The Foreigners

by Maxine Swann

  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.

  My new apartment was quiet. There were black-and-white tiles in the hallway. Every now and then a winged cockroach flew through the kitchen. The owner, Olga had told me, had gone to Europe and disappeared. Her brother rented the place out for her now. In the living room was a vine that wanted to creep in the window. “If you let it, you’ll have ants,” Olga said. I decided to let it for the moment.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” Olga asked on leaving me the day I moved in. I reassured her.

  The windows looked out on an abandoned back garden. No one ever went there. To one side was the white wall of the adjacent building. When it rained, water ran down the wall. I would sit there on the chaise lounge staring at the sheen of water for hours.

  It was a mammoth building. There was no one in the halls. Sometimes, rarely, I’d hear a key turning. Another time, from the hallway, I heard the sounds of people making love in a somewhat brutal fashion. But the walls were thick. Once I was
inside my apartment, I listened again and heard nothing.

  I had paid Olga six months in advance. When the phone rang, it would startle me. It was always a wrong number. I felt as if, apart from Olga, nobody knew I was here.

  In one of the books Brian had given me, I’d read about nineteenth-century urban plans to build parks or “green lungs” all over Buenos Aires, to ward off the infestations of tuberculosis. The idea was that the disease festered in the tiny cramped quarters with no ventilation where crowds of people lived on top of one another. The green lungs would allow these people open-air spaces where they could escape from their homes and come to sit and breathe. Now it seemed that instead of momentary refuges, people had just settled directly in the parks or plazas. This was new, Olga had told me. The year before there had hardly been a homeless person on the street. Now the square outside my building was full of people huddled, individuals, whole families, camped out, it seemed, permanently, and then right here this empty building.

  Around the corner from my house was a church. At Mass hours, especially in the evening, people would be pressing in at the doorway, spilling out, couples, families, teenagers in their coolest clothes casting sidelong glances. One night, post-Mass, I saw a small group gathered on the church steps with baskets of food. I asked what they were doing and a woman, slightly cross-eyed, told me they were going around to feed the homeless. I asked if I could join them and she agreed, taking my hand in hers. It turned out to be an odd venture. As we moved around the streets from one cluster of homeless people to the next, the cross-eyed woman wouldn’t let go of my hand. If I dropped hers, she’d find a way to sidle over to me and pick mine up again. Not being able to bear this anymore, I finally broke away and hurried down a side street on my own.

  On another corner was a small parrilla, or classic Argentine barbecue restaurant, where I’d go sometimes for a meal. I’d sit against the wall by the window. The waiter, a man who must have been in his fifties, with a long face and droopy eyes that showed the lower part of his eyeballs, called me “daughter,” as they sometimes did here. I’d wait for him to call me “daughter” when he was asking for my order or afterward, when he was bringing me the food. It was as if the food, the atmosphere were secondary. I’d come to hear him say that.

  At the end of the block was a locutorio. The locutorio, I’d quickly grasped, was an Argentine institution, a public place lined with phone booths and computers where you could go to write an e-mail or make a call. They were always bustling. Even the cell phone culture hadn’t stymied them. You could sit down in the booths. Often there was a mirror. Women, as they were talking, fixed their makeup and hair. People who’d lost their offices during the crash ran their businesses from here, students without computers shacked up to write their papers. Kids sat in rows playing video games. Of course, there were undoubtedly all kinds of illicit things occurring there as well, in the privacy of telephone booths and computer screens. I would go every few days and read my e-mails, from friends, from my mother, from my ex-boss, the botanist. But I rarely lingered. My other life seemed, in all ways, far away.

  Thinking it would be good if I met some people, I decided to put up signs at the university offering English classes. The Philosophy and Letters branch, previously a factory building, was far from the center of the city. I went there one afternoon. The entranceway was low and dim. The walls, ceiling to floor, even along the stairs, were papered with bulletins, calls for meetings, political tracts, torn off, recovered, torn again, giving the impression of an entire interior plastered with papier mâché. In the bathrooms, there were no toilet seats and no paper. Rather than carrying books around, the students for the most part carried photocopies. Later, I would learn that this was because books were expensive. I wandered around on the different floors, looking in doorways and posting my own signs.

  In the afternoons, I walked. I always took the same route, down the hill to the big avenue. Along the avenue, there were brilliant green patches, grassy spots with trees. Thick pods from the palo borracho trees burst and spread tufts of cotton all over the ground. There were several statues I liked, one of a girl in rough stone, nearly featureless but with curves, sitting and leaning to the side, propping herself up with her hand, another of a faun. He was behind her, up on his hind legs. One night, he appeared in my dream. “I want to suck your armpit,” he said. I walked here almost every day, but then, as sometimes happened when I had nothing to do, I walked on endlessly for hours.

  I circled outward into neighborhoods I didn’t know, the pale buildings, dark doorways, the plazas with dogs loitering, a fountain not working but half filled with copper-colored rainwater, the clanking buses hurtling by. I’d lose my way completely in streets whose names I didn’t know. The whole sky was light. The shadows looked blacker here than anywhere I remembered. I would get walking and wouldn’t stop. In the wide dark doorway of a garage a man stood in the center cutting up meat.

  As I said, there were often crowds. Sometimes I skirted them, looked and skirted. One time I got caught up. Something happened. We were out in front of the government building. There were policemen with plastic shields, a helicopter overhead. The crowd started to panic, ran. One guy with his pants down was running right toward me. He must have been caught off-guard peeing. I ran too. We were in a square, dodging statues. My heart was racing. There was exhilaration mixed with the fear. People were scrambling, touching, in a way that would have been impossible under any other circumstance. In one moment, we were all rubbing against each other and the next we were dispersed. I found myself spiraling off, into a new neighborhood. I slowed down, catching my breath.

  The Jardín Botánico was crawling with cats, hundreds and hundreds of them. They crept over everything, collected, preened.

  The city would abruptly change the subject. I had felt this from the start. You were walking along a smooth Palermo street lined with bars and shops and would suddenly stumble into a wasteland, grass and dirt. Or you looked through a doorway into a huge empty hole. It was an unfinished city, but not only that. It seemed interminable, an interminable job. This was also what I liked.

  two

  I went to make tea one morning, only to realize that the faucet was dry. I had no water. I called Olga, but was told by her son that she was in New York, on a trip. She loved New York. It was her dream, she had told me, to live there—there people treated you well. I looked for the owner’s brother’s number. I called and left a message. No response. Having the vaguest understanding of how these things work, I decided to take a look up on the roof. I had a dim memory of a nighttime Seattle rooftop and a water tank there.

  I didn’t take the elevator but the stairs. I climbed, floor after empty floor. On the fourth floor, there was the sound of a key and then a man standing there, black hair cut close, wearing a raincoat. He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him. I nodded, kept climbing. The stairs gave me confidence, as opposed to the elevator. I heard a burst of classical music—it sounded like a Mahler symphony—coming from below just as I reached the next floor.

  After the sixth floor, there was a last, smaller flight of stairs, then a small door leading, as I’d suspected, to the rooftop. It was a clear bright day, a bit cool. I walked out across the roof. There was indeed what looked like a water tank up on a ledge. It sounded like water was running into it right at that moment. I climbed up on the ledge to peer inside. The lid was attached to the tank with wire, only letting me lift it a little bit. But I was right, it was low but filling. The water inside looked dark and wavy. Below the tank was a round, black shape that could have been a pump.

  I climbed back down from the ledge. Already while up there, I had felt something. Now I saw what it was. There was a guy looking out over the edge of the rooftop, his back to me. Then he turned and looked over his shoulder. He’d seen me too.

  He wore sneakers and corduroys and a shirt with green, red and white stripes, dressed like a kid. He had blondish curls and a mournful expression at odds with his y
outh. “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” he answered from his distance.

  I wasn’t sure whether to stay or turn away.

  “I never see anyone up here,” he said.

  “I never come up here. This is my first time.” I paused. “I came because I don’t have any water.”

  “You live in this building?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m renting. Do you?”

  “No, no, I just have client meetings here sometimes.” He looked tired, but like a child would look tired, not the actual worn tiredness of an adult. His skin was rosy and gold.

  “Really? That’s funny. I never see anyone.”

  “Yeah, we, my firm, rents a place. So that sucks anyway that you don’t have water.”

  “I know. Especially since I don’t know who to call. There isn’t like a super, is there?”

  He shrugged, a helpless face. “I never see anyone.”

  “I just don’t know anything about how water works, like why it would get shut off,” I said. “On the other hand, it seems like there’s been some activity. That tank there’s filling. And here there’s water, or was water, on the ground.”

  I pointed to a wide stain of water on the rooftop, not a puddle because it was sunken in, but a stain.

  By now he’d approached me. He also looked down at the stain, then, looking up, followed it over to the end of a hose. I went with him and, together, following the hose, we came to where it was attached to one side of a pipe. At the point of attachment was a spigot. We turned it on. Nothing happened. Then a little water trickled out of the hose.

  We turned it off again.

  “You have no water whatsoever?” he asked.

  “None.”

  “Hmm. But there’s water in the tank?”

  “Yeah, it’s filling now.”

  He stood there, thinking. “I don’t know anything about any of this either. But there’s someone I know who could help us. I’d have to make a call.”