Dining with Welders

Other than tonight, I’ve shared all of my dinners at the ranch with two welders, Aldo and Dino, who work for the joint Argentine-Chilean venture building an oil and gas pipeline from Tierra del Fuego to Buenos Aires. (This is probably the last time you’ll find me linking to OffShore Engineer).

They both drank Diet Coke with gusto and complained about being bored with their lot down here. As far as I can tell, they get paid to check three times a day on a water tank that will take two weeks to fill. For the rest of their waking hours, they watch subtitled American TV on the small screen in the corner of the living room and pass around mate, that tea that I’ve written about in practically every post because it is like people’s second oxygen in this part of the world. Last night, Dino forked out extra tomatoes - grown here, in a greenhouse - from our shared salad dish. He stopped talking for a moment.

Che, que pasa? asked Aldo. What's up, dude? 

-Es que tienen otro sabor de los del super, said Dino, with his eyes closed. They’re just an entirely different species from what you get in the supermarket.

He went home yesterday morning for Easter so last night it was just Aldo and me at dinner eating carrot soup and lamb cutlets. We have an easy, friendly banter, which was facilitated by the fact that he’s Italian and loves America, and also probably because he’s a welder and his job is often to be in places where there is nothing to do but shoot the shit. 

He’s a big guy to begin with, and only once in 72 hours of living in the same house have I seen him without a heavy blue parka that magnifies this bulky presence. He wears a Dolce and Gabbana chain necklace and he has two tattoos on his arm. For some reason, I have the impression that he has braces, but I never confirmed. 

Because we had also had lunch together for the past three days, I had already heard about his job with the water tank and he had already heard everything about TFA, including the controversy it sparks in various regions of the US. Over our soup last night, we talked about romance. Do you have a boyfriend, there in the US? he asked. I made something up for the sake of conversation, which is an game of theatrics I feel iffy about but keep playing anyway, with cab drivers and welders, for example. 

My story’s funny, he said. I met my wife in Argentina, we were boyfriend and girlfriend for two months, and then we got married, and then two weeks later we moved to Italy together and had a son. It happened so fast but you know, you just know, when someone’s the one for you. 

Aldo will be 50 when he finishes his Level 3 Welders' Certificate, but it’s worth it, he says, you can get paid 3000 pesos just for signing a piece of paper, then, and you can work from home. He imagines a whole home entertainment room; he’s already bought the pool table and he wants to add a bar. 

He’s all about the career change-up. How can you know what you want your life to be like when you’re 18, he asked. [It should be noted that as a dual Argentine-Italian citizen, he's required by law to speak expressively with his hands]. He can’t believe how expensive school is in the US, and neither can I, when I mention it. He studied HR, advertising, and being an airline steward. He recognized how improbable that last one seemed, and laughed at my reaction. When a friend got him a job as a welder at a Fiat factory near Salerno, he knew that was it. 

We also talked about how it was easier, and better to live in Italy than in Argentina; how there are tons of immigrants in Italy, grandsons of Italians who immigrated elsewhere; what sort of work he’d most like to do; whether I’ll go to business school; how the economy of Argentina is shit; building wind turbines and solar panels; the blue dollar rate (if you’re in Buenos Aires, he’ll buy your dollars!); how his apartment in Buenos Aires got robbed; and how he’d like to move back to a small town like where he was living in Italy.

When he had finished his fruit salad, he looked at his Samsung and saw he had to go check the tank one last time before getting on a plane to Buenos Aires, to surprise his wife and kid for Easter. 

Night Flight

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who is best known for writing the children's book The Little Prince, might have preferred the title aeronaut to author. In the 1930s, he spent a lot of time in - or over - Patagonia, flying mail for the Correo Sur. He drew Patagonia into The Little Prince, and Argentina drew his name onto its maps, naming one of the peaks in the Fitz Roy Range after him:

(The image on the left is from http://ibarrafernandez.blogspot.com.ar/2010/04/antoine-de-saint-exupery-en-la.html; the other is from Le Petit Prince)

This is a beautiful essay from Robert McFarlane on Saint-Exupery as humanist, environmentalist, aeronaut. 

Alejo, the new manager of the guest house at Monte Dinero, is also a pilot. When he moved down here two weeks ago from Buenos Aires, he brought a stack of books by Saint-Exupery, and he was nice enough to lend me one, Vuelo Nocturno/Vol de Nuit/Night Flight

In Daily Themes, we did a week on translation. The syllabus included this quote: Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing…. It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift. (Harry Mathews)

To make my brain move, I did a rough translation of a passage I liked from Vuelo Nocturno. I italicized where I added something. I'm including the Spanish at the bottom, which itself is a 1960 translation from the French by J. Benavent:

***

Descending over San Julian, with the plane’s engine running slower, Fabien felt tired. Everything that brightens the life of man was running towards him, getting bigger: the houses, the little cafes, the trees along the avenue. He was like a conqueror who, at the end of his days, starts paying attention to the places he’s collected and discovers the humble happiness of mankind. 

Fabien was feeling it would be nice to let down his guard, to allow himself to feel the clumsiness and exhaustion that were seizing him, and to live here like a simple man, who looks out at the same view every day. He would have accepted this little town: after choosing, he thought, you can take in stride the randomness of fate - love it, even. Choosing limits you in the same way love does – it digs you in deeper. Fabien would have liked to live here for a while, to gather here his share of eternity. He’d only be living for a relative hour, but the gardens of these little cities and their old walls, over which he flew, seemed outside of himself, timeless. …And he thought about friendships, girls, a simple white tablecloth - everything that can become timeless, too, when you know it. The little town was slipping as he skimmed over it with his wings, unfurling the mystery of its enclosed gardens, whose walls no longer protected them. But Fabien, after landing, knew that he had only seen the slow movement of a few men among stones. That town, by not moving, kept locked up tight its secrets; that little town rejected his gentleness: to enter it at all would mean renouncing action, standing still.  

***

Al descender sobre San Julian, con el motor en retardo, Fabien se sintió cansado. Todo lo que alegra la vida de los hombres corría, agrandándose, hacia el: las casa, los cafetuchos, los arboles de la avenida. El, parecía un conquistador que, en el crepúsculo de sus empresas, se inclina sobre las tierras del imperio y descubre la humilde felicidad de los hombres.

 Fabien experimentaba la necesidad de deponer las armas, de sentir la torpeza y el cansancio que le embargaban – ye también se es rico de las propias miserias  - y de vivir aquí cual hombre simple, que contempla a través de la ventana una visión ya inmutable. Hubiera aceptado esa aldea minúscula: luego de escoger, so conforma uno con el azar de la propia existencia y incluso puede amarla. Os limita como el amor. Fabien hubiera deseado vivir aquí largo tiempo, recoger aquí su porción de eternidad, pues las pequeñas ciudades, donde vivis una hora y los jardines rodeados de viejos muros, sobre los cuales volaba, le parecían, fuera de el, eternos en duración. La aldea subia hacia la tripulación, abriéndose. Y Fabien pensaba en las amistades, en las jovencitas, en la intimidad de los blancos manteles, en todo lo que, lentamente, se familiariza con la eternidad. La aldea se deslizaba ya rozando las alas, desplegando el misterio de sus jardines cercados, a los que sus muros ya no protegían. Pero Fabien, después de aterrizar, supo que solo había visto el lento movimiento de algunos hombres entre las piedras. Aquella aldea, con su sola inmovilidad, guardaba el secreto de sus pasiones; aquella aldea, denegaba su suavidad: para conquistarla hubiera sido preciso renunciar a la acción. 

 

Maps

Geography is tangible here. When Ricardo picked me up on Thursday and drove me the 200 kilometers from Rio Gallegos to his family’s sheep ranch, Monte Dinero, he interrupted our conversation to narrate our coordinates. Now we’re going west, towards the border with Chile; now we’re going south; and now east, tracking the border again, which cuts across this land like a crack in a piece of terracotta. 

te ubicas?

Understanding your cardinal position in the world must be important when you are reaching the extremes of a continent, or a planet. You feel a curve in the earth when you look at a map and see that here, we are at Mile 0 of Ruta 40, the road that runs all the way up Argentina’s long spine. We are at the end of continental America. (Ushuaia, the main city of Argentine Tierra del Fuego, the island that sits right below us, ups the ante: it’s “the end of the world”). These superlatives can be used to sell things. Monte Dinero plays its touristic cards well by calling its tea house “Al Fin y al Cabo” - “In the End,” a nice word play that also refers to the Cabo, the point that juts out into the Straits of Magellan. Ricardo and his wife Marcela have tried for years to start a public school on the ranch and finally succeeded this year, an election year, because regional politicians saw the benefit in funding “The Southernmost school in Argentina.”

Here more than anywhere I’ve been, I want to see where I am on a map. The land itself orients you but it’s almost like you need to remind yourself that the extremity is real. Yes, here I am, a dot on the edge. [Humans have impacted this area a lot more than this wild feeling would give away, but that’s another topic].

We drove far out into the ranch today to look for the dogs who guard Monte’s sheep. They are Maremma sheep dogs; maybe it was just our relative proximity to Antarctica, but seen through binoculars from the truck they looked like polar bears. They’re ferocious with most creatures other than the sheep they’re born with and the humans who train them. Ricardo, Joel, Jeremy and I stayed in the truck while Marcela said hello to them. When she had had her time, we turned the truck around and started the drive back to the house. We had to stop for a moment. Marcela went silent and the boys looked up from their cellphone video game because at the end of the sea of grass was the Atlantic Ocean bright blue and holding down the horizon. 

sea and polar bears