In Argentina

Both Juan and I have histories here in Buenos Aires. Juan lived for several years in the capital after moving from his hometown a few hours south, and I moved here shortly after finishing grad school, four years ago this month. It was near the end of the eight months that I was living here that the two of us met, on the nearby Plaza Dorrego. It’s amazing to return to a second home, half a world away, following fifteen months on the road. After hundreds of unknown places, being someplace familiar and filled with memories feels like a dream.

My move to Buenos Aires—like many of my more interesting decisions—was completely half-assed and unplanned, but it was also one of the most challenging and rewarding times in my life. All it took was one simple click. I packed two bags and was transported to a completely different hemisphere, in a country where I knew no one.

I don’t like to research my travels too much beforehand because I like to be surprised, and so Buenos Aires blew me away. I was surprised to see how European the city looked, with buildings that could have looked at home in France or Italy. I was surprised at how busy it was. I was surprised the people were so white. I was surprised that the agreeable taxi driver tried to charge me three times the normal amount when we arrived at my hostel. I was surprised that I found a way to shame him in the twenty words I knew. I was surprised at the heat, and the mosquitoes. And then I was surprised at how lonely I felt—and how fast. I’d figured I would be so overwhelmed with travel and newness that I wouldn’t have time to feel lonely until I first got settled in, but the loneliness settled in even before my fatigue.

I had moved to Buenos Aires in spite of the fact—or maybe because of it—that I didn’t speak any Spanish. Two years in New York City had changed me in a way that I couldn’t yet understand, but I knew it had something to do with words feeling different. Yes and maybe had come to mean the same thing as no, later and tomorrow the same thing as never, and somehow who you were and what you thought somehow all meant the same thing as money. After two weeks bumbling around in the chaotic downtown, I moved myself to a two-bedroom house in the neighborhood of Villa Crespo, a block away from the city’s largest cemetery, Chacarita. My housemates were a gay couple—Saeed, from Mexico, and Emiliano, an Argentine who spoke very good English, and who promised to help me with my Spanish.

I’d only been living in the house in Villa Crespo for two weeks when I went away for the holidays. When I returned, Emiliano was gone, and we had three houseguests: a Swedish guy, an eight-months pregnant woman from Singapore, and their Jack Russell Terrier. I tried to ask Saeed what had happened to Emiliano, but this was difficult to do with hand gestures. This was why I had moved in with Emiliano—Emiliano had been the one who spoke English. Emiliano had put up the craigslist ad with the photos of the room, the roofdeck, the grill. Emiliano had taken my 850 pesos in cash. Emiliano was why I lived there. When Emiliano had failed to return for three nights and the expecting couple had moved out, Saeed knocked on my door on his way up to the deck and I followed him out for a smoke. There, he used his own hand gestures to tell me what had really happened.

“We,” he said, then pantomimed snapping a twig in half. “We break?”

“Ohh,” I said, and grimaced. I thought about putting my hand on his shoulder but I didn’t. The guys walked around shirtless in the hot weather and that felt strange to me, to touch the naked torso of a man I might have lived with—but didn’t know.

I wish I could say that my learning curve in Buenos Aires was steep, but instead it was painfully slow. I studied French in school, and many of the useful Mexican-Spanish vocabulary words I’d picked up from living in California were of little use in Buenos Aires—aguacate (avocado) becomes palta; frijoles (beans) become porotos, and the local butcher had never even heard of fajitas.

Aside from Saeed and the butcher, the longest conversations I had were with the fruit stand guy, the occasional taxi driver, and waiters. They were the same conversations, over and over: where I was from, where my parents were from, what I was doing here. At home with my friends, the question of what I was doing there could have easily consumed a month of happy hour conversations about freedom, creativity, and escapism, but in my simplified language, I could only answer, “trabajo,” work. It was a sad and lonely summer that I suffered in silence, unable to communicate my despair.

My Spanish progressed as it needed to, accumulating the everyday vocabulary of Buenos Aires, and I was able to relax a little and let the city overwhelm me.
I learned the word diluvio (flood) for the rainy time of year when ‘the Paris of the South’ resignedly becomes ‘the Venice of the South.’

I learned the phrase corte de luz (power outage) when the lights went out and cacerola, for the street protest that followed, where people bang pots and casserole dishes and set fires in the streets.

I learned nacimiento (birth) for when our friends’ baby was born.

I learned that the pasta place down the block made really, really good pasta.

True to my few words, I worked. I visited. I cooked. I ate. I slept. And, in time, I finished. I celebrated. I made friends. Once in a while, I even managed to make a joke, with the help of some exaggerated facial expressions. And, near the end of my stay, I took a big risk and went to run with the bulls in Pamplona with a man I’d just met, a man with a Volkswagen van and a plan to drive it one day from San Francisco all the way to the southern tip of Argentina. I left Buenos Aires feeling accomplished and hopeful and less lonely in the world.

But even if I hadn’t met Juan here, Buenos Aires would have a special place in my heart. When I go someplace new, I expect to learn something, and in Argentina I got far more than I expected. Sometimes I wonder how much of what we learn while we travel has to do with the place, and how much has to do with ourselves. Maybe I wouldn’t have learned about porteño culture if I had stayed at home in Illinois after grad school, but would I have managed to find peace? Is it really necessary to go anywhere at all, if the things we seek are so often internal? I sort of figured that what I learned in Argentina—versus what Argentina taught me—were more or less unrelated. Then last week we returned, and Argentina had more to add to the conversation.

Argentina presented us with myriad difficulties months before arrival. Juan had to make sure he wouldn’t have problems entering his home nation with a foreign vehicle. The border crossing from Bolivia was the worst we’ve encountered in South America, and maybe so far on this trip. Once crawling through immigration, the van was subjected to the most thorough inspection we’ve had. The one thing that was easier than expected was that we didn’t have to register our electronics—when entering the country by plane, it’s typical to have to enter serial numbers for each cell phone, laptop, and digital camera entering the country to counteract the “black market” in foreign electronics—as though Argentina had a burgeoning electronics market of its own to protect.

The biggest item that required advance planning on our behalf was the currency situation. Argentina’s economy, Juan once casually mentioned, collapses about once every ten years. In 2001, one peso was about equal to one dollar. When Juan and I met here in 2010, it was four to the dollar. Right now, the Argentine finance ministry has the peso locked in at an official exchange rate of 6.3 to the dollar—but since the value of a peso isn’t determined so much by the finance ministry as it is by the people who carry them, the real rate is about 9.5 pesos to the dollar, according to how much you can get on the street. This means that if we were to use our credit cards, ATM cards, or to go to a bank, we’d be getting about 50 percent fewer pesos to the dollar than if we deal with the ‘blue’ dollar. The black market just might be the most modern and developed industry in Argentina.

Until we returned to the city where we’d met, I believed that the things I’d learned my first time in Argentina were largely independent of where I was. I thought I was recovering from two difficult years in New York. I felt like my relationship with my two roommates had been exceptionally profound, the sort of bond forged among foreigners in belittling circumstances. I’d thought I had buckled down and finally completed the first draft of that novel because I’d had nothing else to do. But then I learned another new word: saqueos—lootings.

The night before we crossed the Bolivian border into Argentina, we heard that a police strike in Cordoba—the second-largest city in Argentina—had resulted in saqueos. They were many miles from Cordoba, however, and didn’t give it much thought, as civil unrest in Argentina is about as unusual as a salt shaker on the table. Instead, we began our journey south through Juan’s home country, camping in a great variety of municipal and private campgrounds and trying to adjust to the hot weather in the lower altitudes of the pampas.

When we broke our water pump in San Miguel de Tucumán, we were lucky enough to find an inexpensive hotel just across the street from a large market filled with vendors selling plastic Christmas trees and decorations. The next day, saqueos broke out in the city, with Juan observing that people were looting in such an orderly fashion that it first looked like they were just “shopping in a hurry, without bags,” and calmly carrying armloads of things out of stores. That night, we returned to our hotel to find the street separating it from the market filled with stall owners, armed with sticks and poles and rifles, ready to protect their wares from potential looters. I went inside and hunkered down for the night while Juan went back out to walk the dog.

The morning that the car was fixed, as we searched for an arbolito (literally: little tree, but in this context, a currency trader) near the banks, we saw that about half the stores downtown were closed in anticipation of more looting, and of those that remained, a protocol of loss-mitigation was being followed. Shopkeepers had covered all of their shiny display windows with paper or cardboard. The pull-down metal gates that protect the stores at night were either half-down—to facilitate easy closing in a hurry—or all the way down, with customers crouching through the service doors to enter the store. Many workers stood in the doorways, monitoring the streets. The scene was placid on the surface, but the wariness in each person’s eyes unsettled me—it was really only the second time on our journey that I’ve felt truly afraid. Nothing scares me as much as lawlessness. Mob violence is the real-life equivalent of a zombie attack. I held my breath, eyeing everyone suspiciously, as any individual could be responsible for setting off a chain reaction of chaos. Juan, unperturbed, stopped to talk with people. He wondered if it was a good morning to visit the vet. I remembered the other time I’d been scared—one night in Baja, when five guys pulled up right next to us in the middle of night and in the middle of nowhere—and how Juan had calmly gotten out of the van to retrieve his camera and put in an appearance.

After getting out of Tucumán unscathed, I realized that Argentina really has taught me something—how to carry on in times of uncertainty. Argentines possess a legendary mix of Latino and Italian temperament that can be described as anything from fiery to dramatic, but in situations where most Americans would break into hysteria, they are incredibly blasé. Oh, the peso is collapsing. Oh, there are people setting fires in the street. Oh, there’s a group of armed men outside the door.

The country’s motto is en unión y libertad (in unity and freedom), but the people’s steely calm seems to suggest a better motto might be de retos, la fuerza (from challenges, strength) or, better yet, lo que no mata le hace más fuerte—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Buenos Aires is not an easy or essential place to visit. It is a chaotic city in an enormous country under volatile controls. But like so many difficult places, to know it and love it is to know and love a new place where you can now feel at home.

*All of these photos (except the shot in the campground) are from my previous trip to Buenos Aires four years ago. For the “best of” that trip, please visit limpire.
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