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About fifteen years ago I went to Buenos Aires with a friend. She had grown up there and was a teenager during the dictatorship in the late 70s and early 80s. She remembers emerging from the subway near her high school and discovering that Argentina was at war with England and wondering if her friends were joking. (I don’t think she was a big news watcher.) She had a story about police showing up at her house late at night and interrogating her mother about the whereabouts of a friend of the family as she listened through a door, stunned that her mother, who she thought of as basically a pain in the ass, remained so calm and revealed nothing. I doubt she was a comrade but at least she wasn’t a snitch.
My story is about none of that, other than the fact that during our visit my friend and I stayed in the same large Recoleta apartment where the above event took place. Close to this apartment was an old, traditional Buenos Aires cafe and since my friend slept late, and I really did not want to bother her mother, who was indeed a pain in the ass, and also terrifying, I went there most mornings.
The cafe had wood paneling and tile floors. There were lots of black and white photos hung gallery style. All the waiters were old men, and they wore black uniforms and did not smile, or at least they didn’t smile at me. I always brought along a copy of Gente or ¡Hola! for company. It took me two or three days to get through one magazine, in which much attention was paid to veteran Argentine talk show hostess Susana Gimenez, the wives and girlfriends of various South American fútbol players (I was watching Footballers’ Wives at the time, and cared a great deal about this genre of celebrity) as well as actors I’d never heard of on shows I’d never seen, What was at stake? Who was married? Who was divorced? Was this person happy about their new breasts or upset about them? I had been speaking, reading and studying Spanish for years but I was somehow still very bad at it and I enjoyed trying to piece together the facts.
The cafe had a lengthy menu but my friend had warned me to stick to coffee because the food was nothing special. But the pastries they sold in the morning were brought in from somewhere else and pretty good. These were, in the style of Buenos Aires, mini-pastries. How many of them you were supposed to eat was a mystery to me, as deep and unknowable as the world within my magazines. I mean, I know how many regular sized croissants I would eat in a sitting: one. But how many of these equaled that? Was it two? Was it three? Could it possibly be four? I wanted to know.
The day I decided to ask, I was waited on by a particularly dour fellow. But I screwed up my courage and in what I am sure was absolutely terrible Spanish, and I’m not just being falsely modest, my Spanish is atrocious, I asked him how many of the little pastries you were supposed to eat.
For a long time his expression did not change and I wondered if he had understood me. After about twenty seconds he blinked and looked to the side. His hands had been folded above his belt, and he lifted one of them, rotating his palm up about forty-five degrees. Then, looking at a space in between that lifted hand and my gaze, he said, “Para una dama?” (For a woman?) I nodded. “Pues… Uno? Dos?” (Well...One? Two?) “Tal vez…” (Maybe…) — and here he rotated his hand back down and made a slight face, not quite of displeasure but to suggest vague improbability, of things not being exactly as they should — “Three?” He put his hands back in place over his belt, and, eyes closed as if to further speculation, said, “Uno, si se cuide.” (One, if she takes care of herself.) Then he walked away.
Happy International Women’s Day to all who celebrate.
Last week I wrote about things to not care about and released an episode of Didn’t See It, Don’t Need To. I know there are a lot of podcasts out there, this one, with co-host Joshua Clover, where we review movies we have not seen, is pretty short and really quite good.
That was amazing 🥐