delta

Our time in Georgia was air-conditioned from beginning to end. Atlanta is just an airport, albeit the busiest. It is also a city, but the airport came first. The plan of the building is unavoidably diagrammatic; it has no scale, no reference other than a plane, a runway, all of which are in any case arbitrary benchmarks - the Airbus 440 that we saw from the windows of the waiting area looked impossible in itself, dwarfing the transatlantic Boeings. I looked at the map, a long spine from which dozens of arms spread, drawings of planes suckling on each one; some questions arose - does the Airbus make the airport bigger or smaller? What colour is the building? Can you walk from the airport to the city centre? - None of these questions are worth asking though. Those that spend the most amount of time there don’t even think about it – the runway staff, the airport police (on segways), the pilots and everybody else just get on with things, and a new reality is created. It is a place where 90% of commuters don’t see the building as we know the term, sucked as they are from a plane through customs to another plane, and none of these people, none of them, care. This is the new built environment, and when it is normalised, we will call other things strange.

The most alarming thing in the airport was the number of soldiers, marines, all heading to or returning from war. There seemed to be thousands of them; tight-knit groups of mostly teenagers, staring intently ahead of them, receiving solemn glances from other people. I couldn’t tell who was coming or going. All of them in grey fatigues, marked with a name badge and a flag. We all sat together in the food hall waiting for an aeroplane to take us away; there was nothing else to do.

The flight to Buenos Aires was good. We arrived early and I was looking forward to talking to people; we asked about getting into the city – it is 46km from the airport, and there were taxis which cost 118 pesos or buses which cost 1 peso, but you need change for the bus, so I had to find change, all I had was 100 peso notes and nobody will give you change of a hundred, nobody will even sell you anything for a hundred pesos. I would later find out that the lack of coins was a side-effect of the devalued currency after the economic collapse – coins were rare because people were taking them across the border to Bolivia and melting them. When Duhalde defaulted on Argentinean loans and abandoned the peso-dollar parity in Jan 2002 the currency lost so much strength that the metal of the coins became more valuable than their face value. It is still done, and change is still a problem but it’s becoming less profitable now, and it is hoped that soon it won't be worth the hassle. I finally got change from a bank in the terminal and we were on our way.

el corralito

We took the bus as far as we could and got a taxi the rest of the way to the hostel. The journey in from the airport involved strange detours and one stop in a petrol station. We went round a roundabout twice. When we finally arrived inside what felt like the city we soon realised that we would never understand it – the street that leads to the centre was perhaps 25km long. We had help with directions from the rest of the people on the bus, all of them, each with an opinion; one guy took charge though and told us where to get off, where to walk to, and how much to pay in the cab. Our taxi driver was a decent old man called Antonio. His people were Italian, they moved out after the war. We talked and he seemed to follow us most of the time, with some exceptions:

Me - y cómo és el uso del voseo?

Him – eh? El boxeo?

Me – no no, el uso de vos!

Him – pero que uso?

Me – de vos!

Him – che, nadie me está usando para nada!

And we pulled into our hostel in Palermo. We offloaded and headed out to the streets, our first stop was in a little coffee shop where we met a Colombian guy from Bogotá who told us where to find the best empanadas in the city but we didn’t find them. Palermo is huge and beautiful, and only one third of one of the 100 barrios of Buenos Aires (there is also Palermo Hollywood and Palermo Chico). The first day we wandered around and found a gorgeous place to eat, a lovely starter of blended carrot and tomato in a shot glass and a huge steak. The following day we rented bikes and cycled for hours, and then days, to the parks, to recoleta cemetery, to Colegiales to see graffiti, to the house where Gardel was born, to Barrio Once where they say do not go, to calle Lanin where the kerbs are painted all colours, to the architecture faculty of la nacional. We sailed to Uruguay in a day and drove a moped around Colonia, we kayaked through the delta of the Rio Plata in Tigre. I became a member of the Biblioteca Nacional. We went into a shop that sold a variety of dolls and nothing else, all handmade and stitched, all weird, non-existent animals, perhaps from Borges´ Chinese Encyclopedia. (Palermo is full of these shops, most with a half-life of 6 months, selling one thing at a time – belt buckles, customised towels, almonds. Later on at a market we would find a shop that sold, exclusively, vintage imperial weighing scales.) I filmed ewa cycle across an 18 lane avenue that smears itself through the city. We saw a guy walking 13 dogs at the same time. We met a Chilean lady and her daughter who invited us to lunch in Santiago. We went to one of a million tango clubs and saw the same band playing a week later on the streets. I suffered, from severe headaches, weakness, diarrhoea and constipation, a strange rash on my inside leg. I made promises that I didn’t keep, and some that I did.

A week into our trip we visited a friend of ewa´s aunt who grew up in Poland. Lucy is married to Domingo. Their daughter is Carolina who is married to Joselo. They themselves have two children, Ciro and Beltran. Domingo looks like he is carved from hardwood; he has the presence of a totem pole. The scar on his forehead is more like a knot in a tree trunk. He traces his ancestry to the indigenous Indians of the river plate and he hates Diego Maradona as much as he hates the current government. He wanted to know if I was half gay when I arrived with flowers for his wife; I liked him immediately. He took me into the garden to show me the meat he was preparing for us all. He had made enough. Carolina and Joselo are both dentists – they were fascinated with my crossbite, they noticed it immediately. They have a dog called Ringo Starr. Domingo played me his tango records and told me about the dances in the fifties (tango was the easiest chance of getting your hands on a woman – so when they put on a jazz record we´d all hit the bar...jazz is shite!). Lucy recorded a message in Polish for Krzrysha, she sounded like a child speaking it, a bright young child. It was lovely, she seemed to find the right words out of nowhere.

We ate soon after we got there, not much messing around, and it was great, we talked a great deal, argued, laughed a lot, and we left with new friends. Domingo grabbed my arm fiercely as we left and told me that when you have a good feeling about someone, that feeling will always exist. I told him that I felt the same. I also wanted to tell him that what he said sounded totally gay, but it would have been lost. Plus I was wearing his shorts at the time. Caro and Jose offered to take us to the train station, but we stopped in the guys’ apartment before we got there, and we had another beer. They explained to us how insane it was during the collapse – the government allowed a maximum withdrawal of 150$ per week, the corralito as it was known. The middle classes were ruined; all savings were withheld and as the currency weakened their money was lost. They took to the streets, millions of people, and a state of siege was declared. The country saw 5 presidents in 2 weeks. But those in cash businesses – taxi drivers, corner shop owners, and especially street vendors - those were the most affected. Having no backup, they were destroyed. Many of them are cartoneros now, cardboard collectors that sell it by the kilo to recycling plants for a pittance. We talked about this. It was difficult to see it as something that happened in a civilised country less than 10 years ago. The two of them were broke when it hit, but they started from scratch and saved up a living. They live in an apartment near San Miguel in the outskirts of the city, and they have bought land to build a house. All things considered they are doing well.

They walked with us to the train station to see us off that night. Ciro likes trains apparently, and he stared at one as it arrived at another platform. But this train was different – it had open carriages, and people sat on the sides with their legs hanging over the edge. Those that got on at the station carried plastic bags full of cans, and cardboard tied up with twine. It was a free train, offered by the government to encourage those from the shanty towns in the outskirts to come in to the centre and collect the rubbish. Women travelled with their children, young men look bent but unbroken. Many have moved out to the slums, non-places that have multiplied since the collapse. They make the trip daily and, it seems, unbegrudgingly, though many have respiratory problems as a result of walking the streets every day, and encountering heroin needles is a common danger. The indignity that they suffered seems to be long gone, they just get on with things, but I couldn’t help wishing that a day would come in which instead of cleaning the plastic and cardboard from the streets they would make it to the casa rosada and rid it of the real trash. Ciro waved to the people in the train and a few people that saw him waved back; our train came shortly after and we said our goodbyes.

huevon

Through its hypocrisies and inequities, through all the stench, I developed a love for this city of Buenos Aires, and for all the people that I met - Antonio our taxi driver, the jogger crossing the road, the girl in Palermo with the portfolio, the old guy outside the pharmacy selling coffee, our first waiter, our friends in San Miguel, the owner of che lulu, the kids playing football in la boca, everybody else we met except a prick in a bike shop in san telmo that tried to rent us bikes for 600 pesos a week, this guy was a prick. After two weeks here, we found ourselves very comfortable. In fact we hadn’t planned to stay that long, but it happened that Fabian Aristizabal came back from Colombia a week later than expected and we were to stay with him. My old friend who I hadn’t seen in over ten years had us over to his place; he was arriving back from Bogotá when we were sailing back from Colonia. We called into his apartment before he got back. Gabriela (another friend from Bogotà) had a brother (Manolito) staying there while Fabian was away, and we talked for ages and ages but it got so late that we went to go, I didn’t want to but ewa thought it best to let them have a quiet return and we would come back and see them in the morning. We headed downstairs but I knew, I knew we would see them. I knew it insofar as I believed it, and it came to pass. At 1.30 in the morning when we made it down to the street to grab a taxi, just as we were heading onto the main avenue, I saw the shape of Ura who I had only seen in photographs. Wait, I said, wait, and yeah, it was them! Fabian smiley and hairy, wearing a short-sleeved shirt that went down to just above his knees and had two little pockets down low to the front – thigh pockets. He was carrying a huge box that was falling to bits, no doubt from being opened and closed a thousand times by customs. They left stuff back in their apartment, had a bit of a wash and said hi to the cat. He hadn’t changed a bit; he still looked like a caricature of himself. Hugs and kisses and then we went out for drinks, to a Polish bar no less, complete with a mammoth Pole behind the bar, predictably enough called Tadeusz. He was the owner and let ewa put on whatever music she wanted. We sat and talked until 6 in the morning and took a taxi home.

The next day, Saturday, we called back to Fabian. It is funny to see the guy married, but this is the way it goes. Ura is lovely and serious in equal measure. They have a really great apartment, a nice balcony garden and they’ve done some not so bad renovations on the place. When we got there they were baked, Manuel included. They were unloading the box of stuff Fabian brought back from Colombia, full of sauces, coffee, spices, and a big box of kids chocolate bars, like animal bars, but inside you got a little sticker of an animal. And not just a cow, a snake, a bear, but specific species, each with their taxonomy. There were about 500 bars in the box but that number was decreasing. Ura had a sticker book out, the one that went with the chocolate bars if you were a serious collector (the Argentineans are great collectors); she was delighted because she had just got the tropical capybara to complete the Animals from the Pantanal section. We smoked a quick one and went in search of the rare and elusive arctic fox to finish the Tundra Predators set, but we gave up 10 bars in. I called home to say hi to the folks, and we headed out to Chinatown to eat something and walk around. Chinatown is weird in Buenos Aires, weird in its normalcy; the Chinese here are the same as anywhere else, with a bit of an Argentinean accent when they talk to you in Spanish. We ate for a bit, stuff on sticks, strange rolls and balls, and some beer. We took a bus back to San Telmo and got sorted out for a barbeque a friend of Fabi was having on the roof of his apartment. He is married to a German girl who seems to have planned the whole thing. Roberto, the guy, was sound, and lived in Dublin 10 years ago and knows Rory Murphy. More interestingly he is related to Frankey Rey, the man who discovered la ciudad perdida in 1972, the same guy who took me on a tour of the place in 1999. There was good craic, the chef was a Uruguayan lunatic who never shut up about women (a woman is like a harp, and a harp is like a dolphin, and a dolphin is like a rake, and a rake is like a chimney, and a chimney is like a woman, this kind of shit), and there was a Chilean couple and loads of porteños, and loads of Colombians. There was a musical duo that played boring stuff on a saxophone and piano but then everybody sat around the pool and drank aguardiente and smoked and had the craic. There was a pissed up madman there from Bogotá called Pablo who talked to everyone with su merced and was basically a deranged drunk. He wanted to go home with everyone who was leaving, and then when we were going to take him home he wanted to stay, and then he wanted to come with us. He made me nearly piss myself, he was so funny (si se va su merced a san telmo pues yo me voy con su merced huevon); ewa and I headed off with Ura and Fabian ended up driving round with him for ages in a cab trying to get him to remember where he lived but he couldn’t, so Fabian just left him back with Roberto and came home.

The next day was brilliant too, through markets and parks and bars, to the edge of the city, and later to an Armenian restaurant which was the best meal I have ever had, I can’t describe the flavours. It was great, and a nice last meal with the guys. When we got back we sorted out bags and I left my Nietzsche book with Fabian. The next morning we said our goodbyes, to our friends and to Buenos Aires, and we flew to the one of the last towns before the Antarctic Circle.