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.