Watching the Axolotls

Coda

2008-04-04T15:26:00.003-03:00

After I returned home, I frequently gushed to friends about how I wanted to round up everyone I knew and take them with me to live in BA. Until it was pointed out to me that that's what the Spanish did when they colonized the place to begin with. Nevertheless, I'll always think of BA as:

Uruguay

2008-04-03T16:33:00.004-03:00

Partidas = la tristeza. Yes, it's sad to go. But the sights continue to amaze: I woke early, returned my key, and set off in a taxi for the ferry. BA's docklands are expansive, though the view of the skyline from the water is more interesting than impressive.

Across the bay lay another country, literally. Colonia is a little Uruguayan outpost where Argentines go for the weekend. This morning it hadn't quite woken up yet, and nothing disturbed the quiet eden on the edge of the brown sea:

a good sign for mate drinkers everywhere

From Colonia I took the bus to Montevideo. This was one of the most beautiful rides I've ever had, rolling along the highway through the pampas. Montevideo is more hectic and less antique than BA, and I felt more conspicuous walking about on my own. The taxi drivers are friendly and knowledgable, though, and more than eager to play tour guide. And there are lovely places for afternoon coffee:

2008-04-03T16:26:00.002-03:00

Some parting shots of Palermo Soho:

miércoles

2008-04-02T16:12:00.006-03:00

For a final excursion, I taxied through the posh neighborhoods to MALBA, the Museum of Latin American Art. It's a small but fine collection, organizing Latin American aesthetics chronologically according to decade. The space is clean and modern, with both indoor and outdoor exhibits. A retrospective of Tarsila do Amaral (female, born 1886) was particularly captivating. A friend of Blaise Cendrars, Amaral's career began in the 20s with drab impressionism and geometric primitivism. After brief flirtations with cubism, her style evolved into sweet and simple line drawings: a few suggestions of a skyline or hills, with rooftops floating above walls, brief tastes of whimsy and delicacy. It then took a turn toward Henri Rousseau with surreal and distorted landscapes, suns like lemon slices, cruciform trees, and tangled limbs. In the 30s, after a trip to the Soviet Union, her painting shifted toward social realism, depicting illness, poverty, despair, and fatigue.

Other highlights of the collection include the watercolors of Alejandro Xul Solar (to whose work there is devoted an entire other museum in BA) and Botero's rotund fleshballs. A strange and wonderful contemporary exhibit down a wide staircase and behind a red velvet curtain is called "Autopsia de lo Invisible." Mario García Torres shows letters faxed to a dead artist in Kabul, describing a fruitless search for a hotel Torres wants to use as a film location. Dated 2001 but referencing events that happened long after, the fragile letters narrate a history of destruction in a ghostly, reverent, neurotic voice. Ignacio Lang matches images to the "Weird but True" column published everyday in the New York Post, documenting appendectomies performed by the light of a cell phone, Chinese dinosaur bone soup, an underwater cemetary, the pardoning of a witch in Virginia. Teresa Margolles settles accounts with "Ajuste de Cuentas," commissioning jewelry to be made from the detritus of violent deaths. From the scenes of drug-related assassinations, she collects glass, transforms them into earrings, rings, cufflinks, bracelets, and necklaces, and presents them along with police reports that anatomize the murder. Margolles turns grave-robbing from a crime into an act of witness.

Before coming to the museum, I had dithered about where to have lunch. The final days, and so much left uneaten! But I decided that because I love museum restaurants, I would check out MALBA's. Good choice: it was opening day, and I was seated at a communal table next to the owner, a Frenchman who also owns the most highly regarded French restaurant in the city. We spoke in French as he sampled all the food that was coming out of the kitchen, greeted friends and well-wishers who approached with a constant stream of hearty congratulations, and discussed business and marriage with a companion. Hedonism and capitalism flowed in his veins, animated his gestures, and raised his voice to chastise the staff when a dish wasn't quite up to snuff. The food and the space, looking out into a sunny park, were both superb.

martes

2008-04-01T13:33:00.011-03:00

As the subway train pulled in, the entire station was shaking in time, as if we'd been transported into the ventricle of a thudding heart. The rhythm made whatever was going on up above seem both enormous and ominous. Would I be crushed to death at the top of the stairs, or would I just be confronted with extravagent violence? But in the streets, though the drums were closer and louder, the streets were cleared of traffic, and the labor syndicates--and their bands--seized the boulevards to march toward the Plaza de Mayo under the blue sky. Chanting, shouting, singing, flags a-waving, they streamed into the square. Deposited into the churning throng, the rainbow eddied and bled, and the cacophony increased.

.

I hung back, not wanting to get mixed up in anything I didn't fully understand. I'd been having lunch at the neighborhood deli when the television announced, to wrinkled old men and children on their lunch hour, that everyone should come to the Plaza at four that afternoon. I obeyed. In many countries in the world, mass demonstrations are held in protest of government policy. In Argentina, they manifest in support of the government. Cristina had raised export taxes on many agricultural products; the middle class, industrial farmers had responded by blockading the roads so that no fresh meat or produce was reaching the capital. The labor class supported the higher taxes, however, on the theory that the revenue would be redistributed and that family farmers would be at an advantage. Cristina called the protest to show how broad her support base was, to pressure the farmers to lift the blockade.

In atmosphere, the Plaza resembled a carnival on the verge of anarchy. Cracking shots echoed as fireworks exploded; smoke drifted between the balloons tethered to the fountains and monuments. Vendors sold fried sweets from carts piled high, and old friends greeted each other with ferocious embraces. Men climbed trees for a vantage toward the Casa Rosada, where the stage was set for Cristina's address.

News helicopters choppered overhead, nervous and frantic as they swooped in and out. They disturbed flocks of birds resting on the roof of the cathedral, who added their own shrieks to the din, pushed and jostling just like the people below.

Leaflets littered the gutters and blanketed the asphalt. The government had prepared well, providing water trucks for thirsty unionists.

lunes

2008-03-31T16:09:00.002-03:00

Tango Monday:

domingo

2008-03-30T22:18:00.000-03:00

La Arquitectura

Click the thumbnail for larger image

La Boca

More from La Boca

Avenida de Mayo

More from Avenida de Mayo

Barrio Norte

San Telmo

Palermo

la boca

2008-03-30T14:45:00.000-03:00

graffiti

2008-03-30T14:43:00.001-03:00

aminals!

2008-03-30T14:26:00.000-03:00

sábado

2008-03-29T18:18:00.009-03:00

Reading as a performing art: in this city of bookstores, the largest is El Ateneo, which occupies a renovated theater. In fact, it's the largest in South America. The balconies are filled with shelves and the former stage is now a café. It's truly grand.

No less grand, but more uneasy in its merging of past and present is the Café Tortoni. In this city of cafés, Tortoni is the patriarch who's just starting to lose it: everyone humors him, and some even love him. With its stained glass ceilings, dramatic mirrors, Tiffany lamps, and rich leather furniture, it's a perfect spot for churros and a submarino: a bar of chocolate--actually shaped like a submarine--that melts when submerged in hot milk.

la comida

2008-03-29T15:01:00.000-03:00

viernes

2008-03-28T17:40:00.000-03:00

You don't have a city--or a country--without symbols, either.

Outside the Casa Rosada, Argentina's coat of arms: the rising sun for the rising nation, the clasped hands for fraternity and the union of provinces, the pike for power, the Phrygian cap for freedom, and laurels for glory:

At the intersection of Avenida 9 de Julio (as wide across as some villages) and Avenida Corrientes, the obelisk of Buenos Aires:

jueves

2008-03-27T17:15:00.004-03:00

Comparative Bovine Studies

Iowan Cow: plastic, mobile, apparently Irish. Primary purpose: dairy.

photo courtesy Hungarian Great Bela Tarr

Argentine Cow: taxidermied, immobile, presumably, well, Argentine. Primary purpose: beef, and signalling to tourists that this is one of those restaurants where you can eat beef. Cause it's not like there are a lot of those around here, or anything.

The farmers are on strike here, angry over rising taxes on soybeans and other crops designated for export. They've set up roadblocks all over the country, and signs in the supermarkets apologize for the empty shelves. There's no sign yet that restaurant supply chains are suffering, however.

BA style

2008-03-27T15:17:00.000-03:00

Examples of style and design, urban and interior:

miércoles

2008-03-26T14:25:00.008-03:00

Gallery openings in New York tend to be hushed, respectful affairs. An opening in BA is positively raucous by comparison. Two exhibits debuted at the Ruth Benzacar Gallery on Wednesday night. The gallery occupies two below-ground floors at the head of Calle Florida, a commercial area that is both literally and figuratively pedestrian.

On my way to the show I was twice detoured: once by a crowd of excited photographers and onlookers outside a theater on Avenida Corrientes (the celebrity, whoever it was, remained invisible from across the street) and once because a Peronist-Environmentalist protest had blockaded Calle Florida, transforming it into something decidedly less pedestrian, in both senses of the word.

In the gallery, the two exhibits could not have been more different. On the bottom floor, an installation of trash by Leopoldo Estol y amigos. There is nothing remarkable about this trash, other than that it includes many dead leaves and some of it is hanging from the ceiling. Also you can walk around in it, which people do not usually do with trash. The exhibit is called "La Mañana de ese Mundo," but its only principle is clutter, and not of a particularly interesting kind.

A crowd has turned out for the opening, making it difficult to move up and down the staircase, and I am of course as interested in people-watching as I am in trash-compacting. It's an all-ages event, from babies in strollers to elderly men in baggy suits with grey hair slicked back to cover the napes of their necks. The women are chic, but in a completely unfussy way, wearing t-shirts and jeans with a good pair of shoes, or knit dresses and necklaces. Everyone has bare arms, and many are carrying backpacks. The French word for gallery opening or private view is vernissage, which literally means polished. At this vernissage, it's wine that brings the glow to the surface, as everyone polishes off the glasses the servers bring around.

Upstairs, in Flavia Da Rin's mannerist images, guests at a young boy's funeral disport themselves conventionally, and to Da Rin what is the same thing, inappropriately. Oskar, named after Herman Hesse's Oskar Matzerath, is seen in monotone, weakly blowing out the candle on a birthday cake or lying silent and feverish in his sickbed. Or else he semi-transparently haunts other frames as a colorful but silent and gaze-returning specter. The mourners wear black and carry garishly-colored accessories as they smirk and flirt and primp and even shriek, always, always looking to see who's watching. Melodrama is the order of the day, and just as grief is the magnifying glass for so many other emotions, so the mourners' bodies are distorted, their heads enlarged with enormous, glistening eyes (tearful or scheming or both), and their arms elongated, culminating in grotesquely large knuckles.

Are these photographs, or paintings, or what? Their style is derivative of John Currin, but their texture conveys a distinct sense of the fantastic. The creamy or ghastly skin tones and the crisp details in the clothing could only have been captured with a camera, but the hair is painted on, marbled, almost, in its highlights, and the scale of perspective is hardly realistic. The figures and the strange, misty, marshy, meadowy, mountainous nature against which they're set are fully synthetic. Even the nymphs, who explode in an orgy of color along one wall of the gallery, and the ghost band, whose music is like perfectly pitched gossip to the living girls who convulse in agonized delight, are wrapped up in their performance of frantic or mournful elation.

This is not a very charitable view of performance, limited as it is to hypocrisy and opportunism. Oskar is skeptical and suspicious of the nymphs who fawn over him in the shimmering otherworld, where his corpsely pallor turns up the saccharine in the rainbow hues. Da Rin takes her cues from Cindy Sherman and photographs herself exclusively--pre-Photoshop, she is parent, grandparent, nymph, Oskar, and all--but where Sherman's target is conventions of representation, Da Rin is content to skewer merely her own viewers. She describes the event she depicts as "entierro-vernissage," or burial-opening. While she may want her viewers to see themselves in the absurd delirium of her photos, it is a bit ungenerous to suggest that they are more interested in each other than in the object they have convened around. Even if that's true (and as far as my interested eye can see, it's not: people are studying and photographing and talking about what's on display), comparing one's own project to a pint-size haunt manages the neat trick of declaring it simultaneously dead and alive, disavowing and proclaiming its importance in the same breath. We have not gathered here tonight to mourn the dead, and our liveliness is not a source of shame. Art is not merely an occasion, but that it is an occasion that brings people together does not discredit it.

* * *

Buenos Aires: Where Zizek is a disco, and Disco is a supermarket.

martes

2008-03-25T10:55:00.012-03:00

The Best Meal So Far

Soberbia 22
Four courses (incl. wine) plus tip for US$10.

Flan for dessert? Now that's what I call the Sense of an Ending!

* * *

In search of more Endings, I visit the barrio of Recoleta, with its famous cemetery. Eva Perón is buried here (those are flowers on her family's mausoleum, to the right), amidst the elaborate memorials and stained-glass windows that snatch the light of the setting sun and arc it in toward the sepulchers rather than out toward the world. The graveyard is packed with tombs as big as studio apartments--evidently it's quite a swanky address to have when you're dead, like Père Lachaise. The living are packed in, too: there's a much higher population density here than in Palermo Soho, and all the buildings are high rises with hair salons, pharmacies, and other retail on the ground floor, with more traffic along the one-way streets. I meet plenty of children walking home from school, in blue uniforms and long, white coats. Recoleta is also the home to the National Library, where unfortunately they don't maintain any exhibits of the treasures in their collection. I had planned to step over from the cemetery to visit the Basílica Nuestra Señora del Pilar, the city's second-oldest church, but a pro-life event dissuades me from going inside.

La Recoleta

By Jorge Luis Borges

Convencidos de caducidad
por tantas nobles certidumbres del polvo,
nos demoramos y bajamos la voz
entre las lentas filas de los panteones,
cuya retórica de sombra y de mármol
promete o prefigura la deseable
dignidad de haber muerto.
Bellos son los sepulcros,
el desnudo latín y las trabadas fechas fatales,
la conjunción del mármol y de la flor
y las plazuelas con frescura de patio
y los muchos ayeres de la historia
hoy detenida y única.
Equivocamos esa paz con la muerte
y creemos anhelar nuestro fin
y anhelamos el sueño y la indiferencia.
Vibrante en las espadas y en la pasión
y dormida en la hiedra,
sólo la vida existe.
El espacio y el tiempo son formas suyas,
son instrumentos mágicos del alma,
y cuando ésta se apague,
se apagarán con ella el espacio, el tiempo y la muerte,
como al cesar la luz
caduca el simulacro de los espejos
que ya la tarde fue apagando.
Sombra benigna de los árboles,
viento con pájaros que sobre las ramas ondea,
alma que se dispersa en otras almas,
fuera un milagro que alguna vez dejaran de ser,
milagro incomprensible,
aunque su imaginaria repetición
infame con horror nuestros días.
Estas cosas pensé en la Recoleta,
en el lugar de mi ceniza.

* * *
Anyone sitting outdoors in BA’s touristed areas will be approached by people selling knickknacks or offering to give a tarot reading. The vendors are ubiquitous but unobtrusive. On the subte, they deposit notebooks or sticker sheets or small photo albums featuring superheroes, princesses, and Simpsons characters in people's laps, make their way to the end of the car, and return to either pick up unwanted merchandise or close the deal. The forwardness of this gesture exceeds my usual experience, and I immediately put the object on the empty seat next to me, but my fellow subte riders are actually interested in what's on offer, examine it and often buy it. One guy made four sales in my car alone, and the girl selling stickers did even better. At Bar Federal, a teenager who approaches is easily dismissed with a "no, no gracias." But her younger sister, who tries next, works the pity angle. When she lingers near a man who could be a character in Metrosexual: The Musical, with his striped buttondown, round glasses, receding hairline, and spiked-up aging intellectual style, he shoos her away as if she were a fly on his chorizo. And when she doesn't budge, but stands there performing a half-hearted and perfunctory pout, he reaches out and shoves her hard, so hard she falls back over the curb.

The worst personal violence I’ve ever witnessed was an attack on a beggar by two policemen in Costa Rica. At a rural bus station, in the early morning, she too had been shooed away by the putative keepers of order, and she too reapproached us, abject and mendicant. She was frail and dirty, her hair matted, her skin contracted into wizened folds. Where there should have been muscle, there was only bone, and her torn clothing and slow, shuffling step spoke to her utter wretchedness. When the attack came, it was swift, unsignalled, and unmerciful. They hit her with a club, wrenched one arm behind her back so that she howled, and then hoisted her by that arm and carried her off, continuing to beat her. Her crime, like that of the little girl in San Telmo, was not poverty per se, nor was it appealing to people whose skin was lighter than hers. Her crime was her refusal to stay put, to maintain a certain distance, her insistence on occupying a public space, on not disappearing. She had offended a location and someone’s sense of location as much as anything else, and her disregard of authority ignited rage.

It is quite shocking to see someone touched without her implicit permission. The little girl in San Telmo is more emotionally than physically wounded, and she hasn’t yet achieved her sister’s bored internal distance, no doubt developed in response to situations just like this one. Outraged, she appeals for comfort but gets none. Indignant, she curses the man, but quietly and from a position of safety, beyond his reach. It’s time to move along, and the girls walk away, sullen, as if it’s not even worth talking about.

lunes

2008-03-24T12:58:00.002-03:00

Las Cañitas

Almuerzo at Novecento

The Polo Grounds

Military Barracks

domingo

2008-03-23T12:08:00.006-03:00

It’s Easter Sunday, and I take C’s suggestion to go to mass at the cathedral in Plaza de Mayo. Both the edifice and the service are unremarkable. Squat, with painted-on marble that’s chipping and cracking in many places, the cathedral has limited seating, and it’s standing room only for the misa de Pascual. There’s little in the way of Easter decorations, just a few lily garlands around the altar, and most people haven’t dressed up. I followed a woman dressed in a white silk suit and flowered blouse from the subte, guessing correctly where she was going. A TV crew also recognizes her as wearing her Easter finest and grabs her for an interview . Midway through the homily, a child playing in one of the chapels slips and cracks her head against a step. Though the cathedral has poor acoustics, her wails drown out the familiar double-double message alert sounds emitted by Nokia cell phones that haven’t been switched off. I’m pleased to see a cardinal, and even more pleased have him splash me with holy water. At the end of the service, the four-person choir sings Handel’s Hallelujah chorus (Messiah is more properly Easter music than Christmas music), and a smattering of applause breaks out.

On my way to mass I’d stopped into a bakery and bought some pastries for breakfast, which I now enjoy while wandering around the Plaza looking at the Casa Rosada, where Evita addressed the decaminados. Today the plaza is empty, save for a few protestors, tourists, souvenir vendors, and sleepers-on-the-grass. There are a few policemen in orange vests, too. Two policemen are stationed all day, everyday, on my block in Palermo as well.

I make my way through the arcades of the Paseo Colón towards San Telmo, a district everyone has encouraged me to visit. Many of the sidewalk tiles have been torn up and reduced to rubble, as if tiny pinpoint earthquakes had erupted all over. Wooden slats that are themselves sometimes splintered stitch together the unbroken stretches. I had expected a quiet, atmospheric barrio in San Telmo, but I am surprised by thousands of people at a Sunday street market. Vendors display their jewelry, shoes, mate bowls, and knitted scarves on the ground. The crowd is so thick you can barely see what’s for sale at your feet. Enterprising souls offer water and fresh-squeezed jugo de naranjas to those suffering from dehydration, while the few that have managed to claim café tables on the main market street squint out at the less fortunate. The antiques market is too choked to move through, and I’m happier on the side streets looking at the architecture and peering into the grocery stores and butcher shops. San Telmo has a specific graphic design sensibility: signs are lettered in bright colors and flowery calligraphy. Families are lining up for lunch outside their favorite restaurants, and for me it’s a cheese-smothered steak that tastes like a controlled burn and soda water that comes in its own siphon at Bar Federal, which is listed on the register of historic BA locations. Trundling home I feel elated at having stumbled on this Sunday party and this local institution without even trying. BA is that kind of city: wherever you go, you find out later that it’s been especially recommended.

sábado

2008-03-22T12:05:00.002-03:00

Theme of the day: pingüinos.

I’m itching for someplace local, not trendy, and I decide that that El Pingüino de Palermo is it. A neighborhood café, where large families push two tables together and a bearded man nods over his newpaper and vino tinto. The servers are elegant in their green checked vests and accommodating of my limited Castellano. They joke with the children and touch them affectionately. I order a milanesa—a breaded cutlet—and sparkling mineral water, which people here drink like Americans drink Coke: at every meal. The usual basket of bread arrives, and with it an unusual bowl of marinated lima beans. They’re tender and tangy, and when the lemon is squeezed dry, I spoon the vinegar and onion over the milanesa. Over cafe con leche I admire the pingüino who appears everywhere the word pingüino should be printed: on the door, on the menus, on the embroidered napkins. Across the street, no pingüino, but an outfit amusingly called CyberBorges.

In the afternoon I meet C. for coffee and medialunas, sweet, dense croissants that go down in just a few bites. We grab an outside table at Bar Taller, one of the oldest cafes in BA, amidst the teeming and streaming Saturday throngs. C. is a poet and translator, and we talk about her work and about her 13-month-old, Félix. I’ve been charged by my friend a!, who lived in BA all last year, with a special mission to deliver some books to her: David Foster Wallace, Aimee Bender, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and a children’s book about a lonely pingüino. She is brilliant and radical, a reader of Naomi Klein. C.’s Marxist take on infancy is that breast-feeding babies are completely outside the circuits of the marketplace, but we are obviously not, and we make a tour of the shops. We agree that we believe in fashion, but we believe even more in sales. C. is looking for things for her new house, which is undergoing renovations, and I am looking to avoid buying anything until my last few days here. The very first store we set foot in shows how much of a challenge that will be: there are soft leather bags and placemats, in earthy reds and browns, fabulous cowhide rugs, handmade wooden toys, and wine jugs in the shape of, what else, pingüinos.

viernes

2008-03-21T12:04:00.001-03:00

Exploring Palermo Soho I pass all the boutiques who advertise in the glossy Argentine magazines or on billboards strategically placed along the exit road from the airport. Two blocks away the streets are sleepy and slow, but between Plaza Serrano and Plaza Palermo Viejo things are humming. Last night, I ventured out around 11 to find a steak and a beer, and the hum had elevated to a low rumble. The steak came with pepper and papas fritas, the beer came in a pinta tirada, and the people came with more people. They pulled up in black and yellow cabs, and their appetite for conversation tumbled out after them. Walking around the Plaza means walking through the cafes, which gobble up most of the sidewalk, and every outdoor seat was taken. There was no competition for tables indoors, though, where you seat yourself and the servers take good care of you.

In the daylight, everything is fresh and there’s a touch of delicacy to the late summer afternoon. I’m working without a net—looking for somewhere to eat without a guide book—but I execute a quintuple pirhouette with an umbrella balanced on my nose when I choose Freud and Fahler (I was unconsciously swayed by the psychoanalytic restaurant connection), whitewashed on the outside, and separated from a warehouse by a transparent interior partition. In addition to the excellent food (the faina tastes rich as paté), I meet two Stanford MBAs from the next table when I ask them how much I should tip. They’re on their way back to California and leave me with their creased and tattered tip sheet, an email from a local with lots of inside information about the city. I’ve been surprised that many of the people I’ve pegged as North American or European tourists are speaking Spanish among themselves, and they could very well be travellers from other Latin American countries, but more likely it’s a testament to the leisurely way Argentines spend their holiday. With postprandial shots of Absolut at 4 PM, if my fellow diners are any indication.

Welcome Back to the Southern Hemisphere: jueves

2008-03-20T15:53:00.005-03:00

Touch down in BA. Pampas-lined runways. A new, blue stamp for the old, blue passport. Water and dulce de leche from a kiosk for the bus ride, and for the coins to board the bus in the first place. I’ve forgotten how I need to carry water everywhere with me in hot weather, how in India it was Priority Number One. The day is so brilliant even the airport’s graying infrastructure seems less prison, more kind of cheerful prison.

Bus 86 costs fifty cents and runs frequently, but nobody is allowed to get on the first bus that pulls up. It goes off to refuel in some magical unseen gasolineland (does it have to ask the airplanes to share?) and returns later, full of what it takes to take me into the center city. After two hours of crisscrossing the expressway, making slow forward progress. Bus 86 stops frequently, too.

The Argentines combine courtesy with perceptiveness and don’t hesitate to give up their seats the elderly or pregnant. I’ve very generously given up my seat to my travel backpack, who needs it more than I do. I’m perched on the edge of a narrow bit of black molded plastic, and though it requires some effort to keep my balance, as the bus gets more crowded and the afternoon gets more sweltery, I begin to doze off. Not the best state for a gringa carrying a couple thousand dollars of electronic equipment. I never worry about crime too much, no matter where in the world I am, which is perhaps why I once lost $400 cash in Kuala Lumpur. Sometimes I do have to remind myself not to do something I could look back on as stupid.

Traffic moves easily, except for a jam when we enter the city proper. I start to gauge how close we are to the Plaza de Mayo, the city’s symbolic heart and transportation center, by whether the shop signs are hand painted or not. As we go along, the ratio of plate glass surface area to number of goods behind the windows rises sharply. The Avenida we’re on becomes one-way in the other direction, and we’re diverted onto a parallel street that cuts through leafy residential neighborhoods. It all feels very intimate and human-scaled, so the first glimpse of the giant buildings that ring the wide open Plaza are thrilling. First indication that BA is the new Bohemia? A restaurant called Totem & Tabú.

For the wild price of thirty cents, the Subte takes me underground from one Plaza to another, from May to Italy, where I am greeted, absurdly, by not one but two swaying Barneys offering treats to the children who are coming to the zoo. I’m after not animals but plants, though in the Jardin Botanica I get both. There are more feral cats than horticultural specimens. Most important, there are plenty of shady park benches. I collapse on one and hang out among the bad statuary (Romulus and Remus suckling at the wolf’s teat; a cautionary orgy; nymphs and other creatures) for the rest of the afternoon. Still can’t doze, but I brush up on the guidebook and the map and the people-watching. In the brick house at the center of the park there’s an exhibit of maps: Carlos Thays’ plans for the municipal parks, including the very one I’m in. After several hours of public R & R I move along.

The street where I live, Thames, is pronounced in two syllables. Plane trees arc across the cobblestones to make a never-ending bower. Across from my building a new condominium development is wrapped in construction placards, with a street-level window that displays a model apartment. Catty-corner, the Maryland English School is enormous and bright red. Up the block the men spill out of the café onto the sidewalk while they watch fútbol.

The agent from the real estate company is punctual and a bit shy, but an adept translator. The owner of my apartment and her daughter catch on quickly that though I can’t say too much, I understand a lot. They’re demonstrative and thoughtful, making sure to show me every detail of anything that flips, clicks, or switches. They fuss over the remote control (the tv is mounted high on the wall facing slightly downward, as it would be in a hospital room), but after they leave I realize that only hot water is flowing from the taps. It’s the next day before I realize I can turn on the cold with a valve hidden behind the bidet, but I am immediately and unreasonably excited by the bidet.

And finally, finally, I can put my head down for a nap.

Beginning of the Game

2008-03-20T15:48:00.005-03:00

Reading Cortázar on the plane, I begin to understand that the problem with much of the fiction published today in America is not actually what I had until now called the fetishization of voice. I’ve complained about too much first-person that seeks to inhabit a perspective either identified fervently with the author (confession) or ventriloquized in a way that becomes more condescending as it approaches what it takes to be authenticity (experiment). At these two extremes we find two styles and two philosophies of authorship, one entirely subjective, assuming that, after a few identifying details have been changed, the writer’s feelings are foremost (no, Leslie Jamison, I don’t want to hear anymore about how you were dumped by that poet); the other entirely masochistic, assuming that the writer is a passive medium through whom the characters’ voices are channelled because they urgently have to express themselves (Gilead). All of the recent scandals surrounding the authenticity of memoirs reify experience into a credential. At issue is the accreditation of The School of Hard Knocks, which awards a Ph.D. in Life.

Cortázar’s stories show that the real problem is the way both confessional and experimental modes are narrated by an experiential “I” rather than an observational “I.” Naturally, this is an artificial distinction. You will say, how can experience and observation be disconnected? You will say that you enjoy reading observations of experience (Alice Sebold’s Susie Salmon is told by her murderer that she’s not observant enough, and Susie spends the rest of the novel compensating for that deficiency) and you lose yourself reading about those who lose themselves in experiences of observation (The Virgin Suicides). But reading to lose oneself is not the only, or even the most interesting, reason to read.

Cortázar writes dramatically, about the shift from observation into experience, and vice versa. Motorcyclists share dreams with Aztecs; Argentine insomniacs change places with the Hungarian beggars they see when no dreams are forthcoming. Photographers morph into cameras, trapped inside their instruments of perception. And with “no transition and no surprise,” a flaneur slips through the plate glass of an aquarium tank to become the creature that has fascinated him: an axolotl, a young salamander with unseeing eyes of molten gold (no sight) and an extraordinarily sensitive tail (but plenty of nerves). The observer becomes the experiencer, “incapable of expression,” who consoles himself by thinking of the story his former self will write. This drama of observation and experience—one mode shifting into the other, as a domestic servant excluded from a party comes to act the part of a grieving mother, and really feels her role—in the end offers little in the way of consolation. Experience is often confining, boring, disappointing; that is, when it’s not deadly. The amateur archaeologist would do better not to identify with the idol he’s dug up, and the reader would do better not to identify with the character in the story he reads, lest the knife be plunged into his skull.

It’s no coincidence that the same filmmaker who adapted The Virgin Suicides also made a film about the solace to be found within the alienation of travel. But travel need be about psychic comfort no more than reading is. Working through Wordsworth and other poets, Jeffrey Robinson has written about the need to read and teach literature as other than consolatory. Leave consolation to Lady Philosophy. Travel, like writing, can be not a means to losing or finding oneself, but an activity that refreshes and redramatizes the ever-shifting balance between observing and experiencing.