1: Think Back, Remember How It Was
My bag got robbed in a barbecue place around the corner from where Borges used to work. Rookie error: I hadn’t the strap eeled around my leg as usual. My notebook was in it. Now I’m in a police station, a loud yammer of hope and anger loop-tracked in my head. It goes on.
Listen to me: my notebook. It’s a bin’s notebook now, probably, chucked once the guy who lifted it realised, “Not even a Kindle!” The pages mulch and pulp, all coffee-splats and sandwich-leaks.
I know there’s no point in reporting it. I know this happens every day. But tell that to the yammer in my head. I don’t want someone to magic the bag back. All I want is busy police to yell at me for trying to waste their time so’s I can tail-between-the-legs it back on home, chastened quiet. I came here to be shut up, basically.
But it’s Sunday, and the police are all out monitoring the markets and protests. It’s chapel-quiet in the big hall. There’s a crucifix and photos of commissioners, bitted step-lips, chequer tiles veined with cracks. “The rotten handwriting of time,” Grace Paley calls it.
In Bar Dorrego people gouge their names in the dark wood of the tables and chairs. The pale gold carves cross, cancel, seem to bicker.
I hover around outside an office. Inside is a plain-clothes detective, bleary, bockety steel-rims, around fifty. On his desk, ledgers, corners bent, pages sallowed by the drag of hands. Gobbets of torn-off pages caught in the spirals of a notebook: fat on a shorn bone, snow caught on barb wire. MISSING posters. The electric light repeats its one-bar phrase again and again. A forgiving wattage: it looks like the ‘70s in here.
I’m not 100% I really care anymore, but I still can’t mute that yammer.
“Can I help you?”
I know this isn’t a big deal. I only have to look at the MISSING posters to know that. But it all still comes out in a garble, and before I know it I look like just another tourist.
The MISSING posters, they’re banded with white lines, white pocks are in the black of their hair, ghost-blanks for teeth bared in smiles. Two are girls. One is 14. One is 27. One is from Bolivia. One is from Flores. One of the ‘last seen’ dates is in December. All three ‘last seen’ places are miles from each other. The city must all look like the one big crime-scene to him.
He breathes out. It’s a heavy breath, not like he’s annoyed, just like he’s trying not to be. “Well, sir, I’m sorry for your trouble, but you must remember that this is a very big city in which many things happen every day. I can make a report if you like.”
I say nothing. I measure this up. Wait.
This isn’t enough to shut me up. This is just what is. The yammer in my head goes on. I’ll be dosing myself with a choppy stream of Californication within the hour. I look at the MISSING posters. I look at the detective. The smoking ban looks like it’s grated him harder than usual today. He’s not fifty: he’s just tired like he’s older. I decide: “No, it’s okay: it’s just notes is all.”
Because it’s not just anything, I have to remember to shrug. Shaking his hand is a bit much, probably, but I do it anyway. A thaw: a smile. He shrugs, too. He knows I don’t get it, but at least I know I don’t get it.
2: It Goes Like This
‘…all told in “a vernacular/of ruin”.’ – Anthony Walsh, ‘The Long Exposed’
Don Paterson says that a poem is a machine for remembering itself. So is a city. This can go too far.
Buenos Aires is a repetition. Buenos Aires holds in it the memory of a city of the same name burned down in 1541. What you see now began with Juan de Garay’s second go, in 1580.
The river-bank where de Garay landed has shifted inland now, the point pegged with a statue. This is the Plaza de Mayo, where the city’s nobility led the revolution of May 25, 1810.
This is where 354 people died in 1955 when the air force bombed a protest. You can still track the gouges.
This is where veterans of the 1982 War and the Mothers of the Disappeared still camp out, the veterans in their army-issue tents, the Mothers with their white caps and MISSING posters. “LAS MALVINAS SON ARGENTINAS,” says one banner. The deckle-edged nubs of land look like frost formations on the sign’s cold blue. The motto and the islands decorate road-signs all over the country.
Opposite the statue of Juan de Garay is the Casa Rosada, where Evita gave her “Don’t cry for me, Argentina” speech and Maradona lifted the World Cup in 1986. The Casa Rosada gets its pink tone from an oxblood-and-whitewash emulsion formerly used as a fixative.
Buenos Aires means ‘good winds’. The name was the relief talking: to get there, the first crew had to ride floods and kill locals all the way down the Paraná river. So Buenos Aires is utopia as *eu-topia*: a good place to be. Until it was burned, of course.
A good place to be wasn’t enough for Juan de Garay, however. He died three years later, on a mad hunt for ‘The City of the Caesars’. This was a golden city founded by either giants, Incas, ghosts, the survivors of a shipwreck, or the survivors of a massacre: it depended who you asked. Where it was also depended who you asked. Some said it moved. Others said it was between two of the Andes.
There are a lot of Andes. Besides, it could have moved.
Juan de Garay didn’t find it. Then some locals killed him.
Buenos Aires’ shape is the memory of a gone river. Exhausted from its thunder and carve through six countries, the Rio Plata sighs out its load and dies in to land. Drive a stake in to its riverbed and they say you’ll have an island the following year. The dirt billows recede further back each year and trace their ghost in silt. You can follow the old riverbank’s old line in maps showing the oblongs o the first farms in Buenos Aires. Those vertebrae used to edge a wide bay, but now they’re lodged deep in land undulant like a riverbed.
Watch the land and water’s slow loll against each other, the traces and the gouges the movement leaves, and you can’t help it, you think, Ovid, “Nothing remains, everything changes”.
When Borges spoke of the “more solid world” he felt vanishing all around him, you kind of see what he meant.
*
I am in a government-sponsored 24-hour burger-bar trying to remember where I left off in that notebook, and good luck with that. ‘Think back!’ I keep thinking. ‘Remember how it was!’
Nac & Pop, it’s called, the burger bar: Nacíonal y Popular. These sprouted up all over after the 2001 default, when rioters began to target foreign banks and franchises, and people like to think of them as a buffer against globalisation. Autarky has always been close to the Argentine heart: even the match-heads are blue instead of red.
The walls are loud with cartoons of Argentine celebrities and pornstars. The style is the kind you get foisted on you by lads who do paintings of tourists on piers: livid tints, chins that steep to comical points, cheeks like deep caves.
Outside, it’s the Sunday-evening peace that drops when they shut roads for protests. The protests sound like a gargle from this far off. It is a wash of sound, it circles in, is an eddy.
The TV showing the football is an Argentine imitation of a Samsung. Ads for the office of the President flash up every now and then. They reach for the gut via the wallet: “Every Argentine should own their own home.” She’s locked in a battle with the Buenos Aires city government for ownership of this motto. They highlight it in yellow. She gets the blue tint.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that people don’t really go in for this kind of thing. On the TV, flares crackle and Boca Juniors’ blue-and-yellow stripes blur up through the smoke. Some climb the fences between pitch and stands and do a caged-monkey bounce on the wire. The River Plate fans look freaked.
The ads grow frantic: ‘Join the air-force, there’s cash!’ ‘This football is brought to you by the President!’ ‘Stop it, we’ll give you a gaff!’
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is the widow of her predecessor, Nestor Kirchner. There have been protests almost every day since the middle of April, as she tries to push through constitutional reform to run for a third term in 2015. She has a chance, having already vetoed a bill protecting the country’s glacial water-reserves from private interests. The bill was passed unanimously by the Congress and by all but one of the Senators.
Cristina Kirchner gives speeches in front of one of two posters of Evita, depending on her mood: strident Evita, raging in to the mic, hair back and a fist in the air, and smiling Evita, from her official portrait. Since 2011, nine-floor tall murals of these same two images have adorned the upper reaches of the vast Ministry of Communications building.
One of the most popular posters clapped up around the place features Cristina Kirchner embracing her husband on the day of her re-election. We’re all in this together, says the poster.
The straight leg of the ‘K for Kirchner’ is a map of Argentina.
While Kirchners were on the left wing of the perónistas in the early ‘70s, their ruling Justicialist Party presents itself as a ‘third-way’ type party – just as Perón’s movement was itself an emulsion of left- and right-wing elements. Even their choice of iconography blurs them in to the shape of the Peróns: the calm, beaming husband, the strident wife who stands with him until the end and ever after.
Think back, say their posters. Remember how it was. Remember Argentina’s golden age, when the wealth of the pampas was harnessed to the wealth of the port, when prospective immigrants found it hard to choose between New York and Buenos Aires. The obelisk looming above the 24-lane Avenida 9 de Julio – opposite the Ministry of Communications – quotes the one in Washington, D.C., and gives you an idea of where Argentina’s aspirations lay when it was completed in 1936. The Big Ben replica in San Martín was a gift from the city’s British community in 1910: Buenos Aires or London, it says, same difference.
For the Justicialists, progress means getting Argentina back to believing lines in like this. They have their script, and they’re sticking to it.
You see the obelisk, the towers, the Persian column gift from the Shah of Iran, you see the murals, and you can’t help it, you think, Babel, the first utopia, that place where the words all meant the same thing to everyone. ‘Freedom. Progress. Justice. We’re all in this together.’
The pavements are splashed with rain and evening ash-light. Buses and people there and then not there, second by second. An old guy stops me. His face is seamed and thick and ruddy with street-life. The beard, the hair, they’re soot-black and bouffant, both of them. I’ve seen him a few times already, in doorways, often with a bottle. I think it’s money he wants and go for my wallet in a startle. But no.
“Who won?” he asks. I tell him. I don’t know who he was up for: his nod is polite, and he doesn’t linger. The pavements are a rush of people. He gets washed away in their tide, stroking his beard, so slow in the rush that it’s like he’s a still island in that flow.
Time is a river which sweeps me away, says Borges, but I am the river.
Borges used to work at the National Library in San Telmo, the oldest barrio in Buenos Aires. It got too full, so they moved it to Recoleta, let the San Telmo building fall hollow. Opposite his workplace the homeless have tugged the bottom halves of doors off of abandoned tenements to make bivouacs inside.
Borges’ more solid world vanishes under a river of script, under the gouge and scrawl of time. Drills dice up pavement-tiles. Pokes of scutch, bowed pavement grids, tugged-down plane trees. The nibbled, undersea look of old stucco, the clouded glass of the anarcho-syndicalist bakery on Calle Mexico, the craze of gapped lines, none of it spells anything anymore.
3: Say It Again
One legacy of the 2001 crisis was the appearance of the cartanero. Here, the top 10% earners make 31 times as much money as the bottom 10%, so when the economy collapsed, cardboard-hunters began work in earnest. The tentative recovery means they even have a union now.
They sit amid their prizes outside my door, sorting paper from cardboard. The unused paper piles in ribbons light as modern sculpture. The cardboard is bound and tamped flat in laundry trolleys. Because of competition, the best ones separate the intact panels from the tatters, and keep the sodden trash away at the back, separated by a plank. I imagine my notebook spilled out of one such bin, filleted, put in a trolley.
Most of these guys sleep in the park by the Congress building, just around the corner. There’s a soot-edge in the fire under a basin where a Dad’s washing his kid. The kid wails. Nobody reacts to the kid wailing, as in, nobody reacts like they’re annoyed. It’s maté pipes and other kinds of pipe, too, and people sitting Buddha-still in their tents, in out of the dusk cool, the ending light. I want my pages on that fire, that one. I want their smoke to rise skywards in grey flakes of ash, hover, fall again, carbon come back home.
*
Home, it starts to really pelt. My tin roof roars. Last time it rained like this I got caught out in it, under a concrete highway bridge near the Avenida Juan de Garay. There was a split in the concrete siding above. The rain flushed down in a phosphor seethe. Little kerbside mud beaches silted away under a lattice of glass-clear water.
Across the road I could see MISSING posters on stakes, names and faces, dates. This is where the ‘Club Atlético’ police station used to be until it was knocked and its rubble ploughed in to the highway. Between 1976 and 1983, in the time of the generals, this is where 1,500 people were taken in black Ford Falcons so they could be made to speak and then made to disappear.
Say it. Say it again. Stick to the script. It goes like this.
The MISSING posters on stakes traced a life-size crime-scene outline. Not all the names were there: they couldn’t be, almost didn’t have to be. The ones that were traced the whole big crime in no words. As it got dark, the outline lit up in white lights, not in chalk marks, so as not to wash away.
Outside, tonight, the walls’ rough pelt of posters melts clear of its glue to heap in drifts. The rain runs their tints. The ink spells a dribble of cursive. It goes on. Think back, remember how it was. It goes like this. Say it, say it again.
