by Julie Powell
I repeat my request. “Sí, jugosa, por favor.” My waiter shrugs, smiles, writes something down on his pad, then refills my glass of Malbec and goes to put in my order.
The steak, when it comes, is divine—deeply flavorful, slightly chewy, with a crackling layer of golden brown fat along one edge, which, after I have devoured every last bit of meat, I suck at blissfully.
By the time I’m winding down with the last of the wine and a double espresso to see me home, the restaurant has gotten a little quieter. Finally I’ve successfully timed my meal to Argentine standards. The difference being of course that all these gorgeous Argentines, after stuffing themselves with extraordinary quantities of protein, will proceed to hit the dance clubs and tango bars and house parties that keep people on the streets of Buenos Aires until dawn, whereas I’m going home to my bed, a little drunk (though not so drunk as some might expect from two bottles of wine in the course of an evening—here’s to Irish genes and alcoholism) and exhausted from my day of meat tourism. My waiter, whose name, I’ve learned, is Marco, lingers at my table.
He tells me he’s from La Boca, a working-class neighborhood in the southern part of the city, the center of the rabid Argentine futbol culture. The stadium is there, and people have a tradition of painting their houses in the garish colors of their favorite teams. I’ve been told before this that I can’t leave Argentina without taking in a football game, but due to my sports phobia I doubt that I will. Still, I nod enthusiastically at his semicoherent chatter about teams and players, assure him I will indeed catch a game when I can, don’t demur too much when he tells me he will show me around “all the most good parts of my neighborhood.” With my check he delivers a La Brigada business card with his name printed on it, and on the back, handwritten, “Tango.” And a phone number.
“I teach also. You know tango?”
The American Dame gives a half smile. “I know of it. But I don’t know how.”
“I will teach you. Call me, okay, Julie?” I pocket the card with a smile and say yes. Though I know that I won’t.
It’s a long cab ride home, the cabbie a quiet, grandfatherly man in a gaucho-style beret. We don’t talk. Staring out the window as we drive down the broad Avenida 9 de Julio, perhaps drifting on the rippling wake of my meal, I find myself falling into a reverie, a tender swell of self-pity and melancholy that isn’t entirely unpleasant, a gentle, guilty feeling that I don’t wish Eric were here, combined with a furtive enjoyment of being alone, and even lonely. It’s not that I don’t miss him; I do. But I realize I rather love the little tug of it. I feel like a witch who has sent her familiar away from her to do her bidding, but still knows exactly where in the world it is. Rather painful, and at the same time rather a relief.
Certainly, spending any time with another man, any other man—D usually, but not always, the exception—reminds me that I love my husband down to the guts and marrow. (“Eyeballs to entrails, my sweet” is what Spike would say, and Spike might have been a vampire on a cult TV show with a bad peroxide helmet of hair, but he knew a little something of love.) Rotund Brazilians and goofy tango-dancing waiters, even Santiago, I hold up, in retrospect or at the time, as further evidence that Eric is someone other and above, someone singular.
I use that word advisedly. I don’t just mean “special,” like you always think the person you love is special. I think Eric is special because he always has these insane ideas for projects he wants to embark upon, which sound totally bonkers until you think about them for ten minutes and suddenly realize they’re fucking brilliant. I think he’s special because he hates his eyebrows even though they’re fantastic and he has no idea how beautiful he is and his obsessions range from the national treasure that is Fran Drescher to conspiracy theories about museum fakes. And I think D is special too, because of how fiercely he fucks me, because he masturbates with his left hand and eats with his right, because I adore his nasty, sneaky sense of humor and sly smirk and the way he can make you laugh even while boring you to tears as he holds forth on some obscure filmmaker or TV show or eighties hair metal band, and because he always wears the same two sweaters and walks in this gliding, unhurried way, like he’s on rails.
But this is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about an objective recognition of a truly extraordinary person, the sort of person anyone with a brain and a heart understands is someone she is lucky to know. Not because he’s smarter or purer or kinder or gentler than everyone else—though of course Eric is often all of these things—but because he… glows. I don’t really like getting into talking about souls and crap like that, but something shines out of Eric. He lives his life so close to the surface of his skin somehow—not like a daredevil, more like the shoot of a plant, transparent and tender. That’s not quite right either. He isn’t fragile, not someone to be coddled, even though he elicits from me such a ferocious protectiveness that it’s probably not good for either of us. God, what is it? He’s honest. Not in the bullshit way that he always says what’s true or doesn’t cheat people or whatever. There’s just no bullshit about him at all. He’s got his hang-ups and self-delusions and esteem issues like everyone else, but he has also got this purity of self that I am so proud of. Proud as if it is my purity. As if he’s my surrogate soul.
But something isn’t right here. If I have a soul, it should be my own, I guess. My own to be proud of or ashamed of. It’s just so much easier to take on his.
Maybe that’s it. Why I don’t want Eric here. Maybe I want to feel soulless for a while. Or not soulless, but with my soul at a distance, away from my errant body and mind. Maybe I just want to be unburdened.
It is nearly midnight, and the cabdriver has the radio turned to the football game. Just as the broadcast voice begins to grow more exercised, we pass a brightly lit café, which is suddenly exploding, as we drive by, with roaring male voices and leaping male bodies. “What on earth?”
The man smiles into the rearview mirror. “Goal.”
ARMANDO COMES out of the gym the morning of our appointment talking into his cell phone, doesn’t stop for any longer than it takes to give me a wave and air-kiss hello before gesturing to me to follow him to his car, which is valet-parked. He’s a compact man, energetic, a stark contrast to Santiago’s tall, thin frame and slightest hint of gentle melancholy. He has a broad, tanned face with a low forehead and a gap in his front teeth, close-cropped, Brillo-pad hair, and a scrub of beard kept at just the right degree of rakish unkemptness. Armando is Santiago’s friend. He raises water buffalo, and today he’s going to take me to see his herd.
As we drive south and west, he spends half his time on the phone and the other half explaining to me his operation, his plan to expand water buffalo sales into the domestic market, a tough sell because whereas Europeans are into healthful eating and whatnot, and find the lean, clean meat of buffalo desirable, Argentines just want their beef beefy and plentiful.
Once outside the city limits, the landscape quickly becomes empty and wide, fields of cattle separated by dirt roads lined with scrubby trees. The pampas, I suppose these are. It looks rather like south Texas, my parents’ country, pale and dusty and flat. Cattle country.
Armando asks what I’m looking to see, to which I say, “Whatever you’ve got.” He explains that right now we are going to a stockyard where one of his herds is being kept. It turns out it’s been a very wet summer and fall. His land is marshier than most plots, which was the reason he decided to take a chance on water buffalo in the first place. He says he’s the first in the country to try it. But this year has been too wet for even his muck-loving animals, so he’s had to move them to a feedlot to keep them heavy and healthy. Problem is, according to import regulations in Europe, no animal that has spent even one day on a feedlot can be sold there. So now Armando is left with the dicey proposition of selling his meat domestically, which is neither as profitable nor as certain. Still, he maintains a positive, can-do attitude, is sure that he can make this go over big here, that Argentines
are changing their lifestyle, becoming more concerned with their health and with the provenance of their food. He reminds me of Josh, always looking for the Big Idea, always full of plans that would seem grandiose if they did not so often come through in the end.
“Have you eaten at La Brigada?”
“I have. I love it!”
“La Brigada sells my búfala meat.”
“Oh yeah? I should try it.” (Not really believing I’ll be able to resist ordering another big old strip steak the next time I go.)
“And Santiago’s other restaurant, you have been there?”
Santiago also runs an Asian restaurant, a sort of noodle shop, catercorner to Standard. “No, haven’t been yet.”
“He serves my buffalo there as well. It’s got a very good flavor.”
After about an hour we arrive at the stockyard. Armando gets out of the car to unchain a gate and we turn onto a rutted road. On either side are churned-up muddy pastures. Chickens pick through the manure and smooshed hay. We pull up to a complex of barns and corrals and one low concrete building that I assume must be the office. We both climb out into the mud. While I greet the dogs that come trotting up, Armando shakes hands with a series of men in rubber mud boots and windbreakers. Some of these men work with the stockyard; others are buyers Armando is trying to tempt. There’s much business he needs to do today, so after he introduces me to everyone, for the sake of politeness I recede into the background, following the group a few paces behind as we all move through a series of gates to a pen where Armando’s water buffalo huddle together in a great glinting black mass of sleek hides and dark eyes and shiny, wide horns that curl down over their entire heads, giving the impression of brilliantined hair parted down the middle—a bunch of 1920s dandies.
A couple of guys start herding the buffalo into a chute at one end of the corral. The animals seem terribly nervous, but also terribly obedient. The biggest cause for panic for an individual buffalo appears to be being alone. Once the men have gotten the first few headed into the chute, the others seem content enough to simply follow, nose to tail, without protest, nothing but a few dumbly pleading glances over the wood-plank fence. Armando tells me to stand to one side, at a safe distance, and though I can’t see that these guys are much of a danger to me, I do as he says.
In a neighboring pen, a cow has just given birth to a calf. As in just just. As in the calf, a lovely white creature with two parallel black marks across its cheek, like the healed scar of an encounter with a puma, is still wet and not yet on its feet, curled up napping, and the cow is still passing the placenta. As Aaron would say, you learn something new every day, because now I know what cows do with their afterbirth. Ew. She must be a Tom Cruise fan. A stockyard dog, a black mutt, manages to get some of the stuff, or at least lick up some of the blood. Which, again, ew. But she’s a sweet dog, and when she comes up to me after gleaning what she can from the scene of the birth, I cannot deny her even though she still has thick crimson splashes across her muzzle.
Meanwhile Armando, with the help of his two assistants, is loading the buffalo one at a time into the scale at the end of the chute, just a cow-sized raised box with doors at each end that slide up and down, guillotine style. One by one they load the cows onto the scale. Often a second one will try to squeeze in with the first. I guess for cattle, claustrophobia doesn’t trump the fear of being left behind. The stockyard workers force them back with quirts and shouts, then shut the door on the beast inside. The scale’s needle swings back and forth until it settles on a weight. If the number is high enough, the buffalo heavy enough, Armando marks the animal with a swath of white paint by reaching through the narrow spaces between the planks with a brush lashed to a three-foot dowel. Then the door on the other side of the box is raised and the creature trots out hastily down the ramp, its hooves clopping loudly on concrete as it hurries to the farthest corner of the enclosure. One by one the búfula clomp into the chute and back out again in half panic, some of them slipping alarmingly, falling to their knees or even over onto their sides, then scrambling up again in terror and dashing to press close together. Once there, they stare at us humans as if they know we’re apt to grab one of them and take them down like a lion taking a wildebeest. They, of course, have had millennia to develop the sense that this is the sort of death most likely for them, but it’s terribly unhelpful now. I wonder what evolutionary leap would suffice to free the herds, to teach them to free themselves. They all look identical to my eyes but for their spangled white marks. In this particular case, it’s the star-bellied, or star-flanked, Sneetches that are going to lose out sooner rather than later. But not just yet.
It takes about forty-five minutes for Armando to weigh out his herd, choose those ready for the abattoir. I stand with a foot on a rail of the fence, sometimes watching the calf, who is bright white and spindly legged and cow-licked in the senses of both its hair being whorled and its mother being attentive, as it slowly gains its feet. And sometimes I watch the watchful, shining black, nervously shifting mass of buffalo, their hooves clacking brightly on the asphalt, their breath steaming and tails whooshing testily. When the family’s all together again, for now, the gates are opened and they all trudge on up the hill toward a barn twenty yards away up a muddy track. A guy in galoshes and a dog follow them, but the herd knows where it’s going and needs no encouragement. And then we head back to the city, and I return to my apartment smelling like cattle, again.
That night, on TV, miraculously, my favorite episode ever of Buffy is on. “The Wish.” It’s dubbed into Spanish, but it doesn’t matter; I’ve seen this episode so many times I know it nearly line for line. The story is this: Cordelia Chase, high school queen bee who gave her love to a geeky boy and then lost it, as well as all her friends, when he fell in love with another, decides that Buffy Summers, vampire slayer, is the source of all her problems. Everything was right in Cordy’s world until Buffy came to town. Unfortunately, she makes the wish that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale in front of a vengeance demon, who immediately grants her request. At first it seems the wish is a great success. Her social standing is restored: boys ask her out on dates instead of treating her like sloppy seconds. But it turns out a world without Buffy is not a nice one to be in at all.
I wonder: is this new world a nice one to be in? It seems so, sometimes, when I’m petting a sweet dog flecked with afterbirth, in this beautiful foreign place surrounded by cattle. But then there are the other times, the after-nap times, the predinner times. What am I supposed to be doing now that I’m here?
The next morning, July 9, Día de la Independencia, it snows in Buenos Aires. For the first time in a hundred years.
It’s not much of a snow. And it kind of edges on toward slush at the end of the day. But all morning it falls, snow-globe, fairy-tale flakes, and the effect of it on everyone is magical. I leave my apartment after staring out my window for a bit, and on the street everything has stopped. No one is shopping in the shops or eating in the cafés. The furiously whizzing black taxis have disappeared. Everyone stands on the sidewalk, staring up, incandescent smiles on their lips. Children and adults alike raise their faces and stick out their tongues. They laugh in disbelief, they kiss, they take pictures. There’s no accumulation on the ground, nowhere near enough to make a snowball, but everyone’s having an imaginary snowball fight. Everyone is behaving as if there’s a six-foot blanket of sparkling snow on the ground and he has nothing waiting at home but a bottle of wine or a mug of hot chocolate, a roaring fireplace, and a lover or a mom, whichever is appropriate for the age and situation, ready to share it.
I’ve no one to share a fireplace with now. But I think I’m fine with that. Because how many girls can say they’ve seen it snow in Buenos Aires, and in a world they’ve managed to crack open for themselves, like a bone saw exposing the marrow?
13
Still Undercooked
IT IS POSSIBLE that I haven’t fully thought this through.
I mean, Argentina
made sense. It’s somewhat traditional, after all—at Fleisher’s anyway—for butchers to travel after they’ve learned their trade, hit some of the world capitals of meat. Aaron went to Spain, Josh to Vancouver; Colin is planning a trip to Italy. But now here I am stretched out across the four seats of a middle aisle on Aerosvit Flight W132, direct to Kiev. I’ve got an enormous collection of Isaac Babel stories on my lap. I have just taken a sleeping pill, swallowed down with the worst wine I have ever tasted. The Cyrillic script on the bottle should have given me a clue; perhaps it actually would have, if only I could read one word of Cyrillic.
Scratch that. I have definitely not fully thought this through.
Seriously, why am I going to western Ukraine? If you asked me, I couldn’t tell you. It’s not as if it’s some renowned mecca of cuisine, meaty or otherwise. I’ve always wanted to go to the Carpathians, I suppose there’s that. They’re reputed to be beautiful, but that’s not really the root of my fascination. Maybe it’s a Buffy hangover. More likely it’s an earlier, deeper yen, to see the place all the dark stories come from, Vlad the Impaler and holocausts and dictators people insultingly name “butchers” and dark Transylvanian castles on stormy nights. (Teri Garr in a dirndl tossing herself around in the back of a farm cart, trilling, “Roll, roll, roll in ze hay!” probably has a little something to do with it too.)
But that’s not a good enough reason to go flying around the world again, not reason enough to buy another ticket almost as soon as I arrived back in New York. I think the reason is, really, that when I walked back into my apartment, I knew, knew, that I wasn’t ready to be back. It wasn’t Eric, it wasn’t D or Robert the Dog, or New York itself. It was me. I felt undercooked, liquid in my center. I stayed a couple of months, veering between caged frustration at home and wild self-loathing. But I knew I had to get out again. The anguish in Eric’s eyes when I tried to explain this almost made me quail, but there was a panic deeper, for once, than the panic at the thought of hurting him. To tell the truth, it didn’t matter where I went, much. I excused my absence as a continuation of my butchery journeyman education. But in truth I might as well have thrown some darts at a map on the wall. I am going to the places I wanted to go at the moment when I bought the ticket—Ukraine, Tanzania, a brief stopover in Japan. Names on an itinerary, chosen very nearly at random.