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.