Going Nowhere Fast in Montevideo
My sixteenth day here, just after sunset. The twilight dissipates out over the Rio de la Plata. Most nights I wander a ways along the waterfront to take my evening mate; tonight I am on La Rambla right down from the Contraluz. If you drew a line from the hostel’s front door on Calle Juan D. Jackson straight to the water, I would be sitting at the end of it.
It’s quiet out here tonight, in terms of humans. I’m not sure why, as it’s lovely, that kind of slightly brisk fall evening that brings a quickening of the heart. Maybe it’s just because it’s a Tuesday, and not everyone can be out here every single night like me. Some twenty other people are taking their mate, spread out along this whole section of the promenade; another twenty are drawing continuous loops on the rink in the little park on their rollerskates and rollerblades. Patines de ruedas. There’s something comforting about all these elliptical motions on one side, and currents lapping the sea wall on the other. Montevideo seems to be a peaceful place, but perhaps that’s just the feeling of la Plata, this sea without waves.
Though being solitary here feels natural, this is my first night doing a solo evening mate in a while. For the past week, Clint and Lili, my friends from Wisconsin by way of Perú, have been my faithful companions in this ritual. Today they left, flying back to Lima in the early afternoon. A good part of me wishes I was going back to Perú with them. In my memory, Arequipa only grows more poignant and distinctive, that green valley in the barren Andes, its white stone constructions and volcanos. But here I am, left to find my fate two thousand miles to the southeast. It has come to dusk, the breeze turning slightly cold, street lights coming on. People are tucking thermoses under their arms, heading for home or some place warmer. Looking far out on the Rio de la Plata, cargo ships make their slow way out east to sea, or westward, no doubt to Buenos Aires.
Sixteen days into my time in Montevideo, I remain in a liminal state, without having made any firm connections or commitments, or gotten much below the surface of things. After five interviews with language schools, and leaving resumes with four more, I have not yet received a viable offer of work that I’m willing do. There is the Plan Ceibal — teaching remotely through closed circuit tv to some thirty classes a week of high school students all over the country — which I had already turned down once before I came here and have been offered twice more now by other companies. But I find myself completely resistant to this. What makes teaching English as a foreign language fulfilling, in spite of the challenging work and low pay, is the relationships you build. Seeing them learn as individuals, seeing the class develop as a group. What they teach you about their culture and human nature and yourself as a teacher. Teaching six hundred students once a week through a video screen, it’s hard to imagine much in the way of relationships.
Other than that, nothing I’ve been offered is close to full-time. The most was fifteen hours, and it’s not possible to cobble together multiple jobs because they all want me to work at the same hours, a split schedule morning and night. Perhaps I should just take something, but it’s hard to justify making a commitment when I don’t see how I can make it work to live here.
I continue to reside on the second floor of the Contraluz Art Hostel birdhouse. The majority of the nesting birds at Contraluz are the same as when I arrived, and seem to be here for at least the medium term, though the state of my particular coop, the dormitorio mixto, has changed. Jaime, the would-be fútbol coach from Spain, spent nine days in suspended animation in the room, waiting for his job or papers — I never could figure out exactly what — to come through. Then suddenly he found a change in his fortunes, or at least in his situation.
Communication was difficult for us for awhile, as I had trouble with his accent, but eventually he figured out how much Spanish I could understand and as we TEFL teachers say, modified his speech. We established a level of mutual sympathy, sharing updates a couple times a day on our progress, or the lack thereof. On the ninth day, he told me he had a date that night with a woman he’d met online. Around eight pm, he went out, and didn’t come back. The date apparently went well enough that when he returned in late morning he packed up his things and said he was moving in with the woman. Just like that. I haven’t seen him since.
There has likewise been no word or sign in some days of Iñigo, the gardener/musician from Barcelona who I’d hoped to build a friendship with. He was kicked out of the hostel a week ago, after being accused of stealing food. The more I think about it, he probably was guilty of this, though it’s hard to reasonably call it stealing. I can imagine him late at night in the deserted kitchen, hungry, without money. What he was accused of doing is not so much stealing as simply, eating. I think most humans with an empty stomach would do the same. But maybe it was just a misunderstanding. For a few days we kept up contact via text, but then he disappeared.
In the dormitorio this week, there was a middle-aged businessman from the north of the country who snored riotously for a couple nights, and then a young gay couple from Argentina. I liked them but they would talk in the room until the wee hours. The second night of it I complained and pleaded, “por favor, estoy tratando de dormir” and one of the guys kinda told me off in Spanish that was much too fast for me to understand. It started with “mira viejo…” and continued on for a good while. I was too tired to get angry, in the moment but also in general, so I just sighed and rolled over and pulled my pillow over my head.
It’s all so ridiculous: one of the many lists I’ve compiled on my journey is entitled “Things I’m Too Old For”. The third entry, from all the way back in Nicaragua, reads “sleeping in shared dorm rooms”, and here I am after all this time still suffering through it. For the record, the first entry, from Mexico in the first month, was “overnight buses”, and the second from a little farther on in Mexico was “falling for young women”. The guys, who were really not bad otherwise, left two nights ago, and I’ve been savoring having the room to myself.
The world of the Contraluz has been dominated as of late by the arrival of five members of an Afro-beat band from Senegal and their Argentino manager, a slightly kooky older hippie guy. They came bearing many drums and instruments and would go out every day to to rehearse for a show that might or might not be happening up soon. There is a real energy, an excitement around them, this feeling that they are doing something or on their way somewhere really cool. They probably are. Their next stop is north to Brazil, where I’m sure they’re going to have the time of their lives. On the contrary, I feel like I’m going nowhere. Most of the Senegalese guys speak minimal English or Spanish, and my French is almost entirely lost, but I like them and somehow we find ways to talk and laugh together.
My favorite, perhaps not coincidentally as he speaks a functional English, is the Cora player, Hassan, a young man in his twenties. He is tall and skinny, a sparkle to his eyes, and very long fingers to play the Cora, this amazing instrument made from a large gourd and cow skin, with twenty one strings. After playing guitar for over twenty five years, I’ve just about gotten a handle on six strings, but twenty one!? The Cora sounds something like a harp crossed with flamenco guitar, or a flock of birds with beautiful voices chattering in a tree.
Several afternoons, between my midday walk around the city and evening mate on the water, Hassan and I have sat in the library and made music together. He is a master musician, and I’m humbled and honored that he is even willing to play with me, but he is open hearted and likes the challenge of playing different kinds of music. He always asks me to play some blues — I lay down a simple progression, and then he composes an African symphony on top of it. It’s so good. I keep wanting to record some of the things we play, but it seems greedy, like it should be enough just to make sounds with him — I shouldn’t want to capture it.
But the highlight of my days has been sharing company with Clint and Lili. All the uncertainties in my current existence are easier to bear with friends. Sometimes we’d meet up in midday: one day we explored all the back corners of the Tristan Narvaja street market; another Clint and I went to busk in the Ciudad Vieja; but generally we’d meet in the five o’clock hour for a mate by the Rio de la Plata somewhere. Pass the calabasa back and forth, talk about whatever was on our minds. Science, space, politics, our home country, South America, Uruguay, Perú, economics, the environment, culture. They are good people to talk to.
Over a week of evenings our locations seemed to be progressing gently farther and farther out east, away from the main city. Last night for our mate finale we made it as far as Punta Carretas, this long peninsula that juts out into the water, the southernmost point of the city, the second most in Uruguay. There is some unkept green space, very welcome in this fairly dense city; a few little fishing piers and a lighthouse whose tower is made of beige stone. On a little rocky beach Clint and Lili took turns playing with stones and high stepping the water’s edge, while I sat and was El Cebador, lista para servir. We saw a faint red sun meet the blue gray waters, and all the colors seemed strangely muted at sunset, like a photo from the seventies. It struck me that this was fall, that the way things look change with the angle of the sun. I haven’t seen fall in almost three years. The nights now are starting to get chilly; sweater weather, and days turn a little desaturated. The usual blue skies are a little less blue, and more now are grey.
Then each night as dark was falling, we would come up with some kind of a dinner plan which invariably involved a stop at El Frigo, the little supermercado in my neighborhood, and then cook some kind of a vegetarian meal back at the Contraluz. Menu items included homemade sweet potato gnocchi; putanesca pasta; arepas stuffed with sauteed vegetables; various iterations of quesadillas and frijoles; and finally, arepa pizzas. Arepizzas?
Arepas are the traditional flat bread of Colombia and Venezuela, almost always made from corn flour. People would hate if I called them tortillas, but they’re like a thicker, softer version, that is often cut open like pita and filled. Last night we made these wide flat arepas like pizza dough, par-baked them in the oven, then covered them with red sauce and cheese and veggies to bake again. I’m sure this must already be a thing, thought I don’t recall ever seeing it in my time in Colombia, or at any of the Venezuelan food places I’ve been to. Perhaps last night we invented the Arepizza. Cooking with other people, if they’re the right people, is so much more fun than just cooking for yourself.
After dinner we’d make some herbal tea and play cards. A nightly game of Cribbage, and they taught me a trump game called Scratch that they’re very into, where every hand has a different number of cards. We’d hang out until ten or so, when they’d catch the last bus back to their place at Plaza Independencia in the old city. It was a kind of schedule. We did this almost every night that they were here, and I don’t think any of us got tired of it. Good folks, good company. They’ve gone back to host Clint’s parents for some months, to keep striving to buy a house in Arequipa, to try and get Clint’s sustainability business off the ground and out of red tape.
I have just about come to the conclusion that things aren’t going to work out for me in Montevideo, at least not at the moment. I’ve long since gotten over my initial difficulties with expectation vs. reality, and come to very much appreciate the place. Whatever criticiques I could make, this city is extremely liveable and one of the best in South America. But there is the pressing matter of work and finances. This is extremely expensive for this part of the world, and I am burning through what little money I have, without even doing much of anything. My dwindling finances are coming to a head. At the rate I’m spending pesos, I will completely run out of money in ten days. It could be worse. Sharon and Clay, dear friends from Arequipa, both separately offered me little lifelines as I was leaving, that have added seven of those days.
It has become clear that I will need to try to borrow money soon from someone back in the states. Even if I land a job, it will be a while before I’ll get a paycheck. I must be confident that my credit is good with some people because I don’t feel panicked, and haven’t begun to make moves to effect a loan, though it will take some time to transfer money. I think what you’d call it is denial. I really don’t want to go any more into debt, so I’m trying to not think about it and maybe it will just work itself out.
A couple days ago I snapped out of a semi-depressive state about my situation and started formulating a Plan B. I’ve been emailing language schools in Argentina, in Salta and Bariloche. The latter looks from the pictures like a dreamlike postcard place, like Alaska or the Swiss Alps and would satisfy my desire to go further southward, to continue my migration. Salta was my favorite city that I found after leaving Arequipa, and could see myself living there from the first day I woke up in Salta La Linda. I’ve sent out twelve emails in Spanish and English, and haven’t heard back from one of them yet.
Since I don’t know exactly where I’m headed, I need to give things a little time to develop. I will take a week and travel east up the coast. It will give me a chance to see a little more of this country if I am to leave before long, and it will be significantly cheaper than here. Maybe something will develop here in Montevideo with one of these language schools. There is another thing. My brother Daniel has reminded me that all along, I’d been saying I was going to Uruguay, not Montevideo. It seems unlikely I’ll find work anywhere else, but perhaps I’m meant to live not in the big city, but in a lesser-known corner.
The first stop will be Piriapolis, which I visited two days ago with Clint and Lili. We took a little day trip, the first and only time in two weeks I’d left the city limits of Montevideo. Our destination, a little town a couple hours east along the coast, had sparked my interest when reading the guidebooks in the hostel. The namesake and founder of the town, Francisco Piria, was one of those eccentric type renaissance men that seem to have been common around the turn of the twentieth century. As an architect and an alchemist, naturally he designed the town named after him with the purpose of harnesssing “bioenergy”. He was also a developer and and businessman, and wanted the town to be a prosperous and healing resort on the sea. Among many other things, he also published the primary liberal-minded newspaper of early twentieth century Uruguay. I was eager to see what a town built by an alchemist, intended to promote and collect certain frequencies, would be like.
Before eight in the morning, we had met at the Tres Cruces bus terminal where I first landed in Montevideo, and got tickets for a nine o’clock bus going east. We sat at a cafe in the terminal and ordered a few token items and played a game of Scratch. Then it was time for the bus and we were rolling through city traffic and the outskirts and suburbs. Clint and Lili both fell asleep and I took up my old familiar occupation of watching the world from a bus window. The route followed the inland highway rather than the coastal one, and there wasn’t a lot to see, though it was pleasing in its way. Farmlands, flat, green, soft around the edges, pastures well-grazed. Could almost be Virginia.
We got off a little after eleven where the highway crosses the road that cuts down to the coast and Piriapolis. We could have continued to the town of Pan de Azucar, then caught a local bus, but there were a couple sights we wanted to see in the vicinity, and we figured we could make the seven kilometers to the coast one way or another.
Our main point of interest was the mountain/hill also called Pan de Azucar, the third highest elevation in the country at a modest twelve hundred fifty feet. It had been visible for a little ways from the bus, a nice little miniature rocky mountain. We walked along the side of the road under an aggressive sun, fierce even halfway through fall, making half-hearted attempts at hitchhiking. A bus came by, which we tried to flag down, but apparently it doesn’t work that way in Uruguay.
At the foot of the hill/mountain is a wildlife reserve, which felt a little more like a zoo. We walked around the paths, among local school children on a field trip and lots of families and couples. There were emus and miniature deer, maybe two feet tall, which were both interesting, and then, there was the animal I’d been hoping to see for my entire journey. Capybaras, which they call Carpinchos here, the largest rodents in the world. We stood at the fence looking into their area, which had a pond covered over with algae and various little stands of greenery. A family of carpinchos was hanging out in a big open area right in front of us.
I fell for them immediately. These creatures, something like giant groundhogs or little furry pigs, are like nothing else. Maybe the closest I’ve seen to them were marmots in New Mexico. I’d liked them from videos I’d seen online, including some of them bathing in hot springs in Japan, where they “are known for their ‘happy, natural, and easygoing lifestyle’ and loved for their healing effect on humans,” but in person it was a different level.They are relaxed, with a calm energy. But they are also inquisitive, playful, delicate, dignified. We delighted in their funny walks, their rolling in the dirt, napping. I talked to them: “Capybaras, you are beautiful,” and “I have come a long way to see you.”
They’d glance up at me with a slight curiosity as if to say, “hm…human,” and then go on chewing on their hay, taking naps in the shade or whatever they’d been doing. I love them. In my South American dream I live in a country house and I have many pet capybaras. There are just capybaras taking naps all around the grounds. I have a lovely companion with dark black hair who likes to sit with me on the porch. We drink yerba mate and sing songs together while I play guitar. I speak fluent Spanish and read Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda and Alvaro Mutis in their native tongue. She is a passionate cook and she likes my cooking too. There are fruits on the trees and a river running nearby. We grow yerba mate and dry it in the barn. And there are lots of other animals: cats and dogs and goats and chickens and cows and horses, but there are definitely capybaras. Is that too much to ask?
I think it is. We sat on the grass next to the fence and watched them and ate our sandwiches. The capybaras went about their lives at a casual pace. Clint said “I have to say something controversial,” and I said “okay”. I think Lili already knew about the controversial thing. Clint had only brought flip flops, and wasn’t up for climbing the hill that we’d come to climb. I understood. It was a little much for flip flops. Not bringing shoes when we were going on a hike seemed like a terrible oversight on his part, but I wasn’t going to force or even persuade him up the path, and I knew my time remaining with them was short, so I didn’t even consider climbing it on my own. I had a feeling already that I might come back there.
Our next stop was El Castillo, a couple kilometers further down the road on a rise that couldn’t quite be called a hill. This “castle” was built by Piria, and was his primary home for many years. The building was whimsical but also kind of gaudy and fake-looking from the outside. The stone blocks were really just lines cut into concrete, and the whole thing was too perfectly symmetrical or something. Obviously this took a tremendous amount of money to build — if you were going to spend all that money, couldn’t you get real stone? Still, it was a castle, here on the side of a country road in Uruguay, and it possessed some kind of mystique.
We took a free tour, and the inside was more charming than the outside. One of the stops was with the resident poet, a woman around thirty. She read our little tour group a short poem in Spanish with forced passion, then humbly requested contributions. I hadn’t understood the poem or requested it and it all felt awkward. Apparently a woman poet long lived in this house, and the large kitchen on the bottom floor was called La Cocina de Poesia. There was another kitchen for cooking food; this one was for poetry. Every surface had some kind of antiquated, slightly messy still-life. My Mom used to say that kitchens and dreams were made of the same thing. I never quite knew what she meant, but I kinda did. On a superficial level, this kitchen was as close as I’d come. I took a picture to send her.
We went back out to the road and found the actual bus stop, where before long we caught the bus to Piriapolis. At first sight it is a quaint beach town, dominated by a giant old hotel, El Argentino, which of course was also built by Piria, and a gentle green hill marking the east end of town. While I can’t speak specifically to the bioenergy, I did know immediately that I liked it there, and the couple hours we had before we needed to catch the return bus weren’t going to be enough time and I’d have to come back. There is a long lovely curving beach with a promenade running above it, La Rambla de los Argentinos.
We decided that the best thing we could do was just go hang out on the beach. I went around to various establishments trying to get my thermos filled with hot water so we could drink some mate. A coffeeshop and a café and a restaurant all kept sending me to the next place, which finally ended up being a gas station a few blocks in from the beach. There was a big machine outside, selling hot water by the liter. Only in Uruguay. Lily collected sea glass and Clint waded ankle deep in the gentle waves. I sat on a crumbling sea wall and looked at the sea which isn’t quite the ocean-ocean but is absolutely not a river anymore, though it’s still called el Rio de la Plata. Clint argued that this was the Atlantic. I countered by asking “where are the waves, then?” The waves are like six inches high. We sat and passed around the mate for awhile. The sun by now was picturesque and golden, and this moment felt like a novel about the 1920s. Maybe it was Lily’s hat. Maybe it was Piria’s town.
I didn’t want to leave; I didn’t want Clint and Lili to go back to Perú. I wanted to stay in this novel and see what happened in the next chapter, not the one where I was scrounging around for shitty English teaching jobs in the city. But this wasn’t a novel at all, too short, maybe a poem unwritten, and after a brief look inside the Hotel El Argentino we were walking up to the Piriapolis bus terminal and waiting for the bus with lots of other people going back to Montevideo. On the way back I couldn’t help myself and fell asleep, all the way until we were in city traffic and it was getting dark.
Yesterday Clint and I went out to the Peotonal Sarandi, a pedestrian street in the Ciudad Vieja, to try our luck at busking. I’d asked around and all the musicians said it wouldn’t be very good, but that it was probably the best place to go at lunchtime. I brought Clint a set of not-terrible bongos from my hostel, and we sat on a bench and played for a couple hours for lunch diners at the cafés and passersby. I tried covers, originals, blues, rock, folk, country, all to no avail.
I have busked in many places in the US; in the UK, Belgium, México, Perú and Chile. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more indifference to my music. Usually even if people aren’t giving money, they might offer some positive encouragement: a smile, a wave, a nodding of the head, possibly even a dance while they pass. Hundreds and hundreds of people walked right past us, and only a handful even acknowledged our presence. In Perú, the response I generally felt was that people were grateful I was playing music in the street. Here, it was as if this was an imposition: who do these gringos think they are, playing music in our plaza? Very early on I decided that I was just playing to play music with Clint one last time. We would have done better to just play in a park. After two hours we had garnered sixty two pesos, not quite enough for my round trip bus fare downtown. Tough crowd. Clint insisted I keep his half.
The strange part is that I’ve been getting great reactions to my music at the Contraluz. Played a couple times with Iñigo; for Veronica — she loves old jazz standards, so I’ve learned to play a few for her; by request for the birthday party of a woman who lives downstairs; and with Hassan playing blues-african music. But out on the street, it was like I didn’t exist. Kinda epitomizes my feeling of not being embraced by Montevideo as a whole. Almost all the above persons who I’d connected with musically are not from this country. More and more, it seems like this might not be my destination after all. Tomorrow or the next day I’ll go back to Piriapolis, try to get some more of that bioenergy.
