GRATING SPACE

The smoke left the city, so we forgot about the fire. For five days Buenos Aires swam in a gray plume sent by southward winds in from the campo, where towers of flames ripped through the brushland in Zárate and transformed whatever they touched into a billion ashen particles that we in the city sucked into our lungs, blinked off our eyes, and washed off our skin for a week.

On Monday the winds shifted and the smoke disappeared from the city. Thursday, in Zárate, the fires still burned out of control, but out of mind for us.

International news picked up the story of smoke in the capital. Nothing like this had happened before to Buenos Aires, but it somehow seemed fitting. The best single line in any coverage I read came from Martín Gambarotta, the wild-haired porteño poet who sits hunched a few days a week in the corner of the Buenos Aires Herald newsroom punching out editorials with a concerted look in his face:

“Each waft of smoke is a reminder to Buenos Aires, which likes to think of itself as a sophisticated metropolis, that it is part of a farming nation.”

Oh, how Buenos Aires wants to be European! Oh, how porteños say they’re not sure why people consider them “Latin Americans,” when they’re actually Italian! Oh, how the rich set beauty standards according lightness of skin, slimness of build, and any other attribute that distinguishes a person’s heritage from the indigenous people who populated this continent before the colonizers moved in, and who still work the farms.

A friend of mine who took me out to dinner on one of my first nights in town to give me the low-down on the city said, “People in Buenos Aires will tell you that it is such a European city, and will point out to you all these different aspects of it to support their claim, all the while ignoring the tenfold characteristics that make it completely unlike any city in Europe. Buenos Aires might be the most European city in South America, but at the end of the day, it’s a South American city.”

**

“Is the movie we’re going to go see part of the film festival?” she asked.

“No. All the people who are going to the festival have already seen the movie we’re going to go see,” I said.

We cut through the gray air down Defensa street out of San Telmo from a tango class towards Ave. Corrientes to see There Will Be Blood. She, a heavy smoker, seemed immune to the ailments the non-smoking sector of the city had succumbed to. She had no headaches, no more coughing than normal. This week it paid to have already trained your lungs to accept impurities.

The theater in which we watched the movie had crackly sound that made the Spanish subtitles helpful. Its seats were made of wood and sat on an almost-flat floor. The movie induced a long period of silence and contemplation after its finish, and when the last credit rolled off the screen and the lights went on we arose and stepped out into the most surreal street scene I’ve ever seen.

The smoke over the neon lights of the narrow, pedestrian-only stretch of Corrientes, the choke of bad air and the citywide smell of campfire mixed with popcorn and trash, the gabbing debutantes filing out of the Buenos Aires Film Festival across the street, and the waves of impervious eyes of nightgoers that stared through the haze as they would into any other Saturday — it all filled us with horror and awe. We wrapped our arms around each other and walked in a daze through the masses of couples and families, marveling to each other in hushed tones that the most bizarre thing was that we seemed to be the only ones who could tell we were in some sort of Twilight Zone.

“No one else knows,” she said. “Look at them, all wandering around like there’s nothing going on. How can they not see this?”

On autopilot, we navigated the crowd, the hooker handbill hander-outers, the prowling threesomes of young men, the throngs of spectators gathered around amateur comics doing sketch skits, performance artists with painted faces, and tango dancers in red velour heels and black brimmed hats. Casinos and fluorescent-lit restaurants glared out at us beneath towering, blank residential facades. No moon, no stars — just upwards and upwards of wafting gray clouds against the sky’s black.

We emerged along the waterfront, with its yachts and floating nightclubs. We figured out why everyone looked unimpressed but us: Misfortunes bind the people of a city. A porteño is a porteño because he lives in a city on a port. But things like the smoke make Porteños a plural because they all have to live in the same shit. During good times, community festivals can encourage the populous to celebrate the city, but it’s things that make celebration an impossibility that really solidify its citizens. Mayor Macri and every single cartonero breathed the same smoke in Buenos Aires, just like every person in New York City felt the crush of 9/11. Argentina has seen much worse than smoke, and its people have prevailed to become, despite class or political division, a singular entity.

We, bleary-eyed tourists stumbling about in Neverland, could only imagine what it feels like to be an unconscious part of something like that.