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Recoleta, the neighborhood where I'm staying for five days.
It's a good thing that I love to get lost, because in Buenos Aires, all it takes is stepping outside. It isn't the layout that confuses me, but the inconsistency of street signs, which appear in thin lettering on the walls, or in black signs under the stoplights — if they appear at all. Add to this torrents of people, cars startling the air behind your back, shops everywhere, air difficult to breathe in, sidewalks of broken tiles, and construction on every corner.
This is all to say, Buenos Aires is a city, but it still perplexes me, not least because the language adds another foreign dimension to the landscape. Rather, the language is a landscape in itself, which can be said in any place but has never seemed so clear to me.
Although I practiced my Spanish with Argentine podcasts and music, people here hardly speak that clearly. The majority of what I hear is just sound to me, woven of syllables into phrases that have no meaning. How can people speak so fast? But not only do they speak fast, the words bend and merge together, so that I can only recognize one out of every five or six words (or ten, I wouldn't know).
An example of this was on Monday, when I asked my hostess if I could practice flute here. She responded in an excited voice and the only words I could catch were "divino" and "fantástico" (after which I tried to practice de manera más divina as possible).
I know it's the accent, because that same day I went to a church (I live across the street from the beautiful Basilica de San Nicolas), where I read a passage on a handout. I could understand it perfectly, but when someone began speaking into a microphone much later, it didn't even occur to me that I was hearing the same passage until she had almost finished.
As a result, it almost terrifies me to open my mouth in public (which is part of the reason I've spent so much time walking alone, because it doesn't involve speaking to anyone). I haven't heard a single person with an accent like mine. I feel that to open my mouth is to soil the landscape with my accent. I fear the instant designation of extranjera, the looks that I imagine will come my way, and the special treatment reserved for someone who can't understand a thing.
Every day that I'm here, to interact with people in even the most simple of ways, like buying food or greeting the doorman, is to force myself to jump into the cold water of letting my voice stand out. Most of the time it isn't that bad, and sometimes I do make a fool of myself — but it's never actually terrible.
However, there's a considerable difference between the Spanish of these fleeting interactions and the Spanish that people speak to me in a conversation. The former is the one whose rapidity I've warped into a personal threat, while the latter is much slower and, though I can understand it better, seems less expressive.
It's the Spanish that my hostess used to tell me why music is important to her. It's only because she spoke slowly that her warm words about hearing me practice flute ("Fue una experiencia maravillosa. Es un privilegio tenerte") have stayed with me. Yet when she speaks to her husband or her children, her cadence comes alive, and the sounds are totally expressive.
My hostess gave me this plate to bring to my room, and it is by far the fanciest way I have ever consumed water.
Yesterday was my flute lesson with Claudio Barile. But first I had to get to his place, and to get to his place meant to step outside, and to step outside is to get lost.
You would think that after two days of getting lost without trying, I would have given myself ample time. It was supposed to be a twenty minute walk, so I gave myself half an hour; but I didn't anticipate waiting desperately outside my room for the freight elevator to come (it never came, not in those two minutes), descending six flights of stairs, and then getting lost within five blocks because I couldn't find those wretched street signs (and had read the map wrong).
I ducked inside a grocery store to pull out a map, beginning to panic that I was running late. They say in Argentina one mustn't take time too seriously, and that lateness is practically presumed; but I can't tell if this applies to foreigners as well. The last thing I wanted to do was to be late to my first and only lesson with Prof. Barile.
I got lost a couple more times before I found the place, climbing three flights of stairs because the elevator was out of order, and arrived fifteen minutes late, gasping and in no shape to play the flute. However, Prof. Barile offered me water, and in the time it took me to catch my breath, we both agreed his Spanish was way too rapid for me to understand.
So the lesson was in English. I played Eugene Bozza's Image, an absolutely gorgeous piece for unaccompanied flute. I've actually performed it in three masterclasses before, and yesterday's lesson shared a couple themes with all three: developing characters and phrasing through the articulation, not in spite of it, and having the flexibility to push dynamics to their greatest extremes. It's a piece that lets you be so expressive, in so many different ways, and to hear four different interpretations of the piece is fascinating.
After the lesson, we spoke a bit in Spanish and at some point he asked me why I came to Argentina. I froze a bit, unsure if he would be offended if I said something about the culture and history, as if Argentina and its people were something I could pick up and analyze.
He filled my silence with "Interesante?", to which I agreed, however inadequate the word is. Then we talked about reading and traveling (he told me a bit about his travels to the United States), and Jorge Borges, and how I would find the air much easier to breathe in Córdoba. Even though this was mostly in Spanish, he slowed down the tiniest bit so I was able to catch more than one in every five words. Before I left, he gave me a copy of Marcel Moyses' Daily Exercises, which he had referenced often during the lesson. It was so generous, and I will start using it to prepare for my lesson with Patricia Dadalt tomorrow.
But as for the question of why I came to Argentina, I suppose I had better come up with an answer. But I would venture that I didn't so much as "choose" Argentina as I found myself heading that direction, pulled by choices I made long ago, by others' influence, and by the opportunities that caught my attention.
4am view outside the balcony, facing inward from the street pictured above.
The night before my lesson, I had one of those episodes where I literally can't stop thinking and thus don't sleep. I lay there for five hours, my mind churning with questions, silly ones like, "What does it mean for me to be here, in Buenos Aires, in Argentina, in South America?", and "Why am I so humiliated by my own accent?," and "What do I do with my gaze, which makes me want to pity the poverty and dirtiness that I wasn't expecting to see in so much of Argentina's capital city?"
In response to the third question, I realized I had walked through the Plaza de Mayo earlier that night, but forgotten a part of its history that had struck me. I searched up and read an article about las Madres of the Plaza de Mayo. The article reminded me that there's so much I can't see, will never see, simply because this isn't my city, nor my country, nor my people.
I finally decided I needed to write, but even afterwards, it took me another hour to fall asleep. Nevertheless, below is what I wrote (with some revision, and plenty more headed its way). The terrible irony of this whole affair, which I only realized after writing the poem, is that in a sense, I have accomplished my first goal and "danced through the night."
Aunque no canta el viento
No duermo esta noche,
aunque no canta el viento
fuera de la puerta de vidrio que lleva a la vista
de espaldas de edificios antiguos.
Si es el viento,
lo que le da color distante a la noche,
me mantiene en blanco y no sé por qué,
por qué no me dejan dormir
tantas nociones extranjeras
volando violentamente
dentro del mente mío.
Allá insisten en bailar,
aunque no canta el viento:
entonces, a qué bailan?
No hay cantante,
ni fuera de la puerta ni dentro de mí,
a menos que sea las ideas extranjeras
llenándome con sus piruetas como un peste:
rechazan irse,
forzando mis ojos abiertos con ritmo inexorable;
aunque deseo descansar,
porque todo el día ya es un baile;
aunque no canta el viento.
Acaso bailan al ritmo de las partículas de aire,
agitadas a una danza de mociones severas y cortísimas,
casi congeladas en su ira.
Están enojadas por mi presencia extraña,
desubicadas del espacio que ocupo yo,
una extranjera
en la ciudad desvelada de Buenos Aires.
Y por lo tanto no canta el viento:
está gritando sin sonido entre sus dientes.