Field Notes Two: Canadian Winters, Fragments of Buenos Aires
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.
-- Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales
My mother has wrapped her shrubbery carefully in hessian sacks. Snow coats everything. This is home, here at the end of the earth. This is where I slow down. The power is out, I'm writing on my remaining battery with assistance only of the light of a log fire. How very rustic. A sliver of iceberg melts into my single malt, Scottish coastal fire mixing with Canadian coastal ice. I romanticise a little, of course -- the plasma TV was on not half an hour ago, I'm still playing games on my iPhone. But let's just pretend for a moment we're rugged and slightly insane Irish fisherfolk, stubbornly refusing to be defeated by something so paltry as Atlantic Canadian winter. "Is this all you've got?" we'd shout to the wind, scooping up our abundant nets of winter cod with a defiant glee. We'd build our houses on the sides of cliffs, sail into twelve foot waves on our rickety wooden boats, throw down the nets we'd woven by hand with our whalebone needles. We'd laugh at it all. We'd be the masters of the ocean. The whales would be elsewhere, ever the more sensible species, somewhere down in Bermuda awaiting return on the warm currents of spring with a calm and sanity we ourselves would never possess.
Or we could be the masters of the strip mall, the jumbo-sized tin of processed sausage or frozen juice, the great Canadian diet of sugar and preservative. We'd spend our liminal summers watching wrestling on stolen cable, lines run down from the poles by uncles with usefully tall ladders. Salt fish in buckets, salt beef in buckets, salt in buckets. Cod tongues in oil on the stove. Always the smell of drying animal flesh, picked over by flies, stretched out in the sun. Tobacco, rolled into cigarettes by the hundreds, in the hands of everyone, always. Collections of Molson Canadian bottles from the back sheds of drunken neighbours, exchanged for deposit, exchanged for sugar and rented Nintendo. And then later, exchanged for Canadian Club, cigarettes snuck under bridges from older cousins, retreats deep into the woods far from the roving eyes of adult supervision. The rules that governed you at home would not apply here in your other space, with these other people. Your blood people. These ones wouldn't see the awkward little nerd with the bottle-base glasses and shaky hands so much as just a boy from somewhere strange, full of different ideas and different experience. A wholly exotic little Scottish other. Your time here would be something else. Eventually, we would have to go home. But not yet, not yet.
Now I watch the ocean do its thing, dare the water to tell me something I don't know; to speak something new with those waves that I haven't learned in all these years of coming here. Daring the Atlantic to tell you anything is almost always folly, but occasionally she'll give something up if you phrase your question just right. Get it wrong, she'll let you know soon enough.
I pretend not to see ghosts. They're the same ghosts I pretended not to see wandering the streets of Toronto, hiding from the weather in bars named after Neutral Milk Hotel songs, Hank Williams and Porter Wagoner wailing on the stereo. I find they're with me most places, but we've learned to get along. We have a deal. I get to live my life, they get to hover somewhere just in the corner of my sight. It was a painful negotiation. My parents know this, they tread around me carefully and lovingly, doing what they can, filling the house with Christmas trinkets for reasons my twentysomething self never really understood but now wants to embrace them for and say thank you, thank you, thank you. The ghosts will follow me for the rest of this trip, all these towns we've visited before. Dreams traced in the fog of windscreens, evaporating quickly with the fans turned to three. We stayed in the place, my ghost and I, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. But today he is just a child in Wales, plunging his hands into the snow, bringing out whatever he can find.
The blur of Germany gave way to the streets of Buenos Aires. The Americas are my home now for the next two months.
A travel writer, a bad one, would lead off a description of Argentina as he would of India, or Australia, or anywhere. Something about a teeming mass of contradictions. It probably says something like that in the introduction to the Lonely Planet. It is not, to be fair, a country that makes much sense. It confuses me. Buenos Aires is the shell of a city built to be one of the greatest in the world, but the vast expanse of Nueve de Julio seems built mainly to ferry lost potential from one end of town to the other, 18 million people on either side trying to figure out exactly what the city is for.
Much has been written about Argentina's economic collapse. It is not the place of a drifter in town for ten days to attempt to explain it here. For an interesting primer, you might like to listen to an interview I did a couple of years back with Avi Lewis about The Take, the documentary he made here with Naomi Klein about worker-reclaimed factories and life rebuilt in the shell left behind by an economy that drove over the border to Uruguay in the back of trucks. Or you might not. The implosion of the peso was just the latest in a long line of misfortune and misadventure to befall the Argentine Republic. Draw threads of a history in words like junta, Malvinas, Peron, Dirty War, the Colonels, coup after coup, a country lurching always in different directions in search of an identity, a basis in faith or in power. But I don't know enough about all of that, not really. I won't pretend to. Maybe you should look to the evolution of the paintings of Berni, or read up on the villas miseria that skirt the fringes of the city's ever-so-European veil. The films of Adrián Caetano, give those a shot as well. Or just do as the locals do and turn to the idea of Carlos Gardel, paint him on your walls and put your faith in a lost tango.
What I do see in the shadow of the collapse -- Carlos Menem still in the news, the junta also -- is maybe a story for the rest of the world on the brink of one. A middle-class country whose flooring and foundations were, not without warning, removed. Dreams of prosperity, inflated by tricks of banking and the market, shown to be little more than air. Though I can't say I didn't go looking for that, that I'm not forcing a narrative on a city I don't know.
We start in La Boca, beneath the stadium. The area is protected by a perimeter of tourist-driven streets, fat North Americans with SLRs slung over shoulders, asking for them to be stolen, eating overpriced facsimiles of parilla-cooked beef and watching tango displays that even I, hardly a trained connoisseur of duende, know to be utter rubbish. But push beyond these, and so many microwave-reheated empanadas, and another town reveals itself. Humidity reconstitutes the general universal stench of a port, salt-water rolled in with ship oil and spoiling stock in long-locked containers, perhaps sealed before 2002, never to be reclaimed. The guidebook told us not to go here, for we'd likely be killed, but since when does one read the manual beforehand?
The warehouses and the factories now are -- at least officially -- empty. Dead spaces for dead, abandoned industries. Like the crumbling mansions just up the road in San Telmo, they've been shuttered and left to be reclaimed in a more prosperous future, always just around the corner. But unofficially, this area overflows with life. Poke your eyes through the door of any one of these vast buildings, you'll see a community, semi-shanty to be sure, but a real town nonetheless. On the streets, fat dogs spread themselves on concrete in futile attempt to find cool, cartoneros stack their hauls on the corners. Teenagers, I suppose these are the criminals and corner boys the guidebook author warned me of, drink from their Quilmes longnecks and throw a half-interested stare our way, something of a "keep on drifting, amigo, you can be here, you can stick your nose in for a second, but don't linger too long". On one corner, a grand old colonial bank building is hollowed out, repurposed as something that seems to be a community market space. I have fantasies for a moment of America five years from now, Chicago and Manhattan corner-banks retooled for same purpose. Presidents on radio, offering new deals and new hope, getting caught up in labour disputes in meantime.
But look, this isn't the Buenos Aires I'm in, it's just the one I'm looking at, the one that intrigues me. I'm staying in another part of town, in Once, just north of the gorgeously named Plaza de Miserere. This was another area I was warned not to venture into, not for tourists, locals only, full of thieves and villainy, the lady in the hostel said. But I'm here staying with two people deeply in love, in an apartment building part-Kafka, part-Jodorowsky. They've put up sheets for me, built a quiet room in the corner of their studio. That strange familiar smell of turpentine and animal that is the trademark of every tiny apartment of an artist and his cat. They show me the other side, the beautiful people, their bars and their parties. We go to the launch of a model-turned-illustrator, somebody else is launching wallpaper, I kiss many people on the cheek but have no language beyond a ¿Cómo estás? to offer them. They do their best with offering their English to me, we talk about artificial intelligence and the weather, skirting the safe topics on the language barrier. It's a good town, this well-heeled bohemian one. I like these people. I like their brand of late-night fun, sponsored as it is by terrible pre-mixed alcohols. I'm introduced to a celebrity TV chef, my friends are big fans and promises are made for the exchange of recipes. Her friend remembers me as the guy dancing like a crazy man the night before, very drunkenly, at an odd-smelling nightclub that was apparently, on all other nights of the week, intended for stripping, not hipster CD launches.
Here I feel comfortable, at peace. We sit for hours on grass and we talk. We journey to the nearby countryside. We crash country club art launches and drink champagne. We spend afternoons swimming and eating asado with family. My ghosts are not here. In a shabby old theatre we watch Juana Molina create beautiful mayhem with her loop pedals. A strange, peculiarly Argentinian sort of star, a wacky sketch-comic turned indie icon. Watching her live, slowly building fragments of discord into the controlled structure of a song, it reminds me of that strange game about a time travelling robot, in which your objective is not to get to the end of the level, at least not initially, but to make seemingly nonsensical moves that will allow future incarnations of yourself to get there safely. Too often, I'm reminded of time travelling robots.
Most cities you can get to know at least a little simply through the extended application of sneaker-sole to sidewalk, drifts and diversions through cultural pockets and stories written only in the brickwork. But, no matter how much I walk the streets of Buenos Aires, something at the centre eludes me. I get the feeling that even years of attempted flaneurie in this town would turn up little of meaning to the non-porteño. But such mystery is a little seductive. I think she got her claws in, more than a little, but though I feel the sharpness and just a small trickle of blood, I'm wary of what she's offering.
We drive to the airport, past roadblocks and buses of football fans guarded by phalanxes of motorcycle police caressing their shotguns. Not certain this was ever South America I was in, direct flight now back to the homeland and the winter cold. Home for Christmas, to the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves.
Nice words on Buenos Aires. We were there for a few days about two weeks ago, but too ragged to achieve anything much in such a place, so we fled over the river to Uruguay. Minor nitpick for posterity: it's "Nueve de julio" ...
Just like the truckloads of cash (though I doubt they took the ferry). Duly edited, nitpicks always appreciated. Thank you sir.