IN ANOTHER LIFE

Downtown Buenos Aires

 I’ve been in Buenos Aires for a couple of weeks. I came the day after my birthday. Something about that, turning three-quarters of a century old, causes you to reflect. Whether you like it or not. I mean, like, despite the fact that I was born American and will die American, that I still feel my American roots deeply, that I still carry some of my native soil with me, like some aging vampire, wherever I go, I’ve now lived in this foreign land half a century longer than I lived in my own.

When that thought hits you unexpectedly, it’s kind of like somebody just punched you in the solar plexus. It takes a minute to catch your breath.  And just when you’re recovering, you start thinking about how familiar you are with this city. Despite its sprawling size, you know it like a New Yorker might know the five boroughs of his or her city. Back when you lived here, you walked its streets, rode its subways and buses, lived in its barrios, reconnoitered its myriad nooks and crannies and knew its people for more than two decades. You come back frequently, and feel at home when you do, despite all of the changes, of which you take note right away. And you almost always wish things were like they used to be. You felt old and streetwise back then, when you left it in your forties, just as you do now. It’s your town—even though it’s not any more.

My corner of Patagonia

Just when you’re contemplating that thought, however, you remember that, for the past three decades, you haven’t lived here anymore, either. No, you’ve been holed-up for thirty years (it will be thirty-one in a week or so) in your own little hollow in the woods, in Andean Patagonia. Out there, in Patagonia, there’s no knowing the place “like the back of your hand.” You may be familiar with enough parts of it to think so, but you’d be kidding yourself. Patagonia is just too vast, wild, untamed and mysterious to “know”, and it’s exceedingly easy to die trying. But then, you don’t try anymore. Those days of exploration are over, but the awe inspired by the surroundings remains. Even your very own surroundings—the immediate ones, as they say—the two acres of forest and cabin that you call home, are awe-inspiring.   

So, anyway, in a place so vast and wild and diverse, you choose your spot, “settle it”, and make it your own. You live near a town for the communications, the medical care, and the groceries, but in the process of adopting it, you may, like me, come very close to becoming a hermit. It’s only when you fly out or fly in, only when you get far enough above it, the nearby town, I mean, that you see just how alone and isolated you really are. All around, it’s miles and miles and miles of nothing. Well, or, of something. But nothing that a man can survive for long. Not on his own. It’s powerful. And daunting. But oh, so beautiful!

Being here—here meaning back in the city—made me remember when I first arrived, like a lifetime ago. First thing I did when I got here earlier this month was go to supper with an old friend, who just also happens to be my brother-in-law, Miguel.

Joy's

We went to our favorite place. Well, his favorite place. I can take it or leave it. But he swears by it. When we walked in this time, however, even he murmured, “Dios mío, this place gets more Kafkaesque all the time.” Actually, it’s more like Dante’s ninth circle of hell.  

The place is called Joy’s—the owner’s own unique spelling of his nickname, Joey, so like Jo-y (I’m guessing his real name is José). It’s at the intersection of a major avenue, Rivadavia, and a narrow alley of a one-block street (locally, una cortada) called La Porteña.

Joy, arguably, offers some of the best pizza and empanadas money can buy. Really. No kidding. Outstanding food.

But the ambiance! It is a crepuscular hole in the wall of indistinct color and dubious lighting with a jumble of furniture that looks as if it were discarded from the block by the auctioneers at a series of pizzeria fire sales. There are only about eight eclectic tables with chairs in varying states of disrepair, and they are always pretty much full, but Joy usually manages to find a place for us.

Joy does a famous business in home delivery, obviously, so the tables are mostly a prop for beer-swilling regulars. Bathrooms are at the back next to the kitchen, but it’s a good idea to make a pit stop before you arrive and to hold it thereafter until you are on more civilized ground, because if the dining area is iffy, the bathroom is almost terrifying. In the men’s, there’s a urinal, a squatter—I mean would you actually want a toilet seat?—and a light bulb dim enough not to encourage close inspection. If you plan to keep your shoes clean, you’ll want to watch your step  as you gingerly pick your way to the pissoir.

The first thought that passes through your mind on entering Joy’s is whether it might not be a good idea to get a tetanus shot before taking a seat. The second is to wonder how the health department has never closed it down. But just then a squad car pulls up, gives one hoot on its siren and a young cop gets out of the passenger side and comes in with his cap under his arm to pick up some packages of food for him, his partner, and apparently for some of the guys and gals at the precinct as well. A streetwise senior reporter I used to work with once told me that you can always tell if a police visit is official or “friendly”. If cops have business with you, they'll keep their caps on. If they’re hoping it may slip your mind to charge them for their lunch, their caps will be under their arms. If there’s one thing cops know, it’s where to eat. They’d be the first to tell you that while the venue might be a nightmare, the pizza and empanadas are righteous.

I suppose that also explains why, despite being in what has become a none-too-safe area of town, Joy doesn’t seem to sweat trouble or getting robbed. (In fact, he’s one of the most laid-back guys I’ve ever known). I figure he takes care of the blue bloods, and they take care of him. But then again, Joy’s isn’t the sort of place where you want to even accidentally stare fixedly at other patrons long enough for them to ask you what the hell you’re looking at, unless you’re in the mood for an altercation. A lot of these (mostly) guys—with an occasional savvy-looking girlfriend thrown in—are fairly marginal types, and hardly amenable to prying eyes.

The clientele is mostly made up of Latin American immigrant population. When I first started living in Buenos Aires fifty years ago, this area of town—Flores-Floresta—was the first I came to know. It was my wife’s family’s neighborhood. It’s still my friend, brother-in-law and brother-by-another-mother’s. Back then, it was an area of town mostly populated by the typical mix of Argentine immigrant bloods—Italians and Spaniards. My wife Virginia and her brother Miguel’s family were all Italians. Some from northern Italy and some from the south, but all “tanos”. Well, except for her paternal grandmother, who was a Basque. Floresta, my wife’s native corner of the world, also had a significant population of Hasidic Jews, who lived side by side with another significant population of Syrio-Lebanese Arabs. So on one corner you had the RC Church of the Candelaria, up the street a branch of the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina, and, almost within spitting distance, a branch of the Centro Islámico. It was very cosmopolitan, and everybody lived in relative harmony and did business with one another.

Buenos Aires’s old rag district, Barrio Once (literally Barrio Eleven) in midtown, hosted the great majority of Jewish population that burgeoned between the two world wars. Today in Buenos Aires Jews number about two hundred thirty thousand, with the city ranking fourteenth for Jewish populations out of all cities worldwide. Definitely a large population, but no comparison with people of some sort of Arab blood—mostly Syrio-Lebanese—that number 3.5 million in Argentina as a whole, but are more integrated into the general population, since a large proportion, on emigrating, were already, or later converted to Catholicism.

Bustling Avenida Avellaneda - the new rag district

Over the years, I’ve seen the demographic and cultural changes that have taken place in Flores-Floresta. And the catalyst was clearly the expansion of Jewish commerce to the west side, beyond the boundaries of the overcrowded midtown area. It was natural that the new, auxiliary rag district that they would found should be in Floresta, where a fairly large community of their number made their homes. At first, it was a few clothing stores and workshops that sprang up on and around Avenida Avellaneda, a main Floresta thoroughfare. But then, suddenly, it was a wave, a trend, and Jewish clothing merchants and manufacturers were buying up every property they could in the area.

It got so that the old traditional majority Italian and Spanish-descent residents quipped wryly that they were going to have to change the name of the neighborhood to Five-and-a-Half, because half the Jews of Once were moving there. One smart guy even seized on that idea and opened a small cafe and bar called Cinco y Medio (Five and a Half) which became immediately popular with local merchants.

Anyway, it was interesting to watch what happened over the course of the following decades.  Jewish merchants hired Korean immigrants to work in their clothing operations in Floresta. As they became ever more upwardly mobile, the Koreans started pooling their money and buying out the Jews. The new Korean proprietors then started hiring newly arrived Bolivian and Peruvian immigrants to work for them, and the Bolivians and Peruvians, learning the process from their Korean bosses, started buying others out and opening clothing operations of their own.    

Bolivians holding an ethnic celebration in Buenos Aires

Today large numbers of Jews and Koreans are investing in other areas of commerce, and Bolivians have taken over as textile industry leaders. In keeping with this trend, the population of Flores-Floresta has mutated as well.

My own personal symbol of that cultural and demographic change is the big restaurant on the northwest corner of iconic Plaza Flores. For many years it was an upscale Italian restaurant that also featured an excellent asado grill and fine Argentine beef. We knew the mostly Italian, white-tunicked waiters by name, because they had been there for decades and were nothing if not professional.  

As the neighborhood changed, so did the restaurant, for a time becoming an all-you-can-eat grill. And now, it is a restaurant and takeout place specializing in Peruvian cuisine.

 But then, everything changes, and so do we. Getting old has an upside. Long experience has taught you some things. You aren’t nearly as scared of, or worried about things as you once were. Being more obviously finite, life isn’t so driven anymore, and thus not as stressful. When a “what if” doubt pops into your head, your wiser self will often say, “so what?” At this stage, who gives a crap?

Then again, obviously, it’s not like there aren’t things about getting old that suck. Perhaps the worst part is that, in your mind’s eye, you’re no older than you ever were. It’s only when you meet friends you haven’t seen in a while and ask yourself how they got to looking so old, or when you pass a store window and gasp at your own reflection that the passage of time smacks you between the eyes. It’s also when you take a seat in the middle on the subway and then wonder how you’ll get up without something to grab onto. Or when you’ve been sitting, like you used to, in a bar talking to friends for a few hours and when you finally stand, with the help of the table, you have to stay there a minute making a little extra small-talk while your vertebrae and knees accommodate themselves, so people won’t have to watch you limp away.  Up to then you might have been feeling just fine and having a great day. C’est la vie.

Miguel and I invariably talk about the old days when we get together. We remember people who are no longer with us, the neighborhoods as they used to be—what used to be here, who used to live where. When we were a little younger, these conversations used to just be a lot of fun. The older we get, the more emotional they become, and now, several times, we surprise ourselves by feeling a knot in our throats and having tears involuntarily well up in our eyes.

Friends for most of our lives, Miguel and I on a
road trip we took together in Canada in 1979.

Miguel has been having some medical issues. They started after he and Virginia’s older sister Alicia died a few years back, following a three year struggle with dementia. Watching that process close up and personal, seems to have drained a lot of strength and resolve from Miguel. Each time I’ve seen him since, in my occasional trips to the city, I’ve noticed, with dismay, how much frailer he has gotten.  Now, however, one of his sons has stepped in and gotten him to start seeing some doctors and to undergo some medical and neurological testing. I’m pleased to see that he is at least feeling less dubious about his condition, that he’s being proactive, that he’s finding out what’s ailing him.

These things sneak up on you. There’s a sort of dichotomy you deal with as you get older. On the one hand, the things you recall seem like they happened only yesterday. As memories, they’re fresh and detailed in your mind. But thought of in chronological terms, it’s as if they had happened in another life to some other person. So much so that, if you don’t remember them mutually with your contemporaries, you might question whether, perhaps, you didn’t just imagine them or make them up. And that, I suppose, is the value of sharing memories—knowing that they are real, that someone else recalls them just the way you do. It’s self-comforting. It’s life-affirming.

Miguel and I talk a lot about the guys at the gym. Back in the day, Miguel was, pound for pound, one of the strongest men I ever knew. He was a highly disciplined bodybuilder, who was once crowned “Mr. Buenos Aires”. He’s the one who got me interested in weights and bodybuilding. I only competed with myself, but for a long time—almost twenty years, in fact—I was highly devoted to it, and spent every spare hour I could in the gym. I went to several different gyms over the years, but Miguel always went to the same one, and still drops by now and again to visit the owner, who is now in his eighties and still working out, leaving running the place to his son.

I always think of that place, the Apolo Gym, as where I learned the weight-training discipline well. Now, over pizza and beer, Miguel and I remember that gym—cramped, spartanly-equipped, but a gathering place for some of the most physically powerful men in the city, none of whom were the yuppy types who frequented the scintillating physical training centers advertised on TV. Rather, they were boxers, wrestlers, cops, firefighters and bodyguards, among others. They took training seriously. It was life-and-death to them, or at least the means of maintaining the tools of their trade. And since I was Miguel’s brother-in-law, some of them befriended me, and taught me what they knew. For the first time in my life, I was an athlete, and loved every minute of it, not just for the sport, but also for the strange array of roughnecks who hung out there and who became my chums.

Ernesto in the seventies

There were two guys everybody looked up to, no matter how powerfully built and gritty they themselves might be. One was the owner, Ernesto. Nobody messed with Ernesto. He was a man of really small stature. Not more than five-feet-five or six,  but so powerfully built that there was no way you could think of him as “small”. He was very image-conscious and made sure all posing images of him were shot with no comparative context—usually outdoors. He owned his own bodybuilding magazine that actually sold on downtown newsstands. Though in person he was laconic, only perfunctorily polite and monosyllabic, he wrote knowledgeably about bodybuilding and bodybuilders, as well as about anatomy and its application to sport. He was an excellent weight-training coach, who, from the outset, made sure that you trained in a disciplined and carefully coordinated manner, creating workout routines and making sure you did them properly. But once you had it figured out, he only provided instruction when you asked for it.

Ernesto’s own training as a phys-ed instructor was obvious, but unless you knew that the murals on the wall of the tiny gym were his, you never would have guessed that he also had a degree in fine arts. He had been a pro wrestler in his youth, performing under the handle of “Mr. Músculo”, and tossing guys twice his size or more around the ring to the delight of local crowds and TV audiences. Part of his performance was also a really impressive display of the muscle control he was famous for, capable, as he was, of individually flexing every muscle in his body, or of combining flexes to create a head to toe ripple effect.

The unobtrusive Apolo
Gym, where some of
the strongest guys in
the city trained.

Wrestling audiences weren’t the only ones who were impressed. Ernesto, over the years, had competed internationally in major bodybuilding contests and had won numerous trophies in his size and weight class. One person who was duly impressed was Arnold Schwarzenegger. After a Florida competition in which they had both taken trophies, five-time Mr. Universe Arnold asked Ernesto to have a picture taken of the two of them together.

“No,” Ernesto responded flatly.

“Why not?” asked Arnold.

“Because I don’t want to,” said Ernesto.

“Oh come on, “Arnold cajoled. “Don’t you want a picture with me?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Suddenly Schwarzenegger started getting offended, then a little pissed off. Who the hell did Ernesto think he was? But even Arnold knew that was a stupid question. Ernesto was every bit the bodybuilder The Terminator was, just in a mighty-mite version.

Realizing he was offending perhaps the most famous physical-culturist of all time, Ernesto said, “Okay, look, I’ll do it if we do it my way.” Arnold grinned and nodded. I mean, you had to hand it to the little guy. He had spunk!

“Okay,” said Arnold.

“All right,” said Ernesto, “me standing in the foreground, and you taking a knee or sitting behind me.”

Schwarzenegger agreed. There were only two photos on the wall in the gym. One was a large poster of Raquel Welsh boasting the skimpy skins she wore in One Million Years B.C. That one hung right above the torture board where we all did our sharply inclined crunchies, and was meant to inspire us to keep sitting up. The other was of Ernesto posing in nothing but a Speedo in the foreground and a smiling Schwarzenegger keeping an amiable low profile in the background—two icons for us to admire and aspire to.

Raquel encouraged us to keep
sitting up on the torture boiard.

But the most intriguing character by far was the Big O. He was a heavyweight. Nearly six feet tall and two hundred twenty pounds of solid muscle. He was a physical trainer, reluctant but talented boxer, and, at the time, an enigmatic and, in his circle, notorious bodyguard whom nobody wanted to cross. Such was his reputation that, when he came to train from work, he would hang his shoulder holster, with his fully-loaded nine-mill automatic snapped down in it, on a peg in the dressing room while he worked out. He knew nobody would be stupid enough to touch it, and that way, he had it close at hand…just in case.  

O was part of what was known, back in those dangerous days, as “la pesada” (literally, “the heavies”). It was a semi-secretive community of plainclothes paramilitary goons, often drawn from among retired or discharged cops and Army personnel, who, prior to the 1976 military coup, acted as a far-right shock force at the service of  leaders of Peronism’s Iron Guard. It was a lawless but vertically well-organized  group that performed every sort of task from gang-style kidnappings and slayings of left-wing rivals, to serving as the bodyguards and enforcers of Peronist union bosses. O was part of this latter group and, we gathered, ranked somewhere at the top of that pyramid.

He had been, for instance, a bodyguard to José Ignacio Rucci, head of the powerful General Confederation of Labor, and a key figure in the dramatic return of General Juan Domingo Perón to the presidency of Argentina after nearly eighteen years in exile. Rucci, one of the most visible heads of far-right Peronism, was murdered by the left-wing Peronist Montoneros urban guerrilla organization the same month and year that I first arrived in Argentina. O was nothing if not a canny survivor and I’ve never been completely sure I bought the story that he simply “had the day off” the day Rucci was assassinated. 

At any rate, O would live on to become one of the chief bodyguards for Lorenzo Miguel (who, after the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic 1972 film, would often be referred to as “The Godfather”). Lorenzo Miguel headed the powerful Steelworkers Union, and was a man with a sharply fascist bent. He would later be rumored to be a key figure in the organization and operations of the clandestine Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, or Triple-A, a far-right paramilitary hit squad whose nominal chief was former Federal Police corporal (who would later magically rise to the rank of captain) and Perón confidant José López Rega.

Lorenzo Miguel

In tamer moments, O had often served too as a sparring partner for famed Argentine heavyweight Oscar “Ringo” Bonavena. Bonavena was a serious contender for the heavyweight crown, who had gone the distance twice with Joe Fraizer (knocking Fraizer to the canvas twice in early bouts of the second fight), and later fought a famous fifteen-round match with Muhammad Ali. Ultimately, Ali KO’d Ringo in the fifteenth bloody round, but had to knock him down three times to do it. Ali grabbed the mic after the fight and shouted, “I have done what Joe Frazier couldn't do—knocked out Oscar Bonavena.” Some experts blamed Ali’s loss on points to Frazier in a subsequent fight on the beating he took from Bonavena before he finally knocked him out.

A flat-footed boxer with the instincts of an alley-fighter and a concrete jaw, Ringo was better known for making other heavyweights see stars with his punches and for being able to take a brutal beating himself while remaining on his feet than he was for grace and style. The Big O, on the other hand, was known for being an almost beautiful boxer to watch, for keeping the other guy’s gloves off of him, and for knowing how and when to land a killer punch. By all accounts, he was a better pugilist than Ringo had ever thought of being, but he had no real ambitions for the ring.

“Do I look stupid to you?” he would say when asked why he wasn’t title-fighting. That wasn’t the sort of question you would want to answer “yes” to. Nor did he look at all obtuse. O had Victor Mature-style good looks, sharp eyes, and, incredibly, a perfect nose and not a scar on his face. “Those guys end up with scrambled eggs for brains. I get in the ring, train the guy, get out and get paid. Let the guys who aren’t smart enough to make a living some other way do the prizefighting.”

They said O was one of the fastest heavyweights ever to enter a ring. I later found out why, when, while on a seaside vacation, I wandered into a camera store owned by a rugged, cocky-looking little guy in his sixties who, apropos of nothing, asked me if I boxed. I said, No, that I’d always been too slow to box, why did he ask? “You look like you train,” he said. I said I did a little weight-training.

That got us onto the subject of training and gyms and people we both knew. When I said I went to the Apolo Gym in Buenos Aires, he asked if a guy called O still trained there. I said that, indeed, he did.

“Why, do you know him?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m the one that taught him to box.”

Turned out this pint-sized older guy was none other than Cacho Paredes, a former Argentine champion bantamweight from back in the forties. He asked if I’d ever seen O fight. I said I hadn’t had the pleasure. “He’s fast. Real fast for a heavyweight. That’s because I taught him to fight like a little guy. Stick and move, stick and move, and only go toe to toe when you see the other guy’s guard is down and he’s ready to take one on the chin. That’s boxing. The rest is just brawling. You box with your head, not your fists.”

But for me, O was just a buddy of my brother-in-law’s and the most disciplined weight-trainer I’ve ever known. Our workout times usually coincided, and he was only too willing to take the time to teach me to train effectively. Later, when there was such a thing, I realized that I would have had to pay thousands of dollars to a personal trainer to gain the knowhow that I did working out next to O and working out with Miguel. In fact, after the dark and dangerous seventies, O cropped up again—after a prudential period of lying low—as the owner of a luxury gym of his own, where he made money on the growing middleclass fitness trend, but where he also trained up-and-coming amateur and pro boxers.

Anyway, these, and more, were the times and the guys Miguel and I talked about during our suppers together in Buenos Aires. Like I say, it made him feel a lot better. Indeed, it made us both feel a lot better. We might look like a couple of old geezers. In fact, we might be a couple of geezers. But we knew who we’d been. And we knew too, that if we made the effort to dig deep enough, those guys were still there, living inside of us.