The way I remember that first month in Buenos Aires is one long rain dance with short burst of thunder and brief breaks in the clouds for the suns ray to dry my clothes. When I think of it that way It's fairly inevitable that I would fall in Love.
After the 'camping' trip, where we played in the rain, danced in the rain, sang in the rain and were practically washed out of our tent by torrential rain, I went back to pretending a quiet life with the Ubillus.
Every day I took in every detail that my senses and capacities could hold. Buenos Aires was a new, magical world to me. And though I thought of Ariel in most of the minutes between thumbing through my thick dictionary, there was much to be seen, smelled and felt in this strange new place. The arch of cobblestones under my feet and the smell of fresh humidity mixed with car exhaust as I was led through the streets to accompany my Peruvian family in their daily chores became my new life. I wandered around being led by these three sisters who must have tired of my constant wandering and perplexed-ness at every simple thing. I jumped over puddles in my black flip flops and took the onlooking stares like a true American. I was in heaven.
There is much to be told of this generous family of women, who gave to me the most authentic experience of Buenos Aires as an outsider on the inside. Being themselves from a different place I was able, for two weeks, to see things through a certain set of polarized glasses. My time was manicured carefully through them. Their lives were set aside selflessly for brief moments to make room for me. I was able to observe a culture that was adapting to Argentinism. They owned a 'verduleria' or a vegetable shop. It was a large stall on street level, the likes of which most Argentines visited on a daily basis to buy the vegetables for that day. Most days I remember sitting for hours watching every thing they did, hiding behind a tall wall of vegetables. The shop was the subject of many hours of contemplation and study; both of the Spanish language, the people who inhabited the city. What did people buy? What did they make with it? If I was ever hungry there was always some of the most perfectly fruit brought every other day by 'el Tio' in his bright green and orange truck directly from the farmers 50 kilometers away. I tried to make sense of the business practices of my family, what things they precut and packaged for their costumers. What they put in their addictive fruit salad. One of the last things they ever told me was what that secret ingredient was. They made me promise not to tell. It is apparently an old family secret.
There are a lot of Peruvians living in Buenos Aires. They use normal ingredients in their food, but the way they prepared them is unique. Countless plates of aromatic butternut squash, pureed and served on a bed of herbed rice. Chicken roasted with lemon and garlic and a thick green herb paste slathered over the top. To this day I try to imitate some of the things I ate with them. I learned a lot from the way they prepare their vegetables. The first recipe I begged from my Peruvian Mother Vicky: Papas a la Juan Caina. One thing my brother got right, I ate well. If it weren't for the constant walking and frantic dancing both under rain and in church houses every weekend I might have gained ten pounds in those two weeks.
These
people, who fed me, clothed me appropriately, who showed me their life
with no boundaries but language. I Love them. And at the time I
genuinely believed that they enjoyed my company as well, even if it was
mostly laughing at my horrid pronunciation or what I had thought I
understood. They let me sing to them. They watched me splash in puddles
and line up wine bottles in the street. They let me photograph them and
never questioned why. They showed me the kind of generosity and care
that I always thought I might find in South America. I had no idea what
it was like to know real people who would have given an arm and a leg to
help someone out or simply take a stranger into their home and let her
pretend she 's one of them.
They lived a humble, magical life. What seemed like long hard days and a lot of sacrifice for them was the perfect balance of sitting, doing nothing and observing. It made it possible for me to throw myself into a storm of information, culture, and sensation that took much energy to process.
When I wasn't at their vegetable shop I spent time recovering at the Ubillus's home. Spending all day every day with things that are foreign is exhausting. On a normal day I would sleep in while they walked the four blocks to roll up a gate to piles of garlic, mounds of onions and trays of kiwi, until one of them would come to fetch me. For me it was a vacation, for them it was life. I daydream still of living in their rooftop house, half a dozen narrow cement stairways, doors to unlock, the map of which is all fading. But some things never fade. The mornings I spent alone at their home were meditative. I took the time to enjoy a shower in the outside bathroom. It was a small cement and tile building with a window that stayed cropped to keep the mirrors from fogging up. Present in my memory is the smell of the first bar of soap and shampoo I bought in Argentina, one citrus and ginger, the other green tea. I can feel the chill of cold from showering with cold water because I didn't know how to work the calefon and no one forgets the sensation of putting on damp clothes because the humidity was already at 99% and the shower had just tipped it over to 100%. I washed my clothes in a large cement basin and generally tried to wrap my mind around the experience. These were my only moments alone.
One morning, the sky gave us some rest from the rain just long enough for me hang my clothes on the line. Alone in this great newness I listened to the sounds of the city. There were apartment noises, radios blaring, people cooking or doing dishes. All these sound of life, floating out into the air, completely oblivious to my listening ear. I sat on a terrace on a plastic lawn chair and put my feet up. It was usually at these times that I wrote in my journal or wrote letters to people in my life who were on other adventures. Letters were in an attempt to bring two worlds into the same space. Considering my life and this new reality together, I felt burdened by neglect. Not of those things I was not tending to but all those things I didn't know that I had and knew less that I didn't need. Living in this simple place made even the most normal things feel extraordinary. My life in the United States was cluttered by so many things that dull the subtle flavors of life, which felt so far away. In these moments everything was so blissfully clear. Sitting with my thoughts, someone near bye struck up a tune. It was an accordion and it groaned out into the morning and accompanied the birds and the clatter of traffic horns with it's weary notes. I could do nothing but sit with my feet on a chair, looking up into the sky and listen. It was the soundtrack for a scene of cement walls and huge black water tanks, tiny windows on the sides of twenty stories of flat concrete. The corners of every wall were hung in moss or a small plant clinging to the soil formed from settled smog and wind blown organic matter. It was simply another magical moment in a place that was settling every day more into my phsyche.
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