CrAzY dAYz in BA pt. II

In a nice instance of travel symmetry, I'm ending this two-month period of my trip where it started, in Buenos Aires. Somehow, I still haven't managed to do much of the visitor-in-BA stuff, like stay out until 5 am or eat a whole cow off a grill (I would be doing that, but I'm still recovering from the quantity of lamb I had to eat in Patagonia). 

Yesterday, I ran at dusk and tripped on a rock in a slim path in between a park and a Friday evening highway. I went sprawling under the weak lights that lit the path. At the end of my run, it started raining and at an internet cafe I changed a hundred dollar bill to pesos with a bleeding elbow. (Crazy gringa, said the cashier's eyes).

I am staying with a friend from school, Sarah, whom I actually didn’t know very well before I got to Buenos Aires. There is a curious luck to getting along with someone new and you take advantage of it, stay put. Staying with Sarah has both pushed me to make as much as I can of my project and kept my project in healthy perspective. She is working to pitch a story she has been reporting for almost two years, about a Cold War-era massacre in a Salvadorean village. 

We’ve been living primarily off of butternut squash and wine. There are two kilos of ice cream in the freezer, which are there mainly as an excuse to practice some activity other than writing but that still feels like writing: we dig spoons into the ice-crusted tubs as if there aren’t just cookie pieces in there, but the word that might hold together the pitch an editor will love. 

We talk a lot and we barely talk; today, we’ve exchanged only a few words, here and there, knowing that in a few hours when this individual flow state has exhausted each of us we’ll talk about life again, the life we’re trying to encapsulate in our stories or the life that exists beyond this apartment. 

I spent most of the day today lying on the floor slow reading John McPhee’s New Yorker piece on structure and taking messy notes in a shitty faux-Moleskine notebook. We float through the apartment moving from one pose of thinking to another, walking slowly to the kitchen to cut another slice of apple, peel another half avocado, mix in a little more instant coffee; always wearing bathing suits, because there is a terrace with a counter facing the midday sun. I think we’re trying to photosynthesize. We cross the threshold of the terrace back to the cool apartment only when our computer screens get too hot.

After my tumble yesterday, I’m limping up and down the stairs and I have a homemade  bandaid ((paper towel)) flopping off my arm but I feel this is appropriate, like falling is all part of this focused and freeing process of trying to make sense, in words, of what I’ve learned in the past few months.

Last week I dreamt of the public library in the town where I grew up. I don’t think this current existence is the long-term life for me, and I’m starting to feel the pull of home again. But when I get home, when I go do something other than lie on floors in a bathing suit trying to sell my thoughts, I hope I have a little scar from that fall. 

Will Hamilton

Of all the Hamiltons, Will lived with the least unfettered joy but the most money. While his siblings tied sofas to the back of carts so they could take two girls to the dance (Tom) or told bawdy stories to all the town’s women in the fitting room of a dress shop, so that those women left feeling less weight in their tired feet (Dessie), Will sold a lot of cars and ate expensive steak alone at the bar in Salinas.

But let’s not consign Will to the world of robots - let’s not make him the forebear of today’s office drone, the antecedent of the millions of collared-shirt-wearing humans held aloft in New York City office skyscrapers each day from 9-5. No, I think Will understood joy, too. He just calculated it in a different way. It was an input, not an outcome; it was a means to an end, not the end of his day with a few beers and a bunch of buddies. 

"From instinct and training in business, he was a fine reader of the less profound impulses of men and women." He understood how to take peoples’ quest for joy, or love, or comfort, or status, and turn it into the money old Sam Hamilton never had. I don’t think he minded sitting alone at the bar, absorbing the rest of the world and storing it for a future deal. Will had his feet firmly on the ground, but in his own way he saw wings. 

[[[Because you can think about John Steinbeck's East of Eden always and in every context. Sentence in quotes is from that epic, p. 252 I think based on the preview I can get on Google Books.]]]

Getting Down to Business

I am thinking about bottom lines before bed. 

This is an excellent piece by the New Yorker's James Surowiecki about B Corps, or for-profit companies that pledge to achieve social goals as well as financial ones:

 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/companies-benefits.

There are more than 1000 B Corps in the U.S. (I'll be finding out tomorrow how many there are in Argentina). The fiduciary duty of these companies goes beyond making money and stretches into returns that are often far less quantifiable - positive environmental impact, for example. In the U.S., at least, the promise of these sort of returns has been attracting investors to B Corps and encouraging the growth of a movement.

The more I read and the more I see, the more I understand that business is never easy or simple. But the idea of B Corp provides a neat narrative. Entrepreneur has idea for product people will buy (financial win). Product is made using clean technology (environmental win). Because people are buying products, company adds jobs (social win). There is the triple bottom line that the entrepreneur envisioned from the beginning.

What feels like a more complicated and more dramatic story is the fight to turn companies that were born with one sole purpose - that money makin - into a triple threat. How would H+M even begin to unravel the way it makes its sweaters (in sweatshops out of cotton that drank all of California's water supply)? What can convince a CEO and her Board of Directors that the challenge would be worth it? 

Some Facts

Near the southern-most point of Argentina, where the Strait of Magellan strikes and pulls at the land, Ricardo Fenton’s ancestors established a sheep ranch. Most of the other first settlers came for the gold rush of the 1880s. Now, most guests here work on the rigs that burn gas in flares offshore. The current guest house is built out of shipwrecks that the Strait spat out. 

For lunch on Good Friday, Ricardo and his family ate a lamb that they had had roasted for a few visitors. They told the visitors to try the ribs. The daughter, Erin, and the oldest son, Joel, are 13 and 11 and rattled off the names of soccer teams. After lunch, they went back to their house to do their homework, and Ricardo showed the visitors how to shear a sheep. 

"The Trader Who Donates Half his Pay"

My parents forwarded me Nick Kristof's NY Times column from yesterday, "The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay." I think it's worth a read.

Reading it pulled me out of this very unique Patagonian world I'm living in for five days - intense geography, rural schools, wool prices, grass regeneration, sheep - and took me back to the decision-making that got me here in the first place. 

A year ago, I was working an interesting job in New York that paid well but had me looking at a screen most of the time. It wasn't arbitrage or trading, but it had me using numbers and making money for big companies. My rationale for taking the job had been some combination of "learn practical, business skills here you can use later to make government or NGOs or whatnot more efficient" and "make money here and save it to give away, also later." I can still see the value in both of these ideas, and I don't fault anyone who takes a job for those reasons. For me, that was not the right job. I missed interacting with people other than at lunch time. So I made moves to become a teacher, and in the meantime I am enjoying a stint as a freelance reporter.

Reading about Matt Wage (also, nice last name), I questioned my decision-making. Maybe I had just been selfish, wanting to do a job that made me happy. At the least, his idea - making such intense calculations as to the effectiveness of your job in improving the world - is interesting.

And I applaud him. I don't think giving away half your salary is easy when you start working in a world made out of money. I think what Wage does is extremely relevant for my peers who enjoy their jobs in finance or consulting. Even if they didn't start their career with the objective of giving away most of their salary, they could take a page out of his book.

I recognize Wage from college - or I think I do, and I'm going to make a lot of assumptions. He's a good person who's hard-wired to enjoy close analysis, philosophic or financial. He'd be that brilliant guy in my philosophy section who made one amazing comment each class and who did all of the reading and stayed after to talk with the TA because he was able to focus in one one line from Singer and keep that focus even when it was 5 pm and everyone else was going to hear Sonia Sotomayor give a master's tea, or play soccer on Cross Campus. He'd definitely be a nice guy. (I can also imagine that, like most people would be, he is a little relieved that his moral calculus took him to an arbitrage job in Hong Kong rather than to a refugee camp in Syria).

But extending the "effective altruism" argument too far ignores a few things, which Kristof points out. First:

 "There is more to life than self-mortification, and obsessive cost-benefit calculus, it seems to me, subtracts from the zest of life."

As an extension of this, Matt Wage's calculus works for him - but we also need people who are going to run the NGOs that do the best work he donates to; who are going to write the articles that show us how bad the malaria crisis is in developing countries; who are going to teach kids in struggling schools across the U.S.

When you have the privilege of an education like Wage's - like I do, and like many of you reading this, I assume - you also have the privilege of making choices. This means that you can pick where you think you can do the most good AND be your best self. I know that I would not be happy in Wage's job, even if I were giving away half of my pre-tax income. I would feel that some essential part of me was lying fallow (and I'd be sleep-deprived and mean). And so I think I'd be missing out on some of the good I can do in the world.

I worry that a story like Wage's will be yet another selling point for the finance and consulting companies that take a disproportionate number of "elite" graduates each year. To people who are still in college, I say: if you know you love teaching, or writing, or tracking endangered birds, or titrating cells to find a cure for cancer, I believe there is unquantifiable benefit to the world in you doing what you love. 

I write all of this pretty sure, especially after the past two months, that business is an essential tool for fixing most things going wrong in the world. Money makes things happen, as Kristof's piece lays out. And I think I'm heading in the direction of business, of some sort, as a career. I just want to intertwine the ultimate impact I make with the way I live. 

I'd love to hear what people think about this, in comments or by email or whatnot. This is an interesting, deeper-dive into the question, from 2013 in the Washington Post.

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. 

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. 

Fluff Post

Things I Should Have Packed:

1. A Charles Schwab debit card, which miraculously does not slap you with double fees when you withdraw money from foreign ATMs.

2. Duct tape, because flip-flops break and your budget is limited and you would rather spend money on wine than on new flip-flops. 

3. Emergen-C.

4. Ear plugs and one of those geeky sleep masks, for 5 am airplane rides where the lights stay on and the breakfast cart rattles up the aisle right after take-off to tempt you out of much-needed slumber with the smell of croissants.

5. Simple stationery to leave thank-you notes along the trail of incredible generosity. 

The Circus

You forgot that in Argentina, you probably didn't need to book a taxi online and ahead of to take you to the airport for a 5:25 am flight. At 4 am, taxis crawl the streets, a nocturnal rush hour. The drivers are wide awake - no hushed radio stations here. Your cab driver gestured so big with both hands when he spoke that he almost hit a bus. 

You forgot that in Argentina, life continues at 4 am as if it were lunch time. You drove by street corners where people sat at plastic tables and ate hamburgers under fluorescent lights. Groups spilled out of bars onto fractured sidewalks, clutching liter bottles of beer. There was a free concert in the Plaza Serrano and more people out than had been at 4 pm. Street lights and shadows are a reverse alarm clock. 

At 4 am, the airport, too, was busy. People seemed to ignore the time of day. A woman wore bright green eyeliner and leather pants; a family with a small child ate croissant and drank coffee

Today is the Memorial Day for the Malvinas/Falklands War, and Friday is Good Friday, and Sunday is Easter, so people are getting out of Buenos Aires to the mountains in the south and the vineyards in the north and they made the airport bustle with good-natured energy. 

Still, you can't get out of your head what you saw at an intersection near the airport in a sort of highway no-man's land: three scrawny guys wearing sweatshirts and faux Adidas shorts, taking turns juggling at red lights for the hope of a coin from these people on their way to vacation.

On Sidewalks and Walls, at Least 13 of Them

Gracias, che, Wallace Stevens (13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)

1.

I went for a walk this evening when I was sleepy. I wanted the reality of my feet on pavement and tangible proof that this is a melancholy city like everyone says.

I walked past parents waiting to pick up their kids at school. I walked through a 6-block area of clothing outlets. I sat at a cafe and bought a coffee. On my way home, it was dusk, and through an open window I heard four friends cooking dinner in their first floor apartment.

2.

On a wall near this apartment, in simple black lines, five mothers of disappeared children hold a car over their heads. The iron goods store is missing a letter on its sign. Plmberia. Light shines through. A window’s open playing the radio, tango. 

3.

There are 500,000 registered dogs in this city. Some starving artists and/or talented dog whisperers walk 20 dogs at a time for extra money. That’s 20 dogs walking on a sidewalk at once, and one person who is probably not paying attention to the pooper scooping laws. Just saying. 

4.

That was the prettiest one we’ve seen yet today, the construction worker said, when the girl with the long ponytail was just a step past him. Te cojo todo, said the old man, when the girl in the short uniform skirt of the middle school walked by. Ay mamiii, the dude on motorcycle whistled, then slurped. And so 89% of women in Buenos Aires say they often change the route they take to get to work, or school. 

5.

I crossed the street to buy a lighter. A man walked home singing a song I didn’t know, skipping the sidewalks altogether.

6.

You can take a graffiti tour of Buenos Aires, I’m told. For $25 USD, you can tour four neighborhoods by foot and by van, learning about how the urban art scene was born in the fire of the military dictatorship. 

7.

The poor man’s graffiti tour: count how many times you see a wall scrawled with nunca mas, nunca mas. Never again, never again. 

8.

I was going to say these sidewalks are shadowy, but that implies they’re creepy. Around here, the shadows cradle the night. In the shadow of a fig leaf, you can see it’s green, growing, covering the sidewalk with photosynthesized light. 

9.

What are Buenos Aires sidewalks like in the morning? Does Buenos Aires have a morning? The night ends at 5 a.m., and you sleep until noon. Do you dream of sidewalks? 

10.

There’s a sidewalk, he told me, his voice slow and deliberate, savoring each word. It’s in Abasto, where he lives, a neighborhood that's still a neighborhood. In the day, old men with big bellies sit on benches and yell. Che, che, tomamos unos matés?  He puffs out his belly in imitation and turns his voice to an aged squawk. You guys, wanna drink some maté!? Then his voice sinks deep again and he smiles at me. I love that sidewalk. 

11.

Look down, cause you’ll trip if you don’t. Hexagonal tiles ripple in mounds over tree roots. Look down. Someone pulled the Tetris blocks off the screen and made them a sidewalk. Look down. Across the street from where the murals are brightest, most beautiful, the ground opens up into dust and an open manhole. 

12.

Look up. There’s crumbled sidewalk dust and an open manhole and a manhole construction crew, but across the street a mural covers a white house with bright green leaves and technicolor flowers.

13.

I tried to get that mural on my camera. It was washed out. I tried to get two houses on my camera. They were washed out, nowhere near pink and orange, nowhere near the warmth of the light that hit them. 

I’m not sure you can photograph any of these walls. You can only see them walking slowly, moving past them, letting them go. 

From the Archives

I bet there is a Borges quote or a Carlos Gardel tango line about how Buenos Aires is a city of nostalgia.

This piece has nothing to do with Buenos Aires, but my posting it here is an act of nostalgia. Right now, my working definition of nostalgia is "the feeling you get after you read 45 short pieces you wrote in your senior spring of college."

I just went through all the prompts from Daily Themes, a writing class I took two years ago, in order to find a few to play with here. Of course, this led me to what I wrote in response to them. 

***

8. Tuesday at the Lodges

 “Harry and Elenita got a new puppy,” she had said a few months ago. “Cache-cache. It means hide-and-seek in French, you know. The most delicious dog!”

At dinner at the Lodges Cache-cache sat under the white-clothed table and there were buttery baked tomatoes on our plates and the rain dripped under eave lights on the slate outside and Uncle Harry spoke in time with wine about Japanese art and the art of being a good doctor and over dessert they laughed about Nonna’s sweet tooth and the way she would regally demand to check her email on vacation and the rain kept dripping under eave lights on the slate outside the most horrendous weather and so and so and Cache-Cache under the table eating crumbs and so wine lights drip would, Laura would, remember? transform from a missing presence to a person who has died some time ago, now.

Orquestra Típica Ferdandez Fierro

Julieta Laso came onto the stage of the Club Atlético Fernandez Fierro as if someone had grabbed her off the subway on her way to work in the center of Buenos Aires. She wore a shiny black trench coat, jeans, and blue-tinted sunglasses, and she looked surprised to be in front of an audience, or at least apathetic. But she had five violins, four accordions, a cello, a bass, and a piano behind her. She was there to sing tango. 

As she began to sing, we weren’t in an old sports club, at a tango show, we were on a street corner, we were in the center of Buenos Aires with cars flying around us, and she was cualquier porteña, any woman from Buenos Aires, singing the city so we could see it better. On the stage behind her, four screens flashed with black and white film from cameras on her microphone and the bridges of the violins. They looked like surveillance film. As she sang and the band played, accordions and violins and deep cello, with more urgency, they played us the fear that lives in this city still, from the desaparecidos, the crisis, the mystery of Nisman’s death. Julieta’s voice rolled into deep valleys and lingered before running away again, faster. 

As the show progressed, Julieta took off the jacket. She became a moody teenager in a black tank top and Levis. She pulled her dark hair out of its bun, and let it cover her face as her hands played the microphone like a saxophone; she flipped it back over her head, angling her face up to the stage lights; she put it into a ponytail and swung the ponytail around to accentuate her words. The American kids in the front row looked up, rapt, realizing that maybe they could translate their emotions into tango. 

Julieta disappeared off the stage between sets, sliding back on when a new melody began. For the last song, she put on a black beanie. When the show ended, and the encore ended, she threw up the shocker like a punk rocker and ran off stage.

Sarah and I waited for her after the show. We were about to leave when one of the violinists came running after us with her in tow. On stage, her voice had made her seem brooding and tall. She was short and friendly. Her eyebrows were plucked thin like an esthetician’s but her voice was still the kind I had only heard before from a record player. She grabbed the bottle of wine Sarah was holding and took a swig. We told her we had loved her voice. Encantada, she said, and thank you. She was thirty, and she had only started singing tango seven years ago. Are you from here, we asked. She laughed. Demasiado porteña, she said. Too much from Buenos Aires. 

Where we were//what we saw: 

http://caff.com.ar/

http://julietalaso.bandcamp.com/

Hostel Educated, Graduated

I’d heard Punta del Diablo, a fishing town on the northeastern coast of Uruguay, was calm and wild; I’d heard it was a gathering place for millionaire faux-hippies from Buenos Aires, which is about the worst diss a Uruguayan can utter. What I found, in this off-season, was more calm and wild, with a hint of backpacker chic. It was fun to return to the world of travelers for a little while. 

I stayed in a hostel that had 6 hammocks, a fire pit, and surfboards for rent. The primary supply guests lugged up the hill from the supermarket was beer.  I had forgotten about the ephemeral and intense nature of sharing a bunkroom and bathroom and kitchen with strangers. I had forgotten how those strangers can become your tribe for three days, so that hugs go around when people leave. I like that. It was a nice change of pace from playing moody writer. 

I remembered a few things from my last trip to South America, and learned a few more. These included: 

-how to say university instead of college, so as not to confuse the Europeans;

-how to add up grocery accounts real fast;

-how to hide a mango in a fridge full of beer and three day old lettuce (wishful thinking, stick with pasta) so no one else will eat it;

-how to spot translate instructions for a German card game from English to Spanish (#UNstatus)

-how to be a good sport when a bottle of vodka falls out of the freezer and shatters onto your foot (keep a Chilean rugby medic on hand at all times)

La Republica Oriental

My Lonely Planet calls Uruguay the Switzerland of South America. And that’s fitting, to an extent; most of the country feels solid, safe, grounded in thick grass, roamed by cattle and lived in by calm people who just want a few minutes of break every few hours to chat and drink mate. The grasslands feel more like a cradle than a wilderness. But the coins and the flag of Uruguay are stamped with a sun. Its official name is La Republica Oriental de Uruguay. 

That oriental . The translation would be eastern, but I keep reading it (orientalistically?) as exotic, wild, unknown. 

Even in the grasslands of the west, in the farm heart, near Tacuarembo, you can catch a glimpse of the wild when you wake up early to a neon sunrise and ibises calling from the trees. The gauchos whoop when they drive cattle and whisper to their horses. But it’s not quite up to the name. Their wildness is tangible, brass-and-leather-tough. This part of the country is sure and clear. It knows how to fix a fence, where to rotate the cows, when it’s going to rain. 

Uruguay leads you east in search of wilderness. Montevideo, the capital, starts to get at the name, wild with 22 miles of coastline and sunset. The boats come in on the Rio de La Plata, the river of silver that separates Uruguay from Argentina. On Sundays, the whole city lives slow and sleepy and sensuous behind the peeling shuttered windows of old palaces, sending their children out in the evening to play on shadow-speckled playgrounds and shattered cobblestones. Candombe music builds to a peak, here, a mix of Brazilian and African beats. That may be more what the name means. 

But oriental, orient. You have to orient yourself east, toward the ocean, eventually. You swing towards the waves like a compass needle. La Republica Oriental - the name makes more sense from the top of a dune that spills down into a curving beach and stretches into sun beyond your sight. It makes sense in a golden-brick fort just a few miles from Brazil, where in 1760 something the Spanish defended the first border from the Portuguese coming from the north. It makes sense in an empty state park on a lagoon leading into mountains, where green parrots swarm out of Ceibal trees; it makes sense in the marshes where two different species of birds prey in synch. It makes sense on a deserted, windswept beach, next to a rusty winch from an old fishing boat and eagles eating fish that the ocean spat out. 

And you’re there, in the Republica Oriental, when you’re on a beach at dusk, when the tips of the waves turn pink with the sky, and you swim in those waves. It’s that wildness, the oriental, that hills and sky can’t match. Even the most weather-beaten fisherman can’t be sure of where today’s wave will take him. 

20+ Lines on Movement

Last night, I built a fort in my hostel dorm room out of a scarf and curtains. I built it because I was feeling weirdly afraid of how loud the waves were, touching an otherwise too-quiet night.

Besides, I'd been in La Paloma six nights with that four-bunk room to myself and it felt like time to make it feel cozy. I had already, my first night, unpacked my books and hung some of my clothes on a plywood shelf. On another shelf, I had started accumulating things that the ocean brought to me - small striped shells with holes, a dried-out seahorse, a bone that I imagined was a piece of a whale skull but was probably just the eye socket of a large fish. Building myself a structure in that room just felt like the next step in moving in, or regressing to childhood, your pick.

When I woke up this morning, the waves moved into the beach quietly and red with seaweed. I sat for an hour in the hostel kitchen, emailing. I biked to the gas station and sat for an hour there, writing. I sat in the hostel kitchen again and interviewed a guy about wool supply chains. I ate lunch. And then, around 2, I started moving. Called the park ranger in Santa Teresa about a visit. Called the hostel in Punta del Diablo. Told Sergio I needed to leave tonight. At 3:30, I biked to the bus station in my bathing suit, leaning into corners like a motocross racer. I bought a bus ticket for 5:30 PM and biked back thrilled with speed. 

I went back to the beach one more time to remember where I was and where I'd been for six days. I was feeling a little guilty for staying less than a week. I had wanted to train my mind to patience and presence. But I wanted to acknowledge, too, that in sitting in a place that didn't push me to talk to people, I was forgetting how to see where I was.

I parked my bike against the telephone pole by the boardwalk and walked down to the sand. Right where the boardwalk met the sand, there was a little beach shack. In the high season, it must have been a bar or a cafe, selling panchos and grilled corn and beer. It had a chalkboard with a half-erased drink menu and a slightly precarious wooden deck, and all week I had been sitting on that deck for a few minutes in the morning. Today, I found the deck disassembled. The shack itself still stood, but without one of its walls, so the dirty kitchen inside stood open and illuminated. 

Here, the Stars are So Dense You Can Stargaze Alone

I took a surf lesson yesterday with the nephew of my hostel owners’ neighbor. I was dying for company and an activity with a clear goal. He greeted me by the lifeguard stand with a smile and his whole face white with zinc and after the lesson he told me I could pay by getting a beer with him.

At night, I got a beer with him. He picked me up in his mom’s car but told me about his car, an old Beetle. He told me about a rescue he had to make once when the lifeguards were off duty. He told me about how, in the winter here, they don’t even bother to turn the streetlights on.

We walked around the town and he smoked a (legal) joint. Then he told me how last summer, in Punta del Este, he had seen a UFO. 

20 Lines on Stillness

Today’s dress-up theme is writer! You wear running shorts, a bathing suit, and a sunblock-stained tank top, and you make yourself stay for a week in a beach town on the coast of Uruguay not too far from Brazil. You wake up in your hostel bedroom before the hostel owners and do yoga on the beach to center your mind. (Thank goodness it hasn’t rained yet, or you’d be required by law to take a pensive walk, alone, on the misty sand). You spend your morning under the thatched roof of the hostel’s outdoor kitchen sending emails and beginning to put into words why you think other people will want to read about what you’ve been learning. You feel like you’re holding a recently hard-boiled egg that you have to keep warm while standing on a mountain top. All you want is to tap into its smooth heat, harness its thermal energy to propel you down the mountainside. 

But the secret of this game of pretend, a secret you can only breathe yourself into over a certain number of days, is that it involves an almost unbearable stillness. You have to sit. You have to look at a textedit document and allow it to take down words about everything other than what you mean. You have to spend an hour moving sentences that you’ve already written around like chess pieces, while accepting that you don’t know how to play chess. Then, maybe, you’ll write something. 

I’ve been easing myself into this dress-up game. I’ve stayed still, broadly. I haven’t left La Paloma in four days and I spend most of my time alone. But I haven’t been sure if sitting alone gets me to the stillness I seek. I want the kind that makes your mind run ahead of you, laying out words. I want the stillness that reacts and creates - the stillness that moves.

Walt and Annie, also on Fear and Swimming

"Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,

Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,

To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair."

(Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Section 46)

"I lived on the beach with one foot in fatal salt water and one foot on a billion grains of sand. The brink of the infinite there was too like writing's solitude. Each sentence hung over an abyssal ocean or sky which held all possibilities, as well as the possibility of nothing."

(Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p. 89)