Change We Can’t Believe In: newyorker.com
Here’s an article about the continuing coin shortage in Buenos Aires.
Change We Can’t Believe In: newyorker.com
SEE ALSO: MAKING CHANGE HAPPEN
Shared via AddThis
Casting Long Shadows
Dancers in Recoleta, April 18
“I could dance with you until the cows come home. On second thought I’d rather dance with the cows until you come home.”
–Groucho Marx
BUENOS AIRES, April 19
The glorious light of Buenos Aires that taught me to really see is fading. The sun sets earlier each day and the hours are beginning to have a valedictory feel. The gloriously touristy San Telmo fería (market) that pops up each Sunday afternoon is different today. There is a blue shadow across Defensa and the street is torn up, a repair job that has a good part of San Telmo’s main street fenced in and strewn with rubble. A brisk wind whips down the street and the tourists, formerly loose and sleeveless, are now huddled beneath fleece jackets. Many of the locals have scarfs around their necks. After a much delayed start, it is autumn.
Walking down Independencia to the Subte (subway), I notice a cart with paint splattered equipment. It interests me, then its owner walks out of an apartment building. It is the dancing painter whose photo is in my post “Happy Accidents.” Seeing him away from his performance spot and in front of his apartment makes him more real and also makes him an anachronism.
I am woozy with nostalgia. I eat my French meal at the Brasserie Petanque and pretend to speak French to the owner. Smiles and knowing chuckles work in whatever language you don’t speak. Several times I have taken the elevator with a well-dressed woman of about eighty. She smells of light powder and wool and she speaks Spanish to me from the moment she gets on the elevator until the moment she gets off. I smile and chuckle and pretend to know what she means and she leaves happier than before. I guess I’m a good listener.
I am sad today because I am missing my home, but I am also sad because I am leaving Buenos Aires in a couple of days. Taking the Subte home, I see a singer in the car and a man handing out booklets to everyone hoping for a sale. I have never seen anyone buy one. The stations go by… Callao… Facultad de Medicina… Pueyrredón… Agüero… Bulnes… Scalabrini Ortiz. I have memorized the stops, know which ones board on the opposite side, know the short cut to cross the street by tunnel, know how much a Coca Light costs at the kiosko. I think of the walks from the Subte to the studio for the Tango lessons, the buskers on Florida in front of my school, the feel of the street in Palermo Soho at 2 A. M. on a Saturday night, the bars overflowing and groups of young people laughing and drinking and smoking their way down the street. I think of the beautiful parks and the famous Cemetery I finally toured yesterday. I think of chocolate con almendros helado, my favorite ice cream. I think of how I still haven’t quite cracked the code of living here. I know the map but not the way, the streets but not the people that walk up and down the sidewalks.
I am going back to Virginia for some family events, my son’s college graduation, to take care of some medical matters, and of course to plan my return. I have a return ticket the end of May.
I’ve made a couple of good friends–Osmany and Joaquin–and developed happy working relationships with my Tango instructor and my Spanish profesores. I have no love interests, no group to hang with, and most of the time no one with whom to share a meal. Still, I have learned to enjoy my own company and I have discovered that my talent for photography never really went away, it simply laid dormant for thirty years.
I have danced a bit of Tango and tonight, after so many lessons, I will attend my first milonga. I’m a bit nervous.
My Spanish remains the biggest mystery. A combination of anxiety, poor discipline, and probably a low aptitude has kept me from making progress with the language. I freeze when I try to speak it outside the classroom and this is something I am not sure how to solve. My profesora tells me that it isn’t a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of confidence and I believe she is right. I can’t change my personality overnight and I am having a lot of trouble getting out of my own way so that I can learn to speak. I have a deep fear of humiliation and my ego isn’t allowing me to fail enough to achieve some competence.
I think back to those first days of South American spring last October when everything was so new and intimidating. I was scared to take the Subte and so I walked everywhere and marveled at the cityscapes. The light painted the city and I walked through an ever-changing movie set. Scenes would unfold and I would capture them with my camera. Later, on my computer, images and stories I never saw at first would emerge and I would be astonished at the light and the people and the activity I had captured. Now with the light fading, I feel those first days of growth begin to pass and with them the knowledge that I have to find new ways to grow and to see things for the first time again.
I’m homesick. Homesick for the city of my birth: Roanoke. Homesick for the city of my rebirth: Buenos Aires. Homesick, as we all are, for past experiences that were so vivid that they shook you awake, rubbed the sleep from your eyes, and made you see the youthful light of a new day.
Behind the Eight Ball
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
–George Bernard Shaw
It’s Saturday night in Buenos Aires and I have met my friend Joaquin and his friend Silvia to shoot some pool. He had proposed “billiards” not knowing that we play “pool” and have the same word for the game. I told him I had no idea how the Brits play “billiards,” or for that matter most anything else.
The game is a classic game of 8 ball. We shoot rayados (stripes) and lisas (”plains” or solids). There are a couple of rule variations for scratches (the other person gets two turns after a scratch) and for winning with the 8 ball (it must be hit into the pocket of your last regular ball) but otherwise it is the same game.
It’s been a long time since I have played pool. The last was about a year ago at the Cue n’ Cushion in Houston and I notice the same phenomenon. I am deadly the first game, my stick sharply snapping the cue ball and the cue ball spinning back after clapping against the target ball, which lands with authority in the pocket. However, in the second and third games my attention flags, I get in a rush, the aim is no longer true and I become frustrated and sloppy.
I have the same issue in bowling. The muscle memory is good. The mind is elsewhere. It is the problem I have with many things: attention span.
My life runs by intuition and not by systems, yet if I don’t have enough structure the dreaminess sets in and I wander aimlessly through the day in my own space–outer space–and ruminate. It is what leads to creative breakthroughs and to leaving things in cafés, falling down stairs and the inability to remember simple Spanish phrases when under pressure. (SEE: “Big Feet, Short Attention Span.”)
After much advice that I need to practice my Spanish in las calles (the streets), I decided that for this visit I won’t enroll in group lessons. I decide to do a few private lessons and depend on intercambio–language exchange–to further my education. A good theory, but unfortunately my Spanish has regressed since the last time I was in Buenos Aires and with the lack of structure I have been spacey and crazy the first two weeks. I decide to go back to my school.
Silvia, who is in the last year of certification to become an English teacher, gives me advice about how to learn language: “You must fail. You must fail every day. You should knock on the door and meet your neighbor and ask for some sugar.” Joaquin observes “that might not be the best idea if his neighbor is a man.” I tell her that it seems that no one has the patience to speak with me. She says, “perhaps it is you who does not have the patience.”
At dinner, Silvia insists that we converse in Spanish, which we do for about half-an-hour. I tell her about this project and about my life before and she gently corrects me when I get the verb tense or the vocabulary wrong. It doesn’t go too badly, but I am relieved when we switch back to English.
After a game of pool and a nice dinner, it is always good to see a bad movie. We choose the movie BELLE TOUJOURS because it is in French with Spanish subtiles and I think perhaps I could follow along more easily since I have taken French and can read Spanish. I understand about 20% of the French and about 50% of the Spanish. The film is an homage to Luis Buñuel. It seems to be too much of a self-parody for it not to be a self-conscious one. It has many of the clichés of French film: the slow beginning, the panoramic shots of Paris with allegro symphonic music, the repetitious insert shots of 19th-century statues and statuettes, and a story of sexual perversion. There are moody nighttime scenes of rain-soaked Paris streets. The protagonist, an alcoholic man in his seventies, spends the first 45 minutes of the film searching for a woman from his past that he has spied at a concert. I would like to say that I could spoil the plot, but there doesn’t seem to be much of one. The man tells a barman that the he and the mystery woman had engaged in a sadomasochistic affair decades earlier and that he was the best friend of the woman’s husband. There is mystery about whether the husband knew. The man finally finds the woman, arranges a private dinner, and after more panoramic shots of Paris, more symphonic music, and more inserts of statues, the man and the woman eat in a fancy room attended by waiters and eat a three-course meal without speaking a word. The man drinks a decanter of scotch. He gives the woman arch looks, chuckles and enjoys his food. Finally after dinner, the two have a conversation for a few minutes that does not go well. The woman leaves in a huff, the man lingers a bit and exits, and waiters clean the room for the last five or six minutes of the film and comment that the protagonist is really “a type.” The credits roll.
I don’t understand much of the French. It has been too long since I studied the language and now my knowledge of the language is limited to Pepé Le Pew like phrases such as “I am ze locksmith of love, no?” I chuckle when I hear the word “désillusion,” a common sentiment in a French film. I can’t quite follow the subtitles in Spanish. Of course, I don’t understand the meaning of the plot in English, either. I am an American in Argentina watching a French homage to a Spanish director and I am unable to comprehend the film in three languages.
Joaquin, a web entrepreneur, likes to say that he is becoming more successful because he is failing faster all the time, learning quickly what to do. I would like to have the same attitude. When I am in group classes, the material moves very quickly and I don’t understand either the exercises, the explanations, or the chit-chat. I start to feel a heaviness in my diaphragm, my breathing becomes shallow, the words mix together and I start to lose hope. My private tutor tells me that I know a lot of Spanish and that my problem is not my skills, it’s my anxiety. Désillusion sets in and I become the statue, searching for the words and feeling the fear.
This Saturday night, though, I am with Joaquin and Silvia and we have a relaxing evening: we shoot pool, we eat a good dinner, we see a bad movie and I get some valuable coaching on how to fail more quickly.
At Café Victoria
At Cafe Victoria, Recoleta (photo taken by a tourist at the next table)
BUENOS AIRES, April 12
It’s another week of loss and regret in Buenos Aires.
It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting at the Café Victoria across from the Recoleta cemetery and I have just resolved a drama. I noticed before I left my apartment that I didn’t have my U. S. cellphone. I tried calling it with my Argentine cell phone, but it wasn’t in the apartment. I knew what had happened. Disorganized and spacey, my mode this entire visit, I had left my phone in the coffee shop across the street. I went there and tried to call the phone again. There was no sound. I couldn’t recall the Spanish words for “Did you find my cellphone?” The shop owner thought I wanted to use a cellphone and tried to hand me his. An American man was sitting there and his Argentine girlfriend decoded the situation. The owner shrugged his shoulders. The American started singing the song from THE SOUND OF MUSIC, a song so cloying it always sets my teeth on edge, “So long, farewell…”
I went home and dialed the cell again. This time a woman answered it, “Hola.” “Hola,” I said. “Hola?” I didn’t even try Spanish “¿Hablas inglés?” She put a man on the phone and he asked me my name. We both laughed when he identified himself as Osmany, my Cuban friend who works at the café. Of all the people who would find the phone in Buenos Aires, he is the one who would be most likely to save it and return it to me without ransom or reward.
Osmany and I have grown close. Against all advice from my language advisors, we chat amiably in English each morning about a variety of subjects. He is a new father and he is married to an Argentine. He has some difficulties with the change in culture. “I want you to know my people,” he says. “We help each other. If you need something, anyone will help you because they know you will help them. It is not like here where people look at me only as a waiter and they treat me like I am…a piece of paper to be thrown aside, or something.” He misses home. “Our freedom is not the freedom just to take a trip. Our freedom is to be yourself.” Pointing to his head he says, “Our freedom is here.”
Cuba has always fascinated me. The music, the atmosphere, the food, and I have to admit it, the cigars. I want to visit. I met an American here in Buenos Aires who said he had been to Cuba some thirty times. No one gives him any trouble and the Cubans stamp a landing card, not his passport. When I mentioned this to Osmany he looked troubled and I decided to instead be one of the first wave of American tourists once the embargo is lifted. I have visions of smoking a big cigar, eating black beans and rice, taking beautiful pictures of an aging city, dancing to the rhythms of Cuban music.
We talk about the embargo and the first signs that the U. S. is considering normalizing trade. “Ojála, Ojála,” he says. “Cuba is in the perfect place to trade with both the United States and with South America.” We make plans to meet in Cuba one day where he will introduce me to his family and his people. He will show me the happiness.
I have brought my camera to the café in Recoleta. I thought I could get someone to take my picture looking writerly for this post. (see above) Three girls, probably in their early twenties, are at the table next to me and they are speaking English but in a non-American accent. I ask them to take my picture and find out they are from Australia. They have been traveling all over South America. It is their second time in Buenos Aires and they say they are “not loving it.” This surprises me since this is such a young city and from what I can see people of their age seem to make friends very easily. Their favorite city so far has been Rio de Janiero, a city that I have been reluctant to visit because of the crime, but I do not tell them the reason. “It is so beautiful. The mountains jut up from the sea and the Christ standing over the water is magnificent. The best views are from the poorest areas” I speculate that since they are from Australia that perhaps it is because Rio fronts the water. “We were very interested in the crime,” one of the girls say. “We were at a football game and we were right in the middle of a riot. You know, it was great. Australia is so bloody safe.”
I explain that perhaps the reason they don’t like Buenos Aires is because it has a bit of a sad quality. Tango music is all about loss and regret and unfulfilled love. The dance is romantic and passionate and many of the lyrics are about separation. The girls blink at me and are interested as I talk about my project, but they can’t imagine going anywhere without knowing someone or having a companion. “Don’t you get lonely?” “Of course, but that is part of the experience.” Again, interest but incomprehension. I try to explain why unfulfilled passion is the most romantic love of all, but they are from a sunny culture and aren’t old enough to understand music in a minor key. It would be difficult to explain to them why ROMEO AND JULIET is more romantic than CINDERELLA because they still think of true love always leading to happy endings.
The other night I watched the fantastically self-aware SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, in part to read the Spanish subtitles, but also because I am a sucker for the story. In one of the final scenes, Lord Wessex, Shakespeare’s rival for Gwynneth Paltrow’s Viola asks Queen Elizabeth: “How is this to end?” The Queen responds, “As stories must when love’s denied: with tears and a journey.”
As the girls leave the café to go see a football game (perhaps hoping to find another riot), I think about how strange my conversation must have seemed to them, but I have had thirty more years to love and lose and to see others experience the same process.
Somehow, the sad stories can make you feel happier. Also, as the theatre manager says to his investor in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, “Strangely enough, it all turns out well.” “How?” “I don’t know, it’s a mystery.”
A old woman shuffles by my table and spies the leavings on my plate and asks if she can have them. “Please!” I reply. She takes the rest of my hamburger bun, fries and the bacon I have rejected and scoops them into a plastic bag. As she walks off with the bag, I feel both pleased and ashamed of myself, sitting fat and happy on a Sunday afternoon, lecturing girls about life and love and loss as if I know something special, and somehow believing it will all turn out okay because I gave the rest of my high-priced lunch to someone who is hungry.
Clase de Tango Video
In the beginner’s mind there are endless possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.
–Shunryu Suzuki
Shadows and Avatars
If you can’t say something good about someone sit right here by me.
–Alice Roosevelt Longworth
I have a rule when I write this blog. I do not write things that I think will hurt other people and I try not to relate any stories that may betray a confidence. After all, I can never be sure who is reading.
I have been astonished at the vitriol of some of the comments posted on this blog. Recently there was a comment that is rude and hurtful to myself and to one of my subjects. I elected not to approve it because even if the writer is correct, the tone is extremely angry and arrogant. The person who made this comment also decided to denigrate me in another forum.
This person didn’t know that many of the complaints were unfounded because I elected to report on the part of the story that I felt my audience would find entertaining and not the part of the story that might have made this person happier, if it is possible to make this person happier.
In one post I wrote about a gathering at a close friend’s house and I mentioned his first name. The gathering couldn’t have been more innocuous and the reference couldn’t have been less controversial, still my friend was quite upset because mutual friends mentioned it to him and he didn’t like seeing his first name on the internet.
I was taken aback because I didn’t understand his issue. It was a small part of a large post that was about something else entirely. I had only used his first name. I couldn’t see the harm.
I removed the few sentences that named him and strangely enough I felt that it improved the content. It is now tighter and clearer. His section was only a benign digression and he acted as an unwitting editor.
This made me think of the larger implications of writing this blog. I have attempted to craft an online persona very close to my own. Yet, writing about one’s self and one’s experiences is by nature an incomplete view of what has happened since I only have a first person perspective. I have occasionally tried to change my perspective by writing in the second or third person as I did in the posts “Chapter Two” and “Failure to Communicate.”
A year ago I became interested in people who tried to change identities completely, creating new names and identities, and then disappearing. I ordered several books from Amazon about how one goes about changing identities. Soon after I had started researching this topic, I found myself in a bit of an uncomfortable situation with security officers at the airport and wondered if my research into this topic had caused me to be placed on a government watch list. If I had been, I placed my official self in jeopardy by wondering what it would be like to invent a shadow personality, a doppelgänger who may or may not have a separate name but who might be free to act in a different or perhaps more reckless way than my “real” self. I wrote about this before I came to Argentina in “The Midlife Protection Plan”
This story has been about the improvement in my outlook by remaking myself, so I am a different person than when I started, both because of the journey and because of reporting it. The subject of this blog is the beginner’s journey and about the many errors one makes in that process. Sometimes the desires of the audience or even the knowledge that there is an audience has changed both my perspective and my writing.
There are others who left pseudonymous comments or sent mysterious e-mails. Their comments sometimes intrigue me and I wonder about their intent. Often the writer’s attempt to remain anonymous worries me. It is as if some people have created avatars, or characters that exist only in an artificial world like Second Life, and imagined a connection with my online persona. I am always happy to engage in conversation with friends and readers and often these mysterious people serve as true inspiration, but I am not an avatar. While this journey is imaginative and fanciful, it takes place in real time and is written by a real person.
I didn’t expect my gentle little journey to be so controversial. Perhaps my friend was right to be upset that he was included. Sometimes I’m upset that I am included as well and so there will be a time later this year when this blog will end.
SEE ALSO: THE MIDLIFE PROTECTION PROGRAM
SEE ALSO: “ON LANGUAGE; AVATAR,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, August 10, 2008
¡Que Zapato!
I never put on a pair of shoes until I’ve worn them at least five years.
–Samuel Goldwyn
Buenos Aires, April 1
Someone has to be playing an April Fool’s prank. I look in my messenger case, the one I take all over town and the one in which I keep my Tango shoes. There is only one shoe.
These are very good shoes, purchased here in Buenos Aires and rebuilt in Virginia so that they hug my heel and push my toe to the front of the shoe. Before I bought the shoes, I was having trouble walking in time to the music and leading properly. I don’t want to mislead anyone, in both senses of the word, but I still have trouble walking in time to the music and leading properly. Yesterday my entire lesson consisted of walking with my instructor in proper time to the beat and then adding a quicker step as a double beat.
Bum…Bum…BuhBuhBUM…Bum…Bum…BuhBuhBUM…
It is one of the hardest things I do. It is harder than the steps we practiced in the last post because here I have to really feel the music. Here I have to time my steps. There is nothing but my rhythm and my intention and my confidence to guide me. It is very basic and very difficult and even extremely accomplished dancers must practice this all the time.
I search my apartment in a sweat, hoping that maybe I was just rearranging things in the bag. There is only one shoe. Perhaps I opened my bag on the Subte and it fell out? I lost a pair of nice sunglasses last week. I was having neck pain and shifted the bag’s strap to my other shoulder. The glasses were propped on my head and I may have knocked them off. I think I would know if a shoe dropped out. I doubt very seriously that there was a thief who was looking for a single right shoe. The only other explanation is that I emptied out my messenger bag at the studio yesterday to get my wallet and left one of the shoes in the dark entrance foyer.
On my way to the lesson, I think of alternate scenarios. I could buy I new pair, but without the heel reconstruction the foot wouldn’t be far enough forward for me to really feel the floor. Maybe I can learn to dance a One-Legged Tango. Perhaps Riverdancing is in my future. I readjust my bag again, hoping the other shoe won’t drop.
I sheepishly walk into the foyer of the dance studio. Guadalupe is a few minutes earlier and I tell her what happened. She at first expresses concern, then mirrors my self-mocking amusement, and then she tells me that when someone is an idiot people her parents age say “¡Que Zapato!” to indicate the person’s foolishness. Also Guada tells me that in a dance hall it is common to call someone who can’t dance un zapato, as in “How was it [the dance]?” The answer: “Not good, bailando con un zapato.”
That idiot! Dancing with one shoe! Both use the singular form of los zapatos: shoes.
There is a different attendant behind the desk and she has no idea if a shoe was left yesterday. She looks under the counter and starts laughing. She pulls out my other shoe.
Now I can start the lesson properly and learn to walk all over again.
Bum…Bum…BuhBuhBUM…Bum…Bum…BuhBuhBUM…
Le Béret: How To Forget Anything
How to Forget Anything (Without Drugs or Alcohol)
–by Le Béret, Guest Contributor
DO go to high school and college reunions. You’ve forgotten everyone anyway and together you can manufacture a new history, when everyone was happy, sexy, could stay up for days, engage in brilliant debate, and have the choice of any career or spouse in the world. Regret earns you bonus miles.
DO only eat eggs. No one remembers eggs.
DO hold grudges. Don’t forgive anyone and soon you’ll have no one left to remember, or to remember you.
DO go back to a city in which you once lived. Walk the streets and see how shops have closed, restaurants have changed hands, condo projects built. Mourn either the seedy decay or the cute gentrification. Go to places where dead or relocated relatives lived. Rinse and repeat.
DO NOT delete important computer files. Keep working and the files will do that on their own. Just like your brain.
DO NOT bother to pay your income taxes or keep any receipts. That’s why they employ the good people at the I.R.S.: to help remember things for you.
DO hang around much younger people. They won’t give a damn about what you remember and laugh at you for thinking they do.
DO listen to the elderly. They are skilled at losing important recent memories and fictionalizing your shared distant past. The elderly should be sought for their wise counsel and you should heed their advice. By doing so, you will choose a safe future, one in which you try nothing and don’t go anywhere. This helps keep you from creating new memories.
Two Steps Forward
Guadalupe tries to improve Sam's posture. Since this picture was taken with a camera on a tripod with a self-timer my pose is rushed and my posture even worse than usual
“Can’t act. Can’t sing. Balding. Can dance a little.”
–Notes from Fred Astaire’s First Screen Test
BUENOS AIRES, March 28
At least I’m not balding.
I know Fred Astaire. I’ve seen him dance. Sir, I am no Fred Astaire.
Forgive me, my children. My writing may be as clumsy as my dance steps. Certainly, there is much in this post that some of my Tango internet friends who have been following me will criticize. One looked at the video that is in this post and said “I’m not going to say anything unless you ask me.” So I didn’t ask her.
People who become involved in Tango are very passionate people and they hold passionate opinions. While in Virginia, I attempted to keep in practice by attending an afternoon lesson and milonga (dance) in Richmond. My partner had never danced Tango before and I am not past the advanced beginner level so I didn’t lead her well. I was telling my partner that as people advance they ultimately move from an open embrace to a closed one and that the dancers lean against one another, become a single unit, and that the communication between the dancers becomes the dance.
An older woman heard my talk, which had been discussed in several dozen lessons and started scolding me: “Don’t ever use the word lean. You don’t lean. That’s not the way.”
I don’t like confrontations and I simply told her that “lean” was the word my Tango teacher in Buenos Aires used and that perhaps it was a language difference. A quick Google search turns up an entire thesis on leaning in Tango as a style called “apilado.” The partners form a triangle and balance their weight against each other using their torsos. Sometimes the best way to win an argument is to walk away. This infuriates some people even more, but I am not particularly clever with the cutting comeback and so I have stopped trying.
The video that I have included was taken on the same small camera I use for all my still shots. That is why the video quality is not up to the standards I like, but it will do for this post. Guada and I are practicing each one of the steps that we learned in February. We set the camera on a tripod and then I edited the clips so that you didn’t see all the walking back and forth to start and stop the camera. Spielberg has nothing to fear.
done
The steps that we are practicing are the basic 8- count step in which woman does a cruzado, a cross, in step five. We practice the ocho cortado in which we begin the basic step and rather than continue to the cross we step backwards and can do a couple of variations. Either I can lead her to a cross and then we finish the step or I lead her to a gancho, or hook. This is the showy step that observers believe will cause the man to be in danger of losing his manhood. The position of the thigh permits the woman to kick the back of the man’s upper thigh, so this is not as dangerous as it looks. I also perform the giro in which I create a spinning motion for myself doing sacadas or stepping between my partners feet while leading her in ochos or figure eights. Another sacada ends with a lapiz, a half-circle that blocks my partner’s forward movement and allows her to make an embellishment called a parada in which she gently kicks my leg and then steps over it to complete the step.
Guadalupe and I pose for my camera. She makes me look like a milonguero. Maybe one day I'll really look like one. (tripod photo)
My instructor tells me that “people think of Tango as something rigid, but it is much more like elastic.” There are moments when the partners are close, moments when there is space for the various steps. It is not a rigid pattern of steps, but a communication between the partners that is mutual and understood through the energy between them.
All this takes a lot of time to learn and even more to master. It is the man’s responsibility to lead the dance and because of this I have yet to go to a milonga (dance club) and ruin someone’s evening by showing my incompetence. My first lesson upon my return was three days ago and I was confused and clumsy at first but some of it came back to me towards the end of the lesson. As Guadalupe said, “the man invites the woman but then must give her direction.” A central dictum in Tango is that if something goes wrong it is the man’s fault. That, of course, only increases the tension for slightly shy guys like me.
Failure to Communicate
What we got here is… failure to communicate
–Spoken by Strother Martin in COOL HAND LUKE
March 27, 2009
Dear Buenos Aires,
We are writing in order to try and work out some misunderstandings.
First of all, Sam left his ethernet connector cord for his MacBook Air at home and had to spend most of his first day here searching for a replacement. It was stupid of him, but no one had it and no one had a decent and affordable wireless solution.
He was able to finally jury-rig a solution. At least then he could phone home.
He also needed to get a prepaid cell phone. The largest company’s agent claimed he didn’t have one, the next company’s agent sold him a nice one. The interaction was all in Spanish and Sam didn’t even know which was the word for his first name (nombre) and for his last name (apellido.) Additionally, for a week the phone would make calls and receive calls and receive texts but not send texts.
This situation was solved last night by an engineer who used to work for the largest cellphone provider. After many tests and many calls to customer service, and not caring that his dinner was getting cold, he discovered that there was an issue between networks and that Sam would have to change the prefixes on all of the cell numbers stored in the phone. Why this isn’t necessary on cell numbers on Sam’s own network is a mystery. Additionally, the customer service agent informed Sam’s engineer friend that “just five minutes ago” the company became aware of a lag in sending texts between carriers. All of Sam’s friends communicate by text and very little by phone, so this was an issue when trying to contact them.
Sam’s Spanish is significantly worse than when he left and this frustrates everyone. For him to tell the portero at his apartment that he needed towels created a pantomime that was a combination of Marcel Marceau and Chubby Checkers. As of this time, he has not received the towels.
Yesterday, Sam was feeling a bit lost and decided to leave early from his apartment and walk to his Spanish lesson, a little over a mile away. A friend called him from the US (damn those roaming rates) and talked to him about interesting things. Sam ended up getting truly lost, sweaty, confused and anxious. He had to take a cab to make it to his class, but even so he was about 7 minutes late. He mentally rehearsed the words in Spanish for “sorry” and “I got lost walking.” He rang and rang the profesora’s bell but there was no answer. He decided to text her to find out if he had made a mistake. He sent the text and then realized that she would never receive it.
This is no comment on his upbringing, but we found that he had no class.
He looked in his notebook and saw that he had written viernes. He then remembered that viernes means Friday and not Thursday.
Sam is once again a stranger. He shyly points to things and seeks out places where he doesn’t have to speak. He is a child looking in a store window and thinking about how nice it would be to understand how to buy something.
Sam’s friends are busy with their own lives and he sees them little by little. Sam now lives part time in two places, and when he parachutes in by helicopter it can be hard to arrange social occasions. This is true in the US as well. The people here simply assume that Sam is never coming back when he leaves. The people in the US assume he is never coming back either. Like the Tom Hanks character in THE TERMINAL, he seems to live at the duty-free shop, just past passport control, but not yet on board.
Sincerely,
Department of Communication
Happy Accidents
“There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.”
–Jackson Pollock
Buenos Aires, March 21
When I was 16 years old, I wrote a short story. It was about a popular sitcom in which every character in the show was spun off into his or her own series. Ultimately, no actors were left on the set. The cameras continued to film the empty set and people watched faithfully each week. The narrator of the story, a television producer, ends the story by saying “I don’t know what they are watching, but it’s a hit.”
Hollywood, do NOT steal this idea. It is MINE.
The last month I have been back in the States and my story has been an empty set and yet people continue to read this blog. This surprises and delights me.
I am so less productive when I am home. My ADD kicks in and I can’t write at all. I don’t read very much. I am left working with my photographs, working out, playing Scrabble, watching silly comedy shows and pacing my apartment, putting papers and bills in piles and spending all day on line reading the news, looking for jokes, monitoring my two e-mail accounts and checking Facebook.
I am living in context, comfortable and nothing creative comes of it.
Now that I am back in Buenos Aires, I seem to have the ability to write again. I can once again mix the alien energies into a new synergy.
I am interested in how all creatives take disparate elements and whip them into an artistic souffle. It is a mysterious process in writing, but it happens all the time, and when the souffle comes out of the oven and doesn’t fall flat it just seems as if it was meant to be.
Something similar happens in photography. I take a photo and people and objects that I was not aware of come out when I crop and edit the photo.
I have a belief that creativity springs from happy accidents.
I am interested in the numerous dog walkers that dominate the daytime streets in Palermo. Here’s a picture I took in January of a dog walker near my apartment:
It has many elements that I like in photography: morning light, shadows, composition that includes several people in their candid moment. However, it is unsatisfying because the dogs are caught from behind.
Here is a photograph that I took yesterday:
I was interested in the pack of dogs and the unselfconscious concentration of the walker/texter. Since I took the picture from across the street and since I could not see the small screen on the camera, I had no idea that the three dogs nearest the walker were looking at me and that the underdog was smiling. They are arranged as a canine totem pole. A happy accident.
Here is a photo I took in San Telmo of one of the many feather duster salesman you see on the street:
I was following him and trying to snap photos. I had no conscious idea that he would have an arrangement of feather dusters that would remind people of a tribal dance and I certainly had no conscious idea that his dusters would so beautifully frame three women. This created three additional moments in the story.
The photo caught the notice of two artists friends, both named Susan. One is a painter and the other is a photographer. They pointed out elements in this photograph that I had never thought of before. For example, the pattern in the street pavers. The touch of turquoise. The cookies.
This is the joy of street photography. You see an interesting tableau and it becomes more interesting later.
When I go out, I feel that I am walking into a film and the scene unfolds around me. I often feel as if I am on a movie set. I walk around a market, marveling at the light and start taking pictures when I hear The Director calling “action.“
My photographer friend Susan has a very different style. Often she takes photographs and combines disparate elements into a new and very successful image. I asked her about how she creates her work and she responded:
My own creative process seems to be a contained found one. Like Burroughs who would cut out words and shake them up in a paper sack and shake them out and then make something of them, I take a lot of pictures then identify a theme I’m currently interested in, start with a file of pictures and then randomly access my data base of picture files and then deliberately make use of the random picture that I found. That is how the train and the dancers ended up incorporated into the moody night pics file. I shot that brick window wall…the other night. And a customer from the gallery said he was looking for jazz pictures so the theme emerged…Very little planning, creative use of what is.
For a creative, the random isn’t random at all. It is allowing the happy accident to stimulate creativity and create directions that have, on some level, been intended all along. Whether you shake words out of a sack, or you throw yourself onto an alien continent and try to learn things for which you have no special talent, taking yourself out of context is often the best way to have a fresh look.
An old joke:
An accountant was blindfolded and taken into a field.
When his blindfold was removed, the accountant saw a cow.
When asked what color the cow was, he answered:
“Brown…on one side.”
When I take the blindfold off, I see the color on the other side, too. How now, brown cow?
Breaking the Surface
Buenos Aires, February 8
Beneath the surface of the water lies an ever-expanding reservoir of self-doubt. I wistfully picture a life boat, a floatation vest, a flotilla of rescue ships, a Coast Guard helicopter hovering above with a friendly officer in a wet suit who offers me a strong hand that I grab gratefully. With remarkably white teeth that reflect the moonlight, he flashes me a rakish smile. He pulls me into an airship where I am wrapped in blankets and given hot strong coffee.
However, there is no rescue. There are two choices: ride the storm or abandon ship.
To abandon ship is too embarrassing. Like Odysseus, I tie myself to the mast, ignoring the siren song of quick abandonment.
I must find a way to rise out of the deep, to pull myself from the depths and move toward the light, break the surface, shake the water off like a Collie and breathe again.
Two weeks ago I hid in my apartment, afraid to go and interact with anyone. Countless times during my childhood I started a new discipline, whether learning the guitar or piano, playing tennis, or joining Cub Scouts. It wouldn’t take too long for me to give it up, teased out of it or talked out it by people who many times just were bored and claimed to only wish to “be honest.” I was easily discouraged and the guitar and the tennis racket or just about anything that caused me frustration or embarrassment would stay in the closet.
I had reached that point with studying Spanish. I didn’t have that smug self-congratulatory feeling I had felt when I had learned something easily in school. I was procrastinating and I didn’t want to do my homework. This was the second time I had arranged my change on the counter and the fourth time in the last fifteen minutes I had checked my e-mail. I wasn’t reading anything because I was guilty about reading in English when I should be studying my Spanish. I had four Tango lessons a week, but the thought of going into a milonga and actually asking a woman to dance seemed impossible.
My coach Bradley believed that I had been trying so hard to publish posts that I was keeping myself from experiencing the very things that would make the posts, and more importantly my life, interesting. We talked about going out and meeting people and trying to speak. I could feel the beginnings of shame and embarrassment travel up my neck and my cheeks were starting to burn. I was ready to last out the rest of my stay taking a few hours of lessons a day, silently handing cash to the clerk in the supermarket, and dining each night alone. That seemed so much easier.
I traced it back, as all neurotic psuedo-intellectuals do, to my childhood. I always thought about what Dr. Freud would say when he delved into my unconscious. I was the youngest of six cousins in a close extended family. At weekly family gatherings, it was a sport to trap me in small mistakes. This would lead to affectionate laughter. Some of it was cruel, some of it was okay, but it was all much less shameful than I perceived.
I lived in fear of misbehaving because I didn’t want to face my father’s and uncles’ stern faces and sharp lectures. I didn’t want anyone to laugh at me, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Yet my constant diet of Mad Magazine, the Flintstones and Looney Tunes made me want to get the laughs that I had solicited. Sometimes my jokes worked, sometimes they led to more lecturing, and sometimes the only sound after a joke was crickets.
I was sketching out a plan of retreat. The plane left in three weeks. I could write a piece or two about an entertainer on the Subte or a waiter that brought me cookies when I asked for a salad or whatever and no one would be the wiser. I could whine some more about how hard this is and how I am a wreck. Bradley was having none of it. He was challenging me to get out of the comfortable apartment on the shaded street and just do something. I felt that Bradley had some nerve and it was making me increasingly nervous.
Bradley and I started looking at Craigslist Buenos Aires (skipping my usual furtive peek into the personal and erotic services listings) and searched for some clubs for conversation. It seemed that most were for English practice for porteños and only one, “Spanglish,” had a Spanish component. It was no matter, though. I needed to make contact with the world. It was not unreasonable to think that if I met a porteño that wanted to improve his or her English that perhaps he or she would help me with my Spanish.
I went to the English Group of Buenos Aires. It was a pleasant evening in a cavernous and distracting venue. Although only English was spoken, I couldn’t hear or understand what anyone said. Yet, it was good to be out among people who were interested in me and friendly.
I started a friendship with Osmany, a Cubano who works in a nearby cafe. He is a friendly guy and he heard me struggling to talk in Spanish. He asked me where I was from, because he is learning French and English. We talked a bit in English and about his time in Buenos Aires. We also talked quite a bit about society and politics in Cuba. Now, I go back several times a week to get coffee and conversation.
The group Spanglish is an interesting structure for intercambio (language exchange) and it is set in a trendy bar in San Telmo, an old and charming part of the city. The fee is 15 pesos (about $4) and includes a beer. You wear a name tag and sit at a numbered table. The leaders instruct the participants to speak for 5 minutes in Spanish and 5 minutes in English. Then after the ten minute conversation, the speakers at each table change. By the end of the event, you’ve had about 7 or 8 Spanish and English conversations.
I was starting to realize that the best way for me to become more comfortable in Spanish was by making enough friends who would like to learn from my English. Each day in my afternoon Spanish classes, each Tango lesson, each Spanglish night I would speak a bit more and get a little more used to confronting my fears. I realize that I am not the best language student in the world, but it is also important to be of this world, rather than trapped in an apartment, marking the days off the calendar like a convict in San Quentin.
I also joined a service called Conversation Exchange, that matches people who want to practice their target language with a native speaker. In Buenos Aires, there are many people who place their names on the listings for this service.
Through Conversation Exchange, I had arranged a meeting with Laura, a 30-year old porteña, who arrived a bit late. Both by her appearance and by her accent she seems French but she is a native of Buenos Aires. She proceeded to tell me of her years in Paris and Vancouver. She is quite fluent in both French and English and I struggled through a bit of Spanish. I told her about my project and how it was about discovering new things at fifty. She said that when she had seen my contact, she felt it was fine to meet because she would talk to anyone from 20 to 80. After that comment I felt much closer to the latter than to the former.
Laura had been late and she invited me to go with her to meet her next conversation partner, Douglas.
We met Douglas, a Canadian of Thai descent also in his thirties, who moved his family to Buenos Aires 8 months ago. Once in the company of a native English speaker, I relaxed and talked more in Spanish. Of course, Douglas was more fluent, but I followed everything everyone was saying and added a bit of my own. I felt happy and relaxed.
Douglas is a lawyer and an investment manager whose ambition is to open a restaurant in Buenos Aires. A foodie through and through, he wrote down the name of an interesting Armenian restaurant and of its best dish.
Laura works for the Ministry of Culture and there was a concert in el Centro to which she invited Douglas and I to accompany her and a friend to see. Douglas demurred because it was family time. I decided to follow along.
We went to Laura’s friend Maca’s apartment and spent a little time talking before the concert. Maca, an actress, is a school friend of Laura’s from Paris and until we walked into the apartment, Laura had no idea Maca could speak English. 5 hours, two liters of cerveza, and a skipped concert later, the three of us had entertained ourselves with one of the best late-night bull sessions I have had since college. Maca and Laura said the only reason they talked to me for so long was that they planned to steal my money and my passport. Alas, their ambitions were thwarted.
I blearily slid into a cab and headed back to mi casa in Palermo at the end of an unplanned, over-extended, and very happy day. I had opened myself to the world and allowed myself to experience new people and new things with no plan. The pool of language that had seemed so overwhelming to me just two weeks before now appeared smaller. Even though I still needed water wings, I didn’t think I would drown.
Sink Or Swim
About poker: If you look around the table and you can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.
–Spoken by Paul Scofield in QUIZ SHOW
BUENOS AIRES, JANUARY 23-27
The water is cold. Too cold for swimming. I dangle my feet to keep cool in the heat.
I am sitting on the edge of a pool at my friend Joaquin’s apartment building. There are lots of families enjoying the sultry Saturday afternoon. Joaquin and I are busy talking about the difference between Argentine politics and American politics. Corruption versus Incompetence, or maybe both.
There are two young boys swimming in front of us. One is chubby, the other wiry. I find out later that they are brothers and that the chubby one is six years old. They have heard me speaking Spanish. The six-year year old swims near me and says, “Hel-low.” I say hello back. He swims over to his brother and they have a short conference. He swims back and says deliberately, “My name is Facundo. What is yours?” “My name is Sam.” He swims back to his brother and they have another conference. “What do you do?” “I swim,” I say making a motion like a breaststroke. He dives back under the water and goes back to his brother. They have another conference and Joaquin tells me Facundo is telling his brother that it is his turn. Negotiations ensue, but the brother is the author, Facundo the messenger. Facundo swims back and says, “I play football. What do you play?” “I play tennis.” “I am six years old.” “I am fifty years old.” Finally, the other brother runs out of questions to write for Facundo and they say “chau” and swim away.
It has been a difficult week. I realize that my Spanish is bad and has become worse since I spent the month back home. When I attempt to use it, no one understands me and I don’t understand anyone. I go into a pastry shop and attempt to buy some medialunas mantecas, the delicious little croissants that form the basis of my diet here, but the counter girl doesn’t understand my gringo accent and I have to say ME-DI-A-LU-NAS. I order tres and she gives me seis. More negotiations ensue.
I don’t understand the simple word “cincuenta” for a 50-centavo piece. I walk down the street rehearsing what I will say in Spanish for “I don’t speak well. I am a student. It is good that we speak Spanish.” I go to school and there are two young Brazilians in my class and they chatter on rapidly and confidently since Castellano Spanish is so close to Portuguese. The review sections of the unit I understand–the grammar is clear—but the conversation between the pretty profesora and the two Brazilians swoops past me like a boomerang and occasionally the boomerang circles and hits me on the back of my head.
My friends that have learned other languages tell me that I should immerse myself. Practice. Practice. Practice.
I write no posts for a few days. I watch television, both English with Spanish subtitles, which helps me review a bit, and news and cartoons in Spanish, which frustrates me, because as in my eavesdropping on the street and in the Subte, I can only make out words, not meaning.
I try to talk, but aphasia sets in. I remember the right verb conjugation three minutes after the encounter. I have to say “como?” to everyone who speaks to me.
My distraction becomes the butt of jokes for the brasileros. They believe it is the result of my obvious attraction to most of the pretty girls who work at the school or study there. I must be broadcasting lust, an antenna beaming out phallic waves, the beeping of Morse Code punctuating my loss of concentration.
On Friday, we have to work longer because one of our instructors was out sick Thursday and we have to make up a class. In the final hour, I completely lose my comprehension. I can’t understand any of the illustrations or definitions of the grammar points. The brasileros rattle on about the financial crisis, about travel, about their families. My male instructor tries to engage me in conversation; the others are talking very loudly; there is construction noise on both sides of me; the sunlight is streaming into the atrium outside the classroom; the visual scene attracts my attention. A very pretty girl paces back and forth, swishing in and out of the sunshine. She has a summer dress cut about a foot above her knee. Each time she walks into the sunshine the light shines through her dress and highlights the entire length of her long legs. Other students join her on their break. One girl has on a pretty white skirt with translucent material and she talks to her friends with her back to me. The light plays a similar trick, but with the longer length of her skirt and the white fabric’s gauzy haze, the visual pleasure is even greater.
The male student notices notices my attention deficit and asks me if he should close the curtains to keep down my distractions. The instructor notes that this is a “problema masculino.” I say it is the noise. No one buys it. The Spanish words run together in a blur, and outside the girls and their friends chat very loudly. A crew drills on one side of the classroom, bringing memories of the dentist. On the other side is hammering, the thumping enhancing the throbbing in my head.
The lesson moves quickly and the instructor sees I am not following along. He sniffs the air and asks if the problem is “la perfuma de las mujeres.” I blush and squirm. I am replicating the dreamy distractions of classrooms of long ago.
I am relieved to leave the class, but I am now intimidated and afraid. There must be another method to learn. I go to the newsstand to buy some magazines, taking some of Tim Ferriss’s language-learning advice. One of the titles is Psicología Positiva, an autoayuda (self-help) publication. One of the articles is 20 maneras de renovar tu vida. (20 ways to improve your life.) One of the points says:
Afrontá un miedo por día. “No ha aprendido la lección de la vida aquel que no vence un temor cada dia.—Ralph Emerson.
(Face one fear a day. “He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson)
I’m facing big fears every day. I have always been intimidated by new social situations and feel self-conscious meeting new people. I have no special aptitude for learning language. I am afraid of making mistakes and looking stupid. My ego doesn’t allow me to function when I am the slow kid in the class.
I shudder as I write this.
When I talk with my coach about the problem, he speculates that I am not a particularly verbal person and that I learn visually. I’m confused. My friends would laugh because of my incessant punning and sometimes exhaustingly long stories (perhaps like this one?) I ask how I can be a writer if I am not verbal.
My coach says, “you write in pictures.” I take pictures, too.
Tuesday, I have a Tango lesson in a new studio. I confidently mark it on the map and set off in the Subte, get off and walk the ten minutes to the location. I am early. I walk to the address and it is a parking lot. I recheck my notebook and it is the address that my instructor Guadalupe wrote down. I look at my map and I have a different street name written down. I wait a few minutes and I still do not see Guadalupe. I worry that maybe I misinterpreted the computer map and I start walking through the neighborhood looking for that other street. It does not exist.
I have forgotten my cell phone, so there is no way I can check with Guadalupe and no way she can check with me.
On top of the slight depression and discouragement I felt earlier in the day, I now start to feel extremely anxious. I know that Guadalupe has written down the wrong number, but I feel slightly culpable because I left the cell at home.
This is a Jewish neighborhood. Gentlemen with wide-brimmed hats and long black coats file by. Very young women dressed in headscarves push carriages with young babies. There are boys that run by me playing that universal chasing game that all children play, their peyos (curled sideburns) swishing back and forth. They hold their yarmulkes in their hands so they do not lose them as they speed up. The Casher (Kosher) butcher shop is fragrant with the smell of meat and blood.
I know how to get back to my apartment and yet I am lost. I don’t know how to ask anyone for help. I don’t know how to call Guadalupe. I am increasingly anxious and I regret missing the lesson. I worry that she will have to pay the studio rent and will miss out on the income from the lesson. The street signs are missing on some of the corners. I check again the name of the street she wrote down and the address doesn’t exist.
I am in a dream. Time slows down. The people dressed in clothes from the old country silently float by. These are the people of my people, the Jews, yet we are foreign to each other. They are so much more religiously observant that they look at me as one of the goyim. I am your lansman (fellow Jew), I say to myself, but it is pointless.
Even though I try to rehearse questions, the Spanish words will not rise to the surface. I have jumped headfirst into an ever-deepening pool of language. Occasionally, I tread water on the surface but then I fall under again, ever deeper. I swim back to the surface, fighting for air. Another wave of words crashes down on me and I sink again.
The water is cold.
Making Change Happen
BUENOS AIRES, January 22
As I waited in the bank line, I mused that buried deep in this country’s character is a resistance to change…or at least a resistance to giving it out.
In the busy shopping streets you hear a rapid patter from men dressed in nice clothes:
Cambio Cambio… Casa de Cambio… Cambio Cambio Cambio… Casa de Cambio…
These are the independent foreign exchange (Cambio) brokers. Most of the time, the Cambio windows at the banks or the ubiquitous Cambio agencies will exchange at a better rate. This process can be quite time-consuming and usually the Cambio agencies exchange using the largest bills possible.
$100 US will currently buy $340 Argentine Pesos. After a lot of paperwork and double-checking passport stamps, the agent will hand you three $100 peso notes and two $20 peso notes. If you attempt to make an ATM withdrawal, your only choice is to withdraw $100 peso notes.
However, no one wants to accept $100 peso notes. If you have one, the response will usually be “tienes algo más chica?” (Do you have something smaller?) If you have large notes you start to strategically spend them at supermercados and nicer restaurants and gather your smaller bills and coins.
My project this week has been to save the right coins to do my laundry. I needed two one-peso coins and two 25 centavo coins for each load. I went from kiosco to kiosco shopping for the right sodas that would yield the 25 centavo coins and strategically handing out five peso notes for four peso items so that I could get one peso coins. Occasionally I would get disappointed and get back two 50 centavo coins instead of a one peso coin. I probably spent 40 pesos before I was able to save the right combination of coins.
I thought maybe this was a problem with my poor Spanish or my foreign passport, but when I paid my Tango instructor Guadalupe part of her fee in coins, she thanked me profusely. She told me that one night she went to 15 kioscos looking to buy something so that she could get enough change to ride the bus.
I went into a bank today determined to change four $100 peso notes to unas billetes mas chicas. I waited in line and the grumpy man in front of me cursed under his breath at the chatty young woman who couldn’t quite complete her transaction with the stern teller.
After Señor Grumpy deposited his check, I proudly placed my bills on the tray and correctly pronounced the right words in Spanish. I rocked back and forth on my heels, congratulating myself on my financial and linguistic acumen.
In Spanish, my banker said “change for one note only.” I did not dare to question him because I was grateful to accept whatever change he would give me.
SEE ALSO: NEW YORKER ARTICLE “Change We Can’t Believe In.” 6/8/2009
Le Béret: Groaners
Le Béret, Guest Contributor
–My editor told me I should use a semi-colon, but first I have to consult my gastroenterologist.
–I tried to buy a monocle shop, but I couldn’t handle the fine print.
–FOR SALE: One slightly dented unicycle. Neck brace included.
-
Writer Photographer Man of Mystery
Sam Krisch
-
Sam's Flickr Photo Blog
More Photos
