Days and Nights in Buenos Aires Kendric W. Taylor

Days and Nights in Buenos Aires

Later, back home, Kent thought of that last dawn . . .

By Kendric W. Taylor For William Kent, the restaurants in central Buenos Aires were someplace to keep the darkness out. He ate alone nearly every night, late, amid the crisp white tablecloths and slowly twirling ceiling fans. Even though he could understand little of the conversations around him, the talk itself was enough; that and the color and the movement. Along with the solid fare and glow of the wine, it cast a circle of warmth that cold despair could not readily penetrate, unless he invited it in.

He was working in this fabled city to escape events at home, not an uncommon theme in Kent’s jumbled story: only this chapter was tall, thick brown hair to her waist, foul-mouthed and funny. And as it turned out – no surprise -- the laugh was on him.

As much as Kent could stretch the workday, at some point loomed the inevitable return to the small commercial hotel and his room with its view of the airshaft. Long after the last newsletter article had been written and everyone had gone home, it was time to shut off the lights and leave, chancing the antique lift down to the street. That’s when he usually headed for a Palacio Papafritas on Avenida Florida, deep and dark, not a palace, only a modest respite for traveling salesmen, lonely clerks and tired pensioners. It was inexpensive and never crowded, and the waiters, after a few evenings, seemed to view him as a regulár. He would sit quietly, reading the Englishlanguage edition of Time, purchased at the kiosk outside, or a paperback. The staff was tolerant of his limited language skills, and his curious Yankee

penchant for blood-red bifé. He would eat slowly, silently, the red Mendoza wine replenished unhurriedly at intervals without the necessity of asking.

He thought about a Hemingway story he’d just re-read, about a waiter who was reluctant to close up at night in case there might be someone who needed the café for its light; a refuge clean and pleasant. That’s me all right, Kent thought, nodding in self-pity.

Without flourish, the reckoning would appear at his table, the tally increasing over the weeks as his appetite returned. He would do the necessary currency adjustments, allow for the daily hyperinflationary swoops, figure in the tip, and leave the unfamiliar banknotes in their huge denominations in a small white dish.

Nodding politely, Kent walked out into the traffic-free thoroughfare, joining the crowds strolling slowly through the warm crowded streets. Even in these days of the military junta, Buenos Aires was alive until late at night with families and young couples casually window shopping or settling into a late meal at the outdoor tables flowing along the sidewalk. It was a city so Parisian in appearance, but so Italian in mood, Kent thought, and one of pleasure, it was so easy to stay out all night, and not even notice the passing hours.

Sipping a cold Pilsner at a corner table, he gazed up at the Belle Époque buildings, their tall windows warmly lit behind wrought iron balustrades, glimpses of paintings and gilt mirrors on the walls inside. Kent imagined what it would be like to live along this street, wondering even if Borges, the great Argentine writer, whom he was trying to read, might be on the other side of one of those windows.

He thought again of that Hemingway story: about what it was that made them seek out the café to sit in the quiet light. Was it the deathly loneliness, the fear of another sleepless night in their dark, fetid rooms? But Kent knew why – a woman! Like the one with the long dark hair. It had started as an intense crush, lasted a couple of years, then she was gone, leaving him with the usual pathetic cycle of questions: why didn’t I do this; or not do that, and on and on. It was always like this when these affairs of his ended – which they did with regularity. Kent smiled ruefully to himself – he always thought they would last forever -- the women in turn always thinking they could change him -- improve him – and it never worked either way. A friend‘s wife called Kent “Birdbath,” because he was so shallow. No more Christmas cards.

As Kent settled into a routine and the long weeks passed, he began to realize he was not only boring everyone with his terrible tragedy, he was actually beginning to bore himself, and losing friends in the process. His usual reaction to these breakups had been to pick one step of the Stages of Acceptance that would cause the most pain and stick with it, but now even that delicious squirm of self-pity was loosening its grip on the pit of his stomach.

Then two things happened: he had gone one night to LaBoca, down by the dock area of Buenos Aires, to see a guitarist friend from the states, whose

band, Tony and the Night Hammers, was traveling South America on a passthe-hat tour. Launched into his usual heartbreak lament, he was taken aback by his friend’s immediate and summate reaction: “Willy man, you got more trouble with women than Hank Williams, and you’re dumber than Elvis. Get over it, for chrissake!” Then, the following day, he was confronted at the office by a fellow expat, who instead of her usual glazed eyeball reaction to his sob story, cut him off in mid-bleat, snarling in a flat menacing tone: “Look, we’re all sorry for you, but everyone’s been through it sometime in their lives. Haven’t you figured out yet that the common denominator in all of these is you? Are you thatfucking clueless?”

Finally shocked into actually facing up to his situation, instead of enjoying it, he began to wonder what actually to do about it? One of his problems, he knew, was to be cursed with almost total recall of every dumb-ass thing he’d ever done. Maybe now it was time to stop remembering and start forgetting. - including any thought about this last one. To his gradual amazement, it began to work -- the self-inflicted wound began to heal. As it did, real life slowly began to intrude; not only was he going to live, but he would be doing it in one of the most vibrant cities in the world.

From the beginning, Buenos Aires had been something new and exciting. He had arrived that first time, shepherding a group of prominent journalists brought to Argentina to assess the potential for foreign investment. Tired and hungry after the long flight down from New York, they had rendezvoused in the oak-paneled bar downstairs at the legendary Plaza Hotel, where they were staying. This was where Eva and Juan Peron held functions in their heyday (the older staff remembered them well for their tips).

The party was seated among the dark leather-covered booths beneath the polo pictures on the wall, enjoying cocktails and canapés, when their translators arrived -- the younger one turning heads all the way to their table. She had introduced herself in passable English as their tour guide, and the other woman as their official translator, who happened to mention as her bona fides that she had once translated for an Israeli psychic known for bending spoons with his mind. This galvanized the journalists to crowd around her to unearth his gimmick, and left Kent the opportunity to chat with his new guide -- about the itinerary. He saw a girl in her twenties, with animated blue eyes, burnished gold hair to her shoulders, and a slightly offkilter smile that spoke of mysteries to be discovered. She had been an international tour guide and part-time au pair (in Penang, of all places). He thought her sophisticated in a European way.

She liked Americans, she said, telling him later that he had reminded her of an actor in an American war film that was playing in Buenos Aires (“Owe you one, Indy,” he thought, getting the actor right but the movie wrong).

He realized later that his feelings for her began the day the journalists had interviewed the general running the Junta at the presidential palace – the Casa Rosada. At the last minute, the two female interpreters had been replaced by

a barely competent male from the Foreign Office. This of course prevented her from seeing at first hand her country’s equivalent of the Oval Office, and no less importantly, the entry to the famous balcony where Eva Peron had appeared before the adoring crowds.

Kent was surprised how bad he felt for her, and as they spent more and more time together, it changed into something else. One long lovely Sunday was spent sunning themselves on deck aboard a financier’s yacht on the Rio de la Plata, where they had been shunted, while the journalists lunched in the galley below with the great man. No problem, Kent thought smugly as they lay on the canvas pillows, then wondered why he was so dumb as to say no when she offered to rub coconut oil on his back.

A few days later, flying back to Buenos Aires at night on the military transport supplied by the junta for a visit to an abattoir in Mar del Plata, (a horrible experience that had made him sick to his stomach), their official host, an army colonel, after many whiskies, tossed aside his machine pistol, got on the intercom and launched into an endless drunken serenade.

“Lele,” Kent asked her, “what the hell is the colonel yowling about?”

“Ah, Querido, you feel better, I’m so glad. Well, he sings of his Buenos Aires, and of sadness and love.” She explained.

“Well, as long as he keeps his hands off you. Listen,” Kent continued, leaning across the armrest to whisper into her glorious hair, “what do you think would happen if these guys ever got into a real war?”

Her reaction was instant and wide-eyed: “Cheesh, darling,” she said in a low voice, “I hope thatnever happens.”

That night she knocked at the door of his room at the Plaza to check on him: “Before I go home,” she explained, “I brought you pills from the Pharmacia,for the stomach,”

“I feel better now,” he had replied. “I just need sleep.”

“Yes, it’s a long day tomorrow.”

The next night he asked her to stay with him.

When the junket ended, Kent had stayed on a few days settling bills. Together, they had seen the journalists off at the airport, and now he sat outside at the fashionable Café de la Paix with this young creature, watching the local yahoos skid their Porsche 911s around the huge buttonwood tree in the plaza. He wondered at the oddity of this lively rendezvous being located smack across from Recoleta Cemetery, a virtual borough of the dead in a city itself very much dedicated to the past. Eva Peron was buried over there, entombed under Duarte, her family name.

They were having a drink with her married boyfriend, who had just arrived, no doubt in one of the Porsches. How sophisticated it all was, he thought.

How Buenos Aires.

How to get rid of the boyfriend!

He wondered if she was thinking the same thing. He knew some things about her now: she was born in Havana, of English parents on their way to Argentina. She was kind, intelligent and without pretense. Not for the first time his focus settled upon those blue eyes, marveling how the day’s humidity had forced that glorious hair into tiny ringlets, remembering the night before and that fountain of gold fanned out on the pillow in his hotel room.

“So, Señor,” the boyfriend announced confidently, unaware he was heading for his own Ricoleta, “we will drop you at your hotel, no? The Plaza, I Believe.”

Before Kent could even think of a reply, she interrupted: “Bieñ, Paco, you can drop me as well. Señor aquimust sign some vouchers so the tour company gets paid. And I know you should get home to your wife.”

And that was the end of Paco!

Ah, these modern Buenos Aires girls!

And now it was time for Kent to go home to the states, and here they were, at a small café on a corner in the evening. Afraid to address the topic, he asked her about Borges; where he might live.

“Who knows?” she replied in her curiously accented English.

“Well, I know he likes visitors to read to him in English,” Kent mused: “Kipling, I heard. At one point, Peron made Borges a Chicken Inspector as a sign of disrespect.”

“How do you know these things,” she had asked, tilting her head to the side, her hair sliding across her bare shoulder.

“I read a lot,” he replied, “as do you. I fancied he might be up there tonight, behind one of those marvelously filigreed balconies.”

“You like Borges, then,” she asked.

“Actually, I prefer García Márquez, and the Peruvian, Vargas Llosa –wonderful story tellers. But Borges as a person is really interesting. Did you know that, after Peron was kicked out of office, the new government awarded Borges the job of his dreams: director of the National Library? But he was going blind: ‘I speak of God’s splendid irony,’ he said, ‘in granting me 800,000 books, and darkness.’

“You wonder about suchthings,” she had smiled, waiting to be kissed in the warm night. They talked awhile about places he might go on the way home -- once-in-a-lifetime opportunities -- Rio and its beaches, or south to the Pampas and Tierra del Fuego. He had seen the legendary gauchos at an estancia, rough men around the cook fire at night, eating bull’s testicles or tearing away at long strips of roasted bifé, one end clenched in their teeth, while slicing the other with their ornate silver knives, finishing by wiping the blade against their bombachas, the distinctive floppy pants they wore tucked into their boots. He had heard of the great cattle breeding plains, the shoreline further south, teeming with penguins and seabirds, and elephant seals plying the waters. It was a place that pulled at his imagination, Kent thought; how much he wanted to go, but now it was time to decide.

She regarded him quietly: “these are wonderful things for you to see,” she said, glancing sidelong at him. “Should you go north to Rio, or south to Ushuaia?” She looked at him full on: “Or, más importante, will you stay here with me?”

Kent looked at her across the tiny table: it felt as if they both stopped breathing at the same moment; the traffic muted, the streetlight behind them dimmed. He felt the music pulsing from the tango palace down the street.

“Maybe I’ll stay in Buenos Aires a little longer,” he ventured,” letting his breath out slowly, adding quickly. “But you have to promise to be with me while I’m here. No boyfriends.”

They leaned across the table toward each other in the soft night and kissed.

She smiled her lopsided smile: “Let’s run for the collectivo and go home,” she said. “No hotel. And this time, youmust pay the driver.”

Ah, Kent understood -- now they were a couple. She was no longer the guide and interpreter, shepherding everyone. It was Buenos Aires and he was the hombre; it is the man who must now to pay the driver on the bus for them both.

Ah, these machismo Buenos Aires men!

At her small flat, sipping wine while looking through her albums of classical music, she smiled at him questioningly, “we’ll have to sleep on a mattress on the floor, querido; my roommate has her boyfriend over.”

“From the Plaza to the parquet,” Kent mumbled happily.

“Que?”

“No es Nada,” he smiled, actually meaning it, “I don’t mind a bit.”

Ah, these romantic Buenos Aires nights!

He remembered the next few days as sunshine and holding hands: ballet at the ornate Teatro Colón, where on hot summer days young boys swim in the fountains in front; Sunday at an outdoor crafts fair in a small park beneath the rosewood trees where they bought small gifts for each other; the smell of leather along the Floridafrom the goods on display in the doorways of shops; the construction workers cooking up their lunchtime meal of steak and chorizo on small grills. Late their last night together they had sat on the balcony of the flat, gazing across the River Plata at the lights of Montevideo in the distance, the scent of jacaranda heavy on the still air, the rhythmic cadences of a long-dead tango singer, floating up to them from the leafy street below.

And now, here he was, several years later, back again, away from the mess he had made of his life, the long days stretching before him, the topsy-turvy Argentine calendar moving into the heat of sub tropical winter below the equator. With his new liberation from his self-pity, he entered into the social life of the office, went bar hopping, took the ferry across the river to Montevideo, rented a car for long drives out into the amazing countryside. He spent most evenings outdoors at the cafés and began to think more and

more about the blond Argentine that he had let go. He went to a street telephone and dialed the number he had saved on a scrap of paper: “Lele?”

They met for lunch at La Mosca; near the Retiro train station, in a huge, clamorous restaurant popular for its prodigious servings. They ordered what looked like man-eating South African prawns and vino blanco.

“Weely, the most awful thing has happened” she blurted almost immediately: “You recall my cat, Gastón?”

“Of course.”

“He fell off the balcony,” she cried softly.

He visualized beautiful brown-and-white Gaston, his eyes as blue as hers, plunging down the high-rise, claws outstretched, slicing like a Chuck Jones cartoon character through a pedestrian 16 stories below, spreading him neatly on the sidewalk like a loaf of bread.

“You are heartless. You laugh. You never like poor Gaston! ”

“No, no. No, not heartless,” an immature sense of humor,” Kent explained.

“Ah, like that dusty old Renault on the street you’d salute? You said it reminded you of the fall of Paris in 1940?”

“I know, foolish.”

“Yes,” she replied, “but it made me want to hug you then.”

She saw his face brighten: “Querida, I am married now.” Her husband was a studio musician, she said, writing jingles. They lived in a small, lovely apartment in a modern high rise in one of the better neighborhoods. She had no children.

He saw her only occasionally after that, generally for lunch. One long Saturday afternoon, they returned to his small hotel and made love.

He never knew when she might call, but began hoping to see her, wanting to see her. Thanksgiving back home arrived, virtually unknown in Argentina, but he was able to share it as a combined holiday with some new friends from the Canadian embassy. But Kent knew his time was growing shorter. He must be home by Christmas.

And then, as before, it came down to a last dinner, another conversation, another decision. When he called, she suggested dinner, as her husband would be away for two days, at a convention in Rosario. That night, as they dined, the setting sun brought a cooling mist off the river, and she suggested stopping at her apartment for a wrap, before going on for an after-dinner drink. He knew there would be no lovemaking; the weight of inevitability hung too heavily over them

They stood on the fatal balcony where Gastón had misjudged his last stroll, while she pointed out the apartment where a famous generallived. There was a small-framed photograph next to the couch of her in Venice; she, lovely, smiling her crooked smile, her beret tilted over that luxuriant hair, the pigeons a halo around her. The honeymoon? He didn’t ask.

“I wanted you to see where I live,” she told him. He didn’t ask if she was happy.

They walked along the riverfront for a time, her hands tucked into his arm at the elbow, finally stopping at a café. It was evident neither wanted to make it end as they talked all through the velvet night. Then as the rising sun’s rays crept down the broad avenue, dissolving the river mist and sliding across their table, warming them, it came to the final conversation.

“You know I care for you,” Kent told her. “That’s why I asked you to come to the states after I went home that time.”

“I had thought that you wanted to marry me,” she replied softly, looking down to smooth her dress.

“I didn’t know that,” he said, surprised and shaken. “I am so foolish sometimes, especially when it comes to these things. After you had been there for awhile, when you asked me whether you should send for Gaston, I made a terrible mistake. I said no, without thinking. No -- I thought of my responsibilities. I guess I couldn’t deal with it.”

She looked at him sharply: “And now you use me to get over another woman.”

“No, that’s over,” he said. “Many months ago. I told you that. I never have room for two. But you have always remained with me. You’re in my prayers every night. And I’m not even religious.”

“Back then, as strong as my feeling had grown for you, I knew you would want children, and I could barely afford the ones I had. It sounds selfish. I didn’t want you to go home, but I let you, like a fool.”

“Es verdad. You areselfish,” she nodded, unsmiling, “most men are, but you have a good soul. I still have feelings for you, chéri. In my heart. That last day at your house, before I came back to Buenos Aires, I say to your mother: ‘take care of my boy.’”

“Always –Siempre --” she told me.

“My mother speaks Spanish?”

“Tu no escuchas! You don’t listen, Weely, especialmenteto those you love. You take them for granted. I see you at work here at your officina; you have only a few notes, but you remember everything when you write the article. Maybe if you listened more to us, those who love you . . .” her voice trailed off.

“I try,” he interrupted. “I try,” seeing it slipping away. “Maybe I daydream too much. Or say the wrong things. Or don’t do the right things. Or be scared and do nothing. Then I lose those I love. But it can be different with you. I’d make it different,” straining at the words, already knowing the answer.

“Ah, mi pobre Chico. But now it is too late, eh? I have my husband now. It is too late for you and me, no matter how we feel.”

Kent looked at her sadly: “Si. Siempre. Always, I guess.”

Later, back home, Kent thought of that last dawn; he had gone to Buenos Aires to forget one girl who had left him, only now to find himself falling back in love with this girl, whom he had let go. And she wasn’t coming back. Always, one wants the other to be something they are not. That’s what it’s usually all about anyway, he thought.

If it’s about anything.

The Boardwalk, Long Beach, New York Photo by Karen Dinan