dear john

It’s not you, Buenos Aires, and it’s not me. It’s Rio.

Catch you on the flip side.

neighborhood friends

I am a creature of routine, as painfully evidenced by the fact that I can walk into the neighborhood bakery and the coffeeshop near the academic center and communicate my habitual order almost through body language. When first I realized this it was a somewhat distressing measure of how boring I am, and I started mixing up my order by adding or subtracting medialunas and empanadas, but it didn’t really fool anyone.  The elderly cashier at the bakery seems to have taken a particular shine to me — we went from him shoving my change at me to him calling me “amor” and asking how I was doing — so today I told him that I was going to Brazil on Friday. “To see the sights?” “No, to study.” He looked crestfallen. “And then are you going back to Germany?”

crossed wires

“Say Facebook.” “Say it.”

“Facebook.”

“See? I told you.” “Whatever.”

A linguistic stumbling-block: Argentines who speak English and Brazilians who speak English can rarely understand each other. Take the word “Facebook,” which is becoming a bit of Esperanto in and of itself. The Argentine pronunciation is more or less “FAIZbuk,” swallowing most of the last syllable; whereas the Brazilian version is a bouncy “Facie-bookie.” The porteños contended that the former was at least closer to the pure pronunciation (mine, in this case) than the latter, which is more or less true, but you can’t deny that Facie-bookie is pretty adorable.

Apparently an American who lives in Argentina and travels to Brazil for business (like a shadow version of me) opined to them that the difference is in Brazilian Portuguese’s tendency to stuff more than one accent into the same word, where Spanish speakers limit themselves to one. “You just can’t help yourselves, can you, you have to add more syllables onto the word.” To me the difference pretty much mirrors the chasm between tango, with its 4/4 and clearly demarcated endings, and sambas that can go on forever given enough verses. FAIZbuk is “La cumparsita,” and Facie-bookie is a samba-enredo, designed to keep on looping all the way down the avenue. They’re equally wrong, each in their own way, is what I’m saying.

last call

At around 5:30 a.m., the hazy dance floor light turns blue and the orchestra (long-gone; recorded) strikes up “La Cumparsita.” Everyone understands — this is the last dance. It’s a romantic way to drop the not-so-gentle hint that it’s nearly dawn and the circling pairs should really be getting home via the fleet of taxis outside. After the tango lurches to a halt, the lights come up. There’s something unnerving about seeing a milonga like this one fully illuminated; it doesn’t feel right, and you expect strange things to materialize in the corners. So as to ease the transition, the speakers crackle again — but this time with 60s bubblegum pop. The ostranenie is complete. Almost everyone clears the dance floor right away, but the few who aren’t Gardel devotees to the death stay and start twisting and bopping, still in their tango shoes. The place immediately seems much more fun, and I cast a wistful glance at the dance floor as we leave.

happy birthday to my partner in crime

tardes villeras

secondhand stories

The statue of the Virgin in Mendoza that looks perfectly normal by day, but when seen from a distance by night looks like she’s dancing. “And not a demure little virgin dance, she’s really shaking it.” Hilarious or disturbing, depending on whom you ask.

The Angelito Milagroso de Villa Unión, who died at one year from meningitis and wouldn’t stay buried. The bricks of his tomb were scattered, the coffin wouldn’t stay closed, and after a few such incidents a graveyard worker saw that the baby was miraculously intact. The tomb is a pilgrimage site, and his mother changes his clothes every day.

La Difunta Correa, who crossed the arid expanse of San Juan in search of her husband and died with her baby at her breast. When the body was found, the child was alive. Of all the offerings, one of the most common is bottles of water.

déjà vu or downright tacky?

Not to get repetitive, but a brief meditation on dreams. (Lest everyone stop reading immediately: I promise not to recount the full plot of any of them.) I sleep so little in Princeton and Rio that I tend not to remember anything from my dreams, which is just fine, I use that time for ferocious productivity and/or rowing. But in the last week or so, with all my final papers done, a sort of feeling that the book is already half closed on Buenos Aires, and the consequent excesses of free time and laziness, I’ve been sleeping in. And my overactive dream imagination, with which I used to delight (or bore?) friends in middle and high school, is back with a vengeance.

This would be unremarkable in and of itself (I say disingenuously, since I took advantage of said dreams for a blog post yesterday), but the thing is that I’m genuinely starting to confuse dreams and reality. I can’t recall if the vertical library in my dream the other night came before or after rereading La Biblioteca de Babel, before or after visiting the house with its walls plastered in elegant white bookshelves, which reality is echoing which.

And then, yesterday afternoon, I got off the bus at a random point for the sake of walking home an entirely different route, through the neighborhood of Once. As I turned a corner I’d never seen before, I felt an odd jolt of recognition like one often does in dreams, the feeling of a face that’s familiar-yet-not. I saw a woman and two girls. And I swear to you that they were the same woman and her daughters who were sitting across the aisle from me on my flight to Buenos Aires.

she’s in my head now

A good reason for hitting the snooze button: you’re interviewing the ghost of Victoria Ocampo in a snowbound, bat-infested mansion and when the alarm went off you were just about to ask her some hard-hitting political questions. Plus you still have to take pictures of her, mostly transparent and shimmering around the edges, for the blog. She seems put off at first, but is then moved to tears by a poem she recites to herself in French.

impatience

Nine days. The end is not only in sight, I’ve got out my binoculars and I’m staring it down; I’ve had my final papers done for over a week now and I could be packed in 15 minutes flat. So the greatest challenge at this point is killing time. It’s not that Buenos Aires doesn’t have more to offer, but a) it’s cold outside and b) the last time I went on a play-seeing binge most of them were terrible.

Luckily, I somewhat foolishly accepted another research assistant job, and this one involves deciphering hundreds of pages of customs documents from 19th-century Angola. “Deciphering” not as in translating, as in literally making out what the hell the log actually says, because the handwriting looks less like Portuguese and more like humsdfumxblisdfjxxx.

It’s not impossible to make it out, thankfully, but involves enough head-tipping and squinting and sounding out words like a kindergartener that it’s quite laborious. And surprisingly fun. Or at least I’ve reached such critical levels of boredom and desperation that I’m finding it entertaining. The code-breaking aspect of the handwriting aside, the documents themselves are pretty interesting. The first couple entries are about the suspension of a customs director in Ambriz for his “lack of intelligence and lack of zeal,” as well as the fact that he was “arbitrary and vengeful,” constantly accusing his subordinates of things. I promise, it sounds really bitchy in the original Portuguese.