No tags yet.
(To my one subscriber: I am thrilled to have you!! Feel free to skim this rather long entry; its thoroughness is more for myself than for hypothetical readers, of which I don't have many.)
Mi último día en Buenos Aires era lindísimo.
Because of that day, I already miss being there so much, and it has little to do with the city itself. It wasn't because I spent half the day walking from Recoleta to Palermo, ate dulce de leche, saw so many plazas and parks, and saw the sea (for which I have an absurd attachment). Rather, I got to spend more time with the people there, and after four days of feeling alienated within this leviathan of a city, their company felt like home.
Walking in Palermo, I passed many buildings covered in graffiti and murals merging together, vivid with color and detail. At one point, I reached a block cut in half by railroad tracks. Walking across the clearing, to my right I could see the tracks stretching towards the horizon, skyscrapers in a richer part of Palermo. Parallel to the tracks ran walls colorful with graffiti.
After half a day of getting lost, I took a taxi back (there are taxis everywhere) instead of spending another hour or two finding my way. I'm glad it was the only time I took a taxi; they are ridiculously expensive.
The taxi driver took a freeway that passed by the slums. I have never seen anything like it. Every building seemed on the point of collapse. There were so many rooms with neither roofs nor walls, open to the sky and the freeway; so many floors stacked on top of one another, the space between each floor precariously thin; yet within the rooms, I saw people hanging their clothes to dry, people talking amongst one another, people living, though it seemed impossible. It all passed before my eyes so quickly, and we were back in Recoleta before I knew what to think.
I got back with enough time to practice for my lesson with Patricia Dadalt. Though the lesson was a twenty minute walk away, I left early to visit El Ateneo Grand Splendid on the way. I'm glad I did, for it was striking and memorable in a way I had no idea a bookstore could be. I impulse-bought a volume of the complete poetry of the Argentine poet, Silvina Ocampo, before continuing on to my lesson.
Later, I returned to El Ateneo and began reading Ocampo's poetry. Somehow, it seemed impossible that I could have been in Buenos Aires without reading her poetry.
Patricia Dadalt was so lovely and had patience with me: she spoke so clearly that I soon forgot our lesson was in Spanish. I played the first and second of Schumann's Three Romances, and she helped me work with the breath to maintain a focused sound and to smoothen out the phrasing. Then I played a handful of orchestral excerpts, including the fast solo from Beethoven's Leonore Overture and the solo in Brahm's Fourth Symphony.
The lovely thing about orchestral excerpts is that, though each solo is short and there are so many rules to follow, there are endless nuances for interpretation and endless ways to envision the technique that pieces them together.
I received many such ideas from Prof. Dadalt, a particularly exquisite idea being about the Brahms 4 solo. It's a melody of fragments separated by short pauses, in which the strings play the upbeat. When playing the solo out of context, one challenge is to phrase across these pauses without covering the silence, nor stretching it. As a way to envision the phrasing, she described these pauses as heart beats; as if the moments of silence in the melody must be there, because there is nothing more that the preceding notes could say. Qué lindo!
At least, she said something to this effect. The thing about my receiving ideas in Spanish is that they remain ideas. When someone speaks to me at length in English, it's hard to divorce the ideas from words, so words are what stay with me long afterwards, what I reflect on. But in Spanish, I can't remember exact phrases, so I'm left with the ideas themselves, floating vaguely in my head without words to ground them. However, the more I'm here, the more phrases I'm able to grasp hold of.
This also happened later in the evening, when I met up with Gabriel and Elizabeth, both of whom had agreed to be interviewed for a research project of mine. It's a project in constant evolution, but one milestone is that, just a week ago, I received an "okay" from the IRB at CMU to go ahead with my project (after months of navigating regulations).
One component of my project is to ask musicians in Argentina about their experiences studying and working. I already knew Gabriel, a flutist in the Orquesta Filarmónica de Buenos Aires, from this past February, when he visited CMU to audition and take lessons with my professor. I met up with him on Tuesday and asked him if he'd like to be interviewed. He was free on Friday after a rehearsal with a quintet, in which Elizabeth, the clarinetist, also agreed to be interviewed.
So on Friday we met. With their consent, I started an audio recording, and in Spanish that wasn't too fast, they began telling me how they ended up pursuing music. With their stories arose issues unrelated to music: one of the musicians is from Jujuy, a town in the North bent on preserving its indigenous heritage; to enter into the classical music scene of Buenos Aires implied underlying movements pertaining to race and culture. They also shared what they believed classical music contributed to Argentine society: there was the experience of the music itself, as well as the fact that orchestra schools are becoming increasingly common as a way for youth to escape poverty.
After the interviews, we started talking about travel. I was surprised to hear that Elizabeth had studied in Pittsburgh, PA, where I go to college, in addition to France. Both told me how it was significantly easier to travel to Europe than to the US; to enter or leave the latter, it wasn't unusual to be detained and questioned like a criminal, which had happened to Gabriel.
"And for this," Elizabeth told me in Spanish, "the US is considered here to be the bad part of America. That, and because over there you call yourselves, 'Americans'... No! It's norteamericanos," she said, grinning. I realized that to so many people in the US, including myself, Latin America is — if not invisible, compressed. During my flight to Buenos Aires, I had pulled up a map on the screen to scroll through the plane's trajectory. Though I'd obviously seen maps of America before, I found myself scrolling and scrolling for much longer than I'd expected.
From this exchange, I found a definite answer to the question, "Por qué Argentina?": I want to see whatever I can of what is invisible in the US, so ignorant are we of the people who share this side of the world.
After our meeting, Gabriel and Elizabeth heard it was my last day in Buenos Aires and I hadn't tried carne asado yet, so they took me to a restaurant (past 11pm, but all the restaurants were full; dinner is late here). After four days of eating out by myself, it was a luxury to have someone else speak to the waiter and not receive the "outsider" treatment. And the carne asado me llenó tanto!
Carne asado is like barbeque, but more intense.
It was lovely to get to know these people, who were so kind to me and full of joking and ideas, and to begin to express myself more easily in Spanish. The language really comes to life when I'm speaking with at least two native speakers; the expressiveness in how they speak to each other blends into how they speak to me. We spoke a bit in English, of which we all know to differing extents, but it was uncanny to hear English words from the mouth of someone to whom they were only sounds.
To him, rapid English just sounds like "urch-urch-urch" — and it was a relief to hear this, because to me, rapid Spanish is also reduced to noise. They joked about the different ways of speaking Spanish outside Buenos Aires; it seems people love to make fun of the Cordobese accent.
On the street, we ran into Elizabeth's boyfriend and his step-mother, who is from the US. We all exchanged besos (I have gotten so much better at this!), and when she heard I was also from the US, she began speaking to me in unaccented American English. I spoke to her in Spanish, but it occurred to me later that perhaps she missed hearing English.
I got back from dinner close to 2am, when the youth in my apartment were just beginning to go out. I sat still on my bed, so full of the laughter and ideas we'd exchanged at the interviews and at dinner. Though I was ready to leave Buenos Aires — many porteños had assured me Córdoba was more refreshing and less crazy — I didn't want to leave the sense of belonging I was just beginning to feel among those whom I'd met.
With Gabriel and Elizabeth
Nevertheless, I left early the next morning. My flight to Córdoba was for the most part uneventful. I left Buenos Aires with three new things: a volume of Silvina Ocampo's poetry, a box of leftover carne asado, and the knowledge that the only thing that could compel me to live in a city like Buenos Aires was to have people there whom I love and work in which I believe.
It's too soon to write about Córdoba, but the three days I've been here have made me realize I do miss Buenos Aires, the city: I miss being able to walk anywhere at anytime, for the most part unseen because there are so many people, and I miss the sense of spontaneity. But the air is certainly more breathable here (though there were some enchanting breezes in Buenos Aires closer to the sea); my host mom and my roommate are kind and funny, and it's a relief to be welcomed by people who understand I'm a foreigner.
Meeting the other students in my program, all from the US, is both comforting and exasperating: comforting, because we share the same struggles (and because my accent is actually better than many of theirs), and exasperating, because... a good handful seem to care only about getting drunk at clubs, speaking English, and traveling outside of Córdoba.
Nevertheless, we begin orientation tomorrow and classes the day after, so perhaps my opinion of them will change. I actually began writing this entry on Saturday (the day I left Buenos Aires) and am only finishing it on Monday. I've had to squeeze writing into the sparse moments not spent talking with my host mom and her many friends, who come in and out of the house. It's been a lovely time; I am more immersed in the language and culture than ever.
Today we didn't have classes because it's the day of independence for Argentina. It was uncanny to look at the TV and see marches of celebration and opposition on a street in Buenos Aires that I had crossed many times, just a few days ago. I wonder if I'll ever return to Buenos Aires; there's so much I couldn't fit into the hours I poured into exploring by foot.
Nevertheless, before me stretches a month in Córdoba!