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.