The Heart of Darkness (Well, Not So Much)

Just as a truly earnest tourist to the U.S. might visit Indianapolis to get a good ogle of Americana's soft white underbelly, several weekends ago Cintra and I traveled to Cordoba, the “second city” of Argentina, to see the 98.2% of Argentina that is not an aspiring European outpost. Plus, we’d recently been loaned a car, a Honda SUV that is no Cadillac Escalade but is, by Argentine standards that lean toward prenatal mini-hatchbacks named “Fun” and “Gol”, a muscled great white of bruiser cruiser. Monday was an Argentine holiday—Flag Day—and on Friday, with the long weekend unrolling in front of us, it was time to exhibit flagrant disregard for the environment and belch 700 km into the interior.

Once you slip the clutches of Buenos Aires’s inevitable box-store and car-lot outer suburbs, most every sign of civilization falls away to reveal acre upon acre of soy and cattle grazing fields, sparsely punctuated by an occasional dusty town, ranch compound or fertilizer plant. The land is as flat as Wyoming’s high plains and patterned into a subtly beautiful agricultural plaid by various crops, some the brilliant green of a southeast Asian rice patty, some the clay brown of cut corn, others patchy with the living and dead earth tones of cow-grazed grass. Every 20km or so, a bouquet of small billboards sprout at the roadside, proudly announcing Roundup Ready soy or other genetically modified crops. “Frankenfood” might be a dirty word to European artesenal cheesemakers, but Argentina’s megafarms have apparently embraced high technology.

What does not sprout is people. As if an uneasy but lasting truce had been struck with the cows over the division of pampas and cities, there are essentially zero human beings visible outside of rushing vehicles. It’s said—and like many truisms about Argentina, this bears investigating—that the U.S. and Argentina experienced similar tsunamis of (mostly) European immigration in the 19^th century, but while U.S. immigrants were able to buy land and build farms that grew into towns, transit hubs and cities, by the time immigrants landed in Buenos Aires most Argentine land had long been divvied into huge agricultural and livestock superfincas. The newly-arrived Italians and Spaniards remained in the city, far from the maddening cows.

From Buenos Aires to Rosario, the midway point of the trip, runs Route 9, an eight lane superhighway with a posted speed limit of 130km/h (or about 80 mph) and an effective speed limit well beyond that. We learned later that this kind of road—so assumed in the U.S.—was something to savor. Outside of the immediate Buenos Aires area, four-lane divided highways are, like sushi and multi-ply toilet paper, delicacies in Argentina. Imagine if New York had the power to decide the U.S.’s national infrastructure spend: swift, smooth highways would run to the Hamptons and Rhinebeck; NJ Transit would run on mag-lev technology; the subway would be free; and Iowa would by neither paved, electrified nor wired for telephony. That is Argentina.

One of the great—or terrifying, depending on your point-of-view—things about driving on Argentine highways is what one might call the “diversity” of speed. As you pass a cattle truck driving 80km/h you may pull to the left to dodge a pokey Peugeot doing 70km/h in the passing line, only to find the headlights of a tiny Suzuki Fun—an insectile fastback doing 145km/h as it straddles two lanes—poking your rear. But to avoid pat stereotypes—you know, “crazy South American drivers” and all—it’s important to note that Argentine traffic, while fast, isn’t bloodthirsty aggressive in the speed sense. Rather, like a bunch of minor misdemeanor parolees, Argentine drivers are adamant that they’re mature enough to be left to their own recognizance. In Buenos Aires, for example, incredibly few stop signs mark intersections and judging from the attention paid to them, those that exist are intended as decorative pieces. (And you have to admit that the vibrant red really does provide an attractive contrast to sycamore trees and stucco apartment buildings.) Instead of stopping at a sign like some easily-managed mule, in Buenos Aires one slows down every so slightly in order to contest each intersection. If you can place the nose of your car in such a way that those easing into the intersection from the other axis would hit you, thus shifting the blame for an accident to them, you’ve achieved intersection victory. At the same time, almost no one uses headlights and the number of usable lanes on any given street is largely defined by the sum of the widths of the cars than by anything as prosaic as dotted white lines painted on the macadam.

Argentina, as a country, does not fear an extended metaphor. Look at tango, an entire art form dedicated to reenacting the chase, rise and fall of an impassioned affair (it is, as Miranda France wrote, “As passionate and loveless as a one-night stand.”). So when I asked Ale P. to explain Argentine driving, it was no surprise that he worked up a riff on the Argentine View of Legal Things. By way of introduction, he said that in the past Argentines famously never paid taxes—to an extent that crippled the economy. “The taxes came from the outside, and were enforced from the outside, and only helped people on the outside so no one paid attention to them,” he said. This, he said, explains local driving. Suspicious of all imposed laws, Argentines see traffic regulations as just more external meddling. “We don’t believe in our own institutions,” he said. “Driving rules are just another set of laws to break.” Argentine driving then can be explained as a crisis of religion: Argentines don’t believe in stop signs, or in the God that placed them; they give no credence to lane markers, or the painters thereof. In large part, they’ve simply lost the faith.

Surprisingly, this godless combination of moderate speeds and unregulated, unlit movement seems to lead to a high number of near misses but relatively few car-on-car collisions. That said, pedestrians are not so lucky. As our friend (and cardiologist) Nestor rightly told us, “In Buenos Aires, the cars come first and the pedestrians second. The pedestrians have lost.” During the first week here I came across a wounded pedestrian, attended by six bystanders and two dog-walkers, slumped against the building wall at the corner of Pena and Billinghurst. Soon enough, two ambulances arrived, perhaps led to believe by a caller’s operatic exaggeration that the victim had been sundered into pieces. Of course, the injured party himself may have requested two. In a city where primping mirrors have been installed on each side of the exit doors in subway carriages, self-regard is in no short supply.

Rosario: Where We Learn That In English Antonio Banderas means Tony Flags

At 300km from Buenos Aires, Rosario sits just behind Cordoba in population and feels like a university town: Boston, Argentina. There are tidy parks, pruned trees and even red brick. The park in front of city hall is attractive and well-maintained, neater than an typical Argentine square and free of the holes usually divoted into the grass by the local pets. A pedestrian mall runs through the town center and ends at the city hall and Rosario’s most famous site: the riverfront Monumento a la Bandera, or Flag Monument. Inaugurated in 1957, the monument is anchored by a huge marble phallus of Iberian fascist stylings (you can presumably use it as a Ouija tower to channel Franco and Salazar) that’s coated with bas relief of muscular heroes of the Patria, Independence, Bravery! type and surrounded by a large patio and promenade, a sculpture garden (including one of a topless Greco-style lady who seems to be hailing a taxi), and a mini-acropolis that’s home to an eternal flame. The whole thing is dedicated to General Manuel Belgrano, the designer of the sky-blue-and-white Argentine flag and a country founder who, in typical Argentine political irony, may have been a closeted monarchist. We arrived three days before the June 20 holiday, and down the acropolis steps and across the promenade scores of students and several middle aged women stretched and sewed together a huge tongue of a flag, hundreds of feet long, to be displayed during a Flag Day ceremony at which President Nestor Kirchner was scheduled to speak.

Under a steel-grey sky we walked past the monument to the riverfront, where hundreds of road crews frantically prepared for Rosario’s annual day in the sun. They worked in damp clay until drizzling clouds, placing cobblestones to define roads. Behind them, the riverfront mall contained a museum—El Paraná y sus isles, or The Parana River and Its Islands—that was dedicated to (and apparently partially owned by) a local muralist named Raúl Domínguez. Positioned as a Natureboy cousin to Diego Rivera, Domínguez paints aggressively obvious murals vaguely reminiscent of the cover of “Where the Wild Things Are”, albeit with bared breasts.

Walking back along the pedestrian mall, we stopped at a Rosario music store to purchase our unofficial “Welcome to Modern Latino Pop” package: an album by Jorge Drexler (of Motorcycle Diaries Academy Awards kafuffle fame) and the newest disc from Shakira, neither of which was located in the inherently patriotic “Rock Nacional” section. At the counter, the store clerk, a furry elf right out of High Fidelity, asked Cintra where she was from. She told him New York and he exclaimed, “Why are you here? There’s nothing here.” When Cintra replied that she was visiting from Buenos Aires where she lived fulltime, he seemed slightly mollified but still uncomfortable with the idea. Many Argentines we’ve met—though far from all—have expressed the view that was crystallized by Lucho’s friend Alejandro. When we explained our plan to live low on the hog, write from Buenos Aires and absorb the language, he said, “Yes, but why would you move here when everybody wants to leave? Perhaps we could make a trade.”

Leaving Rosario, we plunged us into the reality of Argentine transit. Route 9 quickly squeezed into a typical Argentine highway format: one lane in each direction, a 6-inch ribbon of shoulder on each side, an effective speed limit of 130 km/h, and plenty of passing in the face of head-on tractor trailers. In the fog, rain, failing light and apparent fatwa on headlight use, the subtle beauty of the countryside of the first four hours of travel dissolved into a white knuckle ass-to-face high-speed traffic jam. In a giant game of musical chairs, whenever a space appeared in oncoming traffic, we and five other cars would quickly swerve into the opposite lane—jealously guarding our space in the queue—press the gas to the floor and finally pinch in seconds before a cattle trailer or cement hauler pasted us.

Like a never ending game of SpyHunter, no matter how many trucks we passed ever more appeared on the horizon. Adding to the Sisyphean weirdness, we listened to our two new—and only—albums eight times in alternating sequence, memorizing and interpreting every lyric to within an inch of its metaphoric life. It was hard not to worry that if we did splatter in a fatal crash, the rescue workers would pick through the detritus and, with pinch-lipped nods of disapproval, say, “Shakira fans.” Moods were shaved delicate, nerves frayed. It was the kind of driving that causes the teeth-grinding lip biting arguments that break lesser relationships. When we arrived in Cordoba and checked into the NH Panorama, a city never looked so fine.

Cordoba: Where Descartes and Décolletage Come Together

With about 1.3 million people and a label as Argentina’s oldest city, Cordoba is basically the Philadelphia of Argentina: pretty and historic, but definitely not New York. As our friends Pablo and Valeria said where we explained that is was lovely but not, well, where we’d move next, “Coming from New York to Buenos Aires, it is smaller but you can understand. But then to Cordoba? Noooo.” It was founded in 1573 and dominated by Jesuit groups, and unlike BA it’s kept a good deal of its colonial architecture intact. The “hot” gentrifying district is Nueva Cordoba, a sort of East Village area south of the city’s historic center. Built last century by the city aristocracy to be a “little Paris,” the neighborhood is increasingly popular with University of Cordoba students and the like and is bursting with mid-build apartment towers. According to the head of the city’s real estate group, nowhere else in the country is there so much dense construction being done. On a curious note, Cordoba holds a kinship with Kevin Bacon’s 1984 pro-rebellion dance-aganza Footloose. In February the mayor of Cordoba declared that there would be no more dancing in Nueva Cordoba discos in response to the December 2004 Cromañón fire in Buenos Aires, where 193 people died in an overcrowded nightclub whose doors, like most places in Argentina, were not fitted with panic bars (and were largely chained shut to keep out fare jumpers). Despite the obvious need for someone to lead to a pro-dance uprising, however, Kevin Bacon was nowhere to be seen.

The NH Panorama is part of a Spanish chain that goes for a sort of modest Philippe Starck motif, with square furniture, mustard hues, and hip hotel uniforms. One of the four top hotels in the city, the starkly attractive joint sports just enough scuffs to fit perfectly in Argentina’s “Toehold on the First World” vibe. This is the kind of country where you can visit a high-end café on Buenos Aires’s Avenida del Libertador, a eight-lane avenue of expensive apartment buildings fronted with beautiful parks, and be assured that the basket of bread served with lunch with include at least one torn and half-eaten piece from a previous table. In the NH, this translates into pretty furniture and fast and helpful service, but also one-ply toilet (sand)paper, a grungy tub and wall recesses incorrectly cut for the fixtures they hold.

Though constant and unrelenting, Argentina’s “almost first” world status is more endearing than frustrating because it appears so optimistic. The government’s current motto is “Un Pais En Serio,” a hopeful slogan that roughly translates to “A serious country,” as if this time Argentina has really, really decided to stop fucking around and get with the program. And in reality, so much of Argentina works that the things that don’t work stand out in stark relief. In contrast to the U.S., where every service demands its own payment set up, you can pay your utility bills at any grocery store, Banelco ATM or post office; the bus system is so fast and cheap it deserves an epic poem (“The Flight of the Colectivo” perhaps); waiters don’t press you with an “Are we ready to order?” rush but invariably wait until you’ve closed your menu; and you can find an Internet kiosk on every block.

But if Argentina can handle the most convoluted aspects of quotidian life well, why is cleaning up your pooch’s sidewalk droppings such an impossible task that it feels as if one haven’t lived here until you’ve stepped in Dulce de Perro at least fifty times? (Perhaps they don’t believe in the institution of the pooper scooper.) Why is so much of the money counterfeit? How are there so many Harare-style shanty towns? Why can’t they lower import duties so that a $10 answering machine doesn’t cost $50? Is there an embargo on contemporary music, or does the post-junta 1980s era have such a nostalgic hold that people are simply unable to step back from the latest “Best of Queen” collection, a Top 40 fixture here? [In one three day period, I managed to watch Starsky & Hutch on the “Retro” channel and hear Alicia Bridges’ “I love the night life (I got to boogie)”, Alphaville’s “Big in Japan”, Kool & The Gang’s “Cherish (the Love)”, the themes from Ghostbusters and Beverly Hills Cop and more Phil Collins than one country, no matter how large, should possess.] And why—to digress—are there no black people in Argentina? There’s actually a whole story behind that, but some other time.

In the rain, our cursory tour of Cordoba’s city center included a visit to the prerequisite Plaza San Martin, a visit to the obligatory cathedral in said Plaza, and a walk through the old Jesuit school, the Colegio de Montserrat. All beautiful, all old, all not what we visited for. There are only so many churches one person can fit into a life, and we crossed that line somewhere in the mid-90s. In the church, we ogled an 18^th century cresh oddly decorated lit from within by a big red 40-watt bulb. Next to us stood two 20-somethings dressed in Gore-Tex hiking boots and North Face parkas, the kind of tourists who threaten to break into a hike at any moment. In typical traveler’s retardation, only after they walked away did we realize why their Spanish had been so difficult to grasp: it had been English. Nearby, a small plaza exhibited a beautiful bas relief wall under which a fountain had been made by punching a hole under each sculpted figure in the horizontal pipe that ran beneath them, making them appear to defiantly pee in your direction. And in a typical cultural contradiction that shows how nonsensical any blanket statement about the country is, the newsstand outside our hotel that was plastered with fifteen varieties of silicon-enhanced lad mags (“She seduces men with her adolescent Lolita charm…and a perfect body!”) also sold Locke’s “Second Treatise of Civil Government” and “Meditations on First Philosophy” by Descartes.

Alta Gracia: Golf, the Communist Sport

After our nine hour drive to Cordoba—through flatlands that would make Kansas seethe with jealousy—our next stop at Alta Gracia soothed our hunger for elevation. A small town in the foothills of the Sierras Chicas, Alta Gracia is beautiful in odd, forlorn, weird ways. A UNESCO World Heritage Site that gathers around an aged, epic Jesuit estancia that’s to be rebuilt by the Spanish government, Alta Gracia holds both the House Museum of Ernesto Che Guevara and the Hotel Sierras, an abandoned hotel/casino where, curiously, both JFK stayed and Che Chevara learned how to swim (presumably separately). Currently being refurbished after a 15-year abandonment, the Hotel Sierra rambles empty through the center of town, quietly decaying and tattooed with graffiti. It’s made more beautiful by its fading colors, a kind of contemporary Angkor Wat with an eerie stillness that turned it into an unexpected tourist destination, at least for us and for the locals playing tennis on its pocked red clay courts.

Lining the streets on the way to the nearby Museo Casa de Ernesto “Che” Guevara, abandoned mansions punctuate a middle class neighborhood. Beautiful relics with cement block-filled doorways, they speak of the flush years of Alta Gracia, of a time where there was plenty of money and time to install cornices and detail the front porch. As real estate-obsessed New Yorkers, of course this lush decrepitude sent us into paroxysms of desire. There’s nothing like a $10,000 14-room mini-castle with a six foot cactus growing out of its roof to make a Manhattanite go apoplectic with acquisitive need.

The museum itself fills one of Che’s childhood homes, a cute, modest six room square filled with Guevara paraphernalia and photos—including the types of motorcycles he used to circle South America during his radicalizing Motorcycle Diaries phase. Watching the film strips and reading photo captions, we learned that Che’s parents brought him to Alta Gracia to cure his asthma (a sickly little revolutionary he was); he took up the prototypically communist game of golf during his 11-year stay; and the family’s live-in maid will always think of him as Ernestito no matter what anyone else says. Outside, rows of motorcycles, including several with sidecars, lined the curb in homage to Che trips. A few blocks away, the Museo was putting on the “Semana del Che,” ten days of vaguely organized symposiums, salsa dance lessons and films. The “l” in the name of the festival is comically important, as the word “che” is a cross between “yo” and “dude”, and without an “l” marking the definite article—the reference is to “The Dude” AKA Ernesto Guevara—the title would approximate the “Week of Dude”.

Late on the first night we visited Alta Gracia, we visited the nearby event hall to hear Rodrigo De la Serna, the actor who played Che’s co-hort in the Motorcycle Diaries, who was scheduled to tell stories gleaned during the movie’s filming. When he did not show up after 30 minutes, we asked one of the waiter/bartenders whether he was still scheduled: “He was to fly in from Cuba today,” he said. “Do you know when he’ll get here?” I asked. “No. But he might be at a local bar later. One of conference organizers owns it,” he answered. “Do you know where he is right now?” I asked. “Not exactly,” he said. “Is he in Argentina?” I asked, hoping to narrow de la Serna’s location to a hemisphere. The bartender contemplated this. “I think so,” he said.

Judging by the resignation with which the rest of the crowd was waiting—Who would expect a event to proceed as scheduled?—we decided to return the next night for a presentation by one of the archeologists who found and exhumed Che’s body from the unmarked grave in Bolivia in which is had been dumped after his execution by the army there.

The next day we made a thwarted attempt at a hike through La Quebrada del Condorito, a canyon condor habitat. Slowed down by a Stephen King-ish fog, we stopped at a mountaintop café for a late lunch and then finally found our way to the unmarked park entrance and down a mile-long walk to the park station at 3 p.m. The clouds mystically opened and the sun warmed the air into summer. The dusty hills rolled clearly into the distance, a perfectly empty paradise of scrub and sandstone outcroppings. It was the first vista of more than 50 feet that we’d seen in three days, and it felt heavenly open.

Then, however, a park ranger told us we couldn’t start the hike because at five hours for its full length, the sun would set before we returned. Figuring that logic was on our side, Cintra pointed out that we could in fact turn back early. We pointed to our watches and tried to look sensible. We didn’t want to be stuck in a dark park any more than she wanted us to be. “We’ll only walk for 20 minutes,” Cintra said. “But…no. It is too late,” the ranger said. “In half an hour we’ll turn around. Really. It took nine hours to drive here and we have to go back to Buenos Aires tomorrow,” Cintra said. This argument was not only painfully reasonable but had both sentimentality and ego massage on its side: we drove all this way to see your wonderful treasure…how could you deny us that?

But having set her heels, the ranger was having nothing to do with reasonable arguments. “People say half and hour. And then they walk and walk,” she said. “They do? We will turn around,” Cintra said. “No, no. It’s too late. We’re closed,” the ranger said. “When do you close,” I said, as the bureaucratic truth—if we left her day was over—come clear. “I…at…earlier, much earlier. One, two, twelve, eleven maybe,,” she answered. Then, sensing an escape, she threw out a hook: “Where did you park?”

Although the Argentine papers and TV news shows are littered with tales of home invasions—a criminal practice that dovetails with the local distrust of banks and concurrent hoarding of cash (usually American) in mattresses—there’s also a propensity to exaggerate danger among locals and expats alike. The taxis will always give you counterfeit change, your pockets will be picked, you’ll by jumped as you walk the streets. Or, perhaps, condors will steal your car. It’s as if such danger makes Argentine truly a Pais En Serio—Look, our criminals are very much first rate. A TV station—Cronica—even largely dedicates its 24-hour broadcasts to local crime coverage, photos of car crashes, bedside interviewees with mugged pensioners and the like. Imagine if Fox ran a local crime channel.

When the ranger learned the truth—that we’d parked on the highway—she switched her attitude to that of a caring but stern teacher. We had to go back. Run even. We were parked on the highway. The highway. Not just any highway: The dangerous, dangerous highway. We’d be robbed, if we hadn’t already been. Our car would be stolen. We’d be lucky to live. It happened all the time, she said. “All the time?” we wondered. But with a seed of doubt planted, we couldn’t stay. Back we jogged from the beautiful open plain into the eerie Salem’s Lot haze and then 2 km to our car. It was unmolested, of course, but as if scripted, more park rangers drove up to assure us of our nascent paranoia, the constant robberies, the swirling criminals on this abandoned road. Highwaymen, I thought. How often do you get to use that word?

That night, at the finale of the archeologists’ presentation on Che’s exhumation, an audience member with wounded patriotism—or at least the desire for the right of first refusal—stood and asked accusingly, “Why was the body sent to Cuba [for a state burial] instead of Argentina?” The issue of Che and his place in Argentine history is a contentious one and echoes both with the national pride and thwarted patrimony that bathes the Argentine political identity. Recently, the Buenos Aires daily La Nacion has been running almost daily pro and con reader letters about the proposed renaming of a city street to Calle Ernesto Guevara. Guevara is an Argentine who left an indelible mark, an icon, an international hero. And yet, what did he do for Argentina? If he had put his talents to work on his home country, would it have achieved the glory that once seemed its birthright? Why do so many of the great achievers, the Guevaras and Cortazars and the like, all expatriate and bestow their gifts somewhere else?

Such is the theme of inevitable Argentine Pride and Shame speech: Where did we jump the track and how great could we have been? Whether it’s Peron’s wealth redistribution, taxpayer intransigence, bureaucratic corruption, the military junta, excess pride, too many immigrants, Menem, not enough immigration or just a location far from the center of things, everyone has a drum to beat. Having dinner two weeks later with an aged psychiatrist and an older politician from the Radical party—the intellectual minority opposition party that, in its own mythology, could govern with beneficent grace if only its leaders weren’t so painfully honest and if only the working class better understood its own interests—I received my version.

“We were the eighth largest country,” the politician said. “England. It was England with all its colonies, not America. England, then America and then…France?”

“France and Germany,” the psychiatrist said.

“After WWII we were the 8^th largest, from selling the armaments to both sides. Argentina was neutral,” said the politician, chewing on ravioli.

“No one’s neutral,” the shrink interjected.

“Well, we sold goods to everyone,” the politician said, waving the philosophical question aside. “When Peron took office, he was a little fat and there were pictures of him trying to walk through the treasury. There was so much gold, and he was fat, he couldn’t fir down the aisles.”

“Yes,” the psychologist answered

“But by the end of his presidency, it was all gone. From paying off the people. Everyone worked for the party. The election workers, their union, was absorbed into the party. Into the state. So the people counting the votes worked for the party in power.”

“And the maintenance people too, and then the doctors,” the psychiatrist said.

“Everyone worked for the party. The poor, they loved Peron because he made them a little less poor. But they learned that whatever they needed they went to the party. The party just bought them things. If they wanted food, the party told them to go to a certain place once a week. Like a feed trough. People became like cows. They had a place to eat. It was Nazi-Fascist-Totalitarianism. They say if Hitler had learned from Peron how to run a Totalitarian state, he would have died at 80 in his bed. He wouldn’t have killed so many people and he would have kept his country. He would have died like a king.”

The psychiatrist nodded.

“And when Peron was done paying off everyone to vote for him, the gold was gone.”

“It was a religion,not politics,” the psychiatrist said, “because it had no ideology.”

“No ideology. No views,” said the politician. “There was just the power.”

…

The next morning’s return drive delivered us into sunlight. The gray, unproductive storm that had parked atop Cordoba province melted two hours outside Alta Gracia. Sure the trucks still bore down on us, flashed their lights and wiggled a side-to-side menace as we passed in their lane. But the sun fell on the cows and soy and open fields with nary a cloud to block it. We had figured the driving and it no longer seemed unwise to squeeze past an oncoming cement truck at 80 mph on a shoulder-less two lane country road. Our knuckles grew less white as we eased our hands on the wheel.