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nograciasavos · 7 years ago

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“Hard to believe this place had any beginning. I feel it to be as eternal as air and water”

J. L. Borges

All our worlds in one

No apps, no GPS, I got off at Retiro train station and walked to the branch of Banco Ciudad in Almagro, surrounded by the sounds of progress.

I happened to pierce the city center of Buenos Aires the other day - it is fashionable in literature to say "to pierce," “atravesar”, pierced by pain, politics, love, desire. - I hadn´t been there for quite a long time. Nostalgia is our best ingredient, it is the pain from old and new wounds we like most.

I had to unsubscribe myself from a bank package for a loan I had already finished paying. With no smart applications, no GPS, I got off at the main Retiro train station and walked my way to the branch of Ciudad bank in Almagro, meters away from La Orquidea legendary café on Corrientes Avenue , surrounded by the sounds of progress. The train from Olivos - my home town and where presidents have always lived, straight to the terminal we named Retiro (which means: retirement)- had taken as long as it took fifteen years ago although the trains look better, are more comfortable and seem to work better. We now have clocks that let us know we are all going to be late and probably travel squashed and the slow motion after Lisandro La Torre to remind us that something hasn´t moved, stagnated and what grew in the last decades is poverty. Sometimes space can not stand it´s own emptiness.

Nothing has grown more than the exclusive Villa 31, the huge slum quarter that welcomes you coming from the north of the city. One night in a literary workshop we ordered food, the local empanadas from the new neighbourhood. Ah they were so delicious!. Improvised construction reach up to five Storey and some parts even look nice, colourful, exotic atracting tourist and residents from all parts.

The train takes you through the backside of our personal universe. It walks you through behind all of the collective and individual worlds. The train is a national sincerity and duplicity tour. We always put our worst face in the backyard, the rotten swing, the flat bycicles, flat footballs, the rusty grills, broken chairs, ugly dogs, drying stained sheets.

But I had to do a bank procedure and I wanted to get into town and get thing done with. And suddenly all of that took me back to that time when I was a go-fer office boy or my many other jobs in the Capital center, when I walked all those same streets that my old man also walked, all the bars where I served, where my old man was served, offices and above us the neverending cobweb network of cables that come and go. Something hadn´t changed, I'm not sure what it was. I could see the world, I walked out the subway mouth at Moreno station. I can´t stand being underground for long. I prefer to walk, walk and ask. And I asked an officer: In that direction or that one? The stations serve as references. Near Florida Street, someone offered the steak, the beef, the juicy and wounded meat: Welcome, help yourself whatever you want. I asked for Corrientes but I chose Perón and I crossed Once neighbourhood and felt all those worlds in one.

In front of the Congress I was paralyzed by how beautiful it was at the distance, although if the light slightly changes it becomes the saddest place in the world. I saw Rodin, Rodin's thinker, an original sculpture and down below a man who seemed exiled from a neighbour country took a sip from something almost orange, also thoughtful manner. At some point, a sympathetic gentleman with a soviet accent and clear eyes told me that he only sold the fake Gilbert rugby balls in six packs for $ 140 argentine pesos. I wanted one for my nephew. We did not understand each other but nodded with respect and continued our ways. My country always seems the country of the last things.

We are always searching for someone who´s missing. Always in our minds, ourselves, in real life or as a nation. In a way it seems everyone is missing. We have developed tragic genes. We need crisis.

This is a place that gives and takes. The story always matematically repeats itself altough the elements and human factors are unlimited

We call our best "cracks" probably because they break the mold, they crack normality. Unlike Cohen sang we are resigned to believe that there is no crack in everything, but yes that that's how the light gets in.

This is a city of permanent promise. Promises we buy, vote and believe.

As all the worlds in one we are infoxicated. In the middle age of diets, the threat to quit flour and meat, sugar, many should question the use of data and think about starting the diet of information. Information bombards us and we seem to enjoy that addiction of the multiplatform consumption. We buy every news and shake our daily cocktail.

Years ago a man out of Africa offered me change. Selling dollars: Change, change!, Cambio! Cambio!, he said in a shy way. We call people selling green dollars “trees”. There are no tres left because we are betting on our coin and a change for good. We now by watches or sunglasses from our recent imigrants. I tried to decipher their origins. Angolan, Senegalese? The world is a mystery. I thought of the bird that migrates and where it chooses to go according to climate change, bringing different versions of terrestrial affairs,.

The drums from the backround, always the ultra-land drums and the latent and eternal claim. Marches, pickets

The city at times seems to me like a low budget Youth Hostel where people from all over arrive and do not want to go. No one wants to be an adult. We are a little more than teenagers, Argenteena, we do not want to admit that we should be older but that is why time exists, we have time for that. It seems we lack vocations. We don´t know in what to specialize. We can´t live on meat and a tango danced for foreigners. To us locals, the curious, the residents, did anyone give us a vocational test as a nation? What is the next thing we want to be? What do we want to become? What can we become? A German tourist crossed the Avenida de Mayo and looked at our country´s belly button in ecstasy as if he had seen The Aleph they had once ead to him.

Near tribunales, the Courts área, a cafetero showed me the cover of a newspaper with the girls of the moment half-naked momento. At the side street two latin American who attended a place of all kinds of things laughed loudly. Other men who i guessed from africa offered more sunglasses and selfie sticks. A person from the East loaded goods into a utilitarian Peugeot plotted with oriental words. In another street almost the corner a man was moving home and worked from his cell.

Gelman said that under foreign rains we shouldn´t tear away people from their lands. We are all have teared.

El palacio de las flores was a beautiful place. How flowery is this place we named The Palace of flowers where lots met and dance on imaginary ice,.

I went round and round in circles. This resembles a labyrinth and sometimes a cemetery: street-street-street-street-avenue-street-street-street-street-plaza.

I fell in love with Medrano Street and its trees forming the tunnel of time.

You can never write a Tango without Buenos Aires, the city of good airs and the irony of its destiny.

In the same Corrientes avenue, our vein aorta, an historical fishmonger made me come back to rethink why is it that we weren´t taught to eat more fish if it does us so good and we have coast for long and for time. The country of the follow me, the vivos (the alive), a serious country.

How did we get here. Argentina ends with "ina" “ine”, says a tango.

Suddenly a lady, a skinny woman, brings him what seemed like a lost purse. The act is celebrated.

I think we have not lost that of the laudable thing of wanting to be honest. It's not that we always boast about being jets, cheats, hands of god and working less. Something in us always wanted to mature. The common denominator that represents us in the street, at home and in life is good. In other countries there may be less corruption, but a frenchman or a kiwi, a japanese, a swede may not even hesitate to see a wallet on the floor, and say "it's mine" and keep it in the order of their silence. But we, people of the Argentine, want to have our chance to return it and go on TV. A man returns a suitcase with ten thousand pesos and he appears embracing the owner.

This country is over explained but we never understood it. We explain and over explain over and over again. We have never really understood women and we have always loved them and always will..

It is a beautiful quilombo, a incomprehensible hash. As I walked in this loving mess, I came to feel a love I had never felt before. A love after sex, cigarette love, real. A love that endures, I do not know if yet and still with madness, but rather with certain tenderness.

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