South American Diary #3: The Walking Tour

Ministry of Exterior Relations

     If New York City and Paris had a baby, it would look like Buenos Aires.
     I'm not speaking of the entire city—just like New York and Paris, Buenos Aires has its share of slums and favelas, which I did not visit in the two days I was there.
      But much of the fashionable areas, with five-story apartment blocks topped with copper domes, obviously mimic fashionable Parisian streets.
      The first day we exhausted my plan—visit Recoleta Cemetery then grab a steak at Don Julio, which arrived on a searing hot plate, thick and salty and delectable, along with roasted pumpkin. I could have turned around and gone home at that point and felt the trip had been worthwhile.
     But the next morning Michael had an idea. We took a cab to the opera house, Teatro Colon. I didn't ask why, just went along assuming we were heading blindly into the city, which would be my inclination. It turned out we were hooking up with a walking tour, FreeWalks Buenos Aires.
      Like a lot of guys, I have this little narrative loop playing in my head when I travel where I'm James Bond traversing the city in my virtual Aston Martin Vanquish. There is no place in that mindset for tours, for joining the sheep baaing after brightly t-shirted guides.
      But Michael, whose life at times actually approaches the Bondian, has no such qualms. We were briefed by an undernourished young lady named Dominique, who told us about Luciano Pavarotti complaining that the acoustics in the opera house were too perfect—his flaws were being projected too readily.
    Interesting if true, as they say in my business. A thought that came to me a few times more during the tour—perhaps another reason I avoid them: their standards of veracity dip below that of professional journalism, which might betray an excessive fastidiousness on my part, like rating carnivals based on their cleanliness.
     Dominique said the tour would take three hours, and we could pay her what we liked at the end. I knew we'd never last the three hours and would drop out at some point along the way, but was willing to give it a try, since we were here.
      Our first stop, to my surprise, the Templo Libertad, where the group admired a mosaic hands formed in the gesture of benediction, which I had lain on my sons' heads at their bar mitzvahs. As I considered whether to volunteer the story of how Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in Star Trek, was Jewish, and based the Vulcan "Live Long and Prosper" hand sign on the Jewish gesture of blessing, Dominique explained that Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in Star Trek, was Jewish, and based the Vulcan "Life Long and Prosper" hand sign on the Jewish gesture of blessing.

9 de Julio Avenue is wide enough to be easily seen from the air.

      Which increased my confidence in her veracity. We crossed the 9 de Julio Avenue— named for July 9, 1816, Argentine Independence Day— the widest avenue in the world, more than 110 yards across, or longer than a block in New York City. Crossing at top speed took more than a minute.
     Pausing before the former palace of the Anchirena family, now the Ministry of Exterior Relations, Dominique leapt from the standard tourist fluff to history with a bit more substance to it. 
     In the first half of the 19th century, she said, up to 25 percent of the population of Buenos Aires were black slaves—their labors built the fortunes of what was, at one point, the third richest country in the world. An understatement, turns out—some sources say up to a third.
    "If you are wondering what happened to people of color," she said, explaining how after Argentina abolished slavery—officially in 1813, in practice in 1853—it systematically eliminated its black population, either by selling them to slave-owning neighbors, or putting the slaves in the front lines during military campaigns. Today Argentina is the whitest nation in South America, with 97 percent of the population having European roots. 
     "There's a truth we don't speak much of," she said.
      Dominique was a very quotable guide. Stopping at an equestrian statue of Jose de san Martin, the liberator of Argentina, she asked, "Who is our biggest hero? Not Messi. Not Maradona. Not the Pope—San Martin." (Sigh, Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona are wildly popular soccer players. I try not to leave you guys in the dark). 

Basilica of the Holy Sacrament

     We toured a gorgeous church, The Basilica of the Holy Sacrament after Dominique shared an improbable legend about the nearby art deco Kavanagh Building being constructed to deliberately block the view of the church from the home of its patroness, Mercedes Castellanos de Anchorena, as "a revenge" for the high-born woman blocking Kavanagh's romance with her son, even though Anchorena died in 1920, before the church was even completed, and the Kavanagh Building wasn't designed for another dozen years.     
     As Hemingway wrote, "Pretty to think so."
     The shift into the fantastic continued at the memorial to the 1982 Falklands War, which they call the Malvinas War here. General Leopoldo Galtieri and the junta running Argentina, trying to distract Argentinians from economic turmoil and brutal political repression—30,000 people disappeared, many of them dropped from helicopters in "flights of death" or tossed into the River de la Plata—tried to push the British out of the Falklands Islands, where they had squatted since 1841. 
     That part, alas, is all too true.
     The British, ripe for a bit of distraction themselves, responded with the full brunt of their military might.

Kavanagh Building

     "This ridiculous war, often called 'The Most Ridiculous War,'" said Dominique, who then, speaking of ridiculous, suggested that Margaret Thatcher herself accompanied the British armada to South America and personally directed the sinking of the Argentina cruiser General Belgrano, considered a great atrocity because it supposedly was torpedoed while cruising out of a British-established exclusion zone. Whatever direction it was steaming, 323 Argentinian sailors died, nearly half their forces killed in the war.
     I raised my hand, suppressed saying, "That can't be true," and instead observed, "So you're saying that Margaret Thatcher was on the scene, giving orders?"
     "Margaret Thatcher was there," Dominique insisted (spoiler alert: she wasn't). 
     While I still trusted her nuanced and passionate account of the Dirty War at home and the insanity of the battle with a superpower over this collection of rocks off the coast, her leap into fantasy was unfortunate nevertheless. It only takes a little spit to spoil the soup.
      Though it did give insight into how myths develop—the Iron Lady is even more vile if she can be transported to the scene of the supposed slaughter of innocent Argentine sailors, giving the fatal command herself with a wave of her bejeweled claw.
     Not that I held this flight of fantasy against our guide. Her father, Dominique said, was a young conscript in the war, and I appreciated the heat she brought to the subject.
     "We lost 649 men in that war," she said. "It was about stupidity. It was about politics."
     Most wars are. The tour ended, conveniently, next to the La Biala cafe, where we all posed for a group shot—which Michael and I realized was done, not for our benefit, or hers, but to help her bosses gauge the tour's gate, 50 percent of which is supposed to be turned over to FreeWalks.  The going rate seemed to be $10 a head, and we gratefully ponied up. The full three hours had held our interest, even offering moments of fascination, with the detours into fabrication easily forgiven.  It was time to sit down, enjoy another coffee and to plot our next goal: The Tango.

South American Diary #2: City of the Dead—Recoleta Cemetery

Recoleta Cemetery

     Americans can be startlingly ignorant about the world beyond their borders, and I am no exception. Before preparing to visit South America, I had exactly one association with Argentina: Nazis. It was in Buenos Aires that the Israelis nabbed Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and spirited him to Jerusalem for trial.
     Not exactly a roadmap for vacation fun
     Since I had a few days there before heading south to Patagonia, I decided it would be wise to figure out something to do in the city. Every website and guide book I consulted listed the Recoleta Cemetery as the No. 1, essential thing to do in Buenos Aires and, as fate would have it, my hotel, the elegant and refined Loi Suites Recoleta, was practically next door.  
      Lonely Planet calls the cemetery "perhaps BA's top attraction" and every other source I consulted agreed in a chorus of unanimity.
    So I hatched a plan: go to the cemetery.  At the same time worrying, slightly: what does it say about a city if its most alluring attraction is a graveyard? Only one way to find out.
    After a bracing coffee at an outdoor cafe, La Biela, we strolled to Recoleta Cemetery. Here I first saw the value of traveling with another person. I was ready to plunge into the cemetery, blind, using a long-established investigative process I call wandering-around-looking-at-stuff.
     But my former boss and current friend—a rare if not unheard of combination—Michael Cooke, immediately entered negotiations with one of the guides hanging around the entrance to the cemetery. A price was established—$20 US for the two of us for an hour. 
      I was glad we did. Our guide spent well over an hour conducting us through this 14 acres labyrinth city of the dead, laid out like city blocks, marble and granite, black and white, some massive, others narrow, some tombs meticulously kept up by their families, others crumbling into ruin, while overhead crosses, domes, urns, plinths, and a platoon of angels, seraphs, Virgins Mary, mournful women and mustachioed men kept blind vigil.
    Our guide took enormous care explaining the lineage of the more noteworthy tombs.
      "This is the main avenue," said our guide, pausing before a tomb whose doorway was surrounded by nearly two dozen bronze plaques and wreaths. "And then there is the General Pacheco, he of our independent wars. This is the big plaque that included his portrait and all the battles where he participated as an officer, including the Cross of the Andes Mountains and the 10 most important battles in the war for the independence of Chile.  The family of diplomatics and militaries: Pacheco was the other great grandfather of the President Aylwin. The father of his father was he of our independence, the General Loi. The father of his mother was General Pacheco. He of our independence, the father of his mother."   
       That might seem like heavy lifting, and I didn't follow it closely for 90 minutes, but gazed around, floating through Recoleta on a gentle sea of highly-accented verbiage. Yet somehow that felt perfect, and what sense I gleaned showed the importance of family ties in Argentinian society, so different from the U.S., where many people have trouble grasping the relationship between John Adams and John Quincy Adams. 
     We went to the tomb of Luis Firpo—who knocked Jack Dempsey out of the ring in 1923, a moment captured by painter George Bellows.
     "The wild bull of the Pampas," I said, admiringly, showing off my knowledge of the first Spanish-speaking heavyweight contender. (Dempsey got back in the ring and won). 
      The Duarte family tomb where Eva Peron's body, after years of odd international post-mortem wanderings finally found its rest, is tucked down a nondescript avenue. I was never particularly enamored with Evita, so stood politely by while her entire history was narrated, taking a few dutiful photographs. Though we soon realized how lucky we had been, that no one was there when we approached. Passing it by later, the entire row was jammed with a tourist group. 
    A number of tombs belonged to newspaper publishers, including a complicated statuary group that shows the inky benefactor slipping his coffin and ascending to heaven, a physical and moral impossibility.   There were a surprising number of Irish names—about 4 percent of Argentinians have Irish roots; but I think I'll save that story for St. Patrick's Day.    
    Our guide explained that Catholics can be cremated since 1969 (close: since 1963. One should always take the information provided by tour guides with a grain of salt, as we should see tomorrow). In fact-checking Catholic burial rituals, I noticed the church "earnestly recommends that the pious custom of burial be retained; but it does not forbid cremation" although it demands that the faithful inter ashes in a "sacred place" and not keep them in an urn at home or scatter them across a ballpark. 
      "So much death amidst life," Michael said, of the cemetery in the heart of one of Buenos Aires' most fashionable neighborhoods.  
     "So much life amidst death," I countered, gesturing to the people wandering all around.

 

South American Diary #1—Fly Me to, ah, Buenos Aires

    The solidly-built young man had a full red-beard and was dressed all in black, from his watch cap to his sneakers. His new bags—hip, if luggage can be hip—were also black, as were the clothes and luggage of his friend, who wore a Dutch cap. 
     A quip occurred to me. 
     "Are you lads on your way to blow up the bridge over the Remagen?" I thought, but did not say. Shutting up is an art form, and mentioning obscure bits of World War II trivia—capturing the Remagen bridge over the Rhine was vital to the Allies forces drive to Berlin in the spring of 1945—to young strangers is not a practice embraced by those aspiring to be au courant. Okay, hipsters try to look like commandos when they're not aping lumberjacks; deal with it.
     There was no need to chat.  From snippets of conversation, not to mention a few tell-tell luggage stickers for companies like Shure microphone, I figured out that these two fellows, and a few dozen others exactly like them gathered here for the 10:20 p.m. flight to Buenos Aires, had to be sound people, on their way to Lollapalooza, which I noticed was scheduled in Buenos Aires in a couple days. One later admitted, with all the modesty he could muster, that he was the sound man for 21 Pilots, and I hadn't the heart to tell him that this was as meaningless, to me, as if he said he was chief accountant for the Hemschlott brand of rustic pipkins.
    That's why they were going. To work. But why was I going? Good question. The short answer is: a pal asked me to join him on a Royal Canadian Geographic Society expedition cruising up the coast of Chile. 
     I had never been to South America nor felt a desire to go, the same blend of inertia and ignorance that keeps so many content to while away the years at home. My entire impression of the continent, I'm ashamed to say, was formed by watching Walt Disney's "Saludos Amigos" at an assembly one rainy afternoon in Fairwood School.
     But saying "No" just wasn't an option; it would have betrayed a timidity that, while sincere, was the equivalent of climbing into my coffin and pulling closed the lid. I might be that homebound person, but that didn't mean I had to let him do whatever he pleased. The dynamic, still-alive man within would accept the call to adventure from his good friend.
     That didn't mean I was eager to spend nearly three weeks hauling off to a place I'd never been nor contemplated. I really like my life and routine: grapefruits to peel, a dog to walk, columns to write. Going somewhere far away conjured up a raft of particulars to deal with: tickets to secure, inoculations to get, clothes to pack.
    The last challenge was killing two hours during the layover at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. I had assumed there would be a good Southern place for dinner—airports now do a better job of featuring cuisine from their local communities, rather than being just so many anonymous outposts in an interchangeable neutral international world without flavor or distinction. But the closest I came was a palm-sized sweet potato pie in a small round tin to follow my anodyne grilled chicken and vegetables.
    Boarding time approached.   I pulled out my iPhone and wrote a message to my wife: "I seem to be about to board a plane to South America. Should I really go?"
    A joke, surely, mocking my own timidity. But with enough truth that it was less funny, more taking my unease and waving it over my head.  Bad idea. No man wants to be a coward in front of his wife. And why spread anxiety around? Shutting up, as I said ... I deleted the email, gathered my stuff, and got on the plane.

Flashback 2013: "Calling in sick is for the weak"

     "So are you putting out a Gone Fishin'" sign?" my wife asked hopefully. 

     "Maybe..." I lied, embarrassed to mention that I had lined up a few weeks worth of posts, out of exactly the foolish consistency that Emerson tagged as being the hobgoblin of little minds. 

      Though these snippets of a column—which I blundered upon while looking for something on Ed Burke—fills out the mindset a little. 
      Starting tomorrow I'll begin blogging about where I've been for the past ... 10 days.

     Being a workaholic (God, both a workaholic and an alcoholic — I should get some kind of prize) my first thought, when I suspected that the flu jamming emergency rooms and scything through offices is knocking on the side of my head, was to get this written, quick, so I can collapse in a corner and hope to be better 48 hours from now.
     Sure, I could just call in sick, but calling in sick is for the weak; I hate doing that — you’re not in the paper, you might as well be dead; besides, in most offices the present sit around plotting the demise of the absent.
     Plus, it might not be the flu; maybe it’s just some cosmic hand that has reached into my skull, snatched out my brain and is squishing it before my eyes, grey matter oozing through its fingers. Not a terrible feeling, really; a dizzy exhausted numbness. This must be what stupid people feel like all the time.
     Thank goodness I have a few housecleaning topics I’ve been meaning to put in the paper, which shouldn’t demand too much brainpower to relate, or to read, and will keep me in your I hope un-flu-flummoxed minds until Friday, when I plan to be better.

Correction
     Whenever our digital future is discussed, the typical reaction is to bemoan what will be lost — no folded newspaper tossed at the end of the driveway every day, no chance to shuffle curbward each morning to sample the weather, to dip your toe in the day ahead.
     That’s true enough — the brief stroll is always infused with optimism. But there are advantages to the electronic, the central one being the correction of errors: bam, they’re fixed. As opposed to the typical print way to address significant goofs: run a correction and hope people see it. A hastily applied bandage, at best — the error was given bold play, while the correction is coughed into a fist long afterward. I tend not to run them much, first because I, ahem, tend not to make them, and second because space in print is limited, and I am reluctant to shave off what I’m writing today to revisit some past blunder.
     But being sick, this is an ideal day.
     A few weeks back the phone rang — it was Ald. Ed Burke; no, make that “long-serving alderman” Ed Burke; no, rather, “the longest serving ever” as he informed me, having taken office on March 11, 1969, a date that found me in Miss Maple’s fourth-grade class.
     He was not sharing this information out-of-the-blue, but because, in a column gingerly seizing one Ald. James Cappleman (46th) between my thumb and forefinger and holding him under a bright light for his pigeon fixation, I had wrongly written Ald. Dick Mell (33rd) is the “longest serving alderman” (in my defense, I was listing aldermen off the top of my head, so checking seemed unfair).
     Anyway, in my blubbering, yes-sir-alderman-so-sorry effort to apologize, I told Burke I would run a correction, and then promptly forgot about it, until Mell himself, not satisfied at inflicting one relative, son-in-law Rod Blagojevich, on the world, made news applying political lube to ease his daughter, Deb, into his seat. Not her fault; she seems a good egg, and if my dad could name me to some pantheon of 50 well-paid writers who get to make speeches and send staff for coffee, I’d likely tell him to go ahead, though with a bit more guile than Mell is capable of.
     Anyway, the Sun-Times and I regret the error.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 8, 2013

The Saturday Snapshot #33

 
     I loved this place in Charlottesville, Virginia, not far from the university. Loved the graphics, the counter, the clean, retro interior. I loved the service, loved everything about the place.
     Well, almost everything. There was one significant exception:
     The pie.
     I just wasn't loving the pie.
     I wanted to love it. I tried to love it. 
     But the love just was not there.
     The crust, well, it wasn't Sarah Stegner's crust. And the filling, well, it was awful sweet. Maybe that's how they like it down South. And I hate to say an unkind word about a spunky independent place with a love-at-first-sight name like Quality Pie. I sat there, staring at the half-finished piece of pie, willing myself to like it more than I did.
     But I failed. The fault is mine, I am sure. Not the pie's. It is no doubt exactly what people who like that sort of thing like. But that person is not me.
     Just one piece of advice:
     Go for the homemade cinnamon donuts instead. My disappointment with the pie was such, I found comfort in a donut. It was fantastic.   

Era of Contempt IV

     Why didn't I sweep Alan Leonard's letter into the garbage, where it belongs? A kind of amazement, I suppose, a residual non-belief, despite years of evidence to the contrary, that such people really exist.
     A hope that does not die, if you want to get all flowery about it.
     I wasn't running to post it either.  But I went on vacation, and it was sitting there, and I figured, share it.  Why not? We've grown sadly familiar with his oeuvre. There is, I suppose, an entertainment value, the way gross horror movies entertain. 
     Though not much. When I read Michelle Obama's "Becoming," I sincerely thought, "This is the sort of book that should be required reading." Because it might create empathy where none exists, in the Alan Leonards of the world.  I wrote a column ballyhooing the book, not that Obama's memoir needed it—it's the best-selling memoir of all time. Maybe there are some people who will encounter it and have their perceptions expanded. This letter is a reminder how naive that hope was. 
     I'd like to suggest that Mr. Leonard is an exception. I don't know. Maybe he's the rule. That seems something worth discussing. 

Flashback 2004: Maximizing their advantage

     I'm on vacation. This ran back when living in the suburbs still felt uncomfortable, like new clothes that didn't quite fit right.

     Every morning at the train station I buy the Sun-Times. Of course I get it delivered at home, but I leave that for the wife. Besides, I enjoy the banter at the station coffee stand, aptly named, "The Grind." One day last week they were out of Sun-Times—stripped clean—so I went to change a buck.
     "Can I have four quarters, Connie?" I asked.
     "You can have anything you want, dear,'' she said.
     "Could you teach my wife to say that?'' I said, happily palming the coins and heading to the platform. There a man with a salt-and-pepper beard was struggling with the Sun-Times box. It sometimes sticks.
     "It takes a bit of finesse," I said. He collected his change, and I plugged in my two quarters. The box opened smoothly. I took out a newspaper and held the door so this guy could get one. He did and began to walk away.
     "Hey!" I said. "You're supposed to put your money in!"
     "It won't take my money!'' he said, shrugging, smirking and hurrying off down the platform.
     I wasn't going to let this idiot rip off some poor delivery guy—with me as an accessory, no less. I pumped in the money for him. The train arrived. I sat steaming. That's what I loathe most about suburbanites. They have a trait I call "maximizing their advantage." Rushing across the tracks is only the start. They park their SUVs in the fire lane. They cut in line. They'll shave any corner to scramble up the ant hill. I thought of searching the train, finding this guy, screaming "THIEF!'' in his face. Not just once, but every day on the platform. The pure Javert-like craziness of that made me smile. I would find out where he worked, become a constant nuisance, bursting into meetings, clad in white Biblical robes, demanding 50 cents. "Let it go,'' I told myself. At least he's a reader. But I kept shaking my head all that morning over the man who leapt at the chance to sell his integrity for 50 cents. Shameless.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 31, 2004 Monday