ba 101

Yesterday I saw the essence of Buenos Aires: a taxi running a red light veeeery slooooowwwly.

of apples and alephs

The manzana is the atom of Buenos Aires, its fundamental element. Sorry, I should clarify: not the fruit, the city block. The manzana is both the fundamental model for the entire city, mirrored dizzyingly for miles and miles, and a microcosm of the city itself. They’re all pretty much 100m by 100m, and within that nutshell you can count yourself king of infinite space. This is something that was brought home to me once again when I went to see a play in Boedo this weekend. The theater was one of those off- off-Corrientes affairs where you have to know the address and ring the bell because it doesn’t have a sign or anything. The usher let us in and gestured vaguely behind him, indicating where we were supposed to go. The corridor was incredibly long and narrow, with at least a half-dozen doors sprouting off it. I glanced in at the ones left ajar. A kitchen; a dressing room; a dark room with chairs; a waiting room. And at the end of it all, the auditorium itself, a sprawling two-story affair which seemed impossibly big for the block that contained it.

These massive squares tend to be sectioned off into little winding coffins; you come in off the street and walk and walk and walk in these whitewashed alleyways, a dark tiny city between four walls, until you get to the apartment or the bookstore or the cineclub tucked away at the back. By now I don’t think anything would surprise me, in the vast sectioned-off homes of San Telmo or the crumbling high-ceilinged redoubts of Boedo: a theater, a hidden garden, a door to Narnia. It’s at times like this that I think I understand Triste-le-Roy.

porteño morning

it’s only a blind item when it’s about borges

Now that the end is in sight, I’m starting to feel twinges of nostalgia for Buenos Aires. Not so much as to counterbalance the enormous glee I feel as I start to pack my bags and ponder arriving in Rio in two weeks, of course, but enough to guarantee that I’ll be back. I’ll go so far as to say that I prefer empanadas to pastéis (more variety, better made), the wine is scandalously cheap, and the company isn’t half bad either. I went out with a group of journalists and photographers last week (my personal celebration for having finished all my final papers) and the flood of literary gossip was spectacular. The Internet doesn’t exactly back this one up, but one journalist alleged that Silvina was romantically involved with Bioy Casares’ mother and that she was paired off with him to avoid further scandal. “Wouldn’t that be more scandalous?” someone pointed out, reasonably.

Debates as to which Ocampo sister was more attractive; debates as to which volume of Victoria’s autobiography is best (clearly El archipiélago, not La rama de Salzburgo); impressions of the ancient Spanish maid who tremulously denied the “coshash terriblesh” being said about Silvina and Alejandra Pizarnik, that they were lovers. “La Srta. Pizarnik venía y ellas tomaban el té nomás.” Heated argument as to whether foreign books were or were not being held at Customs — the Hungarian said that they weren’t, but the Brazilian swore that she couldn’t get any books into the country. Argument over the moon landing, surprisingly enough, which I personally chalked up to Communist envy while proclaiming that the moon is American territory. In the cab on the way back I said I was Brazilian, which the taxi driver took with somewhat surprising nonchalance and proceeded to tell me about his dreams the night before.

keep it down over there

I hear weird things from my bedroom. Sometimes on the weekends — I want to say most Sundays, although I haven’t been keeping careful track — there’s what sounds like a parade going down the avenue, drums and marching sounds accompanied by a veritable symphony of angry horns. I can never catch the parade, because it sounds like it’s moving pretty fast, and I usually calculate that by the time I got decent, went down eight floors in the rickety elevator and made it the few blocks over to Córdoba, it’ll already have gone. Last Sunday, however, the parade sounds were accompanied by a sound car (or something) blasting “I Gotta Feeling.” I leaped out of my bed in a rage, because that is a disturbance of the peace if I’ve ever heard one, and was ready to sprint out onto the corner and call the police, but it does disarm one’s righteous anger to be blinking in one’s PJs.

The baseline around here is pretty noisy itself, I should say. I have a delicate small-town constitution and the ears of a one-time would-be radio journalist, which is not an ideal combination for dealing with big-city ambient noise. By design, most streets in the neighborhood aren’t far from one of the big avenues, so that’s 24/7 traffic (and the porteños are not shy about leaning on their horns). Add to that construction, dogs, the clamor multiple times a day as kids come and go from the school next door, and it’s all left me positively nostalgic for the days when I had to regularly yell at the skateboarding kids in 1963 Courtyard because I was doing sound editing in my room, dammit, and they were making a hell of a ruckus. 

shout-out to my tigers

Because there are people on Facebook already counting down to Reunions.

mapping buenos aires

The name Erdosain gave to this mood of dreams and disquiet that led him to roam through the days like a sleepwalker was “the anguish zone.”

He imagined this zone floating above cities, about two meters in the air, and pictured it graphically like an area of salt flats or deserts that are shown on maps by tiny dots, as dense as herring roe.

This anguish zone was the product of mankind’s suffering.  And like a cloud of poison gas it slid from one place to the next, seeping through walls, passing straight through buildings, without ever losing its flat horizontal shape; a two-dimensional anguish that left an after-taste of tears in the throats it sliced like a guillotine.

The Seven Madmen, by Roberto Arlt, translated by Nick Caistor (my edits).

one man’s trash

It’s at times like these that I am accused – justly or unjustly – of buying junk.

I found this little gem in a pile of postcards in a fantastic used bookstore on the San Telmo-Montserrat border, where the owner struck up a lively, indignant conversation about how terrible it must be to live in Seattle (he spent a week there and it rained nonstop). There’s a whole string of great dusty bookstores running down Bolívar, as a matter of fact; I keep wanting to go back, but what stays my hand is the knowledge that I am much less likely to find a gift for someone else than I am to end up buying weird, ungiftable things for myself. Case (perhaps) in point: this photo. All right, it was 2 pesos, but the principle’s the same.

First of all, I’d like to defend my purchase: this picture is amazing.

three times fernando

It always gets under my skin when people say apologetically that they’ve “only” read something in translation. Borges famously read Don Quijote first in English, and when he finally got around to reading it in Spanish said it seemed like a bad translation. I read A Hundred Years of Solitude in English first, in the translation that García Márquez praised as being better than the original. Now, I happen to have read O Livro do Desassossego first in Portuguese; but that hasn’t stopped me from reading it again in English (Richard Zenith) and now again in Spanish (Santiago Kovadloff), in a pleasingly hefty single tome. And it’s life-changing, in all three languages.

You might think that there’s not much that you can change between Portuguese and Spanish, which is true, to an extent. I noted some differences like a pebble in my shoe — an ambiguity I hadn’t paid attention to in the Portuguese article “o,” for example, which can be translated either as “el” or “lo” (“o santo” being plausibly either “the saint” [noun] or “the holy” [adj]). But Kovadloff’s translation is graceful, and I’ve been using it as an antidote to the florid prose of Facundo. Soares sounds different, melancholy in a huskier way, when I read him in Spanish (with an imagined Argentine accent). Reading familiar passages in another language not only lets me discover them again, but it shows, in a flash, exactly how they’re constructed — the peculiarities of syntax and vocabulary that slide with ease or difficulty into the forms of a new tongue.

olha o que não tá querendo cair

I have the feeling that this is a metaphor for something.