The Foreigners (2 page)

Later that afternoon, following a visit from my mother, my friend Brian stopped by.

“You know what you should do?” he said, after hearing the news. “Take a trip.”

“A trip?” I asked, vaguely surprised. I had traveled with my husband to Portugal, Morocco and Greece but, apart from that semester in college when I'd lived in Barcelona, I'd never gone anywhere on my own.

“Yeah, anywhere. Just go somewhere. I know,” he said. “I'm on this board now. I can arrange for you to get a grant. But it would have to be in urban studies.” That was his field.

“Oh, God.”

“Don't worry. It doesn't matter if you do it. The point is to get you some money to go somewhere. Let's see. You speak Spanish, right? Yeah, I think I can work it out.”

This was how I found myself one month later in the airport on my way to Buenos Aires with a grant to study the public waterworks of the city. They say that every hospitalization is a journey. They also say that when people enter the hospital, they leave part of themselves outside. Maybe the conjunction of these two elements explains the estrangement you feel on leaving. Part of you has taken a journey, of which the other part is ignorant. Part of you returns, reencounters the part you left outside. The two of you do what you can to proceed. It was in this state of estrangement that I set out.

My stint in the hospital had made it clear how little is actually known by doctors, by ourselves, about the human condition. “We're all tapping along in the dark,” as one neurologist who examined me put it. In the airport, waiting for my plane to board, I was leafing through a magazine when I glanced up and caught a glimpse of what looked like the head doctor from the hospital. He was standing in profile, about ten yards away. Then he turned and approached the set of seats where I was. Now I could see, it was definitely him. He was small, with green eyes set somewhat close. I had never seen him out of his hospital gown. I immediately had the reflex to hide, as if I was doing something wrong, as if, if he saw me, I'd be forbidden to leave. While before I'd felt somewhat baffled by my actions, suddenly it seemed quite imperative that I leave. I ducked out of sight, put on some new sunglasses I'd bought whose lenses were especially, even too, dark. The trip took on an air of the forbidden. Although I hadn't been aware of it until this moment, I seemed to be living it as a renegade expedition.

 

 

My first days in Buenos Aires were sufficiently disorienting to absorb my full attention. It was April, autumn, and the city seemed to have a lugubrious air. All the stereotypical melancholic idea was there, pervasive, stinking like the waters in the La Boca zone, and this even more so because of the recent economic crash. My own financial situation was steady for the moment—along with the grant money, I had some savings, and since the peso had been devalued, everything was cheap. I was staying in the house of a woman in her late sixties named Cecilia until I got my bearings, also an arrangement made by Brian.

The apartment was on the second floor and, as I would later learn, like all middle- and upper-class Buenos Aires apartments, had a balcony with plants. Outside on the street, the very loud buses went by. The plants fluttered. The tiny china plates on gold hooks on the walls quivered. The polished dining room table was never used. On the sideboard was a large crystal liquor container surrounded by crystal glasses. The furniture, Cecilia liked to say, was French. The upholstered couches and chairs, salmon pink, were covered in plastic so as not to get stained by people who never came. When you sat there in warm weather, the plastic stuck to your legs. There were life-size portrait photographs of Cecilia's two children receiving communion. The rooms were kept ready, waiting for the children, someone, but no one ever came.

In the meantime, Cecilia, like many others, had had all access to her savings blocked by the recent bank debacle. The money was floating in some unidentified place, who knew if ever to be seen again, which meant that she either had to sell her apartment and move to a smaller, humbler place or go out and get a job. The only thing she had was her apartment. She had decided to get a job and worked now in a travel agency, long hours, five days a week.

It seemed to me that there was in this woman's life a shadowy flickering of my own, hopes suspended, though her case, of course, was more extreme. Still the resemblance would sometimes make me feel that I was drowning and I'd wake up in the night in an appalling state, feverish, with the sensation that a substance was flooding my lungs. Lying there, I'd picture the streets of Buenos Aires flooded with dark water, up, up over my head. I'd see Cecilia trying to make her way home from work, battling against the current, now well past her thighs. Another time, on waking, I had the distinct impression that a being was holding me from behind, a sort of fiend, clutching me tight, which later struck me as an almost miraculous embodiment of some allegorical idea of death. The life-size photographic figures of the absent children would dance before my eyes. Or else I'd dream of crowds.

An aspect of the city, especially prevalent at the moment, was protesting crowds. They could be found on any given day. All you had to do was step out into the street and listen. They were often around the Pink House, the residence of the president, but would also move through the streets. I found myself gravitating toward them. People would be milling around in one location, sometimes banging pots and pans. Occasionally the crowd would erupt, the police arriving, everyone running. But it was strange because, while for me the crowds during the day offered solace—I would find myself drawn toward them and enclosed there—in my nightmare visions, they did not. The crowds in my mind took the form of insects, reptilian animals, they were crawling over me, invading my bed, or simply a repeated pattern, of light, squirmy shapes, seething, retreating, coming forward again.

Apart from these visions, there was nothing particularly notable about my loneliness, or rather it was all that there was, all that was there. Go back? That was not an option either. Utopia has been defined for many as not what you go toward but what you get away from, utopia because it's not the old life. No matter what it offered, Buenos Aires was in that sense utopia for me.

I did have enough lucidity to realize that my living situation was degrading my outlook. Cecilia, despite her dire straits, refused to accept any payment for the room I was using. This, combined with the bizarre visions the apartment was provoking in my mind, led me to set about looking for a place. From the newspaper I contacted a real estate agency and was assigned to an agent named Olga.

Olga was Bolivian and had a face that looked like it had been carved onto a coin, large olive-colored eyes with visible lids, a straight nose, her long light brown hair tinged with gold pulled back in a ponytail tight from her face. She took me around in taxis, was quick and efficient and her English was good.

“Argentines say this is the widest avenue in the world,” Olga said as we crossed the 9 de Julio. “But Argentines say a lot of things, like that they invented the artificial heart.”

The taxi driver turned and said something to her. She shot back a long line of heated invectives that I couldn't catch.

“See,” she said, “he hears my accent and thinks because I'm Bolivian he can say anything to me. They're all like that.”

“Who?”

“Argentines. They think they're better than the rest of us.”

The taxi driver laughed, enjoying her spitfire behavior.

As we drove around, she told me that she was married but didn't live with her husband anymore, though they almost always had dinner together. “No, no,” she said, “he's not someone you live with.” She had a son, twenty years old now. She was a businesswoman. That was her identity and she was proud of it. “My son always gives me presents for a businesswoman, pens, leather cases.”

I liked Olga but one after another of the apartments she took me to gave me an appalling sense of suffocation. They were fluffy white boxes of varying sizes, all in the central area, Barrio Norte and downtown. Even the apartments with more than one room felt close and small, the appliances brand new, the floorboards painted.

Our search went on for a week or so.

“There's a last apartment if you actually want to see it,” Olga said one day. “I don't like the place at all. I hate old buildings. I hate everything old. I want everything to be new, new, new.”

We crossed the 9 de Julio again and stopped in front of a building with a large door, incongruous with all the doors around, on Carlos Pellegrini Street.

“I don't like this place,” Olga said again as we stepped inside, both pressing open the heavy door.

There was a wide passageway with a tiled floor. The far wall didn't go all the way up to the ceiling, leaving an open-air space. Later, I saw that the hallways on all the floors were like this, partly open to the air. Flowers and leaves would fall inside. It would rain on the floor.

“This place is abandoned,” Olga said. “I never see anyone here.”

We walked up the wide dim staircase to the second floor. The door of the apartment resisted, as if it hadn't been opened for a while. Inside, the place had a kept, cut-off air. It was silent. Vines lined the windows outside. There was a chaise lounge covered in worn purple velvet. You felt in your own world, cut off from the rest.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Olga said.

But there was something about it I liked.

“I'll take it,” I said.

 

 

The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, exiled in Buenos Aires because of World War II, and then staying on, wrote about the seediness of the ports. In passages of his diaries, where the sense suddenly darkens, blurs, we enter a vacuum, he talks about his activity in the ports, these meetings with young men. It's the youth of Buenos Aires that intrigued him, the beautiful youth. He describes his own rejuvenation there, culminating in a moment when, vertiginous in the company of young people, he goes off to the bathroom and, looking in the mirror, sees the lines all over his face and, for the first time really, understands that he's old.

Now the ports, as they once were, are gone. Instead in that spot there's an artificial city under construction, largely the work of Russian developers, flashy hotels, apartment complexes, illuminated patches of grass. To get back to the city from the ports you have to cross a wasteland, on the other side of which lies what is known as “downtown.”

The streets of downtown, bustling during the day, are abandoned at night as if they hadn't been inhabited for years. Your footsteps sound against them. What's odd is that unlike in the rest of the city, here there's no green. Everywhere else the streets are lined with trees, the balconies of the apartments are deluged with plants, green above and green below. Often, as you're walking, water drips down on your head from plants that have just been watered above. Then there are the trees that drip naturally, the tipa. At certain times of the year, due to the parasite
Cephisus siccifolius
, which sucks the sap from the tree and excretes it in the form of a sugary liquid, the passerby, walking under, feels specks of water, like very light rain. Flamboyant, the Buenos Aires trees bloom not once but at several seasons. The jacaranda tree has pale purple blossoms that fall off long before they're withered, littering the ground with pale purple trumpets; the palo borracho has pink blossoms, hand-size, the whole tree flames up with them; the small yellow flowers on the tipa trees give off a dizzying smell.

All the green downtown is collected in the Plaza San Martín. Against the trees here, so tall, a human is an insect. A lawn slopes down to the main avenue. Just beyond is the bus station, Retiro, also known as a site for seedy activity (don't, you're told, go there at night, unless you're looking for seedy activity, in which case, do), and the port beyond. On the lawn that falls down from the Plaza San Martín, people lie out to sunbathe or sleep, exhausted in the middle of the workday. You can find men in business suits, women in stockings, eyes closed, passed out. People come here to kiss. In the evenings, in the darker spots, near where there are trees, you could practically make love, and people do. You think at first that everyone in Buenos Aires is in love. Then you realize that, in fact, many people live with their parents until much later in life, through their thirties, into their forties even. This is even more the case after the crash, when people who did have their own apartments gave them up and moved back home. So of course everyone's always making out everywhere. They have nowhere else to go. Unless they can afford a hotel room. The city is full of these. You can find one on nearly every corner. You pay for two hours. (In Brazil, in these same hotels, you pay for three hours, a difference that has given rise to much speculation.) The rooms are often decorated with themes: ancient Greece, New York, the jungle room. There's a plastic sheet to protect the mattress.

When night comes, the Buenos Aires streets are alive with people who live on the periphery in slums and come in in dilapidated vehicles or horse-drawn wooden carts to sift through garbage. They collect the recyclables and bring them back to a warehouse where they're sorted. They're paid a piddling amount for all that labor, which is orchestrated through a corruption ring, the proceeds from which barely get them through the day, until evening comes and they go out again. In certain neighborhoods, there are no vestiges of this underlife during the day. The sun shines down on the Parisianstyle buildings—the sun nearly always shines in Buenos Aires—and the glinting breezes blow up from the river, only to be interrupted occasionally by an abrupt downpour out of the blue, thundering ropes of rain that flood all the streets—the drainage system needs attention—and then just as abruptly cease, leaving the streets still flooded and, in certain neighborhoods where rents are cheaper for this very reason, even the houses flooded, all the first floors. Old women, unable to get from their places of work to the bus stop, can be seen wading knee-high against the current. Cars make turns on flooded corners, the water off the wheels spraying up in swaths, then pummeling down on storefront windows. Very, very slowly, the water goes down. When will they refurbish the drains? Surely not now, not for a while.