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.
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
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