The Scent of Buenos Aires

by Hebe Uhart

  —

  I didn’t leave his house. Stubbornly, I stayed in a corner and said to myself: I’m going to spy. I’m going to lie in wait. Who knows what I was going to lie in wait for; but sitting there in the corner, I discovered that the old man was friends with some of the neighbors who were out back, behind the chicken coop, and that’s why I hadn’t seen them before. He was friends with one of those men who live in a wooden shack. Together they shared the newspaper and when the weather was nice he went to the corner store and they stood in the doorway chatting. I can’t remember what I ate that whole time; I only remember what I’ve mentioned here, and how once when the old man seemed surprised to find me sitting there so still, he said something strange to me, so completely unexpected from him:

  “Aren’t you going to get a bit of fresh air?”

  But I didn’t answer him. And I stayed there another three or four days longer without moving. I thought about the neighbors almost the whole time. One afternoon when the old man was soaking his feet in a foot bath and I was sitting silently across from him, I said:

  “Alright, I’m leaving.”

  “Alright,” said the old man, “come back soon.”

  And that’s how it went. I go visit him all the time, almost every day. Sometimes I bring him something. The other day I heard him say to the neighbor, the one he chats with at the corner store:

  “My son comes to visit me a lot. You should see how smart he is.”

  My New Love

  I’VE got a new love and I’ve learned lots of things from him. For example, boundaries. So many years of going to the psychoanalyst to hear him tell me over and over again: “But you dive head-first into an empty swimming pool.” I was horrified by that image because an empty swimming pool is the saddest thing there is. Or he would say, “Make yourself feel worthwhile, you have such low self-esteem. You’re intelligent, you’re creative.” This gave me a momentary glint of self-worth but then ended up sounding like a consolation prize, like when you introduce a friend to a man or woman who’s entirely unsuited for them and then try to fix it by saying, “He’s a historian,” or “She traveled to Tangiers.” And since I think I’ve found true love, I don’t need to be pretty or creative or travel to Tangiers: he loves me for who I am. And he doesn’t care if I’m a little old because it’s almost like he doesn’t even notice that type of thing. To my surprise, he loves me unconditionally. With him, I’ve learned how to express myself with just a look, which is worth a thousand words. I’m not scared if I see a hint of hatred in his eyes. I know it’s not directed at me, like I used to think. Or perhaps, in retrospect, all those years of therapy have actually made a difference. A flash of hatred can come across your eyes all of a sudden, just by remembering things, for private reasons. I know when to approach him, when he won’t reject me brutally, and so—and this is something I’ve always considered to be a test for living with someone, my analyst would be proud of me—we can each be in a different room, lost in our own thoughts, without having to pester one another by asking, “What are you up to?” and losing our patience with each other. With him, an unexpected femininity has arisen in me, because his simplicity—he has regular habits and straightforward desires—has led me to put an end to any rivalry or competition. We share that neutral quality that’s formed over time, after a certain age, in which there are no terrible days or dazzling celebrations, because our days have become about eating, sleeping, working, and watching a bit of television.

  To tell the truth, he doesn’t actually watch television. At night, to separate one day from the next, we rub our foreheads together. The only problems are his diet and one particular bad habit, because otherwise he’s quite mild-mannered: he only eats ground beef and he scratches his fleas in front of other people.

  Events Organization

  I WAS on the steering committee that took care of the artists and scientists invited to San Andrés. It’s sponsored by the university, and I gave several years of my life to the committee without asking for a penny. They chose me because I know all about literature and painting, but also because I’m profoundly discreet: I don’t discuss subjects I’m not familiar with, but I’m very good at disguising when I’m ignorant about something. It’s remarkable how you can string people along with a “sure,” “of course,” or “could be.” But once there was a man who had a face that looked like it was carved in stone who said to me:

  “Did you really listen to what I said?”

  And I thought, now he’s going to ask me to sum up what he said and I haven’t got a clue. I don’t know how I got out of that one, but I did. They also chose me because I’m so tall and I’m good at picking someone out of a crowd: when our unidentified visitors get off the plane or the bus, I have to pick them out. Lately, I’d gotten so good at it that as soon as they stepped out, as soon as I saw a person craning their neck and looking all around, I would say, “That’s him.” Right after I was appointed, Nicolás di Marco started giving me the cold shoulder, and when he can get away with it he snubs me on the street. He must have figured that he would have been a more qualified guide because he’s more knowledgeable than I am in just about every field. But he’s also blind as a bat and besides, he’s liable to make friends with the visitors. He’s even gone so far as to invite them to stay at his house after the event is over, which is unwise: you end up running into our illustrious guest, who’s out and about, and then they expect us all to go along with some harebrained scheme. If it’s a woman, she wants to go pick flowers in the countryside; or some guy will inevitably want to go to the casino when he would never dream of going to the casino in his hometown, and then you have to explain the rules of roulette to him. I’ve always been of the mind: show the guest around, then get the guest out of town. Not that I could do entirely without Nicolás di Marco, because he’s useful during the debates. After each lecture he asks the best questions—I’ll admit that—but he sits in the back with his tormented face, like a poor abandoned gaucho, and he makes me uncomfortable. He never stays to have dinner with the steering committee. True, he’s barely scraping by, but he never lets us buy him anything—not even a beer.

  I could write a book about all the people who have come to give talks in San Andrés, because each and every one of them is a novel of their own; but there are a few cases I will never forget. One man, who came to talk about new technologies in copper work, stepped off the plane drunk as a skunk. Our airport is tiny; the one and only airplane lands every afternoon, and while you’re waiting, the plains reach as far as the eye can see; the littlest detail stands out. When I saw this guy get off the plane and realized he was my guest, I couldn’t believe it: he was the last one off and he stumbled out as if each foot had to ask permission from the other just to move. If he hadn’t taken the stewardess’s arm he would have plunged right off the airstairs. He didn’t have a portfolio, which people usually bring along to keep all their lecture papers organized, only an old bag slung across his chest. When he got off I told him:

  “If you’d like, you’ve got time to go to the hotel and rest a little. I mean…To freshen up. There’s plenty of time. I’ll give you a wake-up call.”

  He didn’t seem to understand anything and I was going to add “to change your clothes,” but how was he going to change if he didn’t even have a suitcase? If it had been up to me I would have sent him back that very night, because we ended up having to postpone the talk until much later that evening: he didn’t wake up. Half the people left and I had to wait it out with the ones who stayed, paying their way at the café on the corner. When he finally did show up—his hair all wet and slicked down and his bag slung across his chest—it didn’t turn out so badly, but if it had been up to me it would have been “game over” that very night.

  Women are difficult and older women are the worst. Sometimes they’re deaf, they lose their bag, and the door to the taxi gets stuck; or they want to go see the river at eleven o’clock at night. Once
a woman came (she wasn’t that old) and said she wanted to see the poor neighborhoods and eat what they ate, because only then can you really understand a city. I showed her a humble neighborhood, but she said surely there must be a more destitute part of town. Reluctantly, I took her to the slums—it’s not like I wanted to march around town showing off squalor. I’d never gone out to eat around there before. I put on a tough face so that nobody would mess with me. She wanted to eat at a hole in the wall where the “door” was just a bedsheet hung up like a curtain. She saw some fellows eating some sort of stew at the table next to ours. Nobody—not even she—knew what the dish was called, and she said to the owner:

  “I’ll have the same as the gentlemen over there.”

  It was a disgusting stew with some bones in it. The place was cramped, the air was thick. I pretended to eat while the two men glanced at us out of the corners of their eyes when no one was looking. She had come to give a talk called “Integration Processes in Poly-classist Cultures.” When we left, we hadn’t gone more than three blocks when somebody hurled a rotten tomato at the front windshield of the car. Splat! I was almost glad. I thought, serves her right. Now she’ll learn not to eat where she shouldn’t. But she didn’t take the hint, she said:

  “When the processes of symbolization haven’t been developed, the starkness of the facts becomes as clear as day.”

  She should zip it, I thought. I’m never taking anybody there, ever again. Because the thing is, I’m not just in charge of picking them up and taking them back: I have to make sure the microphone works, or keep tabs on some group rehearsing for a boisterous murga in the room next door at the exact same time as the talk. If there aren’t enough people in the audience, I have to rustle up some high school kids (sometimes they don’t want to come). Plus, people tend to show up late because they eat first and also because of the weather: the warmer the weather, the later they turn up. And then I’ll get a call from the lecturer, from some public telephone, saying they went for a spin to check out the city and they’ll be waiting for me at such and such café—not like they’ve got the slightest notion where they are or what it’s called. Sometimes I have to sniff them out on the street like a hunting dog, and to top it off, I have to put on a face like “What a pleasant surprise” when they decide to stop and buy some donuts because they “just feel like eating donuts.”

  Once we hosted a Mexican professor; we’d decided at the steering committee that we wouldn’t just invite people from around the country; every now and then we’d invite someone from abroad. That visit resulted in my first brush with the steering committee. I remember the name of the talk because it was so long: “Different Interpretations of the Cartesian Cogito in the Context of the Process of Globalization.” When she got off the airplane—the distance from the plane to the main hall is only fifty feet—I noticed that her slip was hanging out from her skirt, and she had hairy legs. Being a man, I couldn’t say anything about it to her, but I told Mimí and Chichi, who were part of the decorations committee. They told me they weren’t about to mention it to her because it was so embarrassing. And Nicolás di Marco—that know-it-all—said that in Mexico women don’t shave their legs. Bottom line, when she gave the talk, sitting there with her legs uncrossed, her slip hung down even more. Or at least it seemed that way to me.

  From then on, I started to think of each guest as a little animal with their own little habits, and it was my job to guess their type: when I saw a woman wearing a floral print dress with red shoes and windblown hair, who wasn’t very quick to pick up on things, I would say: “I bet she wants to go to the river.” And if I saw a man wearing the right clothes, but who seemed to have put them on haphazardly, the garments somewhat faded and worn, in shades of gray and brown, I would think: Roulette. And I was almost always right. But the one who really took me for a ride was a sociologist who came to give a talk about “Tensions Inherent to the Present Day.” He seemed like a great guy: he asked to tour the city, we took a town car and ended up talking about the increase in drug use, the power of the cartels, and how the youth today need to channel their energy into sports. The guy knew a hell of a lot. Now, looking back, he spoke kind of like a politician—like he’d known everything since the day he was born, like someone who never asks any questions or has any doubts about anything. This guy knew all the tricks and he knew them well. When we drove by a little pink house I told him:

  “They sell drugs over there. The guy in charge is called El Chino.”

  He asked me, “Do you think there’s anyone there?”

  “Probably.”

  “Hold on, I’ll just be a minute.”

  He got out, rang the buzzer, and out came El Chino. They spoke briefly. When he came back he said:

  “I’m just doing some research.”

  But I don’t think he was doing research: he was bullshitting me so he could go back later. It’s too bad that Marilú, who lives the next block down, was on vacation. Otherwise, I would have been able to confirm my suspicions. Personally, I’m 98 percent sure it was bullshit. And from then on, I didn’t believe a word anyone said to me. I barely listened, and I became much more guarded than I’d been before. I would say, “aha” or “could be” to everything.

  But not everyone who came was a disaster. After the sociologist there was one lady who, compared to the local women, the ones we all considered to be ladies—they couldn’t hold a candle to her: she was the real deal, from the tip of her head down to her toes. Her hair was shaded a striking ash blonde. She wore barely any makeup, just a hint of light pink, and her dress went with everything. It was a dress that seemed inconsequential at first, but then you realized it was proper, practical, and perfect. And even though the idea was farfetched, everything about that lady was so exquisite and refined, just like her clothes, that I could have fallen in love with her (although she must have been twenty years my senior). She came to speak about “Life as Artwork” and I remember the entire talk, especially a quote from Goethe: “One cannot think properly with a poorly combed head of hair.” Her talk had a big impact on everyone. When she said that she only ate macrobiotic products (whole-grain bread, wheat gluten, chicory coffee, and stuff like that), we brought Mónica Gaucheron onto the committee because she was the only one who ate that type of thing back then. And from then on Mónica was in charge of ordering specialty foods for anyone who wanted them. This led to a discussion at the steering committee because they took the opportunity to dismiss Chichi and Mimí, who had been entirely useless of late—not even asking their silly questions during the debates. That lady marked an era: after her visit people ate macrobiotic products for quite some time; then they got tired of it. I started to get tired, too, especially of having to wait for people at the bus station. Those dogs are always there lying on the ground; it looks like they’ve been there for a hundred years. And if it’s hot, the street sweeper makes it even hotter by sweeping with a dirty broom. And I don’t know why, but there are flies. When the buses roll in from the countryside, people get off with packages and more packages, as if they were carrying their house on their backs. Truthfully, everything started to rub me the wrong way, but especially the dogs and the packages. The dogs are almost always just lying around, and if they do move it’s only out of pure necessity. Who they belong to, nobody knows. And the packages pissed me off because their owners’ faces were filled with hope, as if they’d just arrived in a big city, like Buenos Aires or Paris. What do I know. By that point, I was showing up at the last minute. “I’m here, then I’m outta here,” I would say. Soon enough, going to the airport started to get old too: the lone airplane in the middle of the prairie, the starkness all around. It’s a small airplane, like a toy plane. To think that when I was a kid I wanted to watch that airplane everyday. I started to get tired of going to pick people up and I would call them “freak,” as in: “The freak said he was getting in at ten o’clock.” I would get up in a rush, arrive at the last minute—or even a l
ittle late, worried that they had already left and, sometimes, hoping nobody was there. Then I started calling Nicolás di Marco “freak” too, because even when I didn’t know what the talk was about, I knew exactly when he was going to ask a question, even before he opened his mouth. Since I was in charge of organizing the debate, I started cutting him short. I would only let him ask three or four questions, and then: game over. That’s when Nicolás di Marco and I had it out. He said, “It’s authoritarian to interrupt people during the debate.” No wonder he says that, debating is the only thing he knows how to do. Once they even asked him to give a talk and he said no, poor idiot! He thinks the talks are so special. After he lost his chance, he started to ask even longer and more complicated questions. Eventually, I began to distance myself from the steering committee: they kept complaining about me cutting people off during the debate, and whatnot. That squabble helped me to realize that I wanted to leave town; I’d been so indecisive. A while back I had started searching on the computer for some sort of grant that was up my alley. And I found a one-year fellowship in the Netherlands for events organization. I leave tomorrow.

  Boy in a Boarding House

  ARTURO’S godfather said:

  “Send the boy to Buenos Aires? How could you! All that traffic, everything’s overpriced, and all those non-believers!”

  Arturo’s godfather always knew what he was talking about: he’d been to Caracas, he’d experienced the big city. Arturo’s father wanted to send the boy to Buenos Aires because he liked the tango, especially one song in particular called “Vida mía.” Once a blonde-haired singer came to Portofino and sang “El día que me quieras,” “Mi noche triste,” and “Vida mía,” but it was that last one that was so memorable. Besides, the exchange rate favored going to Buenos Aires, and if everything stayed the same for a year or two, he could meet up with Arturo—who would be a real young man by then—to go see that singer or some other girl just like her.