5: "It´s All Shutdown"

I moved last Sunday.

That afternoon, after packing, taking a cab down the street, and unpacking, I went to a concert at Elefante – a hipster art space a couple blocks from the pedestrian mall.

There are drawings and paintings on the walls, a painted mannequin torso on the floor. They play Cut Copy before shows start. They’d been screening John Waters and Russ Meyer films Sunday nights.

Juanito el cantor came from Buenos Aires.

After the show I walked to my old house and returned the key. On my way home, along plaza San Miguel, I ran into Gabriel. He was the union member I’d talked to at a Wal-Mart protest a couple weeks back. We had met once to talk about the recent protests – reclamos. I was working on a new article about it for Barriletes. I had called him the past week to get together again, but he hadn’t gotten back to me.

This happens a lot in Paraná, bumping into people, especially when you want to see them. The downtown is so tiny and dense that, even with 250,000 people, you´re always saying hello to somebody.

We planned to meet Tuesday, after my classes.

I had two lit lectures to give. One class heard my final lecture on Huck Finn. In the other, I compared Bradbury’s “Usher II” story from “The Martian Chronicles” with Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. I said that Bradbury’s story takes a psychopathic, decadent Poe character and turns him political, has him give a polemic on censorship, book burning, all that.

I went to a café to read and wait for Gabriel. I sent him a text, telling him where I was.

He called me, said he couldn’t come. They were at Wal-Mart. “It’s all shutdown,” he told me.

I rushed home, changed clothes, took off my watch, put on my boots. I grabbed my camera and notebook and recorder and hustled to the store, past my old house.

I could hear the explosions, the fireworks, as I got close to the store.

I got to the end of the neighborhood, over a rise, towards the shantytowns. There were two clouds of black smoke rising between the afternoon sun.

I got up to the protesters, found Gabriel. The entrances were blocked with burning tires. No cars were let in, only foot traffic.

The chief of police was there, wearing a striped sweater and aviators. The head of the SEC – the service-workers union – was there, too. A big, bald, clear-eyed guy named Rupert. He said there were complaints because they were blowing off fireworks so close to a gas station.

“But that’s a secondary concern,” he said.

Seven people were fired that morning, including a pregnant woman.

The SEC picketers were going to spend the night out front. A truck pulled up and a metal barrel was hauled up to the line. I asked Gabriel what it was for.

“Choripan,” he said. That’s chorizo served in a bun. To eat. To feed everybody. He made a joke about roasting marshmallows over the tire fire.

I headed home after dark. My new roommates are Claudio and Daniel. A friend of theirs who had just got back from working in Bariloche, a resort town, came over to eat.

I cooked for the first time in the new apartment. I brought my laptop into the kitchen, put it in on top of the broken refrigerator, and listened to MGMT as I chopped tomatoes and carrots and onions and garlic. My mom had sent me her minestrone soup recipe earlier in the day. Zucchini is out of season here, so I used a squash called zapallo anco, instead.

We sat down, the four of us, to eat, at 11PM. The way my mom makes it is to toast some bread, cover it with mozzarella, then put it in the base of the bowl and pour the minestrone over so it all melts.

Claudio and Daniel washed up. Their friend went home. I ate a pear for dessert and wondered if I’d be going back to Wal-Mart the next day.