by Maggie Downs
I’ve been in this city for more than two weeks, and I know it’s time for me to move on, but whenever I consider leaving, I am filled with a desperate sense of longing. I’m tempted to call off the remainder of my trip to stay in Buenos Aires. I can’t pinpoint the source of that desire, though—I don’t know if this is where I could really stay or if this is just a passing moment of comfort. Either way, I wish I could sustain it. This is as satisfied as I’ve been in a long time.
It makes me wonder about the nature of home, what it means to feel so comfortable in a place where I have no roots, no right to stay, and no reason to belong.
They say home is where the heart is. But there’s no easy idiom to apply to my situation: If I am scattering tiny pieces of my heart all over the globe, what does that mean for my sense of home? How will I ever belong anywhere when parts of me are forever in exile? My heart is in a condo in California, nuzzling the warm crook of my husband’s neck. My heart is in a nursing home in Ohio, tucked inside my mom’s sterile white bed. Now my heart is here, in a city that is bright and complex and as sweet as nectar, a city that I love in part because I first feared it.
THERE’S JUST ONE MORE THING BEFORE I GO: I REMEMBER flipping TV channels with my mom and how she was awed by the athleticism of soccer, the only sport besides Olympic figure skating that she ever paused to watch. And that’s why I have to attend a Boca Junior football game.
The reputation of Argentinian football matches is that they are rowdy and wild, and it can be dangerous for people unfamiliar with the stadium, the environment, and etiquette of the fans. This is why tourists are told that the safest way to experience the games is with an escorted group. I book a tour with my new friend from the hostel, Jeff, an American who is all dimples and a toothpaste-commercial smile.
This is one of my last outings. In just two days I am scheduled to fly from Buenos Aires to Johannesburg, South Africa, a ticket I reserved three months ago. My thought was that having planned flights would propel me forward. Instead, it paints my final days in the city with regret. Such a huge part of me wants to stay.
The stadium, La Bombonera, is located in La Boca, a working-class barrio with a colorful history. La Boca (“the mouth” in English) is located at the mouth of the Riachuelo river, which forms the southern border of Buenos Aires. The river is also the reason the neighborhood was formed—La Boca was settled by workers from the shipyards that dot the banks. The houses are crafted from shipping materials, like grainy, cast-off planks and corrugated metal, and painted with leftover supplies, so each facade is a different color, creating a wild patchwork display.
The neighborhood is rough, which is why we are under the watchful eye of a guide. She is there to sweep us past the police barricades and through a funnel of people into the stadium. We are told repeatedly that foreigners should not be alone in this neighborhood after dark—under no circumstances are we to come here by ourselves.
The bus drops us off on El Caminito, a cobblestoned street full of souvenir shops and art displays, like an open-air museum. Our escort gives us strict instructions to stick to the lit and well-traveled Caminito while we find food and restrooms, then to meet back at the bus in a half hour.
The buildings along the walkway are painted primary colors, so garish that they are beautiful. The colors are stacked like a child’s blocks, one against the next. A blue wall leans into a yellow building, while red shutters sag along a green windowsill. Life-sized mannequins lean from the balconies, depicting the seedy history of this neighborhood in a jovial manner. Laughing prostitute mannequins are fondled by leering sailor dolls. Mafia mannequins look on.
On the corner, a real couple dances the tango. At the end of each song, the woman poses dramatically while her partner passes a black fedora and asks for tips. Painters display their art on chain-link fences; the work is textured and bright, matching the buildings that form a real-life backdrop. They look more like postcards than paintings.
Each restaurant has a patio, and the scent of food is overwhelming. Waiters carry sizzling steaks as round as a cocktail waitress’s tray. Volcanoes of pasta erupt with oil and marinara sauce. The pizzas are tall, piled with shredded cheese and grilled vegetables. My stomach growls, and Jeff’s stomach responds with a similar noise.
We can’t resist the call of the restaurants—especially not when waiters tug on our arms, shove menus in our faces, promise us the most wonderful food in all of Argentina.
We sit at a table topped with a red-and-white tablecloth and are given bottled beers and a basket of fresh-baked bread. I end up with a platter of fresh ravioli, and the pasta is toothy enough to hold the cheese inside but soft enough to melt with each bite. It is slathered in a sage-and-butter sauce, salty and slippery and fatty. Jeff doesn’t speak as he lingers over his own meal, a plate of gnocchi. Red sauce clings to the grooves of each potato dumpling, then to the stubble of his strong jaw.
Between the beers and the carbs, we lose track of time. By the time we pay for our meals and make it back to the spot where we were dropped off, the bus is gone.
“Shit,” Jeff says. “What do we do now?”
We decide to find the street where La Bombonera is located—our tour group will have to pass by eventually. We can reconnect with them there, collect our tickets, and still have an escort to our seats.
Except, we realize after we find La Bombonera, our group might have already passed by. Dusk is quickly disappearing, shifting firmly into night, and I can’t help but think that this might be a bad place to be waiting on a street corner in the dark.
Passersby walk in clusters, everybody wearing blue and gold clothes, scarves, and hats from head to toe. One chucks an empty can at me with impeccable aim, hitting me square in the chest. That’s when I realize I am inadvertently wearing black and red, the colors of the rival team playing in tonight’s game.
Instead of the street corner, Jeff and I retreat to the steps of a nearby bank. Even though it’s closed, I figure banks have security cameras, and I feel slightly safer under a watchful electronic gaze.
“I don’t feel so good about this,” I say.
Jeff turns to me and hisses through clenched teeth. “Don’t … speak … English,” he says. “Not now.”
So I am silent, and the time passes slowly. The chill of the concrete steps tears right through the denim of my rhinestoned jeans. I pull my black jacket tighter around my chest, try to cover the red shirt underneath. The sky is now navy, and street lamps flicker on. In my peripheral vision, I see my reflection in a long glass door that leads to the bank’s ATM. I eye myself as if I’m a stranger, and I try to assess if I could pass for Argentinian. I wonder if I look like I belong. I see shadows in my face, but there’s light there too.
Jeff is reflected in the glass next to me. He is tall, but so am I, and I wonder how many people we could take in a fight if it came to that.
The pasta sits heavy in my stomach. I am no longer hungry, just full of regret. I wish I had never seen the adorable table, the convincing waiter, the dumb ravioli that got us into this mess. Fireworks sizzle upward from the stadium and shoot into sparkles in the night sky. I hear the crowd chant and sing. The game is about to begin.
I almost don’t believe my eyes when our tour escort crosses the street, the rest of our group in tow.
“It’s them!” I say.
“Shhhh,” Jeff warns.
“No, look.” I’m so excited, I can’t contain my volume. I leap to my feet. “It’s them! Our group is here.”
We run to catch up with them, and our escort is visibly relieved. And angry.
Mostly angry. She reluctantly hands over our tickets for the game.
“Stay by my side the rest of the night, both of you,” she says, pointing her finger and waving it in the air as if it were a weapon. “Or else.”
At the stadium, the stairs are sodden with liquid, and the concrete hallways smell of stale beer and urine. Our guide ushers us to our bleacher seats, which are tucked underneath an
overhang filled with rowdy Boca Junior supporters.
“Stay underneath here,” the tour guide says; then she points to the shouting, cheering, singing men above. “The fans like to pee on the tourists. Though you two,” she points at Jeff and me. “I should let you get pissed on.”
The football game is secondary to the action from the crowd. In front of me, a slurring man climbs rafters and, with a wobbly grip, hoists a Boca Junior banner in the air. The crowd cheers, even when he nearly stumbles and falls. Everybody seems to know the same songs, which are repeated throughout the match, and every chant booms like thunder beneath our seats. The effect is celebratory and colorful, and the festivities leave me unbelievably exhilarated. I don’t even care who wins. I try to sing along, but I only catch every fourth word.
“I can’t believe you’re going to be in Africa, like, the day after tomorrow,” Jeff says.
I suck in my breath. Even my lungs want to pause this moment and prolong my stay.
“I don’t want to think about it,” I say. “I mean, I’m excited to see South Africa, but I had no idea leaving this place would be so hard.”
At that, the man and woman sitting in front of us turn and introduce themselves. Erin and Pete. They are a married couple from America.
“We’re headed to South Africa in a few days too—” Erin says.
Pete finishes her sentence, “And we’re looking for someone to travel with us.”
I like them immediately. Pete is a teacher, with rumpled red hair and a nose dotted with freckles. Erin a lobbyist and lawyer, has a sleek brown bob and a friendly face, and she has been working for the same kind of liberal causes I support. We share the home state of Ohio. Erin is also a vegetarian, and Pete is fueled by coffee, just like me.
Navigating South Africa with a couple of nice Ohioans might not be the worst idea. Erin, Pete, and I agree to meet the next day to discuss our traveling styles, see if we might make a good backpacking fit.
Finally, the match is over—a Boca Junior win—and masses of people swarm the pitch. Flares send scarlet smoke into the sky, the color of autumn leaves. The guide tells us to wait under the overhang until security can assist us. Fights break out in the stairwells. Men pee all over their feet and all over each other; there’s piss everywhere. It’s a glorious, slovenly, drunken scene. When the tour guide says it is time to go, I am reluctant to leave.
This place is cluttered with litter. The crowd is noisy. I have no roots here. There are no ancestral springs in this land for me. Still I feel like my notion of home has already changed and stretched to include this part of the world, this city, this stadium, this night. Maybe I don’t need to stay here, but I will carry this place with me as I move on.
One Straw Can Be Broken, but Together They Are Strong
I’M IN A RENTED NISSAN, HEADED TO THE WILD COAST OF South Africa. My friends from the Argentinian football game are in the front—Erin is driving, and Pete is in the passenger seat. I’m in the backseat with Barbara, who wanted to travel with us for the next month.
The driving is slow. The road is rocky, caramel-colored dirt, slicing through mossy green hills. There are potholes on top of potholes, and Erin navigates the car carefully, but every once in a while, a tire still sinks into the road with a jarring thunk.
Every hillside is dotted with pastel-colored huts, round with pointy, thatched roofs, like something that would house a village full of charming gnomes. Animals graze in the pasture. Occasionally we pass a group of children playing in the nearby fields, and they run after our car, dancing in the dust kicked up by the tires. Their smiles are so wide, it makes me smile alongside them.
Suddenly Erin hits the brakes and we screech to a halt, barely missing a thin and energetic goat that has run into the road.
“Whew,” I say. “That was a close one.”
Erin begins to drive again, but within seconds, she slams on the brakes once more. This time, the car stops just before we run over a fat log. It’s as wide as a stump and is attached to about ten feet of rope that encircles the tiny goat’s neck. He is trotting along the road, dragging the log behind him.
I love that spunky goat—the little guy who so desperately wants to run free, he has yanked out the log that was supposed to restrain him. I love the fierce beauty of the scenery, the wild blue ocean that breaks just beyond the hills. I am the annoying tourist in the backseat, singing a 1980s Toto classic at the top of my lungs.
I am joyful to be here. I am grateful for this country, this continent. I lean my head against the seat and relax into this big love that began my first full day in South Africa and has only increased since.
That was the day I visited the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, about fifty kilometers northwest of Johannesburg. The area has produced some of the oldest pre-human remnants ever found, including the 2.3-million-year-old Mrs. Ples fossil, which was excavated from a nearby cave in 1947. She is that link between primate and Homo sapiens, believed to be a distant relative to all humankind.
There are many fossils similar to Mrs. Ples, all packaged in tidy boxes with thick glass, where visitors can look at them from every angle. Mrs. Ples herself isn’t on display, but there are photos, drawings, and reconstructions of her skull. The entire effect is something cartoonish, her forehead slightly flattened, with a jutting bone beneath her nose, the way a chimpanzee’s face presses out. Her eye sockets are perfectly oval, as if widened with surprise.
Somewhere along the way, Mrs. Ples became a mother to someone who became a mother to someone who became a mother. Then eventually, after many thousands of years, came my grandmother, and then my mother, and then me. A scientist would probably say it isn’t that simple—but then again, it is. One woman begets another. Those of us who exist now carry the generations that came before us. I can almost feel this thread unspooling.
That idea alone makes me want to sing out and embrace the people around me. It helps chase away the isolation, the outsider-ness that I’ve felt elsewhere. If I am engaged with something bigger than I ever knew before, linked to a family so sprawling I don’t know how to map it, I am part of a larger whole. I have many mothers.
It was late afternoon when I left the Cradle of Humankind museum. The vast savannah that surrounds the site glowed gold, nearly the same gold as my mother’s hair. The dirt there is a strong red-brown, as if rich with the bones and blood of ancients. The trees are wispy and wide, their branches stretched open like patio umbrellas. I saw a thin snake in the long grass.
The air was warm and dry, and it reminded me of the desert I call home. I’d finally shed the fleece jacket I’d worn for three months straight in South America.
When I called my dad that night, I was just about to hang up when he said, “Wait!”
“Yes?”
“Africa,” he said. “Is it pretty?”
The question brought tears to my eyes. South Africa is gorgeous, but it is also a feeling. One that I had no words for yet.
This was also the first time my dad had shown genuine interest in my trip. In three months, he’d never asked me a question about the place I was currently in. My mom must have been doing better, I assumed, for him to wonder about something else.
“Yes,” I said, and I was grateful he’d asked. “It’s very pretty.”
ERIN, PETE, BARBARA, AND I SHARE A HUT ON THE WILD Coast at an eco-lodge called Bulungula, located in one of the most remote villages in South Africa, Nqileni.
Bulungula has minimal electricity, and there is no cell phone service or internet. There are showers, but they remain hot for approximately five minutes—about as long as the small paraffin furnace at the base of the shower remains lit. Bread is baked the traditional way, inside a dirt pit.
A coastal forest sprawls all the way to the sand of the estuary and kisses the edge. The water is a heart-stopping blue, true and bright and clear. At night, the sky is generously sprinkled with stars I’ve never seen before.
On our first full morning, an acrid scen
t hits my nose and at first I think there must be a landfill nearby. But when I walk the beach, a man from the nearby Xhosa village shows me the source of the odor.
“Dead whale,” he says with a shrug, as if it happens all the time.
I nod and shrug in return, as if I should have known better.
The massive beast no longer looks like a whale. It is more like a smudge on the shore, its skin melting into the sand. The smell is briny and musky, fish and rot, dirty sex and earth. It is tinged with the sweetness of decay and the sourness of time. And despite my attempts to hold myself together, the odor makes me gag.
The mammal washed ashore about three weeks prior to my arrival, but I didn’t smell it right off. This morning the wind shifted, carrying the smell right up to the door of my hut.
The nearby villagers have already extracted much of the carcass, sawing off layers of fat, meat, organs. The remnants remain on the surf, discarded blubber and bone, bleached by the sun, washed by the waves. The beast is slowly returning to the sea, piece by piece.
I take photos, crouching close enough to the whale that it looks like rock strata through my lens—layers of blue, white, and brown folded onto one another. The villager on the beach watches me and erupts into laughter.
“I can show you more dead animals,” he says with a smile.