GRATING SPACE

A man named Pete arrived at our hostel soon after Tom and I got to Buenos Aires. This was in November. Pete had run a pizza shop in Mar del Plata that served up New York style and had just been ditched by his Argentine wife. He is the fourth American man I know who had married an Argentine who had grown tired of him after two years. He had, as had the others, a reason or three to explain why it hadn’t worked out, but all four had the same resigned shuffle of feet that accompanied their excuses that betrayed they all were suffering from the same shock of having become boring to the one they loved.

Pete was from Queens, a wiry 35-year-old with shock-blonde hair and a stiff jaw. He asked us our plans, and after we told him, he said, “Guys, go out and fucking rule this city.”

On more than one occasion, months later, stumbling home in the bleary pre-dawn from a party or DJ gig, Tom and I would turn to each other and say, “Hey, remember Pete? We fucking rule this city!” I found Pete’s email address the other day in a pile of paper scraps. Under his information he had inscribed the same imperative. I thought of emailing him to let him know that I have at least occasionally accomplished his mandate, but then I felt sad for him.

The night before we moved out of the hostel into our apartment some of the hostel habitants had a dance party in the lobby — Tom, Pete, I, the ever-sleazy Pepe, and five or six Brazilian girls of varying levels of physical attractiveness. The dim yellow lights did little to detract from the room’s overwhelming redness, given it by the bright-blood color painted over all the walls. Pete and I sat at a small table, drinking beer, watching the girls dance. Tom and I had been out looking for a permanent residence all week, and this was to be our last night without a true home. Pete and I were sizing up the Brazilians, noting their positive features and detriments. Pete pointed to the skinniest one, who wore a broad belt and long, straight hair. Her lips curled back a bit too much to expose her overly square teeth.

“She’s the best one,” said Pete. He swallowed a mouthful of beer. “I’m gonna fucking rape that girl.”

Pete and I didn’t talk much after that. I was glad to be moving the next day.

**

I knew it was where I wanted to live when the door to my (future) apartment opened and in the portal stood a short old man with perfectly slicked silver and black hair, wearing a pinstriped suit and a gold Virgin Mary medallion on a chain over his necktie. The place was gorgeous, but not nearly as amazing as Ale, el dueño, who shook a firm hand and walked with a stiff limp, called me “my friend” and wrinkled up his already deeply creased face to tell sly jokes in stilted English. He glossed over nothing in his tour of the dwelling, flipping switches up and down to show each light worked, on and off, opening and closing each kitchen drawer, taking the knives from their magnetic strip and putting them back to showcase its effectiveness. Each demonstration was accompanied by an enthusiastic, “You see? You see?”

Sadly, I apparently missed a portion of the more thorough tour Ale gave Tom when he came over to see the place a few days later. This included a segment about the nozzle apparatus on the terraza, about which Ale explained, “It’s a nice day, and you want to take shower outside, you take shower outside,” while simulating the soaping of his armpits.

Ale turned 80 this year, and actually oversees the apartment for his daughter, who owns it but lives in Virginia. His prior occupations in life have been at least, but are not limited to:

Pastry chef
Tango instructor
Gynecologist assistant

He has five daughters by who knows how many mothers, is a veritable nutrition encyclopedia, and an expert on Argentine political affairs. Problems with bathroom appliances that my roommates deem unmanageable and I don’t have time to handle are no match for Ale’s expert deep-plumbing jabs with the toilet brush or precision snags with a hook-ended wire hanger. His good humor regarding his ailing health transform unbearable moments of sadness and embarrassment when I am struck speechless — once, speaking Spanish, I misunderstood his telling me he might have to have surgery on his knee, and thought he said he would probably have to have his leg amputated — into jovial bouts of camaraderie.

Ale and I have the same cell phones, and occasionally he takes mine from the apartment on accident to the great confusion of he and my friends who call before he realizes the mishap. I also have two entries in my phone for people named Ale — one for him and another for Alejandra, a brief Bolivian affair who hates me for telling her the truth.

I met Alejandra on a Tuesday, she went home with me on Saturday, and on the next Tuesday I went to a club, called and invited her to come out, and ended up going home with another girl. Even after this, Ale(jandra) would text me to try to hang out, but I was still with the other girl, so I would inevitably make up an excuse not to go. Finally I decided to end the charade and explain it all to her in an email, to which I never received a reply. She ran into my friend soon after at a club, and expressed to him her feelings about me.

She hates me because I told her the truth.

One afternoon on the terraza in the fall, Ale, el dueño, was watering the plants and he was distressed that they were dying. I said this was natural in the fall, and that the leaves always fell off the trees eventually, but I couldn’t remember the Spanish word for “leaf.” I asked him what it was, but as soon as I did I remembered that I had looked it up a couple weeks before, when my friend came back to Buenos Aires from Bolivia with a sack of coca leaves. She was getting on a plane for New York City the next day and, although we were not sure of what the Argentine laws were regarding coca leaves, we decided it would probably not be a good idea to take them to the airport, and that she should leave them with us.

The next three days were a mess. Tom and I didn’t eat at all. We got up, brewed coca tea, crammed the leaves from the bottom of the cups into our cheeks, and went about our days, refilling our mouth pouches whenever we felt the sensation spent. I imagined myself an Incan porter, scrambling over rugged Andean miles with hundreds of pounds of supplies for the next village on my back.

On a cab ride to a DJ gig I asked the driver about the law regarding coca leaves, and he didn’t know either, so he got on the radio and called dispatch to see if they knew. Their reply made me somewhat nervous, especially since it was the end of a three day spree strung out on the stuff, I had a whole bunch squashed up against my gums, and my nerves were somewhat shot. Yes, the dispatch announced to who knows how many drivers, coca leaves are indeed illegal, at least in Buenos Aires.

But when I asked Ale on the terraza what the word for “leaf” was, he did not simply reply “hoja,” but recited from memory the first two stanzas of this poem:

Te recuerdo como eras en el último otoño.
Eras la boina gris y el corazón en calma.
En tus ojos peleaban las llamas del crepúsculo.
Y las hojas caían en el agua de tu alma.

Apegada a mis brazos como una enredadera,
las hojas recoían tu voz lenta y en calma.
Hoguera de estupor en que mi sed ardía.
Dulce jacinto azul torcido sobre mi alma.

“Borges,” he said afterward, and walked inside with a smile. This was only a few minutes after he had extracted from our clogged drain a hairball the size of a weasel, colored like the Russian blonde who had moved out a few weeks before.

Unfortunately, Ale refuses to let me take his picture, and I respect his wishes. He was undoubtedly a strapping young macho, and from his preset appearance is still plenty vain. Regardless, he’s still the most handsome 80 year old I know, and does plenty well with the ladies. Ale always insists on coming to the apartment and cooking pizza for us from scratch, and in an effort to arrange the first such occasion, another roommate, a German who Ale was never fond of, called him around 9pm on a Saturday to confirm the date the next day. I was not present for the conversation, but heard from Ale the next day, irate that the German had called him at such an hour, as that hour was an obvious time when Ale would be hanging out with his lady friend, which he was.

“I know, Ale. I’m sorry. I have no idea why he called you then.”

For whatever reason, Ale and I have a deep understanding of each other. I like to think we’re kindred spirits, and it makes me immensely happy to be kindred spirits with an aging Argentine Renaissance man. I can only hope that when I am 80 years old, some bright young lad will write a blog post about me with similar sentiments.