BUENOS AIRES, MY SECOND HOME

 

I arrived in Buenos Aires a week ago in the mid-afternoon. The city, my second home, gave me a warm welcome. A South American summer welcome. Ninety in the shade and a heatwave that’s planning on sticking around for a good part of my stay. After the relative coolness of Andean Patagonia, where I live, the heat was like a sixteen-pound sledge that hit me in the chest as soon as I stepped off the plane. But then, you survive and move on. Or as my drill instructors at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, used to growl if you complained of heat exhaustion on a seven-mile forced march in heat-category-four weather, “Take two salt tablets and drive on, maggot!”

Admittedly, I was twenty and weighed a rock-hard hundred seventy-five pounds back then, while now I’m seventy-four, weigh two fifty and have a touch of cardiac insufficiency, but you know what I mean. What are you going to do? As Mark Twain  once quipped, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” It was funnier back then, when there wasn’t enough knowledge to think we could change the weather, but it’s still just as true today, though no longer humorous, when we could do something about it, if only we wanted to, instead of living in abject denial and hoping it’ll get better on its own.

I saw a guy die like that once. From the heat, I mean. Right there, at Fort Bragg. We were each issued a little box of salt tablets that clipped onto on our dog-tag chains. We were expected to take them periodically over the course of training—no Gatorade for the soldiers of the early seventies—and we were also expected to dissolve two of them in each refill of water in our canteens. 

This guy, the one who died, at every refill of our canteens, he’d always reiterate that he “wasn’t drinkin’ no goddamn saltwater”, as the rest of us dutifully dropped our recommended two tablets into our canteens—or cheated and dropped in one only—and shook the contents. Nor did this guy take salt tablets as a preventative measure. “Don’t see no goddamn Massai a-drinkin’ saltwater and takin’ no goddamn salt tablets, and them boys can run all day in the African heat.” Of course, nobody bothered to point out to him that the Massai he was talking about were tall, willow-thin members of an African people whose origins stretched back to the beginning of time, and that he was a short, stocky American, who, like a lot of us, was doing the first really extenuating training of his life.

So anyway, on a particularly long forced march with full gear, on a particularly hot day, this guy suddenly dropped out, meandered to the edge of the dirt road and puked. The senior DI, a whet-leather tough combat veteran who, not one doubted, could probably double-time from Fort Bragg to Fort Meyers with no more than a ten-minute break to check his compass and map, started running circles around the guy where he stood, shouting for him to “Get back into that goddamn formation before I put my size-nine jump boot up your young ass.” 

But the guy didn’t respond, just stood there wavering on his feet. Then suddenly, there in front of the bellowing DI, he dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes. By the time the other drill sergeants had halted the formation, the senior DI and another sergeant were down on their knees doing everything they were well-trained to do to try and save the kid. But by this time the trainee had rolled up in a ball like a dung beetle, his entire body one big cramp, and when it finally relaxed and lay out flat, it was because he was dead, and there was nothing anyone could do for him.

Amazing how that sort of incident becomes a mass learning experience that no amount of theoretical instruction can replace. After that, none of us cheated on the salt we put in our canteens or the salt tablets we took during training. We drank the piss-warm saltwater, and found it the most refreshing beverage on earth.

It was just like on the infiltration course, where you crawled through mud and concertina wire on the stormiest night of the year with flares and quarter-pound charges of TNT going off around you and two fifty-caliber M-60s strafing the air a barely safe distance above your head with red tracers every so often to give you an idea of just how close to sudden death you were. In preparation for this training event, instructors repeated again and again that if you panicked, if you ventured out of the “dying cockroach” low-crawl position, if indeed you “lost your shit” and, god-forbid, stood up, you were going to die. This wasn’t a game, they emphasized. This was the real thing. Nevertheless, every few cycles, some faint-of-heart trainee would panic, jump up to run and, in technical military terms, “get his shit blown away.”

That served as a practical lesson for the cycle the deceased was in, and for a couple of cycles to come where news of the unintentional homicide would reach the ears of the newbies, until the lesson wore off and some other poor jerk panicked and died.

Beating the heat in Buenos Aires

I refer to Buenos Aires as my second home and indeed it is, and keeps on being. I have a lot of life lived here. The formative years from my mid-twenties to my mid-forties.

But I’ve actually had three homes in my life. Wapakoneta, the rural Ohio town of my childhood and youth; Buenos Aires, where I built my career as a journalist and translator, and the mountains of central Patagonia where I’ve made my home ever since—thirty years so far, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. In between, I spent a year in Columbus (the Ohio capital, not the one in Georgia), eight weeks at Fort Bragg, seven months at the Naval School of Music in Norfolk (nobody trusts the Army to have its own music school, which would be like expecting gourmet food in an Army mess hall), a year in Los Angeles with the Seventy-Second Army Band, and fourteen months in Europe, based in Germany, with the thirtieth Army Band. The rest has all be travel, not residency.

Says Don Miguel, It's the environment.

Regarding the sweltering weather here in Buenos Aires, my brother-in-law, Miguel, said it the other night, when we were having supper together and, true to Twain’s dictum, we were talking about how unbearable the heat was. “It’s the environment,” he said. And he’s right. But I still can remember some real dog day afternoons in the metropolis, even from the first time I visited the city, when I had just turned nineteen and Miguel was still seventeen. (That’s how long he and I have been friends and brothers—basically, forever). Fainting-hot days b ack then too. Still, if he’d said it back then, he probably also would have been right. Already in those days, thirty years before the turn of the century, huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and of the Misionera jungle in northern Argentina were being cleared, creating what amounted to progressive lung-failure for the earth and doing its part to help indiscriminate use of fossil fuels raise worldwide temperatures at an alarming—and perhaps irreversible—rate.

The view from Miguel's "lighthouse".

Speaking of my brother-in-law. He lives in a small condo on the seventeenth floor of an apartment building in the Flores neighborhood. That’s about eighty blocks from downtown. The place overlooks Plaza Flores in front of which stands the Church of San José de Flores. The populous, bus-choked streets down below may be sweltering, but of a summer evening, if anyplace will be cool and breezy, it will be his little balcony. That’s where I was last night, chatting with Miguel—we always have a lot to say since, as I say, we’ve known each other and a lot of the same people and neighborhoods for the past fifty-eight years. It’s the second longest relationship I’ve had, the first being with his sister.

That narrow little balcony has an added advantage to the prevailing breezes of Buenos Aires, which, by the way, is a very apt name, since it means, literally, “good air”, but could just as easily be called fair winds. The Copernicus Eyes on Earth report might, on any given day, show LA, Santiago, Mexico City and Sao Paulo with a soaring pollution rate of four or five. But Buenos Aires always shows category one, clean air. That, despite its being a densely populated city of more than fifteen million in the capital and surrounding metropolitan area, with hundreds of bus lines, taxis, trucks and privately owned vehicles vying for spaces on the main streets and avenues. Why? Because to the east is the River Plate Estuary, twenty-five miles wide at its narrowest point between Argentina and Uruguay, and to the west, north and south, beyond the city limits, lie the endless plains of the pampa grasslands. Well, as I say, the other advantage of Miguel’s balcony—his sister calls it The Lighthouse—is that it is so high up that you can look out over the urban sprawl all the way to the vast horizon of the River Plate. It’s truly spectacular.

From the "lighthouse". Spectacular!

Speaking of heat, I remember once, when I was still a “young blade”, a day a lot like these, when it was insufferably hot. Back then, I was reporting for a major Argentine business magazine. They had assigned me a story that, if I could make it work, would be the cover for the next issue. It had to do with a major multinational whose local management was being increasingly suspected of corrupt business practices that violated the law in the US, where the firm was based. I had my stuff together. I’d done more than three thousand pages of reading on the subject and interviewed competitors and former employees of the firm, as well as talking to whistleblowers in the government, who knew precisely how the corruption was carried out.

But if I was going to get the story to work, I would also have to trick top executives in the firm into admitting to some of the things I already knew from other sources. I had first talked to wary department heads who, under careful questioning, came close to saying what I wanted to hear, but not close enough. I decided I would have to get an interview with the local CEO. Get it straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. But it would be no easy lift. They guy was as street-smart as they came, which was the reason why, in accordance with his Italian heritage, he was known, behind his back, as “The Godfather”.

So, the day of the interview came. I had a previous interview that morning with a source who was to be key in my preparation because the guy knew just what information I would have to go after if I was to catch The Godfather off guard and get him to say some things he had no conscious intention of saying.

The prior interview ended up lasting longer than expected and  I was running late for my meeting with The Godfather, and being late was something I couldn’t afford to do, since this fellow was one of the four or five most important CEOs in the country.

Now, my decidedly Nordic blood has never taken the heat well. It gets anywhere above seventy-five and I’m sweating like a pig. That day it was already hovering in the high eighties, heading for the low nineties, with overcast sky and relative humidity of eighty percent. Add to that the tension of the interview ahead of me, and the double-breasted, pinstriped business suit I was wearing, and it was a formula for disaster.

When I stepped out of the elevator on the top floor of the towering office building where the CEO held court, I was still panting from dashing four blocks from the subway station to get there on time. I composed myself in the passageway, and then stepped up to the reception desk in The Godfather’s waiting room. “Hi,” I said, “I have an interview with the CEO.”

The young woman looked at the schedule and said, “Mr. Newland?”

“Yes.”

“He’s running a little late. Please have a seat.” But then, she turned and glanced out the panoramic window behind her with its spectacular view of the port and the endless expanse of the River Plate Estuary. Then she looked back at me, cocked her head quizzically, and said, “Is it raining?”

I said, “Uh, no. Feels like it might. But so far, it’s not. Why?”

“Oh, um, no reason. Please have a seat.”

It wasn’t until I sat down on a comfortable couch and tried to relax, that I glanced down at myself. To my chagrin, there were rings of soaked-through sweat under the arms of my jacket, my tie was wet halfway down from absorbing the perspiration under my collar, my white dress shirt was nearly transparent, and indeed my lapels were spotted with sweat drippings, as if I’d been caught in a downpour before I could run for cover.

With my friend an award-winning author Esteban Lozano

I’ve had a stroke of luck on this trip. Whenever I come, I get together with my writer friend Esteban Lozano. Over the years we’ve had different haunts, some of which were the kind of old traditional bars we loved, but that have since closed down as their owners grew old or died. But for close to a decade now, we’ve favored a place downtown, a few blocks from Congress, called the Bar Celta.

We used to  meet there at night and often closed the place with long beery sessions of talk, food and abundant drink in which we discussed and debated writing, writers, cinema, politics and people and places we’d known. Esteban has a wry, quick wit, so there was always a lot of laughter as well.

Lately, we’d had to admit that neither of us is getting any younger, and Esteban went on the wagon a few years back, nor can I drink like I used to. So we now get together at the same bar, but for lunch that we wash down with lemonade (Esteban) and tonic water or Pepsi Zero (me), when we don’t meet in the afternoon for coffee. But nothing else has changed. The conversations are still lively and stimulating and our friendship has only deepened over time.

But this time we had an added treat. When I met up with Esteban on my arrival, he said, “What a coincidence. Claudio is here. He’s at the seaside right now but will be back next week.”

He was referring to our mutual friend, Claudio Remeseira, whom Esteban knows from their youth and with whom I worked for a few years in the nineties when I was special projects editor for the Argentine magazine Apertura. It was, in fact, through Claudio that Esteban and I met and ended up working together for a decade with Luxury Road Magazine out of Panama. The magazine and the work we did for it sucked, but the pay was okay, and our back-and-forth repartee in the messages we shared was enough to make it all worthwhile. We managed to have fun, in spite of the work.

So it was that, this past week, the three of us got together for the first time in years, because, since just after the turn of the century, Claudio moved to New York where he’d won a master’s degree scholarship to the Columbia University School of Journalism and ended up living in Harlem ever since and working for a wide range of media and projects. We met, as per custom, at the Bar Celta. Claudio presented each of his with a signed copy of his latest book, Ñuórk! It’s a book of  Spanish verse that charts his early life in New York, beginning with the nine-eleven terrorist attack on the Twin Towers.

Added treat, mutual friend Clauio Remeseira dropped in.

It was a great meeting full of news, humor and chats about old times. We ended up commandeering the table by the window for more than three hours. Old friends. Good times. Better memories.

I usually don’t visit Buenos Aires at this time of the year. Even in the best of cases, it’s always too hot for me in the South American summer months. I try to come in autumn when the weather is fine and the sky a deep china blue, or in winter when it’s cold and often drizzly. But this time I had no choice. My US passport expired this week, so I had to come to the US Consulate here in the city, a thousand miles from home, to renew it.

Speaking of which, I’ve been around long enough to remember when passport renewal cost twenty bucks. If I remember right, it was fifty that last time I renewed it a decade ago. It now costs one hundred thirty!

So anyway, right before I came to renew it, I had an appointment with my cardiologist because I’d been getting more fatigued than usual walking. It was getting so I’d have to stop every block and take a breather, and I found that intolerable. So I went to see him to see what we could do about it. He ended up doubling the dosage of one of my medications and said when I got back he wanted me to go to a specialist for an artery scan, even though the EKG and the doppler he did on me were normal.

I said, “Listen, I have to renew my passport in Buenos Aires and it’s going to cost me a hundred and thirty bucks, so I’ll make you a deal. The renewal lasts ten years. You have to try and keep me alive long enough to enjoy it for a while.”

He laughed and said, “Don’t worry. I figure you’ll have to renew it again.”