The Scent of Buenos Aires

by Hebe Uhart

  “Now, here’s a tip: I wouldn’t let her go out with such a short skirt, or that bright red bow…”

  “What…What did she do?”

  “Nothin’. She sat over there and downed a shot of grappa, just like you did. Shows she’s your kin.”

  “Yep, yer kin,” said the sidekick.

  Don Mascali left; he sensed he’d better get home quick, but his legs thought otherwise. He hadn’t had a good foot bath in quite some time, a foot bath to ease his aching feet. With so much going on he’d forgotten. He sat down to rest in the middle of the road, noticing some low clouds, the kind that don’t just threaten rain—it looked like the clouds were about to swallow him up. He hurried the best he could and from afar saw the children running toward him. No matter what they say, there’s no place like home. Everything was alright. Everything had been normal until his wife, in her role as Princess, had started chasing after Enrique with a knife all through the fields. She never did love him: in her own way she always loved Leonardo more, but the slightest shift in his mother and he kept his distance. Luckily, Leonardo was able to grab his brother and pull him out of the way, because Enrique had become practically paralyzed next to her, saying:

  “Mamita, mamita!”

  And she just kept getting angrier.

  Leonardo told his father everything. No sooner had he arrived, Don Mascali built a bread oven as far away as he could, next to the dirt road, using some bricks he’d been saving for quite some time. He worked day and night with his two assistants. Don Vicente, who lived across the way, just about two blocks down, watched as Don Mascali built the oven right by the road, confirming his suspicions: the people who lived in that house were not up-and-coming. They didn’t have a vegetable garden or a sulky to drive to town, and besides, the people who lived in that house spent all their money on rags: there were always clothes of every possible color hung out on the line, and when a man lets a woman spend money on such junk, he’s a lost cause.

  When Don Vicente saw Don Mascali and the children eating down by the road, practically out in the street, he pointed them out to his wife and said:

  “Didn’t I tell you? Can’t you see now that I was right?”

  Coordination

  ONCE, I was asked to be on the organizing committee for the Buenos Aires Book Fair and to coordinate a roundtable discussion among writers. The topic had already been chosen: rural and urban literature. The invitation was printed on the letterhead of the Ongoing Commission for the Organization of the Book Fair: from Authors to Readers. It was a great honor but I was reluctant. I didn’t know anything about the subject, I don’t know the first thing about coordinating, and one of the writers invited to take part in the panel was a priest who talks on the radio and travels from province to province on an evangelical mission. He wants to do away with the antiquated stereotype of reactionary priests, so he tries to copy the way kids speak nowadays. He says, “Christ loves you to pieces,” or, “When you hit a rough patch,” and sometimes he talks like he’s from the countryside, telling stories about animals—like that one about the parrot that doesn’t want to share. All his stories have a moral. It’s really just a bunch of mumbo jumbo with words like paranoia and identity mixed in. In my opinion, he’s a fraud who sells a ton of books and his breath smells like rotten eggs and he’s sneaky.

  I hope he doesn’t show up, I thought.

  Besides, I’ve never been able to coordinate anyone. If I’m with two people who start to argue or dig in their heels about something, I immediately come up with a third alternative to appease them both: I know how to mediate, but not how to coordinate. I’m not capable of cutting anyone off. I can’t look at my watch to let the other guy know his time is up, because I don’t wear a watch; and if someone tells me to do something, I do it.

  We were gathered in a small conference room at the book fair. A lot of people were there. To my right, a very elderly writer was reading an excruciatingly long story. She kept pausing because she kept losing her place on the page. She had the voice of a convalescent—no, it was more like the voice of someone who had lived alone in a cave for a long time without speaking to a soul. I would have offered to read the story for her, but her handwriting was so cryptic that only she could make sense of it. The text was covered in scribbles and words that had been crossed out. Besides, I thought, taking the paper away from her would only make her seem even more defeated. She could break into tears right here in the middle of the roundtable discussion. The writer to my left—a man itching to get involved—said to me, “Cut her off. Tell her to stop reading, to wrap it up.”

  I gently asked her to summarize the rest of the story and tell it from memory. A minute later the guy on my left tapped my shoulder again: “Cut her off. Her storytelling is worse than her reading.”

  Luckily, she was interrupted by the woman sitting next to her—a lady who wrote stories about the countryside. It was one of those stories in which the sorrel gallops, the morning birds warble, and the farmhands drink yerba mate around the fire. Everything was as it should be. At one point she said, “Because he who possesses the countryside knows it best; it’s been passed down from generation to generation.”

  You wouldn’t believe all the fuss! Enraged, a woman in the audience stood up and said, “What—you think only the landowners know how to love the land and write about it? You’ve got some explaining to do,” with a look like she’d shoot the writer lady dead if she didn’t explain herself.

  The writer did the best she could, but people were already on edge. I don’t know how we ended up talking about the Desert Campaign, which led to how poorly the lands had been divided up in the previous century, and the massacre of the natives. Then somebody pointed out that gauchos and natives were not the same thing, and somebody else said that actually, they were entirely related. By that point, I had completely given up hope on coordinating anything; I just sat there watching them all as if I were at the movies. I even ended up wishing the priest had shown—anything to unite all those people so it wouldn’t be all on me. I realized, levelheadedly, that I never should have accepted the honor. Still, I kept my cool—I didn’t blame myself or anything.

  From way in the back of the audience a man said, “Until now we’ve spoken only about the Buenos Aires countryside. Have you all forgotten the provinces? San Luis exists, too.” (Three people stood in solidarity to show they were from San Luis.) “We provincial writers are here, too, but the capital—the bigheaded monster—feasts on everything.”

  Fortunately, by that time they’d stopped fighting. It was as if each and every one of them wanted to voice their anger, but in isolation. The shit really hit the fan when a writer from the Pampas stood up and spoke of the drought, reminding us that the Pampas also exists. To pacify everyone, I came up with something amiable and flattering to say. I recited some lines from a famous tango:

  Y la pampa es un verde pañuelo,

  colgado del cielo,

  tendido en el sol.

  And the Pampas are a green mantle,

  suspended from the sky,

  lying in the sun.

  The writer from the Pampas looked at me grimly and said condescendingly, as if talking to the stupidest of all his students, “But that song is about the Humid Pampas. The Dry Pampas have giant cacti.”

  I said, “Of course, of course.”

  And while he elaborated on the cardón cactus and its mythology, I was reminded of an obscene poem I’d read at the age of twelve about the Pampas and giant cacti.

  I was never invited to coordinate—or do anything else—at the book fair again.

  Paso del Rey

  THE type of thing overheard at Aunt Elisa’s house:

  “Blue is a fine color. Beige checks are more slimming than red checks.”

  It was the kind of house where melon with prosciutto was served, and once Aunt Elisa had gotten a thorn stuck in her eye. It remained
an absolute mystery how a plant had dared to prick Aunt Elisa in the eye because Aunt Elisa wore gloves when she traveled to Buenos Aires and carried a purse with little compartments containing only the essentials. All charm aside, Aunt Elisa’s house was as dull as dishwater compared to Aunt María’s house. For the longest time Grandmother had lived with Aunt María, but then some terrible calamity had ensued to prevent her from staying any longer. Now Grandmother lived in the house next door with her son Esteban. Nothing in Grandmother’s expression had changed now that she’d moved: seen one house, seen ’em all. No matter where, she slaughtered the chickens, boiled them into a nice broth, and once they were good and cooked she stuffed them with some sort of green paste all chopped up like grass (which looked like something the chicken itself might eat). Nobody cooked at Aunt María’s. Aunt María either ate the food brought to her by Esteban, or otherwise she made fritters. She didn’t cook out of necessity, only when she was in the mood. Fritters, which at Luisa’s house were dismissed as an unwholesome privilege granted to children—a treat to put a smile on their faces, but not the adults’ faces—that’s what Aunt María fried up any time she pleased. They were flat and wide like lily pads. Aunt María formed them impetuously, blabbing nonsense the entire time. Her knack for making fritters no doubt came from an era long gone.

  Once Luisa had gobbled up the fritters—without anyone checking whether one of her knee-high socks was sagging or her coat was dragging—she would go visit the chicks. Aunt María kept them under lock and key in a damp room, where she bathed them. They got a proper bath right after they were born; every now and then a chick would actually survive.

  All of Luisa’s other aunts and uncles—even her own mother—reproached Aunt María for this habit, saying:

  “They die.”

  Not that they felt sorry for the dead chicks—they just enjoyed observing how ineffective the practice was and showing off how smart they were. Who knows how they got so smart? That’s why Luisa liked visiting the room where the chicks were kept: perhaps her aunt was conducting a special experiment in there with them. After all, some of them lived. She locked the door with a key, but you could still hear them cheeping inside and Luisa pleaded with her aunt to let her go in and see. Aunt María only rarely opened the door, so when the chicks were confronted by people they became frightened and fluttered around, cheeping louder than ever. Aunt María scolded Luisa for riling them all up. She yelled:

  “Troublemaker!”

  Luisa ran out and María said:

  “Now where are you off to? Troublemaker! Trickster! Busybody! Come back here this instant!”

  Luisa ran off to tell her Uncle Esteban how María kept the chicks holed up, cheeping. Uncle Esteban said:

  “Wear a hat if you’re going outside, the sun is strong!”

  Luisa ran off to the swings at the playground. Between María’s house and the playground was Uncle Esteban’s market. He was a watchdog to steer clear of—albeit a distant watchdog. He yelled:

  “Don’t go in the sun! Don’t run so much, you’ll get all sweaty!”

  But from afar. He was always sweeping the big dirt and flagstone patio where there were some little cement tables bolted to the ground and some aluminum chairs. Uncle Esteban was weighed down by life, he never held his head high. He swept like a maniac, his lips pressed together tightly. If it was Saturday or Sunday Uncle Ernesto would join them from the city to help out. He didn’t sweep; he got drinks for the regulars and poured liquids into bottles with a funnel. Uncle Ernesto would say to Luisa, sweetly and absentmindedly, as if all little girls were made of sugar and spice:

  “What does my little girl have to say for herself?”

  This he cooed without even looking at her, holding up a bottle of beer for one of the regulars.

  On the far side was the playground; there were swings, a seesaw, and a bar for practicing gymnastics. Luisa ended up choosing one swing as her own, it was tied with chains to the branches of two thick trees. The chains had been tied at an angle and there wasn’t enough space between them to go very high, but you could do all sorts of tricks without falling off. If you sat sideways on the swing it was like a boat, rocking around in a circle. Sometimes Luisa felt like there was something wrong with that swing, like it was crooked. But the swing was so solid, its chains were so thick, that you could whack it and kick it and it would bounce right back. After sitting on the swing like a boat, then standing on one end to throw it off balance, she would get bored and walk off. The swing just wobbled back and forth on its own, lopsided. Then Luisa would go to the playground gate to watch the cars pass by on the road. One after another they drove by. She wished one would stop and take her somewhere else, to some other house.

  * * *

  —

  The park was comprised of the playground with swings, the regulars’ seating area, which was next to the market, and another vast space with a fig tree and a bunch of grass with lots of crisscrossing paths; that area bordered on a big henhouse.

  Since it wasn’t enclosed, the chickens were constantly walking around the area by the fig tree, which was next to the bathrooms. The vacationers wandered around the fig tree too. The park became truly lovely when the vacationers came. They were people who weren’t used to living in nature. Nature unsettled them, making them want to enjoy everything right then and there. The vacationers’ children chased the chickens, used sticks to prod the broody hen who sat peacefully on her roost, and then ran off to drink orange soda. When Uncle Esteban noticed, he threatened them from a distance. They ran off, and no one knows how they found their families again. Families were always getting lost in the park.

  The men on vacation claimed if it were their land they would plant potatoes, tomatoes, and squash and they could live off chicken eggs. Every once in a while they’d kill a hen. No pigs though—they wouldn’t breed pigs because they’re dirty. In other men the contact with nature would awaken their desire to set up industries, poultry farms, and flower shops selling wildflowers—all those aromo flowers going to waste.

  But then they would arrive at the conclusion that chickens get roost mites, and since their children would come running to tell them how they’d been scolded by a man just for playing with the chickens, they’d say:

  “Don’t mess with the chickens, they’re dirty birds.”

  And the vacationer fathers would do a spin on the gymnastics bar.

  The vacationers drove Uncle Estaban into fits of hatred, while Uncle Ernesto was bursting with friendliness. Someone would come up and say something like:

  “Don Esteban, could you please heat up this kettle for me?”

  “No. No can do.”

  Then they would ask Ernesto:

  “Don Ernesto, would you mind?”

  “Why, of course. Bring it right over.”

  It was the same with heating up bottles of milk for their babies and chilling bottles of beer. Later, Esteban would bicker with his brother for being so good-natured, but these discussions always took place while the two were out on walks. Esteban started to make empanadas and matambre; he was old by then, his mother had taught him. They turned out so well he decided to sell them. Then the vacationers started in with:

  “Don Esteban, could you please sell me some matambre?”

  And if he was in a bad mood or didn’t like the customer’s face, he would say:

  “Nope. I’m all out.”

  Quick as a squirrel, Uncle Ernesto would beckon them over his way and sell everything in sight.

  There were so many vacationers who descended upon the park. They were so unruly, and always asking to heat up so much water and chill so many beers, that Luisa stopped going to the playground. But on Sunday afternoons the park was different; neither the regulars nor the vacationers sat around the little tables outside. Instead, the place filled up with peaceful folks slowly sipping on a beer. That was the day the Shuets came: Old Man S
huet and Old Lady Shuet, who may have been his sister or sister-in-law, or perhaps they were siblings or cousins. They were ancient, but there was nothing haggard about them. The other lady was somewhat younger, and she came off as easygoing and whimsical. The three of them chatted jovially, they seemed grateful for something, as if it were their last Sunday on Earth. They smelled the jasmine, inhaled the fresh air—because they drove in from the city—and left early, before nightfall, because the road got dangerous. The old man drove. When Luisa saw them, she cheered up. She approached them and talked with them for a while, they regaled her with smiles and a pat on the back.

  Deep down, Grandmother knew something good when she saw it. She took off her apron, smoothed down her hair, and stepped out to welcome the old folks. They greeted her warmly and respectfully, and Grandmother treated them with a charm and politeness that Luisa had never seen her use among the family.

  * * *

  —

  Luisa started to take the bus by herself to Paso del Rey. She went to visit Aunt María and brought her what she had requested: Rachel face powder, bobby pins, and sewing thread. She first stopped by Uncle Esteban’s market asking for two chocolate bars: one for herself and one for María. He said:

  “Chocolate bars are junk.”

  All the food and drinks at the market he regarded as junk. He didn’t think much of the regulars either because they drank his wine and ate big salami sandwiches; and like everyone knows, there’s nothing refined about salami. And the conversations he overheard were abominable: Don Juan Ventura said that all governments are garbage, that every president on Earth should be hung to rot forever in hell. One day Don Juan Ventura even went as far as to say that the sun is the real God and father of us all because it shines its light on everyone. Don Servini said that up until the Battle of Abyssinia, Il Duce had been right; and that Arpegio, foal born to Parejero and Rosalinda, had a better pedigree than Yatasto—but they’d never let him show his true potential because of the political interests involved.