Ghosttowns & Other Ghosts

This morning in Buenos Aires, the streets were empty.  One lonely black-and-yellow taxi ambling past a parilla, an old man walking, a young couple with their dog.  Not the bustle and traffic I'd come to expect on Avenida Estado de Israel---a busy shortcut between main avenues Cordoba and Corrientes---after 2 weeks in this city.  It's Census Day, a national holiday, and all businesses are closed, everyone at home waiting for the census takers to do their survey before they pour into the city's parks and green spaces to drink and rollerblade and fish and walk and talk and tell Argentinian jokes I don't understand because I don't speak Spanish.  In the U.S., we don't even get election day off, and we are supposed to be a beacon of democracy.

It's been 2 weeks.  I should have been blogging---or at least writing---this whole time, telling anecdotes & digesting this new, alien city.  Instead, I've been whining or drinking or playing cards or reading American liberal news.  I could have told you about the day after we landed, when our luggage was still lost and the old man who ran the locutorio (like a minimart where you can use a phone or internet) called the airport for us and told us our luggage would be here by 5 p.m.  He had seen us completely defeated after our first attempt to call LAN, the airline, whose number was answered by an automated voice speaking very fast Argentinian Spanish.  I don't think it even said "Empuja 4 para ingles."  I almost wept when he helped us, a blubbering fucking baby, because here I was, hating this town, his town, because it wasn't mine and because my luggage was lost and I couldn't even speak the language.  And then he called, and it was, for a while, ok.  (Jess, a poet from Wisconsin and my partner in crime & travel, schooled me in Gin Rummy in our tiny vacation apartment as we waited for the airline guy to arrive.)

But I haven't been writing.  I have been making notes to remember to send facebook messages to this person or that person I miss.  On the bathroom wall at an American bar in Recoleta called The Alamo, someone had scrawled "40 Ounces to Freedom" in red pen.  I crosses out 40 ounces and wrote, with my black sharpie, "1 Liter."  970 cm3 might have been more accurate.  I have also written homesick laments in my facebook status.  I have written all the scores to our Gin Rummy games.

When I say I want to go home, people back in the states---some who have traveled, some who haven't, some who have done the exact same thing I did, hitched a plane to South America with ideas but without a plan---say it will get better, that this is just culture shock.  I'll love it soon.  Give it a month.  And there have been culture-shock moments, like discovering that stores here don't stock tortillas or refried/black beans, that only mysterious stores in Chinatown have caches of peanut butter.  Or the night I was up till 4 with a fever and didn't know where to get medicine.  But the shock has been more a shock of reality.  For months, I'd dreamed up a Buenos Aires where English-teaching jobs were there for any native speaker who knew how to look, and apartments were cheap and easy to find, and there would be a whole network of interesting, intellectual, international expats waiting to welcome me into their arms and maybe their beds.  Jess and I fed off each other's fantasies about "The Paris of South America," where we would live and write, we thought, maybe forever.

The reality is, it's almost summer, and the city is about to empty out.  Schools are finishing their semesters.  Businesses are readying for lulls.  Anyone with any money to spare is headed for the coast or the mountains or elsewhere.  There may be odd jobs to be had, but not to live on, not until autumn---February at the earliest.  But we each have money stashed---we didn't cross half the globe empty handed.  We had imagined that sharing a small space would be temporary---just this three weeks---and then we would move on to our separate apartments, meeting up to talk writing and to complain about our roommates.  But apartment prices here are about the same as Pittsburgh or Spokane, sometimes higher.  Neither of us can afford an apartment alone without a job.  And Jess also brought her dog, Luna.  On days when living here seems hopeless and even a $2000 plane ticket seems cheap, Luna is here to snuggle or to bark annoyingly at the neighbor's cats.  It's nice to have her here.  Someone told me once that animals remind us that we are human (which is why it's good to include them in stories).  Unfortunately, realtors and apartment owners aren't as happy to have Luna around as I am.  We have 9 days before we have to leave this vacation rental, with its water closet that literally has a showerhead above the toilet (you have to shove rugs under the door to keep the place from flooding when you bathe).  No apartment to move into yet.



This morning, we walked north, almost to Rio del Plata, to the parks that buffer Palermo from the river.  Once we neared Avenida Sarmiento, the main drag between the parks and the neighborhood, there were people.  The one open business---a dessert shop---had a line out the door.  Traffic zipped from Sarmiento to Libertador, around the big monument in the middle of the intersection.  Men hocked ice cream from bicycles and teenage girls rode skateboards and old men tottered on rollerblades.  People were fucking everywhere.  They stretched out across the park, next to man-made lakes and palm trees and marble monuments.  Jess and I sat in the shade beside the lake.  We drank 6.50-peso red wine from plastic cups and read until the "good air" breeze got too cold.  A boy fished with a bamboo pole nearby.  Couples shared cokes and sandwiches.  I didn't worry about where I would live two weeks from now or when I would be back in America.  It was the first time in 2 weeks I was truly happy to be just where I was.