A Stranger in Córdoba

It always seems like a good idea, an important thing to see these big cities. This is my second night in this busy ciudad of a million and a half people, the second largest in Argentina, that is not without its charms. It is generally well regarded, and it was on my way. When you’re traveling by land, the roads take you to the next city, and in a big country like this, that can be a long distance. This is also the hometown of Pancho Luna, the guy I met in Panama who was in the midst of cycling from Tierra del Fuego to Mexico City, the first friend I made solely in Spanish and something of an angel of my journey. I had to see where he comes from.

The reality is usually not so great, being in a large unfamiliar city, in the midst of a million and a half souls and not knowing anyone. Really exacerbates the feeling of being alone, adrift, a stranger. Last I saw, Pancho was bicycling across India. Big cities are expensive, overbearing, rushed. I didn’t feel this way in Salta, a much smaller city, or Cafayate, not a city at all. Part of why I was comfortable in those places, though, was the hostels where I stayed, where I was constantly meeting and interacting with other humans.

The Greengo Hostel — not sure if the name is some kind of play on words with Gringo — it certainly isn’t attracting any — is an expansive establishment, four big floors of rooms and hundreds of guests. It appears to be a longer term residence for university students, and that’s what it feels like, a college dorm, but also part apartment building and hostel. Full of lots and lots of people much younger than me. When everyone is twenty, forty one feels old. A strange time, when you’re a stranger. In Salta and Cafayate, after a day I had met good people to hang out with; twenty four hours on at the Greengo I am still entirely on my own. But I have a comfortable bed; for now I have my own room — the other bunk beds in my dorm being unoccupied; the price is reasonable, and it is walking distance to the bus terminal. It is a fairly lonely existence here, but not a bad one.

Spent the day wandering around and not finding what I was looking for, which I suppose on this journey has always been a place to live. In the words of the Talking Heads: I’m checking them out, checking them out...find a city, find yourself a city to live in. Short of that lofty and elusive goal, as a person without a home, I’m just looking a place to be, and be pleased by, even for a little while. There are lots of things to like: it’s a clean, well-kept city, wide boulevards, plenty of trees, big parks, plazas, good food and drink, historic buildings, museums and theaters and galleries. While you can find people everywhere sitting and talking and sharing beverages, that soaked-in sense of tranquility I liked so much in the north is more fleeting here.

This is an industrious place, a place to get things done, go to university, go out, go running, go out drinking. There is an energy to the street, but it feels too much like the over-developed world. That’s part of what I’m realizing is wrong with my country, what I left to get away from. It’s not that it’s developed; development is just evolution, growth. It’s that it’s developed in highly problematic ways, developed to be less human, less connected with the natural world, more isolated, corporate, soulless.

My first destination today was the Estación de Tren. The grand plan was that from here on out, there wouldn’t be any more buses. A train runs from here to Buenos Aires. This train has been recommended against by most of the Argentinos I’ve talked to, mostly because it takes almost twice as long as the bus, seventeen and a half hours to cover seven hundred kilometers. That’s just the scheduled time, and transportation and especially trains here are notoriously not on time. But it is a train, and my first real option to take one on this journey. There are trains in Perú but they’re astronomically expensive. The fare is cheap, about a third the cost of the bus, and by this point I am completely, entirely, absolutely over riding buses. From Buenos Aires I will take a boat across the Rio de la Plata, straight to Montevideo, so I let myself believe that this could be it, the end of buses for a good while.

The first step of this grand plan was not well-executed. Only two trains leave Córdoba each week for BA, and tomorrow’s departure is sold out. I needed to make a reservation a week ago. The apologetic ticket seller from behind window glass offered...tengo lugar — long pause — el jueves siguiente. By next Thursday I will be in Uruguay — inshallah — so my fate is sealed. There will be at least one more bus, and from what I can tell, it looks to be the overnight kind. I don’t even want to think about it.

Leaving the station demoralized, I wandered aimlessly towards the centro, from plaza to park to the central Plaza San Martín. People were setting up for some kind of fancy event that had something to do with art installation and fashion, but it meant that the plaza wasn’t really open for sitting. I kept on and found myself in a wide alleyway just out of the square called the Pasaje de Memoria where I was stopped in my tracks by row upon row of photos hanging on strings. I read on a plaque that these were photos of people who were disappeared under the military dictatorship of the late seventies and early eighties. In 1976, a military junta took control of Argentina in a coup, and during the next seven years, some thirty thousand people were secretly abducted by the government and never came back. In most cases, their imprisonment or fates were not even acknowledged by the authorities.

As so often is the case, the historical evils over the last century in Latin America are linked to my country. Before they seized power here, the right-wing generals were in direct consultation with the US government. Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State at the time, gave the junta approval and cover for their actions, and this encouragement was not simply in words. In the year following the coup, the US gave Argentina eighty million dollars in security assistance.

The black and white and gray photos were reminiscent of an old yearbook, a lot of completely normal-looking people. These were somebody’s brother, somebody’s friend, students and teachers and workers, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers. There is a darkness in this country, under the surface, and these photos were a testament to it. Of course there is darkness in every country; it just felt striking because to a visitor, this country feels so peaceful and stable. Perhaps the salient fact is not the darkness itself, but rather that there is a serious effort to confront and make amends for it. I scanned the faces, row by row, thinking about how it can all go so wrong, worried that it might be heading that way in my country. As I’m sure was the case in 1976, there is a significant portion of the population embracing the darkness.

I walked on and came to a somewhat rundown park at the edge of the centro, and sat by a large fountain pool. Some women were throwing plastic coke bottles in the water for their dogs to fetch, who splashed in and out and shook off closer and closer to me until I moved away. The dog owners made no acknowledgment of my existence. College students sat on the grass drinking mate and coughing as they passed joints. A young punk dressed in leather with crooked teeth was the only person I talked to. I didn’t notice him until he was right next to me.

¿Extranjero? He started.
I only replied, sí, not at all in the mood to talk about my country.
¿Porque venís a Córdoba?
Está en el camino a donde voy, I said — it’s on the way to where I’m going — or at least that’s what I meant to say. This seemed a solid answer to him, and he launched in to a passionate recommendation that I go to a mountain town nearby where there have been many UFO sightings.
Hay una ciudad secreto abajo del suelo, a secret city under the ground, he said, his eyes wide.
¿De verdad? I asked, as if he would just tell me if it wasn’t true.
No sé, he admitted. ¿Dame un cigarrillo?

✦✦

Tonight I figured if I was in Argentina and didn’t know what to do with myself, I should go out and get a steak. Went first to a storied yet laid back parrilla, recommended to have reasonable prices. But their cheapest cut was fifteen dollars, not including any sides nor the necessary glass of red wine, and this was going to be far too rich for my current station. I had walked by a slightly more modest place across the street, and it was here at the Amerita Cafe that I have taken my dinner. A brightly lit, modern bistro type restaurant. The white-haired waiter is very solemn and attentive, not that I am a particularly important customer, but like the honor of his position requires it.

Ordered a chorizo del bife — which isn’t a chorizo at all but a sirloin — cooked jugoso, with fries and their cheapest glass of malbec. All for ten dollars, and it was a good flavorful steak. This is something I never do, but apart from the when-in-Rome philosophy, I think I’m also trying to compensate for feeling superfluous and disconnected. A few nights alone in big cities will do that to me, quick. This was some kind of instinct, put some meat in my belly, find a sense of ground.

The farther I get south in this country, it becomes more and more different from the rest of the continent. More developed, more European, less relaxed. I think I preferred the north. In Salta I had the feeling that it might have been the place I was looking for; here I don’t have that. I have a ticket for a night bus tomorrow, horror of horrors — the day bus was twice as expensive — that will deliver me to Buenos Aires at eight in the morning the following day. Two steps away from my goal. I can feel the miles wear on me — I see now that when I left Perú, despite being off the road for the better part of a year, I didn’t have a full tank. After eighteen days back on the road, fatigue is ascendant.

My feet are ache-y, my left achilles is flaring up, and my throat has been sore and swollen for a few days now. As long as the places were good, I was alright, but coming into that first shitty place, Tucumán, my spirits flagged. It’s a good thing that this leg will be short, and I deeply hope that Montevideo will be a good place for me to live. I have neither the appetite nor funds to go looking for another city anytime soon.

On the positive side, this city is an excellent place for an unreformed night owl. I went out looking for dinner at ten thirty, and had no problem at all finding options. Sitting down to dinner at eleven pm is a completely reasonable thing to do in Argentina. It is well after midnight and there are a half dozen tables with people still eating.

✦✦

A last day in Córdoba, a free day. My bus for the capital doesn’t leave until eleven thirty at night. I slept in until after ten and missed the hostel breakfast, but it seemed like I should get sleep while I can in preparation for the night bus. This hostel has mercifully allowed me to hang out for the day, given that I was out of my room by eleven. Stashed my bags in the hostel office, and retired to the kitchen, where I’ve spent much of the day, drinking various teas, and working at my laptop while a steady stream of university students come and go. Lots of boiling water in the electric kettle for their mates and cafés, lots of microwaved meals. I was writing about my time in southern Colombia over a year ago, traveling from Jardín all the way down to Cali in a day. Wrote some emails, and reserved a place to stay in Buenos Aires for tomorrow night, after hearing that the hostels in the center all fill up on the weekend.

In mid-afternoon I went out seeking lunch. Ended up with take-out ravioli in a bolognese sauce, sitting on a retaining wall in the middle of a block. Delicious. Came back to the hostel, made a thermos of mate cocido, and took my guitar up to the Parque Sarmiento, a big urban park I’d passed by several times, on a hill a few blocks from the hostel. Wandered until I found a tree trunk to lean on in the middle of a wide field, a shaded place to play guitar and not bother anybody.

Tried to work out some new songs that are slow in their gestation, let myself play old ones as they came to mind. It was good to play but my heart wasn’t in it. That old feeling of clumsy fingers and no power in my voice. Sometimes music rings out and flows, other times it comes out muffled, dampened. While I played I watched people in the wide field doing their park things, playing with dogs, runners, various fitness groups cross-training. There was a serious fútbol coach with orange plastic cones and a whistle, running some young girls through rigorous exercises.

These Argentinos working so hard at exercise seemed almost like a different species than the humans I’ve been around the last couple years. This kind of thing you see in the states all the time, but rarely in most of Latin America. There are plenty of gimnasios in every city, but you just don’t find the cross-fit platoons in parks. It occurred to me that everything happening in this park could be found in Chicago or San Francisco or Boston. Here in Córdoba, it really might as well be the US or Europe. That relaxed pace of life I enjoyed so much in Salta seems to have been traded away for first world living.

At some point a drum line began to form a couple hundred yards away from me. The sound was something like what I associate with Brazilian rhythms. Soon, enough people had joined, and it became loud enough that my choices were to play along or quit playing altogether. Trying to keep up with their frenetic polyrhythms and the sense of connection, however distant, brought some energy to my music. I realized that simply making music by and for myself felt lonely, after months playing with Elise and Emily and Clint in Arequipa, of the excitement of performing for people, playing shows and on the street and at hostels. I suppose I’ll need to find some people to play music with in Uruguay.

The drum line sunk into a groove, and stuck with that particular rhythm for awhile. I found the rhythm and then a progression that worked along with it. It occurred to me that I was playing — for the first time — the music of a song I’d started writing in Panama, a strange nonsense song that came to me while walking through cloud forest in Boquete. When I’m on a long long walk, I often find myself singing these kind of nonsense songs to pass the time, with lyrics repeated over and over again, played with, turned around and stretched out. They don’t usually have any staying power, but for whatever reason, this one had stuck with me. I’d never been able to find music remotely appropriate for it, and now here it was, the song had written itself in this moment and I was singing walkin’ through the spiderwebs, walkin’ through the spiderwebs…spider through the walkin’ webs, spider through the walkin’ webs, ow-uuuuu with an accompaniment of thirty drums in my backing band who seemed completely unaware of our collaboration, and this was the best thing that happened all day.

✦✦

A couple hours in to what I am hoping will be my last bus ride for a long time, an overnight FONO bus bound for Buenos Aires. A mark of the level of sophistication of this world: my budget class bus is comfortable and clean, has excellent wifi, and they served us a dinner when we boarded at eleven fifteen, nothing to write home about but just as a gesture, it meant something.

The wifi is good enough that I am sitting here in the dark streaming an NBA basketball game, my Golden State Warriors playing the Indiana Pacers. Because we are so far east and the game is on the west coast, it was just about to get started when we pulled out of the bus terminal at eleven thirty. It’s such a strange world, to be on a bus in Argentina, watching a basketball game over the internet taking place in Oakland, California, where not so long ago I was living. It feels like some crazy magic trick that I can watch this game, riding on a bus. It’s halftime. The Dubs are up ten.

I have wanted to see Buenos Aires for many years, at least since my old friend Nate went to live there some years ago. I genuinely meant to visit him then but it proved to be a bridge too far to get myself out of my life and down to South America. So often in the normal day-to-day going to Buenos Aires just doesn’t seem possible. But I’m on my way there tonight. I don’t think Nate liked it that much, though he did find a very good dog there, a mostly black German Shepherd street dog with a heart of gold, named Manu.

Whatever excitement I feel is outstripped by the anxiety of coming into a big big city, a megacity, that I don’t know at all, particularly early in the morning after an all-night bus when I’m sure to be groggy and dragging. I would add, coming into a big city where I don’t know anyone, but I do know someone. My friend Dani from La Pacha in Colombia more than a year ago is from Buenos Aires and lives here, is going to graduate school. Unfortunately, she has not responded to any of my messages in a while. I’ll try again tomorrow when I get there but I am not hopeful.

It would appear I am coming to the very end of my journey, inshallah. A weekend in Buenos Aires and Monday I’ll take the ferry across to Montevideo. I can feel it getting close, but it’s a little hard to believe. There was a long time when I thought I wouldn’t actually make it to Uruguay. Somewhere in Colombia, still a continent away, I realized I didn’t have the money to do it, at least not the way I was traveling. It comes back to me, maybe six years ago, living on Scott Street in New Orleans, deciding I wanted to live in Uruguay. It was a fairly low down time, and really something of a pipe dream, a protest against what was passing for reality in my life.

Perhaps it was something like Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, a book that was read to me many times as a child. In response to said bad day, Alexander announces, then repeatedly insists that he is moving to Australia. I suppose that by my mid-thirties, Australia just wasn’t conceptually far enough away for me. At this point I associate my self-imposed exile from the United States with the current state of affairs and our abhorrent administration. But it is important for me to remember, however bad Trump is, that I felt spiritually, existentially lost long before he came around.

The second half is starting, and I have the great privilege to watch Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson play the game of basketball. I’m gonna watch as long as the game stays close, and then try to get enough sleep to function. When the sun comes up, I’ll be coming into a megacity which happens to be Buenos Aires.