The Streets of Buenos Aires

I avoid them of late. The Streets. The throngs outside my doors. The mass of human motion everywhere.

But when I walk, I walk. Then the huge city, porous and ridden with its indecipherable riddles, seems to expand and contract all in the same moment, in size. As vast as it seemingly appears it also suddenly is shrunk and intimate. There are magnificent nooks. Magical corners. Secret doors, if you can find them. I wander aimlessly. I have never mapped the city in my mind really. I betray my native compass I possess everywhere else in the world, but here. I never seem to grasp its true dimensions. Then suddenly I know everywhere and how to get there. The entire thing a conundrum.

The obelisk has saved me in that regard. It is central and from here all of Buenos Aires' streets emanate and expand.

I am now re-learning the new/old neighborhood, which was, for a few short days, my home in the second hotel. The endless parade of shops, cafés, bookstores, leather craftsmen and merchants hawking wares and passing leaflets. I wandered these streets at the start of my journey. But when one really lives anywhere, a streetcorner, a neighborhood, different aspects reveal themselves than one could see before.

Microcentro. This is the dazzling, shining beacon of the city. The jugular. The heart-wrenching, comical, friendly and raucous heart of Buenos Aires. The Great Obelisk. 9 de Julio, the world's widest boulevard. The winds coming in from the river.

But now, more than two months later, I cannot quite put my finger on it, I find that there is something dark alongside the cacophony of carnival atmosphere. An undeniable shadowy desperateness. The scars of bad times and hard luck visible everywhere. Litter is wantonly scattered everywhere. It feels of abandonment. There has been a surrender of sorts even among the great heave of continual revolution and cries for social reform. Everyone is a survivor of the downfall. But they are still dragging the pain of the loss inside along with their courage and endurance. As if exhausted of all the fought-for ideas, ideals and hopes. Some have survived physically but not the psychic price of the struggles within. A part of their spirit is broken and missing. A sadness, A melancholy, again and again we're reminded.

Because of this then there is a grey pallor, even on the brightest most spectacular afternoon of sun and beauty across the long wide avenues and boulevards, the narrow streets.

I walk among them. More often than not, alone. Me and The Porteño Millions. The scattered souls, ant-like, marching on hurriedly to their illusorily important destinantions punctuated by street lights, the constant honking of cars and buses and ambulances. pauses, yet affixed to the spiderweb, crawling and conniving, moving with the drone millions.

Unlike other Capitals where people meet your eye, here most everyone maintains a forward gaze uncommiitted, detached. They peek more than stare. Unless someone is trying to hustle you. Then they smile, wide as a sail at full mast and follow you and cajole you and invite you to decadence and the sordid pleasure houses of the quarter.

The new neighborhood is just that. A fair. A carnival. A dream and a nightmare. A pleasure and a dread. Like the country, a battlefield of contradictions. Beautiful, magnificent, sad and broken.

If in pairs or a group of friends, long known, then you see copious laughter and camaraderie and jostling. And of course the constant noise of chatter and banter among we Latin people who lack not for words nor the desire to out shout our neighbors. But to the stranger, the irreverently cursory eye, there is no other imminent sense of relation to the person passing you than that of the mere business of endurance and moving forward.

Sometimes, not even New York seems so callously indifferent. At times, I dare say it, not even a Londoners - which is another way of underscoring the distance and control in the native character of the Porteño. Like Tango, you are entwined, enmeshed and yet at just such a distance to keep the tension alive the hands the only real connection when

My friend Maggie says that after 40 no one really sees you anymre, literally does not see you physically in a space. You cease to exist. A kind of palpable absence at best. I have felt that way here in many ways. But it might be me, it might be what has happened to my way of seeing in the world. The fruits of my dream. It is a world, this Buenos Aires, that maybe it is I who have failed in opening myself to properly.

Originially, I came on a mission of intro-spection into one of the most curious places in the world. I came to do a job and to find inner strength. In my time here, my best friends have proven to be the cinema and the silence of this last home. The sense that I have a small portion invested here. A part of me has already found its peculiar niche. It has been work. I have held my own.

But I ever think of home. The U.S. and all the turned corners that might not be so easy for our society to recover from. The upcoming demoralized and frighteningly polarized elections, again. The long-term effects of what has transpired for us as a nation that were never fully considered. These are the spoils of bragadoccio and impulsive and random use of force majeure. Rah! Rah! We Are No. 1#! Rah! Rah! We are royally......

We went in search of the nightmare and now we have found that the nightmare is us.

And here we are - where we are - and we cannot go forward nor can we turn back either. We have wedged ourselves into a most determined and dogged corner of hell. And we must find a good manner of ending this insanity the world cried against in the hundreds of millions - we all knew the world was going to be changed forever. And here I am. And there we are.

I am now only a member of the audience. A watcher. Not the performer. Not the determined and strategized soldier. Rather the one who rarely turns on his television, listens to the satellite. I am the guy who keeps all windows and shutters closed. I have made a cave of this place and I keep it dark as a vampire's lair. Only my office, the large desk, the large window receive a great whiteness of light. I sleepwalk the calendar away. A kind of hybernating creature awating the next, the one true spring. I chide myself.

Here on the streets of Buenos Aires, even speaking their tongue, I am but a tourist, a stranger, not to be confused with one of their real countrymen. Even after almost three months, I have yet to really arrive and yet here I am. Thus, once more we contradict ourselves and laugh in spite of it. I go to gatherings. I go to museums. I go to the movies. I go to parks. I walk, walk, walk. Alone. The beautiful, broken, magical, beautiful streets of Buenos Aires.

The Script

Back in the apartment on the table beside the computer is the diary. It lays there as it has lain for over ten years now in various mausoleums. Shut and packed and shunned and darkened. In warehouses, in a box, under a desk, in a crawl space, in a firey attic. Closed. A dead story, buried and silenced. I return to it. I read through it. Read the journal. Scan the reports from the mundane and practical to the absolutely stark, absurd, raving visions and sad emotional currents.

The story about the promise. The story about the walk. The story about the stories.

I return to it in the afternoons. Evenings. During the long insomniac's hour. Read the hand-writ pages; the one after the other, a rich kaleidoscope of terrific madness and foot wrought journeying. A testimony of boundless illusory surrealism of being. A kind of record of a subjective "I Am The Center of All Creation and the Unverse". One human being, a self-proclaimed sovereign intergalactic presence of Being. Crazy. Almost like being God.

Which she would consider profane being of such archaic and devout rituals. Everything in her religiosity was ritual and form, unseen connections. Repetitions. There were the endless self-batisms in the names of all the slaughtered in all the wars and ways that people murder one another.

I don't think many human beings have undergone such a long, arduous and lonely journey of self-discovery and self-abnegation. Much less a woman. Alone. An emptying of all the weight of her identity. Escaping the confines of the body and mind and entering into a psycho-tropic state of pure hallucination and freedom of perspective. It isn't L.S.D. - It's schizophrenia or Bi-Polar Disorder in the extreme. in the mind of a genial poet.

A ghastly and intense experience to read and to know I am born of this woman. Of this consciousness. Thwarted, yet gleaning the full magnificent import of all history, all the connected tissues of time. A genius who can compose the most sublime sonnets and a raving lunatic who can lose all composure and reasoning in a moment.

The journal is rife with stories. Her recounting of locations and experiences is immediate, palpable. The look of things. Her maps and pens. The weather, the environment, the people who approach.

When she incurs a loss of perspective and place she is rescued - awash in harmony with desire and a wandering poet's hope for the love between two brothers who are an Old Testament Cain and Abel tale of eternal discord and detachment. My brother and I. As she walked and fasted and prayed. For our love. Our eternal misalocation, connection

Then there are the other characters. The other locations. The demons attacking her mind. Vociferous interlopers. The world we live in.

The script began and moved forward and leapt and then was abandoned for the wedding and the guest that came from New York for a stay. And now I have returned to it and go on with it.

There are yet about 180 pages of journal to read. The previously researched are all tabbed, in colored indicators for important facts, places, encounters. Move the story along now kid. No one wants to dabble. No one wants to sit still. Keep it alive. Back to work. Back to work.

You get the picture. Today is one of those bay days here. It reminds me of San Francisco. Cool breezes coming in off the river. There is water in the air and the sky is a field of fast-moving clouds. It seems the last whispers of this winter. Rain is due. Will soften the blow. Cool nights. Warm days mixed.

I am ensconced. I am alone. I am writing. I am.

San Telmo Sundays

My first immersion into the world and culture of the street fair that takes place every Sunday in Dorrego Square in the neighborhood of San Telmo was more than a mere thrill for a lover of the old and curious collections of the early 20th century in glass, lamps, victrolas, graphics, plastics. It spawns the gamut of style and era, epochs of design and influences and spirits under the sun.



My greatest desire, besides an evening nominated for an Oscar would be an evening spent under the moon on a crisp but balmy night, dancing slowly under the stars, listening to an old love song on a victrola that would be all mine.



But above all it is a street fair. A square mile or less that brings together the colors, the vibrations, the music, the melancholy, the laughter, the mercantile and the magical from the entire history of Buenos Aires' time and art into one singiular pulse of humanity. Street performers, the perfume of cooking meats coming from the many restaurants and open air grilles, costumes, travellers, merchants. It is a collision of everything in the history of the plastic arts in Buenos Aires.


Near here, in Boca, I am told, was the first real cradle of the beginings of Buenos Aires. The old sea port, of course. But after Boca, St. Telmo became the outcropping, the begining of the journey ever-outward. Here the streets are cobbled and you walk past the endless parade of pieces and people. There can be few things in life as relaxing and other-worldly than musing over old things, connecting with the ancient spirits and makers of objects.

For the modernist, this carnival echoing the tired and lovely strains of the tango through open windows would be nothing more perhaps but maybe the peculiar and a bit absurd confluence of so many people over so much old junk. But to the eye of the artist, the romantic, it is beauty incarnate to see all these people assembled with their passionate curiosities and the feeling provoked is charming and timeless. I stroll. I photograph. I taste. I listen. I am alone. I am free to move in any direction I choose. This is candyland for me.

For the various clowns, costumed carnys, and performers it is the day to drink of the milk of human kindness. And good weather permitting and the spirits in good form, a peso or two may land in your lap, or cap or luggage or plate for a song.

Mango Tango

While in a café reading the Argentine rags for bird droppings, I came upon an advertisement for an upcoming Tango show at the Teatro Colón.

They named the show: Café de Los Maestros (The Masters Café) was to be an offshoot after the wildly successful Ry Cooder reassembly of old Cuban Masters in his album: Buena Vista Social Club. The idea, contrived by Gustavo Santaolalla, the Argentinian composer and musician who scored Brokeback Mountain, 21 Grams, The Motorcycle Diaries - was to make a compilation mix of the old tango masters while they were yet drawing breath.

I promptly gulped the coffee and headed out to stand in line at the Teatro Colón to get tickets for the show. It was to be my first experience of the form in the flesh and why not begin with a troupe of octogenarian Argentine masters (music = longevity) at the renown Colón? Being audience to the early 20th century musicians and singers, reliving a bygone glory of themselves, what could possibly be better?

Ticket in hand I paid the grand old dame a visit. August 26th. A lovely early spring shudder was afoot. Crowds making their way in escorted by a band of white-gloved ushers in their late fifties and sixties aping for program handouts as they take your ticket and steer you like a vessel through the sea of red and gold. All the while, the night upon us all. We are moon-covered and in attendance, the entire crowd glazed with an air of expenctancy and desire.

Everything is visually rococo, golden gilded and even-aged, the glowing golden shining brass-numbered plates on the seats assign you and the climbing levels of horseshoe cake with garlands of people hanging from the rafters above make the space become a well ordered circus of sorts. It is lovely. The yellow globes hanging from the bronze of the big light fixtures throughout the large house. Ladys leaning forward thrust into space above like seraphs untethered.

The stage curtain is a red velvet bloodstain also gilded and heavy with time on her like a tired whore . The chatter echoes throughout the space, or rather, resounds in rich timbre the cacophony of pre-curtain mumbling and fumbling about.

All this was crowned by a pallid painting I did not much like, a circular storyline of seasons I imagine, or moments from great operas, semi-coloned by a kind of Don Quixote figure in various attire in a pale medicinal light in the alcove above. Lit a pale blue it seemed to me like certain pieces of bad fifties pale. In my opinion it should be painted over by a new artist and art.

The rest of the place feels like the old rich city that once bathed in a richer pomp and place in world affairs and the old pleasures gather and El Colón yet conveys her time and art and the presence of artists and singers long silent and one is indeed transported to higher level of thought and feeling. You are aware of being very very far away in a strange and magical place.

I picture the Perons in the President’s Box arriving to a performance in those days of their transitory but eternal glory. This is their place. This is Argentina's history and bosom. In this room great minds and talents have cavorted and made magic of the hours.

Yet deified in so many places and people's hearts and I wonder will there always be a part of human nature left to idolatrizde that way. Absurd love seems a scarce commodity.

I didn’t bring a camera but should have as every tourist and his mom was shooting it up to high heaven before, during and after the performance, shameless, waving their glowing video devices like sparklers in your field of vision. Contemporary perversions cell cameras. What abortion of a mind conceived of such a thing?

The concert was being filmed for a documentary on the Masters.

Me. Alone. A sea of strangers at the grand Argentine Event.

It was then the lioness man/boy creature with the porcelain black doll's eyes came and took a seat beside me out of nowhere, a fright wig of black endlessly expanded dead keratin on a skin as wan and pale as a north sea carp, translucent and morbid. I say hello to it in the native tongue half still in shock. He nods at me in a general way, in a kind of Marie Antoinette sort of way. I yawned in reply and we both shuddered in disgust. The chatter continued. The seats before me remained empty. I felt enchanted with my solitude and just drinking in the molasses when

Then:

Of a sudden he came and strode down the aisle in front, tall and ruddy reddish brown hair all Swift and Cambridge in curls with a velvet jacket in a deep blue or so I remember it blue, to take his seat before me, he who was to be Harry Williams.

I watch him take his seat, look hither and thither and I notice he is the combined strands of a few good filaments of Europe. He is a strawberry white man all blush and softness draped over his masculine moustached profile and he was aglow with life. He inhaled and exhaled English through his large and scarlet mouth, but he could have been Dane from the seafaring kind of way he had about himself. A certainty to his gaze. Although he possessed a generally languished and relaxed demeanor, lush and open as a spring rose as well. Harry Williams is a contradiction or combnation of opposites brought together harmoniously. Like a seaborne ship he always seemed poised against the waves of time, like all young men. I tapped him on the shoulder. Invited myself into his life and he turned to me and I asked, “Traveling alone? You look like a traveler to me,” and he, "I am. I am. Hello." and so forth, etc..



The lights go down. I tell him we’ll talk more at intermission.

The show’s not bad. It is being filmed live for a documentary and a man with a guide slides across the stage from time to time swimming throughout the proceedings, shooting footage for the doc.

I listen and fall under the spell of the sad strains coming from the orchestra. A Viola, Violins, Cellos, Bass and of course the ubiquitous accordions . These are the strains and heart-wrenching beats of palpabe and deep music born from the old tangos performed by the elders who made this music known to the world. Some of it is truly good and the applause wrinkles the time and space after each song or number. Some of it seems a bit maudlin in delivery, but always with a grace and a gesture of humility.

Tango seems to me, to be the unfulfilled cry of sexual disillusionment. It begins with great seduction and arousal and then becomes a cacophony of ferocious and thrusting desperate jerks, the accordions, musical foreskins pulled and yanked and caressed, but they always end in lamenting. It is a metaphor for love. The music expresses the inherent pain of communion and separation, intimacy and eternal distance. It is a kind of sadomasochism, but more masochistic than sadistic. It is the sound of pain and ever un-whetted, unrequited, unfullfilled love. A longing for what is in the hand and though one tastes and holds it, it is empty and not real, or at least does not belong to us. It is the most yearning and longing of any sad and needful tone.

When you allow yourself to succumb to its charms, you feel androgyne: both man and woman at once. Its sound comes from deep within as if from the bowels of a conch shell, straining through the endless corridors of a turbulent sea.

It is the dance and the sound of the coming together of man against and alongside woman; bullfighting steps, careful veronicas of movement, spiderlike and sensual, sublime and sorrowful, wet and warm, yet cool in precision. It is sex with the sorrow of inevitable goodbyes.

Internission. Harry and I speak over the seats and decide to walk out to the lobby to intermt and get to know one another. Right off let me say Harry is a charmer. His are large and inviting bovine eyes with a vivacity and casual disinterest that only a true Briton can muster. He is a fine raconteur and at the ready with a phrase. He smoked and I did not yet and we told a little of one another to each other and then returned. I took one of the empty seats at either side him. We watched and listened to the second set and when it was over we dutifully stood and applauded approval and then went out into the cool night and I let Harry direct me to the Café Tortoni which was supposedly the classic after Colón venue and off we went to it together, he smoking and me not yet.


The café Tortoni is a tourist spot without its being a rat trap. It is a classic. It is the old café life setting with an old glass ceiling done in deco like many Parisian brasseries with a good old bar and tables scattered well wall to wall. There are musical numbers from time to time and when I went with Harry there was an awful saccarin guitar singer with a couple of his buddies bravely backing him.

We ordered drinks. This was my first real cocktail in over three weeks of life in Buenos Aires. I ordered Sapphire. With a lemon wedge and got a lemonade. Harry was a sport and drank the mixed thing and they brought me another straight with the wedge itself on its side.

Harry ate a king’s meal of a steak with ham and melted cheese atop it. I had ever seen such a thing, or at least not in years. We talk about his work, his family. I tell him about the work. We talk poetry, writers. We hit it off. He tells me of having been in Barcelona for some months and then much longer here and preferring Argentina to Barcelona. It is great to be talking to someone who travels who eats with gusto and loves books and places and people. Harry is the bees knees.

Afterward we walked the city. Harry having lived in it for the better part of those months led the way. Eventually we ended at my place and drank more wine and spoke about more poets and I read him some of the old things I'd done from memory and some of Pura’s poems from the books I'd brought with me. And then of a sudden I cried for no good reason.

So very like a lonely train bum who has shared good rum with another rummy of the rails and sitting at that cold night fireside he recognizes that they have shared a tin of hot soup and then one of them cries for no good reason at all except that this other person is a friend and he knows it and it counts against the frost and the solitude.

We were sloppy drunk or at least I was and I do think I did smoke that first partial cigarette in the two months of tobacco celibacy just then. It was just books and time and a new friend and the night upon us moonbeaming and it was wonderful. And the puff didn't seem to hurt.

I had now my first good friend in Buenos Aires; he was convivial, ripe with intelligence and a keen sense of place and pleasure and he was to leave the following Friday. This was an unfortunate fact too that marred the real fun it was to be in his company for there was always the knowledge and sense of imminent loss . I suppose we are meant to know someone ever so briefly sometimes and yet their trace, the mark left in their wake by their gestures, honesty, friendship endures and remains. It is like the Tango, even among men at times.

The long dark nights begin

After all the good physical work and the wine and the food and the film sleep would evade me again. I have been subject to the most pernicious insomnia since I arrived and it has only worsened. I spent the night reading in bed unable to put my mind to rest. It was very cold and the sheets were not enough. I walked the Estancia under the moonlight in the cold dewy air. Waited for the sunrise and decided I needed to return to Buenos Aires and get to work. A little after dawn the maids came into the main house to clean up our mess. I had kept the fire going and was laying on the counch with the dogs amid my legs and just below the sofa. I asked for someone to give me a ride to where one can catch a "micro"- a bus - back to Buenos Aires. After awhile, a nice sweet and round-faced young man offered to drive me the 70 kilometers to the town of Azul.

So we return to the Earth and plant something alive....

In the morning the master of the house, king over all he surveys, invites me to work. Taking me up on my admission of loving the soil, trees, shrubs and flowers and all matter of rooted things that open outward into the eyes and slip into the great space of sky, he invites me to help him plant trees.

Although there were but four, maybe five hours of tossed and troubled sleep and a feeble awakening I was resolved to face it all again. A good stiff coffee and truck full of trees to be planted, what better way to take hold of the day? What better remedy to my troubled imagination than grab a spade and dig out this foreign soil beneath my feet and plant a tree.

I happily acquiesce. It is the least I can do for the kind and generous soul that has housed this stranger under his roof for so many days. This way I can also avoid confronting the other thing and be with the laborers and feel useful and worthy of my meals. I might forget my troubles and hopefully earn some sleep in the bargain.

The day before we had gone to a nursery miles away along a wonderful road toward a town called Azul....Blue. Funny huh? Alexis loves this game, this mercantile bartering and asking and ordering and planning. His bellowed British accent falls into a comfortable French when the woman who runs the nursery explains her holdings in their shared Gallic tongue. There are many trees and plants and roses, a passion we share. In the yard pertaining to the nursery's home, there is a peacock strutting in defense of his female concubines.

We stopped at a roadside beer hall and gas station and sausage maker and antiques dealer. Here Alexis had bought his dinnerware fresh from some barge or shipped crates at the port and driven out here by the man who owns the place; he must have acquired them in a warehouse on the RIver Plata, bidding among lost or abandoned cargo.

Alexis insists these handsome white and heavy plates with the light blue markings we have dined off of in the past few days have a Portugese pedigree and he is proud of them. We have come to see if there are any more of this pedigree to complete the collection but all have been sold. They drink beers and I watch. I have kept myself from drinking in the daytime against any and all forms of peer pressure and I have forsaken the delights and disgusting nature of tobacco consumption since just before I left the United Bedevilled States of America. In this regard at least my dire discipline has born the fruit of better health. However I do crave a good joint to reverie my way through this wide canvas.

But today, the truck and the trees were ready. I donned a pair of big mud boots and went out to where the workers had already dug up the holes for planting and Alexis and I chose which trees to insert into them. My favorite were the beech trees of which we planted a good twenty five or so. I love beech trees, they are among my favorite trees. Thin little adolescent sticks that someday would make a fine view from his window.

We also planted lovely Pampas grasses which grow wild pell mell, but placed correctly will please the eye with their windswept undulations and their graceful feathery stems. They seem ladies at court taking in a great composition on a harpsichord as they feign a delicate immutability fanning themselves.

The day expired after a good five hours of planting. Alexis owns an old Ford truck from the early 60's. A three gear monster thing full of glorious creaks and groans which handles the uneven terrain and varying grades of soil with aplomb. We have brought the dogs with us. Juan who is an old man of a dog, faithful and still putting on his best paws forward to affect a keen and determined hunter's eye and nose. We also have his crafty sister who reminds me of my Sunny Boy and they both leap from the truck and begin to scamper over the grassy hills trying to flush quail and partridges from their hiding. Sure enough in moments the birds take to the air and they bolt into the sky ready for a bullet that will not greet them on this day. For this day is not for hunting but for planting. But still, it is a sight to behold this ancient ritual between a man and his dogs.

After the trees are all in the ground, the Italian cypresses, the eucalyptus, the birches, the willows, a good fifty or sixty trees we have laid into the ground, we return for one last dinner. I promise Alexis I will help him again the next day.

Again the solid table, the fireplace coked and ablaze, the green glasses and the red wine within them, the little brass bell and the 3 acts of feasting, appetizers, entreés and desserts and we are back in the living room talking, laughing and all my nightmares seem to be absent and life seems aglow with a simplicity and a pageantry which are this gentleman's gift to me.

I pretend to be happy. I believe it myself, almost. The other thing, the tension, is unresolved and remains so.

Worse yet, the tension increases as we have chosen to see Brokeback Mountain and within the first twenty minutes Carolina curses it, a cat hissing, finds a hundred reasons to dislike it. Accuses it of manipulation, Hollywoodization, abandons us to it finally refusing to endure the insult and humiliation it is for heterosexual women to watch men, strong men, complete men, fall deeply in love, consumed with desire one another, the need of one another.

For me, it is the fifth viewing, a sad reminder of longing for something and someone that I can never quite be certain of anymore.

Also a reminder that I am finally against all hope, middle aged; that I will never be young on film again as I once was in my limited way. A realization that my lithe and pliant body which was once as slim and athletic as these actors' are, is older.

But I also see that my experiences have been as deep, as wide and broad as the landscape of the film. My life could well sustain a soundtrack as elegiac as Santaolalla's and I could easily fill the screen with endless majestic vistas, oceans I have crossed, mountains I have trekked, horses ridden, roads driven endlessly and places as amazing as where I am just now.

Also it is a reminder - nonetheless - of the last vestiges of sprite and youthful ardor, for now it seems all of life is to be a kind of wise surrendering, acceptance of the dreams that never materialized and joy before the ones that did. I give in to inevitable odds and chances. I accept that my long slought Golden Fleece has eluded me and may very well always be just out of my reach in spite of my incantations and efforts.

Nonetheless, I will. I will write my screenplay, finish with these demons and exorcise the tormenting visions on to the pages. I will give birth to my malformed, ill-equipped children. But born they must be. There is no more denying them. For if I do not deliver myself of these gestating monstrous creations, then I will be fated to succumb to a final and tragic degradation of my self-respect, a sad and pointless deterioration of my soul.

I must yet fight this last ignoble war within myself if I am to live the remaining time of my calendar in the world at peace with myself. This is no more a matter of choice but the very vein and crossroad of my survival; the last great thrust of my endurance. I cannot go back to procrastinated waste. I must endure.

A Bucolic Moribund Cadence....

The two day trip became three, then four, then five and no indication that we were ever returning to Buenos Aires. Not that it mattered much. For here is a great land. It was a balm to the spirit and mind. I was free to roam. Carolina and I gathered blooms and branches for the empty vases in the house. Alexis' wife would surely have furnished these but was in Greece touring the islands on a friend's yacht with the their two daughters. Alexis was due to join them in the coming weeks after his work at la Esperanza was finished.

One day followed another in a relaxed and quiet order. Minutes and hours noted only by the changing temperatures, cloud cover, quality of the light the coming and going of workers, meals, cups of coffee, glasses of wine. Evening falls boldly colored but fast. Then we had movies, the fireplace, backgammon.

Each of us was able to retreat into their own worlds. I would usually awake after Carolina and before Alexis who liked to linger in bed reading the daily papers. There was always a small set table for breakfast by the window overlooking the garden. Coffee, toast, an egg to your liking accompanied to the chorus of the intense, wild cry of morning birds. The ornithological bounty of the region expresses itself in a vast cacophony of birdsong, from the laconic cry of seagulls to the plaintive melancholy wails of falcons and eagles. Friendlier sounds emit from a wide variety of smaller songbirds, partridges or quail calling from the thrush and also filled the air.

I thought there was no internet access on the estancia, so I retreated into books and quietude but invariably my intranquil mind returns to the place from whence I came. The square glass box on Lloyd Road. The neighborhood friends. My garden. Are they watering it? Does my dog dream of me in his canine sleep? And I realize that so soon I am in the hands of an anxious and childish homesickness. Is my absence felt by the one I feel so distant from? I begin to feel unsure of this great leap into a country I really know so little about. I begin to worry about my task, my work. Will I be able to accomplish it all?

Alexis leaves me with Carolina and the fire, the dogs. She feels an ardor invited by so many of my kind and chivalrous words...perhaps they were seductive too, but now I balk. I quickly put up walls. My feelings are incoherent.

This pleasing envirnoment of a sudden is not comforting to me anymore.

It is as if I wandered here, an aimless voyager seeking refuge, friends; a man, who in spite of having received such a warm and caring reception, feels completely out of place. Out of sorts.

I know I cannot open myself to this woman completely. I have already said too much, explained too much, shared too many secrets. She seems a kind woman. She also has said too much. Told too much. She rarely let's me get a word in edgewise. She is determined to be bold, secure, strong, indifferent, so self-assured that the overcompensated effort drowns the flower of her delicacy and I close shop. We embrace nonetheless. Play out a pantomime. A cinematic ideal of what could have been in another place, another time. We seemed so similar. Both writers. Both idealists. A kiss, then another. But no power behind it, no arousal from me. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed. Have I misled her to think I wanted more from her than I did? I did not mean too.

People are often drawn to me this way. As if I possessed an oasis, a secret garden with an answer that can be bitten like a fruit, a swallowed cure in the palm of my hand. They feel that I deny them the taste of it. That I am selfish to hold it back, to keep it for myself. There is no fruit, no balm, no reward for me to offer. There is no point in this. I feel empty. Not because of her, but because my love, my heart is already bruised and healing from a deeper wound to my pride, my sense of trust.

So many other fragile things have been marred, abused, torn and laid bare. I am too recently discharged from the surgery, the removal of so vital an organ to my hope that I can barely breathe. I suffocate. I need to escape. But is this not the escape itself, if not then what can one hope for after this? I excuse myself and go back to the room alone.

Once there, I cannot find sleep. I look out of the window framed in moonlight. I see past the patterned embroidered curtains to little twinkling lights from a distant town. I reel in disgust and mourning. I feel lost and lonely, desperate so suddenly. A fallen knight.

What has happened? Where do I really belong? Why have I agreed to this distant remedy? And the one thing that could have salvaged everything, the key to so many many things, now can not be extracted from the bottom of the sea of silence. Was the price too high to pay in shame? Or am I simply just not worth the price such battles exact, these battles for my honor? Was I ever worth a battle, a defense?

But the price cannot be paid out as easily as cash that moves from one account to another. It must be paid in bravery and putting a shield across my breast to keep all ill-intentioned swords that wish to impale me far at bay.

It requires a passion that perhaps had long sputtered and spent itself so quietly I never noticed. The false ones continue to craft and make dates and plot business deals and delight in putting brick upon brick to the house of their mendacity.

Thus, in the end, they win and I am left exposed, bared to my enemies, humiliated again at the hands of too many false friends. This was why I came so far. But how far can I really run while the metre marks the falling coins from my king's ransom?

Can I seek out my own Eldorado in this land dreamt of in the 16th century, sought out by the explorers on horseback? Can I yet again in this savage world reimagine another destiny? Can I again reinvent my story and open yet another door, another window into another future than that one I had so securely spent the seasons planting flower upon flower, rose upon rose? Year after year. For this? For empty solitude and undefended defeat?

It is too late. I cannot recover it now. I want to sleep. I want to vanquish the harrowed and worn out spirit.

I want to take a horse and gallop beneath the moon with this good woman, that opens like a queen so easily to my ardent spirit. To know in spite of all bravado and acting the part, that one is really broken in too many paramount places. It is a loathsome thing to lose one's sense of strength. To be Samson sans hair; a blind, enfeebled man, his eyes gouged, unable to make his way in the black of daylight, imprisoned with all the world at his feet and nowhere to turn for truth. Watching the legions of lessors dancing and cavorting with all the spoils of life at their whim and beckoning.

Yes, how that night I suffered. I so desperately wanted to weep and release this woe from me. I wished that I could drink from the cup of the end of days and sleep forever more. But sleep did not come and tears would not flourish and sleep wanted nothing of my slumbering company and I am left too often in this copious darkness, night after night, gazing from a window where the world never ends and yet all the roads lead back into myself, a place of endless questions and an abiding refrain from the dirge that sings of the empty ache of loss... a poor and lonely plaint born of tired blood and the hurt, the unavoidable hurt of being less than all the marvel of my dreams.

An Estancia under a Southern Cross

I arrived full of wine. Opened my door to an empty apartment. Quiet as the tomb. I was alone. Without turning on the light I went into the room and lay on the bed thinking. The sheets smelled. The pillows were flat and held the bitter sweat of other heads departed from their temporary home. The bed was hard. The darkness was hard also. Late as it was I knew sleep would avoid me passing on to the tired limbs and hopeless hearts somewhere else in the city, but sleep did not want for my company or my time. I missed my dogs. My bed. I was fighting the realization that something was forever different. If sleep had not found me, the hours certainly had and held me prisoner of my memories. If I was sad, I did not weep.

There is a place after tears, after want, after pain. Stunned and shocked our brain feels like a swollen bruise that no longer palpitates with keen and vivid lament... merely looks into itself, amazed at its own endurance and the capacity to go forward in spite of all the hollow windy rooms of one's soul.

I think I remember knowing this even as a child. Yes, I was maybe six, just back from kindergarden, not long after a small boy who was my first friend in the world was run over by a truck and killed. I was told of it without embroidery and myth. My mother, as fantastical and poetic as she was, believed the hard truths must be tasted and understood without censorship. Even to children when the fates had chosen and they had chosen then, so I must know.

I was made to clearly see that death was part of life, the secret was revealed to my young mind and thus I had already discovered the mean truth and a part of my happiness was lost forever.

But we all go on. Children. Adults. People. Human beings. We move forward even after the bitter taste of betrayal or the needless cruelty leaves its acid flavor on our tongues. And we savor the salty remains of our wretched liquid solace when it falls upon our lips. I knew. I have always known of these irremediable and terrible sadnesses. I drank early from the cup of woe.

Not long after that boy died I wandered off alone one day into the horseless paddocks of the racing fields just behind my childhood home. They lay a stone's throw from the place where the boy had been killed. In those years, we children were left to our own devices, free to roam so long as we were quick to trample home when called to dinner by our parent's echoed cries. And we always did as the twilight of those innocent evenings cast its peaceful glow of faded summer suns along the streets of my boyhood stomping grounds. We always did.

But that particular day I went off exploring, wanting to shed my lingering sulleness, alone. I made my way in to the forlorn and empty granstand by myself. All the while creating inner worlds of wonder for my singular pleasure. My buddy was after all, gone forever.

Yet somehow, I felt accompanied. There was an inexplicable sense of a presence enveloping me. It was a cloudy day, for I will never forget it possessing as I do a preternaturally photographic memory of certain things from the dusty trunks of my time in the world. There in that place. Hopping among the bleachers, watching the grass island just past the dusty dirt of the track, I felt a connection to something formless and huge. Something held me spellbound in that vast great empty space, a sense of timelessness, eternity if you will. Such as we are all apt to feel when we hear the wind grieving in fields where terrible battles have been waged, after the dead are gone and the victory or defeat forgotten in the calendat of years.

I felt just such a comfort that day. A small boy, barely seven, singing his small refrains. Trying to ignore this great if comforting unknowable thing, this all encompassing sense of totality, this unknowable force of which I had a sure and certain sense of its presence, I realized more and moe that it seeped slowly into my conscious mind, claimed my attention utterly among the dancing pines and blowing refuse of bets and tickets, popcorn bags, candy wrappers, abandoned newspapers.

And it was then I felt a sense, an indescribable sense of something very like a whisper, but not a voice in itself; it was as if a thought or the pure idea of something had lit up within me and this idea, this thought said but didn't speak the words... I am God.

I was transported and felt bodiless as if I had become a part of the emptiness and silence. Then I was suddenly compelled by this thought, this realization, this IT - to understand, that there, among the many flying bits of paper I was to retrieve a message especially for me and I moved toward one specific piece of overturned paper - knowing it was the one I was meant to lift up off the ground - I did so and turned it over.

The paper in my young and tender hands read, For I am God. No other words in the bold typeface. It was a shredded part of a larger message, but this ripped piece stood alone with those very words. My body electrified and I wanted to run for this terrfied me for some reason. It was as if I could not escape a giant's grip.

I was never able to forget it. Now it forms only one bit of the unforgettable and soul-stirring wonders one collects in a lifetime. Those indelible things. The lasting impressions and revelations of consciousness that can never quite be explained nor digested of a whole but are a kind of assurance. And thus then, as now, I never feel utterly bereft, abandoned, unloved.

Caveat: This was not a specific religious thing in my opinion. Not a denominational event. It was in my opinion nothing more than the voice of the One whole thing of which we are a part that spoke to me. In other words, I myself might have written the words on that paper through the purity and honesty of my wish in a quantum leap. But there it was in my hand. Black ink on white paper. An echo of an idea?

So in times like these, as I was that first night, alone in the darkness of my apartment, I felt as we all must feel sometimes, that desperate longing for the womb, the perfect timeless sanctuary. The warm embrace of a tender woman; our mothers, our lovers, all fated to comfort all the children of the world upon their bosoms, regardless of their age for they are the harbors of our storms, the lighthouses that guide us back toward inner peace.

When they are absent, these Godesses of safety and compassion who absorb our laments; when these sepulchres who soften our blows, caress away the dread and disillusionements of life are dead and gone, or simply not there to hold us and deliver us from our own poorly-crafted horrors, then we must bear it.

And in this manner we are by force made to learn our unknown paths toward the inevitable.

Maybe, if we are brave enough, we gather at these moments, the elements necessary to fortify our spirits and live on in spite of any harrowing facts. We reassemble ourselves, reinvent the truth to assuage the nightmares and thus force ourselves to take back from unconscious and ageless forebodings whatever makes our live's tolerable, or, if we are lucky enough, ecstatic and joyful as only a child can be.

The dog that normally occupies my bed is gone, accompanies my troubled sleep, his grumbling exhalations, sighs and company are sorely missed, my sweet furry friend. I must wait to feel again his joy at recognizing my face, my gladness to behold his exhuberance and leaping, licking, pleasure in having me back. If all goes according to plan, this will happen again. But I must complete the promised mission.

--------------------------------------------------------------

The following day we went off without impediments and I dismissed the vistas from windows of the heir and chose to sleep away the many hours trip at lightspeed toward the estancia. When we finally arrived, I rose to gaze upon the given name of this place and its named was La Esperanza, the hope.

From in between the Eucalyptus trees that lined the road to the house I could see the endless sweep of fields and cows, newly planted crops offering just a glimmer of their promise. Those Titan pocked and mottle-barked trees framed the rising dust and carried one's vision toward the main house which of a sudden revealed itself when the trees fell behind us, as a curtain opens across a stage, and there rested the simple warmth of the main house stood in a grand simplicity.

White and green-roofed, a welcoming portico spreads itself with red clay tiles into a broad and wide U and various doors lead to various possibilities. There rested great big earthen pots, like pregnant ladies, with old and aged but still flowering red geraniums for hair. The only thing lacking would have been, to a Cuban sensibility, a chorus of creaking wooden rocking chairs that one could idle and let roam the eye and watch the land undulate into the great spaces of distance and the harmonious green of Alexis' well-planted gardens.

I was assigned a private room and the nervousness and discomfort of the sensual tension with the girl was dispersed as it was clear I would not be cast into an uncomfortable situation and be made to face the undercurrent of mutual intrigue and desire in the first evening.

Night was upon us quickly for it is winter here. The air had a cleaner, brighter bite of cold and just before dinner I strolled outside in hopes of seeing the Southern Cross, but the night was cloud-covered. Still, a swollen testicle of a moon served its bland and opalescent glow upon the earth to dream upon and I moved like a darkened firefly in the yard humming old forgotten songs of romantic movies.

Inside we began what would be the nightly feeding ritual. Alexis, mercifully, is a man of order and a genetically orchestrated understanding of the circadian rhythms of the old world, the old ways. Here the characters are all comfortable in their roles. The landowner. The Guests. The housekeepers and maids. The horseman. The landscaper. The Agricultural engineer who arives every morning to discuss the future of the land. The changes in weather. The yield of the earth and the health of the beasts upon it. Alexis, as he had the evening prior makes it his business to disarm your sense of propriety. For it is his wish, for his own comfort's sake that all the members of the ensemble be comfortable and at ease. Small snacks are brought out and laid on a thick and dark-wooded table just before the bar. Alexis offers a drink and pours glasses of wine for us to enjoy in the living room, sipping as we watch the fire grow in the stone hearth. Alexis' dogs cuddle with us on the couch and I am reminded of my canine compatriots back home and how much I need their affections.


Carolina was freshly bathed and her eyes were puckish, playful and happy to have orchestrated this gathering of souls. We laughed and talked and spoke of life. And here began her thirsty curiosity and the questioning.

Why Argentina? Why so long an absence from my lover, my life? What was I seeking here at the bottom of the world? Didn't I realize just how far I really was? After a few poorly improvised answers to those questions (questions I yet pose myself) I was literally saved by the bell for Alexis keeps a small brass bell to advise the help that the master is ready to be served and we rose and took our places at table.

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.

Into the night....

Well I have been very busy since I arrived. Most of you are aware of my days since I arrived second hand from Buzz. Let's see...a week in hotels with endless notes in my inbox from rental agencies, replies from my craigslist query. The Art Hotel was nice, clean, a little noisy at night but had great dramatic curtains to block out the neon sign outside my window. A little t.v. that only came on late in the evening before bed where I watched and waited for the demise of El Jefe with no such luck.

I wandered the city freely exploring the different neighborhoods and trying to get a feel for what part of town I would like to be in. The weather was and is perfect for me. Not the dire winter they spoke to me of. Highs in the 60's lows in the mid to upper 40's. It is odd after so many years travelling with Buzz and others to find myself as I once was when I was a young man, wandering the streets of an unknown country and capital alone, discovering in silence and dialoguing with my own thoughts and feelings. It is not as easy as it was at 17, 20, 30. Things, while utterly beautiful and interesting just don't capture the same sense of magic, bewilderment and freedom of youth. One cannot forget nor erase the collected scars of time and age and knowledge with a mere shrug. But it is wonderful in a new way. A different intensity. Also, I am not just here to be a tourist but to evolve and work. To delve deeper into things I have avoided in myself. Disciplines I have ignored and put aside too long. I have held on too long to the tether toward the simpler, vainglory days of yore. I have resisted growing up. I must grow up. I must become more responsible to my talents, my ideas, my work. God it is... has been... the most loathsome four letter word in my argot. Why can't life be a string of magical, euphoric unchecked passions. The one blending into the other. An epic film. Sure, with sorrows, regrets, but only as entre-acts to the enduring waltzes, candlelit spaces infused with the glow of romance and the carnal and spiritual love of other human beings, charatcers clothed in outrageous costumes, commingling with one's own ceaselessly inspired and effortlessly gliding soul, drinking from the cup of power, creativity and beauty as if it were only a question of wishing it so. Ah, yes...this little Prince must grow up at long last.

Not that magic and good fortune and luck don't always find me, for they invariably do. Like attracts like? Belief in wonder and magic? Who knows, but I bring a special astral force along in my wake and it opens doors, windows, spreads wings, takes flight and carries me further than I could on mere desire and hope.

Example: I am connected to a mysterious bloke through the new literary and lovely friend I worked with on translating one of my mom's books. We speak from the parking lot of a hotel in Rockville, Md and I speak to her of apprehensions, fears, excitement, the challenge of the thing at hand. She tells me I will be happy in Buenos Aires. The city will sit well with me. It will embrace me. She offers a contact. I take it. A few days after my arrival I contact said guy. He asks if I like cinema...can I rollerskate!

In a few hours I find myself in the old part of Buenos Aires, the most interesting neighborhood, San Telmo. A fantastic amalgam of streets devoted to Art, Antiques, a collection of bars and cafés, cobble-stoned streets, the aged and lovely patina of long forgotten dances, if the streetlamps could speak they would tell us of rich tango- spent evenings, drunken lovers, brawls born of jealousy and ardent lovers. Everything exudes a faded but redolent beauty.

I appear in a cab at the Unversity of Cinema. Buenos Aires' version of NYU, where many of the world's endless celluloid novitiates, products of the wealthy loins of the world come to feel like Hemingway, Buñuel, Bertolucci, Fellini. Endless rooms full of the useless stench of cigarettes and human flesh combined with the clamor of ideas, words, intellectual determinism, foolish dreams, like mine too. For I too, am one of these unrepentant dreamers who are willing to suffer for dreams that may or may not ever bear fruit but are planted nonetheless, prayed over, coddled and dragged within us like huge and musty trunks of desire through our ambitious terrerstrial maps.

Two films. One of quesitonable production values, but honest, guilty of the first time director's crime of length, unedited. Bad sound, but great story, many good moments. An absurd tale of the day of Perón's death - a small group of revolutionary youths who want to switch his body for another's. Interesting, but flawed.

The next was a documentary on the death and subsequent embalming and deification of Eva Perón's body. The Perón era is still a matter of great and polarized passions. Dangerous to give one opinion or another too loudly in public I am told. The devout fanatics and the derisive enemies who feel that Perón and his Vedette were nothing but populists, demagogues serving themselves copious portions from the excesses and loot of the rich, while presenting a pageant of obfuscation, miscreants savoring their lust for power at the cost of the producers and developers of business, manufacturing. Another endless and pointless battle among men, the haves and have nots. Either way....the story of her body and how she was literally mummified and turned into a porcelain human doll is without question one of the most bizzare and incredible posthumous stories of our collective global history. Not even the mummy's of Egypt went through such unspeakable things. It capitvates and enthralls especially for one freshly arrived at this bay city.

After the show we went as a group (of oh, say 20?) to a marvelous restaurant called El Desnivél (The Unevenness). A boisterous madhouse, loud and lusty with laughter, conversation. Full to the rafters. A few tables and odd chairs brought together to accomodate us and thus begins the dinner hour....what time is it? Oh, 1 A.M. the perfect time for a lovely Tenderloin Steak or some Veal Medallion or French Fries and Ribs. All washed down with an endless stream of wine and bread. A manly woman comes in off of the street and begins to belt out a heartbreaking ballad of loss and regret, a lover forever longed for but long gone into the mist of memory and time. I think I'm gonna love this town!

I arrived in Buenos Aires the first day of August. Watched the sunrise from the air after looking for the Southern Cross in the dark night air. It was a long but cosy flight. My seat mate, a small Argentine boy that had been in New York City for the first time with his mother, cousins and an aunt. He reminded me of the innocence of beginings, childhood, open eyes, unmarred soul, clean and clear-hearted openness. Things I hope if not to recover then not lose the memory or idea of.

My bags were naturally the last to enter the conveyors. I was sure that I would again have to fight the Gods of luggage and go into town uncertain of their destiny...but it was just another opportunity to exercise patience. Customs was a breeze. They ask you in the customs form to declare your cell phone, which I brought along as an address book. You must enter the serial number to ensure you are not trafficking in cell phones. Bizarre.

Stepping out into the crisp cool of morning I thought of how that northerly sun would scald my friends back home. It was 105 in Washington D.C. and a cool 48 at EZE. The city is a 30 minute cab ride at a flat rate of 50 pesos (17 USD) - a noisy horn blaring affair with the ugly outer monoliths of prison-like towers housing the suburban poor. Argentine flags slapped over balconies, in spite of World Cup defeat, steadfast national pride alongside dirty laundry, faded white paint.

Entering into the city it is not yet 10:00 am. The crowds swarm everywhere. This is certainly the capital. Crawling with cars and taxis, people marching along toward their daily duties. I think how we are all, human beings, so similar, two-legged légionnaires, always doomed to forward motion, ants connecting to each other, antennae feverishly trying to detect the subtle shifts of reality in our paths. Still, I think, we are no more important or conscious than the miraculous ants and bees and other socially organized order of life forms.

The cabbie is proud of his city, he invites me to concur on his feeling that it is beautiful, I concur and lie. He asks why I am here. Fatigued, I find it dirty, polluted, trash on the curbs, grey. Tired buildings that show wear. I am being unfair, I tell myself, don't judge its facade. There will be treasures behind these rain-faded walls. I lie again. Tourism. A long held dream. The long held dream is a fact. Maybe I can finally open my literary vena cava. Bleed the mind through my fingertips with the holocaust of thoughts, imagery, ideas. Give form to this desired ink of creation. FInd the way to unfurl my flag of hope. Awaken and live again.

We arrive at the hotel. I am embarrassed by the bulk of my baggage. A porter alights from the lobby and begins to drag the corpse of dead weight up the little steps, squeezing it through the aperture of the front door like a bloated still born baby through a tiny woman's vagina. It pops through. I give them the proverbial credit card and my passport. Another guy from the U.S. - his expression quietly takes me in. Warm smiles. There is a nice dark young girl behind the front desk. Warms up when I speak Spanish. They are surprised. Ask how I came to be American, what country is my Spanish from. Cuba. They smile even broader.

Did you hear about Fidel? Yes I say, the criminal and murderer of freedom in my homeland? The guy who imprisoned poets and journalists and made Cuba into a Soviet prison? Why yes, I've known about him for years. Smiles pucker tart and tight to a point of no return. This is not what they hoped to hear, not what they believe in their romantic idea of the tyrant dictator obviously. How absurd that people whould harbor romantic ideas about socialist justice at the hands of this devout torturer, jailer of poets and journalists, persecutor of people's freedom of religion, thought. How can anyone stand by the idea of a 47 year dictatorship. Viva La Revolución! My ass...all those people are compelled by a police state to utter adoration or be hunted down, marginalized and jailed if one stands or speaks out against th government. Is he dead?!

No, they inform me, Castro underwent emergency surgery this morning. Oh well, hold the confetti in check...the day will come. Shame he didn't get to taste some of his own dire medicine of dank, inhuman jails, psychological and physical torture. Sure would have like to see him hung in the public square a la Musollini...

Good, I think, another dictator on the brink of expiration. If only our own little team of lying totalitarian fascists in Washington also experienced sudden hemorrahage. Fidel's caused enough sorrow, enough heartache. Maybe Bush can make his final legacy á la Reagan? Mr. Castro bring down this gulf! Now THAT would make Cuban Americans in Miami devout to the party forever. Don't they see that? But the world is a powder keg, CUba is small frys compared to the horrors in the Middle East, Iraq, bombs bombs bombs...the eternal stupidity and madness of men.

The U.S. obviously has other plans and troubles beside extending their 'Operation Iraqi Freedom" to my little tortured island. More like "Operation Who Gives A Shit About Your Banana Republic - Find Me Some Oil And We'll Export A Little "Freedom" Your Way Too!"

But hey...forget that. I in Buenos Aires and the police state ended here awhile ago. People were free to elect the thieves that followed and actually had a hand in choosing who would rob them of their security, trust, ideals and hopes for a decent life.

We squeeze back into an even tighter twat of space, a turn of the century elevator, the kind I love with little iron gates, cranky and noisy and lovely. I barely fit in with the porter and the thing whirs and pulleys us upward. I am on the 3rd floor in a tiny room with a tiny bathroom and just enough room for a bed. The porter behaves as if I've just checked into the Ritz in Paris. All professionalism and pomp. Demonstrates the t.v., the light dimmer. I cut off his polished performance with a 5 peso note. He smiles and almost curtsies as he backs out the door.

I push the bags to a corner and fall on the bed as dead as their contents. I sleep an hour off and then head out. The closest iconic spot is the Recoleta Cemetary where Eva Duarte, Eva Perón, Evita, Santa Evita... is buried. It is a walled cemetery. Grandiose. Marbled mausoleums full of the country's fallen heroes, presidents, whores, thieves, martyred bourgeoisie. It doesn't take much to find her. A black marbled affair. Faded flowers dying on the gates to the mausoleum. Melted candles. Plaques paid for by adoring organizations. A small group of gawkers stare at it as if she might rise from the dead and begin waving her arms and shouting for justice. Gotta love day 1.

The travelling Man