“Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.” — Seneca
Vienes aca todos los dias?
Do you come here every day?
No. Vine porque creí que vendrías.
No. I came because I believed you would come.
Por que?
Why?
El pescado en dos panes con todo.
The fish sandwich.
She was right. I had come back for the fish sandwich. And in some way for her, but I could tell she was broken, an intellect sopped too long in the mop bucket. Her face paled in the shadows’ palpitations from the tarp above a quadrant of sidewalk along the café-front. She turned the pages of her JM Coetzee novel too fast. She stared into it like she was short one microchip. Non-meticulous and pretty, she sat at the next table until I finished my meal and left.
Te ví ayer me seguiste a la playa, despues nos vemos en el café.
I saw you follow me to the beach yesterday, after we saw each other in the café.
Sí. Nos vemos en la playa también. Pero fuiste a otro lugar.
Yes. We saw each other at the beach as well. But you went somewhere else.
Estaba lloviendo. Y hizo frío.
It was raining. And it was cold.
Pensé en volver aca, al café, pero me arrojé en las piedras del mar, y lloré.
I though about returning here, to the café, but I threw myself on the sea rocks, and wept.
Along that same stretch of seawall the next day, Sunday, I watched the carcass of a dog wash around among a foamy float of trash and driftwood, its ribcage exposed on one side, through which miniature fish entered to eat her from the inside out. The seawall walkway stretches around half the coast of the point on which sits Montevideo — the other half is all cranes and cargo, commerce, and battleships. The seawall is where the ponderers must have more luck than the fisherman, who I watched as I humped up and down the coast for two days, and I never saw one catch anything. The ponderers though, must make some progress. The seawall is perfect for pondering, but perhaps the sea eventually turns into a hypnotist, and the ponderers, with half-buttoned shirts and cigarettes that seem like extensions of their faces, exercise the intellectual equivalent of a hook without good bait, being bobbed near the dock by a fat man on an empty bucket holding a rod without a reel who would not unclutch his free hand from his yerba mate cup if he snagged the tail of Moby Dick.
I took the night ferry to Uruguay, across the Rio de Plata from Buenos Aires. I went to escape the claustrophobia of the city, the choke of fumes that fill the narrow streets of San Telmo, the buzz of too much foreign speech, the multitude of half-assed projects I’ve started, the obligations to half-friends, my familiar bed. In Colonia, the town in which the ferry docks, I could hear the sound of birds’ wings flapping, see stars, and take a long ride on a bad bike down the beach. I shot pool the first night on a table covered with translucent flies, which were of little consequence to the trajectory of my cue ball. I spent the second day climbing the lighthouse, crawling along the fort wall, imagining the stately form of ancient war, in which cannons needed only to point in one direction, where enemy ships would abidingly anchor to duel gentleman-like with the fortitude of the coastal defenses.
On Saturday I took the bus to Montevideo, the port capital of the country. I read Celan on the sea wall:
Go blind today already:
eternity too is full of eyes —
wherein
drowns, what helped the images
over the path they came,
wherein
expires, what took you too out of
language with a gesture
that you let happen like
the dance of two words of just
autumn and silk and nothingness.
I drank beer and whiskey alone in the hostel and read Duras:
But since my work has already shown me the other side of happiness you need not worry. And in the end what does it matter if I find happiness or something else as long as it is something real I can feel and deal with. Since I am in the world I too must have my share of it.
I thought about loneliness, the need to share. I didn’t talk to anyone. Not even the girl at the café who followed me to the beach, wrapped in her white jacket with a tight hood, who I saw across a corner of seashore, looking out at the impending rain, while three Brazilians arrived in a hesitant state of glee they hoped would force away the clouds. We all shuddered, and I ran. I found one of the Brazilians beneath a hotel awning. We talked about Chinese authoritarian capitalism, the new power of South American presidents, the shortness and swiftness of newspaper type, and St. Louis. I skirted building facades during a rain-lull that didn’t last and found myself beneath a news kiosk with a six-year-old beggar. I felt I should say something to her.
How are you doing?
What?
How are you doing?
Good.
I darted into a grocery store and bought an umbrella, which did not keep my shoes from becoming soaked.
On Sunday, more Celan on the seawall:
The jugglerdrum,
from my heartpenny loud.
The rungs of the ladder, up
which Ulysses, my monkey, clambers toward Ithaca,
rue de Longchamp, one hour
after the spilled wine:
add that to the image,
which casts us home into
the dicecup, where I lie by you,
unplayable.
In a square at night after an Afrocentric parade I watched two boys shadowbox in a square while I drank beer on the bench. I felt overwhelmed by the continent, its godlike largeness, its seething rhythms of life, its exotic brown light. Then the sun rose and I walked once again to the seawall, next to a public skating rink in which preteens in skirts damned the lack of Uruguayan ice and performed elegant series of figure skating routines on rollerskates. Through the golden roller-Lolitas snaked a skate punk who put together a string of nollie kick- and hardflips but could not stick a backside tailslide. Around us all pigeons and seagulls swept the scraps from the sidewalk. I felt at a loss — a directionless mass without a purpose or cause, on no great exploratory adventure, in search of something spread too thin in the multiplicity of modern ether to discern or grasp onto. My mind poured out of my eyes, totally distracted — anything to fight for disappeared, and I found myself wandering around the world alone.
Read about Uruguay from this guy’s perspective here.
