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.

11: "To the north, to the desert: Part 3"

I got up at 8, showered, packed my bags, and walked to the terminal in Jujuy for my bus to Chile.

I saw some other travelers there. We’re easy to spot. I’d thought I was being unique, being way up north in Jujuy.

The Pullman bus came late. The driver opened the hold underneath. It was stuffed with all colors of hiking backpacks.

I got into the bus. It was almost all Europeans and North Americans. More together than you would ever see at any moment in Jujuy. My seat was next to an old Chilean man.

We passed through the Quebrada de Humuahuaca then drove up switchbacks to the top of the puna – the high plateau.

I finished Typee. My pen was open, the cap off, to mark notes on the pages.

I saw ink on my shirt, then on my jeans, then on the seat cover in front of me. I looked right. There was ink on the old man´s pants.

My pen was bleeding. I figured it was the altitude. I put the cap on and put it away, trying to be discreet. The old man’s pants were navy and the small stain would be hard to spot.

The shirt I stained was a button-up I’d gotten at the Dump and Run garage sale at the University of Illinois. I got it the last day of the sale, when everything’s free.

It´s an Abercrombie and Fitch girls´shirt. I´d never had a shirt that buttoned right-over-left before. I took it off a rack along with a Faded Glory plaid shirt. Faded Glory is a Wal-Mart brand.

That shirt got stained in Montreal, with the same kind of blue Pilot pen, when the pen was open and I tossed my shirt on my desk before I went to bed.

I had stained a pair of boxers a couple days earlier here in Salta, when I was writing notes in bed, in the top bunk, and fell asleep with the pen open.

We reached the salt flats. There were vans and cars and motorcycles stopped, people out looking at the white, bright fields, taking photos. There were mounds of salt piled-up, and heavy lifters and a building where they bag and prepare it for sale. There was a restaurant, there, too. We were at 10,000 feet.

On the far side of the flats we saw llamas. The old man nudged me, pointed out the window. When he saw I saw them, he nodded and winked.

We passed a hotel, a place with a few rooms, Direct TV on top, a big gas tank in the parking lot. New and big and clean SUVs and pick-ups were parked there.

We passed a makeshift tourist stall. A few women and children were sitting on the side of road, at the crotch of a sharp, high turn, with a sign and tables and blankets, selling knit clothes, indigenous souvenirs. There were a couple cars stopped, tourists in Gortex and sunglasses looking.

There were more llamas near there, alpacas, too. These were bigger than the others and had polychrome yarn tassels pierced into their ears and tied around their necks.

We were handed our customs declarations. We stopped at the border crossing, at 13,000 feet. There was a pay toilet there – 1.50 Argentine pesos, 200 Chilean pesos. The attendant gave you a fold of toilet paper after you paid.

There were two wooden kiosks up there, too, selling what kiosks sell: soda, crackers, chocolate, water, gum, potato chips, mints.

We got back in the bus and headed higher, to 14,000 feet and the end of the plains. It got grey outside, then began to snow. The land was red, just rocks and sand and hills and mountains. No trees, animals, or bushes. The old man was catching his breath.

The bus was warm and comfortable and steady. I took off my hoody, to cover my lap and the stains.

We passed volcanoes – sharp, even cones, covered with snow. The tallest is Licancabur, 18,000 feet. There´s also Sairecabur, Lascar and Putana.

We got back into the sunlight and away from the snow, heading down to the Atacaman valley.

We got to San Pedro de Atacama and were dropped off at a customs office. There´s no bus station there.

I met my friend Lucy, who’d gotten in a half-hour earlier from Calama, Chile.

We found a hostel and put down our bags and walked to the edge of town. You could look back across the plains to the volcanoes and to where the highway runs up into the puna. Where I’d just come from.

The Andean passes close at night. It got dark out and Lucy and I watched the last cars and trucks come down the highway.

At first, they’re so far away they look like stars. They´re just one bright light. They drift down, in a silent procession, one following the other. Like a constellation falling apart.

The light stays simple and bright and one, getting closer. Then the light splits in two. Then the car or the SUV or the semi pulls up to junction and brakes and is heavy and makes noise and turns left or right and goes on.

We walked back into town and got dinner. We went to a restaurant that was serving chili, which she said no one really eats in Chile.

I got the chili, and a pear smoothie. Lucy got lasagna. We sat next to a fireplace. It started to rain while we ate.

10: "Dinners with Élo: Part 1"

My roommate Daniel’s got a friend named Martin. His mom’s a French professor at UADER.

One day he told me that Martin’s mom wanted to get me in touch with Élodie, a French girl who’s doing the same thing here as me but in the French department.

So I got her e-mail and we made plans to meet for dinner.

This was back in June, before winter break, yet.

We met in front of the Escuela Normal. She showed up late, in spandex and sweats and headphones and her curly hair tied back. She’d come from the gym, with that damp musk of a workout, with a French accent on her Spanish.

I can tell my Spanish is getting better. I can hear accents now – French, American, German – and dialects – Spanish, Chilean, and within Argentina, Porteño, Cordobes, Correntino.

We went to Live Rock, the only big sit-down restaurant with long hours, a long menu, and a generic 80’s pop rock motif.

I got a Calabresa pizza – that’s with mozzarella cheese and salami and olives. Élo’s a vegetarian and got a pizza with Roquefort.

We had a long dinner and a long conversation. She talked. I listened.

She studied tourism in France but could care less about the place and doesn’t want to go back. She said Europe’s old and racist and got no jobs.

She’d spent a year in Mexico before getting a government grant to come here as a language assistant. Before the grant she traveled through the Southern Cone with her boyfriend. They hitchhiked through Patagonia, down to Tierra del Fuego, then back north through Uruguay, Porto Alegre in Brazil, and Iguazu Falls on the border with Argentina.

Now he’s in Paraguay and Peru, backpacking, and she misses him and is really thinking about giving up the grant and getting away from Paraná and dull rural Entre Ríos province and getting back to him and going up to Mexico.

She was frustrated with the inconsistent school schedule, that even though we get days off – for teacher strikes, plumbing problems, board exams, new public holidays, flu pandemics – usually there’s no announcement and she can’t make plans to travel.

She’s bored here, having to work only a dozen hours a week, with too much free time and not enough to do. She reads – Zola’s her favorite author, though now she’s reading a long book by a Greek writer. She said she’s never read any North American literature. She asked me if it's any good.

And she works out, cooks, prepares her classes – though even that’s a frustration (one professor told her just, simply, to talk about Montesquieu – she asked how: politically, philosophically, historically). And then there’s not much to do in the province – no mountains, oceans, forests. There’s a big river but nobody goes in it, out on it. And they hardly ever eat the fish that come from it.

She went to the thermal springs in the countryside – but that was really just a hot swimming pool.

Her head’s telling her to stay, to finish the grant, to keep working with her French students – she’s been teaching radio production in one class and they’re working on a yearlong project to write and record and produce a show. Her heart’s telling her to go.

We finished our pizzas and talked til midnight. We left and walked home. Turns out we live a few blocks from each other and she walks down my street every day on the way to the gym. Baucis is an old, preserved, historic street – narrow and brick-paved and with murals and poems painted and posted at each end.

We said good-bye. We’d see if we’d ever see each other again.