My friend Sole is from a farm town in the middle of Entre Ríos province. It’s called Maciá. It’s got a population of 10,000 and is surrounded by soy and sorghum fields, and pasture. Sole said the population´s really not quite 10,000, but they like to round-up.The land there is rolling and green and dry. It’s called monte, which is a mix of prairie grasses and bushes and creeks and rivers. There’s palm trees, and a lot of thorn trees called espinillos.
Sole is short for Soledad, which means solitude. She moved out of town after high school. She left to go to Córdoba with her then-boyfriend who was finishing a thesis on Amartya Sen. Córdoba’s the second biggest city in the country, and is hundreds of miles west of Maciá.
She moved to Paraná this year, a few months ago. She’d been studying law at the University of Córdoba, which was founded in the early 1500’s. She’s dropped that major and is looking for a new one, to study here. The way Argentine university’s work is you have to start over, from the beginning, if you change majors.
She’s been looking for work since she moved here. Her mom got her a job working for an ambulance company, selling their emergency service to businesses in town. She had been working for a law firm, but her old roommate was dating the boss, as well as dating a guy who was also going out with Sole’s cousin. Sole told her cousin. The roommate told the boss to get rid of Sole.
She moved away from that roommate and lives in a girls’ boarding house with Flor, an old friend from Maciá.
She has a lot of free time now. She does gymnastics. She sleeps a lot, and reads a lot. She likes Ray Carver and Charles Bukowski and John Cheever.
She sprays her books with perfume so they smell nice when she turns the page. Her Ray Carver anthology smells like lilac and bubble gum.
* * *
Spring is ending here. The days are longer than the nights. We went to Maciá during a heat wave, when it was humid and breezy and near 100º at midday.
We left Friday afternoon. It was a three-and-a-half hour bus ride. We stopped in a few other small towns, including one where people still speak German. They call the Germans here Rusos, which means Russian.
Sole and I got off at a highway junction. The buses don’t stop at her town in the afternoon.
You could see the horizon in every direction. There were some barns nearby, and others far off. I felt like I was in Champaign, in Illinois. It was late afternoon and mellow and quiet.
We walked down a highway. She called her brother, who lives in town. He said his kidney hurt and he couldn’t come pick us up. A puppy came up and played with Sole while she smoked a cigarette.
We waved down a cattle truck that had stopped at the junction. The cattle had plastic tags on their ears. Some of them looked at us as we walked to the cab.
Sole asked the driver if he´d take us down the road, to the turnoff to her town.
Sole threw her bag in the back of the cab and climbed up and then took my backpack and I got in and we pulled out.
The driver’s name was Omar. He had Gauchito Gil stickers and Virgin Mary prayer cards stuck to the dash, and red Chinese tassels dangling from the ceiling. There were cases of CDs and a pack of cigarettes and a lighter by the steering wheel. He was 21 he said, and started trucking after high school, because his dad did it.
We got up to speed. There were stripped cowhides in a ditch on the side of the road.
We got to the turnoff and he stopped and we climbed down and said thanks.
We waited a few more minutes. A lady got dropped off at the corner. She was waiting for a ride in the direction we came from.
I took some pictures. One car drove past without stopping. Sole said that’s bad manners. A lumber truck stopped and the lady got in and it drove away.
Another car turned the corner and came past us. They stopped.
It was a girl Sole knew from high school. They hadn’t seen each other since.
We got in. They had a German shepherd in back that barked and put its teeth against the glass as we got close. It won’t bite her mom said. Her dad was driving.
I sat in front while Sole was in back saying what she’d done since high school. The other girl had spent a year working in New Zealand picking kiwis and apples and studying English.
We drove past barns and houses as the sun was getting lower and the green of the trees and fields was glowing.
We got dropped off in the downtown, which is one street that runs for five or six blocks. The dog hits its face against the window and growled again when we got out of the car.
We walked towards her grandparents’ house, which is empty now that both of them have passed away. Sole found 20 pesos on the ground, on the sidewalk. For the beer, she said.
A lot of people were sitting outside on the sidewalk, in lawn chairs, in front of their homes or stores. Some were drinking mate, others beer. Some of them stared at us. Sole said adios or chau to most of them.
Her aunt and uncle were waiting for us at the house to give us the keys.
Her aunt married late because her father was protective and jealous. She married a man named José, a few years ago, whose wife had died. He’s a tenant farmer and works on a piece of property outside the town that’s owned by somebody else. The owner’s called the patron.
The property’s got both pasture – for sheep and cows – and farmland. José also has some chickens and geese for himself and his wife and sons.
I sat in the living room with José while Sole’s aunt was showing her the house and the room she made up for us. We were watching TV.
They were showing clips of a school employee getting punched and slapped by parents and other people standing and looking. He had touched some of the kids, apparently. They interviewed him with his face bleeding. He went inside the school and a woman shut the door behind him and kept the camera out.
Sole’s aunt gave me a glass of water. It tasted like something and had white flakes floating in the bottom. Sole said the town’s water’s been contaminated, that it’s got a bunch of minerals and other stuff in it and they buy bottled water mostly now.
Her uncle asked if we wanted to shower. Sole opened her bag and touched-up her makeup and sprayed deodorant. Her uncle looked at her and raised his voice and said just take a shower. We’re just going to keep sweating, she said.
We all left the house and got into José’s car that he’d just bought used. We drove to Sole’s brother’s house. His name’s Pepe and he works for the Argentine post office. There was a white Correo Argentino pick-up in the driveway. We got out and walked around to their backyard.
His little daughter was there with a friend, and a couple big dogs, and he and his wife were sitting in lawn chairs. Pepe had his shirt off. They were drinking mate. You could see big grain silos off beyond their brick fence.
Pepe´s brother talks like Marlon Brando. He called me maestro.
His wife used to teach Italian, but just stopped. She’d been to Italy, too. She also teaches in an elementary school in a village outside of Maciá. It was too much work doing both.
She said the elementary school doesn’t have running water, so the teachers have to bring it with them each day. She said it was a disaster that day, with the heat, and they had to ration it for the kids.
There’s not even running water for the bathrooms, she said.
Sole and I left and said bye. We walked along gravel roads, then paved roads. The sun had set and it was getting dark.
We passed a slaughterhouse, where Sole said you can hear the braying at night when the cows are lined up and killed. She said they were taken there in elementary school once, to see how it works.
We went to Sole’s mom’s house. She lives by herself. Her ex-, Sole’s dad, lives in Paraná, now.
Her mom said there’s a lot of discontented women in Maciá, and that she’s a threat because she’s so active. She has a green belt in Tae Kwon Do and does Arabian dancing and works with the women’s national basketball team, which she played for a long time ago.
We left and walked back downtown.
We went to Dani’s, an ice cream parlor. There’s three on main street. One’s corporate, but Dani’s and the other are local and have homemade ice cream made with fresh local milk.
We got ice cream cones. I got dulce de leche and white chocolate. Dani served us. A cone with two big scoops cost less than a dollar. Sole said you could tell the ice cream was fresh because it was so smooth. She asked and Dani said it was made that morning.
We sat outside and ate and then went back in and washed our hands at a little plastic fountain by the bathroom.
Clouds were blowing in and the moon had a halo around it. We thought it might rain.
Sole’s roommate Flor was back home, visiting, too. Her boyfriend lives in Maciá and owns a clothes shop. We went there and Flor came out with a shirt she’d tried on and they shared a cigarette.
Sole and I went back to her mom’s house. She’s turned her house into a medical office, for specialists to come to from outside of town. A doctor from Rosario was doing an exam and we had to be quiet so we walked to the backyard and waited for dinner.
There was an old empty concrete swimming pool. There were weeds growing in it. We sat on the edge and talked. She said spiders and scorpions live in the pool, now. I told her about how there was a scorpion in the shower with me right after I got to Paraná, in the professor’s house I’d been living in.
I said I didn’t really know it was so poisonous when I saw it and just sprayed water on it, which seemed to do it. But then I came back after I dried off and it was still alive and killed it with a squeegee and washed it down the drain. She said I shouldn’t have washed it down the drain.
Sole’s mom made perdix for dinner, which is a partridge that lives in the monte and is common to eat. It was marinated in a vinegar sauce and served with carrots and onions.
Perdix is Spanish are called perdiz, or perdices, plural. Children´s stories end with the line "Vivieron felices y comieron perdices", which means "They lived happily and ate perdix".
Sole’s mom has three phones, which were on the table while we ate. One is a cordless landline. The other two are cell phones.
We finished and left and went home to shower and change.
We went back out and walked along main street.
There’s two big bars in town. They’re called social clubs and are wide, bare halls with pool tables and a bar and tables on the sidewalks out front.
I saw her uncle sitting at a table drinking with a few other people as we walked by on the other side of the street.
Kids cruise around back and forth on the main drag at night. The rich boys have expensive new pick-up trucks and call girls to give them the privilege of going for a spin.
We bought two bottles of beer at a corner store with the money from the sidewalk.
We walked to her friend Nigel’s house, who she went to high school with. He and a few other friends had barbequed and were watching concert DVDs of Pink Floyd and the Traveling Wilburys and Rammstein.
We sat on the driveway and passed around bottles of beer and Nigel and another friend called Fausto played guitars and sang John Lennon and Ray Orbison songs. Fausto played an acoustic and Nigel an electric. The amp was in the living room but he played outside.
Fausto asked me if I like rock and roll. I said yes.
He’s about 30 and is tall and has curly, fluffy hair and teaches music in an elementary school in town.
He was pretty drunk and telling me about the fundamental basis of life in the country; that being surrounded by so much green calms people down, that the people are hardworking, and so on.
He said the U.S. has got something in that the states don’t fight with each other, the way the provinces do here.
I went inside and took a sausage and a bun and made a choripan. The meat had been sitting for a while and was dry, and the bread was dry. It was tough to chew but it was OK.
The breeze was steady and the night got cool. We got up around 2 and said bye and Sole and I walked back to her grandparent’s house.
The next day we were going to the country, she said.
