9: "To the north, to the desert: Part 2"

I got into Salta after dark.

I got to my hostel, ate some fruit, wrote, talked with a receptionist and a Porteña who was there on vacation. We were talking about Swine Flu.

I showed them the photo I’d taken of Cristina Kirchner. The Buenos Aires girl liked it, fawned. The receptionist started swearing and pretended to stab my camera. He said the U.S. has got it figured out, that the three branches of government are separate, clean, apart from each other. He said here it’s all mixed together.

I went upstairs to the bar where they were playing The Rolling Stones, Daft Punk, The Clash…standard hostel fare. A blonde Scandinavian girl was working the bar.

The receptionist came upstairs with a couple of his friends, who were going horesback riding to the mountains tomorrow. They’d ride up there, cook an asado, take naps, practice lassoing, ride back down by sunset.

I showed them the photo of Kirchner. They shouted and flicked their lighters at my camera.

I drank a Quilmes, wrote a bit, while English and Australian and French kids talked and played foosball. When I went down to my room to sleep, a Chinese kid had fallen asleep in my bed. I grabbed a couple blankets and made up the one free mattress and went to sleep.

The next day I walked to the center of town. There’s a famous archeological museum in Salta that has some child mummies found in the Andes. They were a sacrifice, apparently. The museum was closed because of the Flu.

I hiked to the edge of town and up a mountain, along a stone stair trail, past monuments for the Stations of the Cross. At the top was a park, with a restaurant, waterfalls, a trim and green lawn, benches, shops, and a big building to haul in the gondolas and the riders that rise up from near the bus station at ground level.

I went to a quiet part of the peak, sitting in the shade under a tree. I ate an apple and some biscuits I’d got from the bus. A gardener came over and told me to move, that I could only sit on the benches.

I got up and moved. I saw him go to somebody sitting at the base of a statue, telling her to get down and move to a bench.

I hiked down in the afternoon, passed through the central plaza again, then got on a bus for Jujuy.

Jujuy has a quarter million people and is in a valley of the Andes. It´s the last big city before Bolivia and Chile. It’s an Argentine city, but the people begin to look different this far north – with roots more Andean than European.

I wandered around the city after dark, looking for a place to stay. The first hostel was full. The second was out of business, just a dim outline of where signs used to be on the walls and doors. I stayed at a place near the bus station – decent, tiny rooms, no windows though.

Near the bus station is a big market. There’s vendors set-up in cramped stalls selling…clothes, choripan, quack medicine, hot dogs, cookware, kebabs, plastic toys, unlabeled spices…a lot of it looks imported from China. A clothes store near the market had a window display with three mannequins. One was wearing a respiratory Flu mask. One had an American flag bandana tied covering his face. One was wearing a gas mask.

There are restaurants here too, little dives with tile floors, scattered metal tables, florescent lighting, plastic curtain doorways and cheap, good, greasy food. Spicy, too – the first I’ve seen in the country.

The next day I went to a café – the archeological museum here was shut, too. I passed through an artisan market, an art space with a Jujuy painting competition on display, and over the little, dry Rio Grande and the shantytowns on its banks.

I got on a bus for Humahuaca, the oldest settlement in the Quebrada de Humahuaca – the valley of the Rio Grande that’s got polychrome desert mountains and ancient ruins and sentinel cacti.

Humahuaca’s a tiny town – 9000 people or so. I got in at 8pm. It was dark and chill and moist. I hiked out of town to my hostel. I took a wrong turn and started walking on a trail up and out to the desert. The stars were bright and shining and sharp. I could see the Milky Way just like on the beach in Brazil.

I backtracked, found the right way, got chased by a dog that squeezed under its fence and ran out into the road, and got to the hostel. I checked in, put my bags down in an adobe cottage with a cane-thatched roof, and went into the lobby to sit and read Typee and warm-up by a space heater screwed on top of a tank of butane gas. The guy working the desk said I couldn’t shower in the morning, that it gets so cold at night the water can freeze and it’s too hard to heat it until the strong sun during midday.

The next day, Sunday, I got up for breakfast, which was the standard toast and jam and dulce de leche and tea, though all nicely, carefully, quietly served in ceramic jars and plates and mugs and dishes.

I headed to town, through the market. I heard people speaking Quechua, saw old ladies wearing flat, long-brimmed black hats and men wearing knit ponchos. The people were soft-spoken, with less gesture, strut, than most Argentines. I bought bananas and oranges, then bread and cheese and bottles of water, and headed for Coctaca, a village 10Km out in the desert, along a gravel road, where there’s pre-Columbian ruins.

I was walking alone most of the time. Every now and then a car or motorcycles would pass, coming or going. I could stop and look around and see nothing but hills and mountains and cacti and brush. No shade. No clouds, nor trees. No other people. A few birds and bugs flying around. I could hear my heart beating.

One moment I could hear water running. There was a shallow creek that ran away from the town and crossed the road a few kilometers out. It flows down the valley to meet the Rio Grande, which runs south to Jujuy to meet the Rio Xibi Xibi. When I got up there, there was ice and snow in the water. It was midday, clear, bright sun.

I picked up some snow. The crystals were long and sharp, white, shining needles that looked like they would cut you. I held it in my hand, felt the cold wet burn, then threw it at a cactus. All the snow in the creek had melted when I came back in the afternoon, on my way home before dusk.

Approaching Coctaci, I passed tiny ranches, one with a few cows in the pasture, each place a couple low brick buildings, some with clothes hanging on the line, one with smoke coming out the chimney. They had thin thatched roofs held down with big stones along the edge.

I got to Coctaci. There was a soccer field, dusty and covered with rocks. Around the main square were just a few houses, a little chapel. There were a couple kids out but they didn’t come talk to me.

I got to the ruins, looked around, sat in a line of shade from a cactus, and ate my lunch. It got chilly in the shade.

I climbed higher up the terraces and lied down and took a nap in the sun.

I woke up, brushed the grass off my clothes, headed back as the day got late. A couple people were washing a mini-van in the creek that runs through town. They had pulled it up over a bed of rocks and were wiping it with rags.

I listened to M83 on the way in. At night I ate at a little restaurant in town, like one of those florescent, quick, cheap dives in Jujuy. I got a plate of rice and chicken and potatoes, bread, and spicy sauce for less than three dollars.

The next day I wandered through town, past the dozens of stands and vendors and tables all set-up to the parade of tourists, of foreigners and Argentines who feel like foreigners, who come to buy a trinket or bibelot, a striped bright table cloth, a llama figurine, a poncho, a sweater. It was the same stuff at each stall, and the same stuff in Jujuy, and in Salta. Guides were leading travelers past the church, past town hall. People were walking with their camcorders in front of them, turning this way and that, recording as they went through the narrow brick-paved streets.

A couple guys were selling these metallic oblong magnetic things. When you throw them in the air and they touch, they buzz and rattle. I saw the same things, heard the same noise, at Sun Yat-Sen´s tomb in Nanjing.

I got some coca leaves at a grocery store and walked to an overlook above the town while they soaked in my cheek.

I got on an afternoon bus back to Jujuy, to cross the puna – the high Andean plains – the next day and then cross the border to Chile. I stayed at the same hotel. New room across the hall. Still no window.

8: "A Sunday"

Sunday, July 26th. Last weekend before school starts again after winter vacation.

I slept-in until midday. Claudio fried milanesas – breaded chicken or beef that’s fried in sunflower oil…very popular here. He put some mozzarella on top, and served it with pasta and bread.

We went up to the roof after lunch. There had been a rare cold spell the past few days, with overnight temperatures between 10 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It even snowed in some cities like Cordoba. The newspaper said it was colder in northern Argentina, near the desert, than at the research base in Antarctica.

It was nice out, though. I sliced apart a navel orange and gave half to Claudio. Their friend, Pablo, from Buenos Aires, was spending the weekend with us. He lives in the capital, with his family downtown near the Obelisk, where he’s studying public relations. He comes to Paraná every couple weeks to work daycare at a Howard Johnson. They pay the 80 peso, 6-hour bus ticket, so the few hours he can pick up here and there are worth it.

It’s that hard to get a job in Argentina. A six-hour commute for a few paid hours is worth it.

He had just got back from the hotel and came up to the terrace as we ate our oranges and sat in the sun.

We got to talking about social groups, cliques – tribus, as they call them here. Pablo was telling me about some of the ones here – like floggers, that are teenagers who use online photo logs (flogs) and social networks and wear tight jeans and bright colors and have androgynous, messy, parted hair cuts and do this kind of jig-dance with their feet.

Cumbio is the most famous and powerful flogger in Argentina. She’s sponsored and gets paid to attend parties and events. The Times did a profile on her a while back, after which her homepage was hacked.

He told me about another group that was all about the Rolling Stones - the rollingas, they were called, in which you wear rock band t-shirts or Stones shirts and bandanas tied around your neck and talk with this kind of melody and put your hand up to your face and shake it up and down when you say certain stuff. And just in general move around and peck and strut like Mick Jagger. It was a movement in the early 90´s connected with a lot of BA bands. Cofler chocolates made a satire of the thing, how to play the role, in an old TV commercial.

I asked Pablo when he was going back to BA. He said he wasn’t, just yet, that he was going to Gualeguaychu first, a small city in southern Entre Ríos province.

He was going to see his girlfriend, who lives there, although they met in the capital.

It was six years ago and Pablo went into an Internet café and saw this girl he liked. So he looked at the screen of her computer and saw her e-mail address and wrote it down.

He sent her a message later that day, saying how he thought she was pretty, all that.

She responded, and they started chatting on Messenger.

They went out on a date in Buenos Aires, going for a walk somewhere.

Soon after, her mom died and she returned to Gualeguaychu, her hometown.

Pablo had moved to Paraná because of a girl. Many people – myself included – asked him if it’s worth it to trade Buenos Aires for a girl. He spent a couple years here in that relationship.

They broke up and he had to go to Gualeguaychu for a job. He was working doing antique auto show promotions.

He got into town and called 110, the information line. He asked for his old girlfriend´s last name. There were 11 listings but the operator said she’d only give him two.

He called the first one and asked if Jessica was there.

“Hold on,” the voice on the phone told him. The first one he tried. It was her house.

So he asked if he could drop off his luggage there and they got back in touch and started dating again. They’ve been going out for the past four years, now.

I asked, again, when he was heading back. If he was going back that night to Buenos Aires. He reminded me, again, that he was going to Gualeguaychu, first. But he said no, what’s the rush? He said he’d cook an asado (beef barbeque) that night. He’d go to the grocery store – nothing else would be open on a Sunday afternoon – and buy everything, the meat, wine, everything.

I went to Facturity, the bakery and café I’ve made my regular place. I got a large cortado (which is still smaller than an American small) and a croissant filled with dulce de leche. I finished reading Mrs. Dalloway, which I’ll be talking about when I do lectures on The Hours in August for Literature II.

I left and headed to Elefante, for the Sunday night Cine Groove cycle. About 20 people showed up, sitting in wood folding chairs in the main room, smoking cigarettes, filling cups of beer with big Quilmes bottles, drinking wine. They played Justice’s Cross album while we waited for the film. I bumped into Valeria and Martin, two friends of Daniel I’d met in Santa Fe. It was her first time there, but Martin had come before.

They showed Walter Hill’s The Warriors. Claudio texted me early in the film, during the big, citywide gang conference. He wanted my Swiss Army knife to open a bottle of wine. I had the knife with me in my backpack.

I walked home after the movie, quickly saying bye to Valeria and Martin. The bells of the cathedral rang ten when I crossed the plaza. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

The asado was almost done when I got home and up to the rooftop, where we have a brick grill. An asado barbeque is almost always done over wood, instead of charcoal or, god-forbid, gas. He was grilling chorizos (beef sausages) and ribs. They don’t put anything on the meat – no sauces, no seasonings – just a little salt. It’s good, grass-fed meat, and a long, slow time over wood coals that get out the flavor.

Pablo asked me if I believed that men have walked on the moon. He said Danny showed him a video earlier that had a lot of damning evidence...like photos with no stars in the background and shadows that go the wrong way. I remember I had tried to watch a conspiracy theory show like that on Fox when I was a little kid. I think it was on my birthday but nobody else wanted to see it. They were also going to talk about bleeding Christ statues.

Pablo said a lot of people here believe it was a Cold War hoax and that Stanley Kubrick was hired to direct it. July 20th is now Friendship Day in Argentina and a lot of countries around the world - though not the U.S. - celebrate it. It was in honor of the moonlanding. He said Friendship Day is very significant to be attached to something that could´ve been political hoodwinking.

A thin, waxing moon was rising in the west. It looked like a white grin over the apartments.

Pablo´s question reminded me of my friend Martin in China, who asked me if the videos of the Tiananmen Square protests were real or fake.

Downstairs Lisandro, the friend who’d worked in Bariloche, was making a salad.

We brought down the meat and because we only have three chairs in the house, pulled up two big, empty paint buckets. We were short a knife so Daniel used a butcher knife to cut his meat. We passed around the sausages first, then got into the rib meat. You have to eat it fast, while it’s still hot and dripping and tender and gets wedged in between your teeth. When it gets cold its too hard to cut from the bone.

Meat, salad, red wine, bread – the Argentine asado. We finished eating, smoked some cigarettes, drank the rest of the wine, washed-up. It was midnight.

Lisandro took off early. Pablo had a bus at 6am to Gualeguaychu, so he went out to find a bar and have a drink and pass some time. I looked at some scenes from Children of Men, which we’d all watched the night before.

7: "To the north, to the desert: Part 1"

Winter break came two weeks early because of Swine Flu.

Monday, June 29th, I was supposed to give a talk to Language II about a video I’d made. I got a text in the morning from my adviser: because of the flu, school was cancelled. She wrote back later in the afternoon – the school’s been closed for winter break, no classes til July 27th.

Entre Rios province shut all its schools early, as a health measure. That weekend, the clubs and bars were also closed, along with church services and any big public gatherings. The newspapers were referring to it all as a “psychopandemic”, as there was no national consensus on how to respond, on the extent of the outbreak. Each province reacted as it wanted to.

What really made things bad was the resignation of the president’s minister of health just after the June 28th midterm elections. The replacement declared a few days later that the number of Swine Flu cases in the country weren’t a couple thousand, as they said before, but one hundred thousand.

I stuck around town for another week writing, reading, cooking, eating, going for walks, sleeping.

Tuesday, July 7th, I set off with my backpack, some Melville and Woolf and Philip K Dick, pens and my notebook. I had a date to meet a Chilean Fulbrighter in the northern desert in a week´s time.

I took an overnight bus to Tucuman, a big city in the northwest, near the Andes, that’s like a miniature Buenos Aires.

I got into town early in the morning. I walked downtown, to the morning rush. A waiter walked by on the sidewalk, balancing a polished tray, carrying a cup of coffee, a glass of seltzer and a plate of toast. I stopped at a café for a drink. I saw men wearing three-piece suits, talking with their hands, their faces exaggerated, just like Porteños (Buenos Aires natives). Women were wearing high leather boots, tight pants, sweaters.

I walked to a shop that sells old magazines, books, fliers, comics, instruction manuals…all sorts of stuff piled up on metal tables, with hardly any space to walk or turn around. On the way I saw a woman and a little boy. She guided him towards a garbage can, put her hands on his waist. He started peeing into the corner, as the crowd flowed by.

I walked towards the main plaza. A red light stopped traffic. A group of old people, retirees, walked into the street, stretching out a long banner – “Retirees of the Plaza” – it said. They were protesting for the rights of the retired, who have been losing government benefits.

One old guy was blowing off fireworks. The light turned green and they didn’t move. The cars, the trucks, the taxis, started honking, drivers leaning out the windows and shouting or throwing mean gestures with their hands.

The retirees made a loop around the plaza and finished near the congress building.

A line of riot cops waited for them, behind metal barricades.

The group approached, and one old guy, wearing a canvas hat, carrying a shopping bag and a flag, pulled down the fences. The riot cops formed into line and put up their shields. A big, bald, dark and nasty guy – wearing a wool overcoat and a grey three-piece and a red tie – stalked around in the front of the cops, holding a walkie-talkie, staring at the retirees.

The old people hung around there, passing around the bullhorn, smoking cigarettes, talking, shouting. They chanted too, sometimes profanities. Another group protesting something else – relatively younger, wearing powder blue caps – came from behind the retirees, along the plaza, and formed into the mass.

I took some pictures and went to a bookstore and then a Chinese buffet for lunch.

Later, I met up with Fareed, an ETA living in Tucuman. I hung out with him during a conversation group he’d arranged for his students.

The next day, July 9th, was one of Argentina’s Independence Days. I walked downtown and saw a crowd gathered around a white adobe building. They were waiting behind barricades, looking towards the fresh-painted, shining blue doors of the place. I got in with the mass to wait and look. Thoughts of Swine Flu were far from our minds.

The president, Cristina Kirchner, was going to talk in Tucuman that day. I thought it was probably for her that we were waiting.

She and her entourage made their way down the street, towards the white building. The crowd got happy and eager and amazed when she walked by. One little girl tried to hand her a hand-written letter.

They proceeded through those blue doors into that building, filing in, photographers and bodyguards and local politicians and accomplices. A journalist got locked out of the place, lingered around too long and had to knock on the big doors a few times before they opened them again and let her sneak in.

I didn’t know what the building was. Some private meeting place I thought. Turns out it was the House of Independence, where declaration was signed in 1816. I passed by there later that afternoon, after the crowds and celebrity had left. I paid 5 pesos and got to go in and see the old rooms and a museum there and some quiet courtyards.

I took a bus north to Salta late in the afternoon.