GRATING SPACE

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The water in my apartment has begun to smell strange. Each time I flush the toilet it smells like a chemical sewer, regardless of what I put in it. The kitchen sink is the same — the faucet emanates odors of gross. Today it was the shower. I just covered myself with soap and forgot about it.

Last night I came home drunk and wanted a glass of water. We’ve managed to break most of the glasses that came with the apartment, but we eat lots of olives and drink from empty olive jars. For whatever reason, however, the maid that comes to clean the house once a week refuses to store the olive jars in the cupboard with our few remaining glasses — she leaves them standing in a line on the counter along the wall. Two nights ago I saw that one of the olive jars had trapped a house centipede. Who knows how it got in there, but it couldn’t climb the slick sides to get out. I watched it for a bit run around in circles, take concerted thrusts to halfway up the walls, and I put the jar back down on the counter to wait for it to die so I could throw it in the garbage and be rid of it and not have to experience the indescribable unpleasantry of forgetting I left a house centipede in the olive jar on the counter and then coming home drunk one night and wanting a glass of water and having to settle for an olive jar of water instead because the single unbroken glass was dirty, and filling that olive jar with slightly funny-smelling water in the dark, carrying it as I pad across the parlor to my bedroom and bringing it up to my mouth for a sip and feeling draped across my bottom lip a carcass of possibly the most shocking and repulsive bug ever known to exist. I would have hated for that to happen as I sat the jar back down on the counter after finding a house centipede inside, and I hated it when it happened last night.

My largest general gripe about the Argentine dining experience is the unavailability of free, unlimited tap water while I eat. Servers often act disheveled when I ask for a glass of water, instead of a bottle, so much so that I rarely ask for two. Sometimes they bring me a bottle anyway, and I’m often reticent for thirst to refuse it and hassle them for a simple glass. Un vaso de agua, por favor.

Por favor.

It’s been raining for a week in Buenos Aires. The heavy showers wash the dog shit off the sidewalks and run the garbage down the gutters toward the river. Flat neighborhoods sat under pools of rainwater. The lights went out. Cars here don’t drive with their headlights on at night so they can flash them at blind intersections to let others approaching perpendicularly know they’re coming. They leave them turned on during storm nights though, when the traffic lights don’t work and ten-lane-wide avenida intersections are left to the discretion of porteño drivers, whose techniques counterbalance almost entirely the otherwise tranquilo feel of the city.

It’s striking to see the blackness of a powered-out metropolis, and even moreso when its wet with shallow streams running down the streets, filling up blocked storm drain depressions like fishing holes. The homeless converge in the green glow of emergency generator bank-front lamps, and the only glistening outside of those comes from the moonlight, because the smog and storm clouds have blocked any semblance of stars from the sky.