday night, no drinking, just a movie and Coke and early to bed. She didn’t want to be hung over Sunday, canoeing.

Martin went upstairs to bed. Mónica got up to go. She invited us to a movie night at the Catalan cultural center. She speaks Catalan and is a member of the center and said there’d be short films and food and a couple other things.

Élo poured me an aperitif that Eva had brought with her. It was strong with anise. Élo mixed it with water and I drank it and we got up to go. They needed cigarettes. I was going home to keep working on my website.

Élo poured the aperitif into an empty Coke bottle, mixed in water, put the cap on, and carried it out. Her and Eva were going to the river with the bottle and the cigarettes. Élo said she hardly ever goes out this time of night. It was 11:30. We kissed goodbye and said we’d be in touch for the weekend.