Jolts

  _________

  Missing Buenos Aires is a daily routine. Some days the longing arrives after a sound — memories are triggered, homesickness kicks in. Other times it happens after a smell, any smell, heavenly or foul. Most times the longing comes after the wanton recollection of this or that corner, any part of Buenos Aires that in my mind looks like how Buenos Aires should look. Some days the feeling is overwhelming and I can spend hours wallowing in self-pity. Most times the situation is manageable. I’m writing this, listening to Astor Piazzolla, because today is one of those days where I can’t handle homesickness very well. The music helps with the fantasy, it feeds it.

  Because the thing is: I never lived in Buenos Aires. I frequented Buenos Aires a lot, but I never lived there, never managed to settle there, had my name on a bill, or a fixed abode, or a favourite café that wasn’t a cliché, or a library card. Unlike Dublin, Paris, and later London, Buenos Aires was too much for me — I couldn’t tame it, own it, call it my own. I used to spend many a weekend in Buenos Aires but I would spend this time couch surfing, mostly off my head after rock concerts, preparing a landing that never materialised. So I miss the possibility of Buenos Aires. And by missing its possibility I can miss my own hometown without the uncomfortable bits, without all the impossibilities, the proximities, the complexities and familiarities. The parts that can hurt.

  I miss an imaginary Buenos Aires instead of a real Rosario. Homesickness is safer this way. And besides, like this I can plug into some universal motifs of Argentineanness — perpetuated by literature, tango, film (Argentine and international) — that I no longer wish to contest, since I have long given up trying to express the nuances and the complications of being an Argentinean.

  Of course I miss Buenos Aires.

  Of course I play football.

  Of course I’m a gifted tango dancer.

  Of course I’m a charming Lothario.

  Of course I’m prone to fits of passion and — unlike British guys — fits of tears.

  Of course I can ride a horse.

  Of course I’m a streetwise intellectual who likes to sit in cafés to solve the problems of the world.

  I have, during these past fifteen years away from the possibility of Buenos Aires, become a simplified version of myself. My life is better without corners. And more importantly, in (self-)exile I have become what I always wanted to be: the stereotypical porteño.

  I miss Buenos Aires. How could I not write about this now that I’m here, now that I return to the city I never left, the city where I never lived?

  _________

  Ariel Ruzzo, Professor of Latin American Literature in some college, University of London, arrives in Buenos Aires after a hiatus of five years. Actually, make it Professor of Comparative Literature, it will be easier to market. And Comparative Literature sounds less of a con. It sounds like he went abroad to do the vini, vidi, vici. Professor of Latin American Literature, for an Argentine character like Ariel, sounds like he escaped an economic crisis to then accidentally find his way into a claustrophobic department, where he ended up teaching unsuspecting and overpaying students the soporific drivel known as magical realism.

  So Ariel Ruzzo — Professor of Comparative Literature — lands in Buenos Aires after a hiatus of five years. He has come to sell a flat, a flat he inherited a while ago from an auntie, a flat in which he barely lived back in the late 1990s. He has found an overseas buyer, so it is only a matter of signing a couple of papers at the notary’s, some other papers at the solicitors, receiving the money in his British account, and then back to London, to his office overlooking a square once frequented by Virginia Woolf.

  But there is also the thing with the boxes: he has to remove some boxes from his flat. Rita, an ex-girlfriend, has been living there all this time, paying a symbolic rent, keeping the place alive. He would much rather avoid this, for a series of reasons, but he has already arranged to meet her tonight, have dinner together, old friends and all that, get the boxes out of the small storage corner under the stairs tomorrow. There must be five or six of them, said Rita. It can’t take him that long — most will go in the bin anyway.

  _________

  I don’t remember where I was or why I was searching for images of Buenos Aires — it might have been a moment of procrastination; it could have been research towards an essay; it could have been anything. The reason for my search is no more but I remember very well the words, scribbled on a wall in some porteño suburb, in blue: ‘morirse no es nada, peor es vivir en Argentina’ — ‘dying is meaningless, worse is living in Argentina’.

  These words pin down very well the atmosphere of the 1990s and early 2000s — my 1990s and 2000s. The decade felt like a slow death, punctuated by a long series of socio-political and economic upheavals. Like many others, this slow death — peaking with the crash of 2001 — sent me away. In my particular case, away from the possibility of Buenos Aires, on a journey to become Argentinean. No, I don’t know what I was before; I only know that I became Argentinean abroad, probably while I was cleaning a toilet in Dublin, and the toilet was full to the rim with shit. This was a defining moment in my life. The realisation must have hit me then and there, or during the series of crap jobs I had for years on end. Somehow, suddenly, it was clear: who I was, where I was from, what I could aspire to. It was both humbling and enlightening.

  I know Ariel Ruzzo left for the same reasons, even if he likes to play the scholarly card. But I still wonder if he became Argentinean abroad. Is it a generalised disease, this displaced becoming? What was his ‘cleaning an overflowing toilet’ moment, if he ever had one?

  _________

  Ariel has had a stellar career. From his undergraduate studies in Buenos Aires’ School of Filosofía y Letras, to an MA in Cambridge, to a PhD in Princeton. A stellar career, from the very start, in all the right places. His thesis, which surveys the detective story from its birth in the mid-nineteenth century all the way to cinema noir (briefly touching on the work of Ricardo Piglia, a nice nationalistic gesture), has become one of those rare documents that manage to leap outside of the reduced spaces of academia, in order to become a non-fiction classic. Reading the Detectives is into its sixth edition and in the process of being translated into French and Japanese. And Ariel is only forty.

  And yet, success aside, here is Ariel, back in Buenos Aires, like any mortal, after a hiatus of five years, and even before getting off the plane it is clear that it will be a difficult trip, that coming back to Argentina always involves a process of re-adaptation and submission. There is a transport strike and among the people exercising their right to piss off everyone else we should count those in charge of driving Ariel and his fellow passengers from the plane to the airport. And no, the captain won’t let them walk the scant hundred metres to the terminal, because it contravenes a series of safety regulations, even if passengers from other planes seem to be able to do the walk. A two-hour wait, then, until British Airways manages to find a scab to do the job, in several trips, old people and those with kids first, no mention of literature professors.

  Ariel is back in Buenos Aires, after a hiatus of five years. He will have to come back later to get his suitcase — the strike — or get a courier to pick it up on his behalf. But he’s back.

  _________

  But I should be taking notes, there are so many things to remember, so many things that could go into that piece about a return, things that add realism, the details, the lived feeling. Now that I find myself in Buenos Aires I should be noting things down, focusing on the contradictory bits, because readers love the contradictory bits, not only of returns.

  In the subte, Línea B, between Gallardo and Medrano: a mother with a disabled kid. She’s having a loud go at him when he tries to eat a cookie and the crumbs fall all over the place, as he contorts visibly in pain with some muscular malfunction. The mother, tired, aged prematurely — she resents the child, not that I have to guess this, because she says, ‘I can’t stand you anymore,’ in Spanish
obviously. And then she realises she needs to get off, and makes her move, politely asking the other passengers in the carriage to make room for her and the wheelchair-bound kid, all charm. This must be the first time in my life I hear a porteño say sorry, please, thank you. I’m impressed.

  This is a world apart from my first experience of Buenos Aires on my own, in 1995 or 1996. I was walking down the avenue connecting the Retiro bus terminal with the city centre — it was an ocean of people. I was a bleary-eyed lad coming to the smoke from a place where we swallowed the S’s at the end of the words — El interior but not even really El interior, nothing that endearing or worthy of a story by Saer. Still, I was bleary-eyed and scared and walking maybe too slowly and maybe on the wrong side of the pavement. A redhead guy suddenly turned up before me, kindly shouted in my face that I kindly move aside and pushed me aside, kindly. I almost fell kindly on the floor but I didn’t.

  I wonder if this kind redhead is now as polite as the mother on the subte.

  _________

  The car flies down the Ricchieri. Thank god the driver is quiet and Ariel can dedicate his time to watching the ugly houses on both sides of the highway, sprouting like verrucas. Many an Argentine house built since the big migration waves of the early Twentieth century is an example of Feísmo, the Modernism and beyond of the impoverished European, at home and abroad, he reminds himself, almost as if he were thinking in footnotes. Who lives here? What is it like to live by the side of this road that never sleeps, with planes over your head, in one of these eyesores?

  He’s about to find a provisional answer to this question when the love motels catch his attention. He might have gone to all of them, here on the outskirts of civilisation. What a perfect site for love motels. A perfect place to stop for a shag before you make it to Buenos Aires and get lovelessly screwed by the city. He once was in one of these love hotels — or he imagines he was in one, or I imagine he was in one, which for a fiction piece would be the same — called París. He might have gone there with Rita, before he got the flat, when the options were shagging against a tree or in a rented room, shifts of two hours, mirror on the ceiling, adult channel not included in the standard rate. They might have gone to a room called La Torre. There might have been a photo of the Eiffel Tower glued to the window, both blocking potential perverts from peering in from the parking lot and providing the ambience. Or, like I said, he could have imagined all this, or I could have, thinking about his ghosts, planning his return in my head.

  But it doesn’t matter who imagined or imagines this — soon Buenos Aires is there, to the right and to the left, tower blocks, barrios, more lack of planning, advertisement hoardings that look like soft porn, seen from the elevated Avenida de Mayo. And a song starts playing on the radio, make it a tango, make it Piazzolla, make it legible and easy for foreign audiences, the ones likely to read this piece about a return.

  _________

  And the poor, their dark faces underground — it’s always a matter of skin, whatever Argentineans might tell you. The pregnant woman with several children, begging barefoot in Pueyrredón, when I get off to change to the line that will take me to Once station, where I have to catch a suburban train to Ituizangó. The kids’ dirty faces, their shredded clothes. They might be the same poor kids I see later on the train — poor but with air conditioning. Poor but spoiled after the tragedy of Once in 2012, when fifty-one died crushed like sardines when the 3772 from Moreno decided to enter the station at full speed. I can’t guarantee trains are able to stop now, but at least they have aircon.

  These kids or other kids, around eleven or twelve years old, drinking warm white wine from a plastic bottle, happy and off the trolley. And the itinerant salesmen offering everything from sweets and colouring books to a CD with the latest hits of x radio — they are playing the songs with a contemporary ghetto blaster, the salesman showing off a voice probably acquired during a journalism degree. And the Africans. Africans in Buenos Aires — they’re back. Speaking a language I can’t pin down, sitting in groups of two or three, ignored by the other passengers, for better or worse, travelling to provincia with bags and suitcases. What are they doing here? Where are they going? There used to be many of them in Buenos Aires but then they vanished — blended into the white population over the years, according to some; decimated by the flu and the war with Paraguay, according to the ones who know better. And now they are back. Like ghosts. Is there any other way of being back other than as a ghost?

  _________

  Ariel uses his keys and comes in unannounced. The door is heavy. He remembers the door being heavy but it must have gotten heavier during these past five years.

  Soon he’s riding the lift all the way to the sixth floor. It’s an old Otis with scissor gates. He thought they had been banned — children kept getting their hands and feet crushed by the gates. But here is this lift with scissor gates and it feels like being in a film, cinematically moving up with the numbers of the floors painted on the walls turning up one after the other and this irregular chiaroscuro of shadows and lights, scrolling in vertical pans.

  And soon the sixth floor. Ariel leaves the lift, closes the scissor gates behind him, and the lift disappears towards the ground floor, called by another person. The door to his flat opens and Rita is there, unwilling to be taken by surprise. She looks beautiful, the same, she hasn’t aged a single minute. Or maybe he never paid attention.

  _________

  The dead. If I were to write that piece about a return, of Ariel’s return, I should make a reference to the dead of Buenos Aires. The dead might explain the ghosts, or add some material basis for them, or just some colour.

  The dead of Buenos Aires, underground. Not as in buried six feet under but given a platform in the actual metro stations, on station names and writing on walls — the battles, violent patriarchs, terrorist attacks, catastrophes, accidents, disappeared writers. Caseros — Ejército Grande versus Juan Manuel de Rosas (another station and one more tyrant we love to hate) 1852. Pasteur / AMIA — vaccination / suicide bombing. Carlos Gardel — plane crash, Medellín, 1935. Rodolfo Walsh — killed in Constitución, 1977, disappeared. But maybe I’m exaggerating, forcing wanton connections. Or maybe not, because Cromañón.

  By the tracks, in the depths, a small mural consecrated to the dead in the fire of Cromañón, where almost two hundred music fans burned to a cinder during a rock concert, in 2004. The choice of words in the mural, on the black wall, links to other deaths: ‘Cromañón Nunca más’. Nunca más; Never More. The words chosen back in the mid-’80s to attempt to quantify and qualify the crimes of the juntas between 1976 and 1983. Nunca más was the title of the book by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, two words that would also become a call to stop death. In the mid-’80s the call was to stop state terrorism. In the early 2000s a call to stop another type of death: one born out of the state’s disappearance, all the corruption and oversights that would make it possible for almost two hundred — many of whom were children — to die in a blaze.

  A piece about a return to Buenos Aires wouldn’t be a piece about a return to Buenos Aires without some paragraphs dedicated to the dead. This is, of course, another trope I’m expected to write about, another form of surrender, part of the demand that Argentine writers fill the page looking back towards this or that violent past. Disappeared, victims of terrorism or petty crime, any of these will do to please the reader. Perhaps the dead might grant me the attention of a publisher too. Perhaps I have to be that opportunistic, like many of my successful compatriots. Maybe just once.

  _________

  And of course they have fucked by now. Ariel is smoking a cigarette, lying in his estranged bed. Rita is smoking too. Of course they are smoking.

  And of course a dialogue will here ensue, one of those dialogues full of love, longing and bitterness. Like Graciela Dufau and Héctor Alterio talking while promenading by the rotten Riachuelo in a 1982 film about another return, Volver, unimaginatively named a
fter the tango tune with the same name.

  Alfredo (Alterio) comes back to Argentina, tortured by (self-)exile. He comes back for work, although not only for work. He’s a successful businessman in the USA, and he comes back to Buenos Aires, in 1982, when the dictatorship is crumbling, and the Malvinas stupidity is about to happen. He returns, and he works and he beds Beatriz (Dufau), an old flame. And then — or even before they get laid, I can’t remember and I don’t wish to watch this film again — they are walking by the Riachuelo, in a clichéd postcard spot better avoided, yet abused by art, cinema, music and literature. There are still dock workers here and there, because they had not yet been decimated by neoliberalism. Alfredo and Beatriz walk, loving and hating one another in dub, in sepia, with corny phrases, so much to say, in so little time. And of course Beatriz is a journalist, just like Rita, who starts speaking over the dialogue in Volver, perhaps reading my mind or Ariel’s, or perhaps to stop me from reproducing the original exchange of platitudes.

  ‘Why did you come?’ asks Rita.

  ‘To sell the flat, you know that,’ says Ariel. ‘And to see Buenos Aires.’

  ‘I mean why did you really come? You didn’t really need to.’

  ‘I was curious.’

  ‘Tourists,’ says Rita bitterly. ‘In just a few days they want to see everything: visit all the museums, watch the tango, the football. Everything. As long as it is authentic.’

  ‘And I really wanted to see you,’ says Ariel. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  ‘Have you realised how much we sound like characters in a bad Argentine film?’ asks Rita.

  ‘It’s the fate of all Argentine characters,’ says Ariel and lights up another cigarette. Or I might say that. But he definitely lights up a cigarette because I quit smoking years ago.