So, I was saying....

The night ended splenidily. The next couple of days were spent in apartment hunting. Nice people, rental agents, all a little on edge, trying to appear reasonable. There is a local's price and the "Americans Abroad' price...worse yet, all the best apartments, but for the minority of wealthy Argentines, are saved for tourists. Hard to find a good deal if you live here. Almost like the saddening apartheid of Cuban citizens Buzz and I experienced in Varadero, Cuba.

Not as horrific, of course. In Varadero, Cubans cannot bathe alongside tourists at the beaches, they have their own beach at quite a distance from Havana and Varadero. Here there is not as much human suffering apparent in the nucleus of the city. Yet if one watches the local news one hears of the constant "piqueteros", i.e. - people protesting governmental injustice or lack of funds for school, or the fixed rate of a cabbie's fare, or or or....

The "piqueteros" exact revenge on the indifference of the ruling class by blocking major transit arteries. There are surely slums here. One sees those awful towers of the doomed, colourless, concrete economic prisons the one wider and sqaurer than the last, lacking any art, any loveliness any visible aspect of beauty that might incorrectly inspire their inhabitiant's toward holding dear the hope of escape. From these bald and arid pauper's mausoleums the endless odor and sweat of the desperate emanates as surely as the exhaust from a Ferrarri does, releasing the noxious and terrible scent of poverty. Testimony to the eternal plight of the disenfranchised, marginalized, uneducated, dieseased, ugly, broken people compelled to exist in the squalor of their better's lack of imagination and compassion.

My first experience with piqueteros was when my new friend - Carolina - and her friend, Alexis (a most kind and audaciously fragrant personality) invited me to Alexis' country "estancia" the very day I finally took possession of my apartment here in the neighborhood known as "Alto Palermo".

No sooner then I had signed the contract and checked my e-mail, than I discovered that Carolina was inviting me for a "couple of days" to the countryside, if I would like to accompany them to a region in the Pampas 5 hours south of Buenos Aires, one caveat, I simply must be at her apartment no later than 12:30 - As Alexis, a blue-blooded Frenchman whose family has run this concern for well over a hundred years does not abide tardiness and would easily be gone if I didn't appear on time. Not having slept in the place at all, I beat a hasty retreat, telephoned her and grabbed a taxi to her place. No sooner than I arrived than became apparent that our compulsive and timely gentleman was already a few minutes late. The minutes turned into an hour and I began to suspect a more than mere affinity between the Argentines and the Cubans. Noon means two o clock, five for dinner means eight and a late night snack at 9 means an all night bender til the wee hours. I was in cast adrift and glad of it, in the bosom of my new culture. At peace.

Intrigued by this lovely, complicated lady I had only met only a couple of nights before at the film screening about Evita's narcoleptic lovers, we spent the next hour and half talking about whatever occured to us in the moment at her house.

She reminded me of the girls I used to fall in love with in the ninth grade and chase around during recreation in quest of kisses and the scent of their napes. These girls were invariably tall, manly but not mannish, soft-skinned but tough, smarter than most girls and definitely reluctant to allow me a simple kiss. Nowadays I would be deemed in public schools as a menace and a kind of sexual pervert in the making, worthy of a court case and a restraining order if not a dose of Ritalin and castration. Abhorrent modern America and its twisted understanding of anything, let alone the natural impulses and nature of children, their native instincts or otherwise.

But ah, those were the sixties and were still, children at least (they'd got to us yet as a social group worthy of distorting and mutating) human beings. The lusting for a schoolyard kiss, a hot and probably heavy petting behind some shrubbery or the long and saccharin declamations of true love writ on the double-spaced lines of the early entries into my notebooks of lust were then regarded as nothing more than the healthy evolution of an ardent and precosious boy exploring his androgynous thirst for a boysih girl's lips and love. Thus were the springtime afternoons spent in the running fields of a Los Angeles junior high school, when the air was not yet too smoggy for such breathless pursuits as my errogenous zones would allow and the thwarted and diseased minds of the adults who supervise children were not yet so aberrant and infirm.

Oops, ah yes, those piqueteros. So, as I was saying, after Monsieur Alexis arrived around 2:30 PM and AFTER we had to change a tire - his Peugeot's "state of the art" computer insisted there was a puncture - we went off speedily at first...only to be put back in our countryside desires by a determined pack of piquetero's and had to surrender to their blockade and return to Buenos Aires.

There was nothing more to do than repair to Alexis' apartment and have a good stiff drink perhaps they were two...were they three?

Let me explain that Alexis is a character, a vintage chap straight out of Conan Doyle perhaps, or rather one of Nabokov's most romantic confections or even better one of Victor Hugo's heroes, perhaps even moreso a child descended of Edwardian ideals, a cultured gentleman such as are in danger of extinction should the regiments of the socially stupid remain determined to squeeze all of mankind into the grind of a sausage-making scheme, wanting virtue and justice to fall into the tight confines of sameness and the utter banality of a concept of democracy and freedom that should fell whatever remains of art and style in the native human animal vested with poise and good manners. He is the real thing. A man not only at home equally in one of the great capital's: London or Paris, easily conversing on the crimes of Napolean's Empire or the Restoration under Louis the XVIII. But he is a man of the earth. His feet well positioned on the ground. Not dreamy, not precocious. Merely a good and noble steed of his land.

For the moment I had only to see his home and hearth in Buenos Aires than to realize that here lay a man of true vintage. Good and solid art gracing his walls, a benevolent and gracious demeanor and a sure sense of his place in the world's pecking order. He possesses a loud but charming voice with a deep timbre and a masculine but refined manner of movement. In short order we were all roaming the great space of his "apartment" in Buenos Aires.

We played backgammon, drank wine, listened to music, laughed and visited the many rooms he is attempting to accomodate his sudden and latent family into. For Alexis made the wise choice of marrying rather late in life and acquired the great gift of children engengered through the auspices of his own loins into the modern world at this late stage in the drama of his life. As a true gentleman you see, it is one's duty, not only omoral obligation to see that thus invested with such holdings, he should rise and accept one's responsibility to produce heirs. None of this leaving it to The Society For The Betterment of Cats for him! Well done 'ol boy! Well done.

We sauntered upstairs to his upper floors where he keeps an old antique computer, along a narow staircase which he decked up with Boatswain's rope as bannisters where Alexis and I spent a good hour trying to find the origins and name of the artist which had created a most faded but interesting watercolour on the subject of the Russian Revolution.

Let's face it guys...shit like this just doesn't happen in Rockville, Md on a Tuesday night!

Eventually we headed out for our dinner meeting, wine bottles in each of our hands to rendezvous
more of Carolina's endearing friends. Among these I met a puckish and very amiable man full of laughter at the merest suggestion of comedy, Eduardo. A man in his early sixties, Eduardo, through dedicated and devout mirthmaking and a constant vivacity seems far younger than I. Mercifully he lit a most delicious joint and I inhaled at last the only smoke I allow myself these days and arose into a light-hearted and fantastical performance such as I am apt to deliver in these states of mind. We all had a most splendid time. Alexis, a man of discipline if decadent in spurts, bid us adieu and returned to his home while the rest of us continued to enjoy our company and revelry.

At 3 am they (Carolina and Eduardo) deposited me at my doorstep with my doorman a la Manhattan, and I begged them my privacy - for they were ready to come sleep in my place, perhaps my bed as well - but I explained I had need of having my first night's repose alone, lest the Prince feel the pea.

Exhausted and glad to be in the company of living souls and under the charm and magic of such a splendid evening I fell to sleep.