Nido Gaucho

We are in Norfolk.  It’s Bank Holiday Monday, and for once it’s a perfect day – warm sunshine, clear blue skies and birdsong.  An ideal circumstance for thinking about the rural idyll depicted in ‘Nido Gaucho’.  Here as in the song the countryside is putting on its ‘plumage’, the tree shimmering with new leaves or heavy with blossom.  As we near the coast, suddenly the hedgerows are bustling with Alexanders (somewhere between parsley & celery in flavour, they say, and enjoyed by the Romans – and horses.  My brother says they need salty air.)  We watch a fat hare bounce across a ploughed field.  The roads in this quiet bit of the county are lined with the white fizz of blackthorn in flower, and rounding a corner we come upon fields full of cowslips.  I thought they’d become something of a rarity, but not here.  They have a lovely milky quality; after the garish blaze of oil seed rape, this is like a redefining of the colour yellow.  You can see I’ve been infected by the season and the (finally) appropriate weather: like Hector Marcó who wrote the words to the song, it’s hard not to be filled with hope.

The tango ‘Nido Gaucho’ is a current favourite, featuring regularly in the playlist in Cambridge milongas and thus often lingering in my head.  It has a lovely rolling rhythm and a great sing-along chorus: if you’re unconvinced, have a look at/listen to the delightful ‘Chino’ Laborde (I believe his real name is Walter) giving it everything with his mate ‘Dipi’ Kvitko and audience in El Caff (!) In Buenos Aires:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEjzZe-B6ds

I haven’t been there yet but it’s certainly on my list for next time.

You might feel that the singer makes the song.  Certainly part of the reason the lovely Di Sarli recording of 1942 is much loved is for the singer Podestá, then incredibly only 18.  Alberto Podestá was born Alejandro Washington Alé in San Juan in 1924 and became for a time Di Sarli’s signature singer (he owes his name change to Di Sarli) although he was soon overshadowed by Roberto Rufino.  My Di Sarli CDs alternate between the two vocalists.  I think the jury is out as to which is better but for my money it’s Podestá every time: a fuller voice, like velvet, like chocolate, but not so smooth that it cuts out the pain.   Podestá went on to sing with several other orchestras and made over 500 recordings, most famously ‘Nada’, ‘La Capilla Blanca’, ‘Al Compás del Corazón’ and, with Caló’s orchestra, the lovely ‘Bajo un Cielo de Estrellas’. ‘Beneath a starry sky’.  Amazingly, until a year or two ago he was still performing.  Although his voice is no longer reliable, there are some recordings which, with a bit of imagination, still capture some of the old magic – and who wouldn’t grab the chance to see him in person as this ‘tango commuter’ did  in December 2010?    

     

    http://tangocommuter1.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/alberto-podesta-sings-at-porteno-y.html

As for the song, ‘Gaucho Nest’ seems unusual in its celebration of the country life – a far cry from ‘Buenos Aires Querido’ and the tango halls of the city.  Roses and daisies are in bud and thrushes – ‘zorzales’ – nest at this ‘ranchita’ – little ranch – on the hill.  Marcó was a city boy himself but apparently attended a ‘gaucho circle’ in town, as well as being an actor, poet, singer and musician and a racing man who went on to own his own stud called, not surprisingly perhaps, ‘Nido Gaucho.’  It’s a love song, of course, as unashamedly sentimental as they come, you can hear it in the music: though those characteristically choppy Di Sarli rhythms are there in the strings, for the most part they carry the melody, swelling with feeling as the notes run up the scale.  There's no stream mentioned in the words but the piano ripples and bubbles over & around the violins so Di Sarli must have pictured one, I think.  I've been trying (and failing) to understand how the form works: I can hear the call and response in each section, and there's a clear verse-refrain divide repeated twice, once with the orchestra alone and then again with the voice, and then the refrain once more for good measure - but there seems to be an extra bit in between, that yearning rising scale just before the chorus.  Help, anyone?

It's gorgeous, though.  The first word we hear is 'luciendo' - 'shining'.  Now I understand why there is a school of thought that says you can't dance to sung tangos.  I don't agree, but I am easily distracted by words and there is plenty to catch my interest here.  The singer tells us that his illusions will ‘bloom’ – ‘florecerán’ – one of my favourite Spanish words which appears regularly in tango lyrics (as in the beautiful ‘Remembranza’, where we hear that our love will blossom ‘volverá a florecer/nuestro querer’ like a flower) and our hearts will unite – as long as you say yes.  Podestá captures perfectly the yearning in the words, his voice lingering sensually, light and shade, before the final full-throated plea - because it’s a tango, of course, we are never far from the possibility of despair: don’t say no, the singer begs, or the rosebush will wither and the poor thrush will die for love of you.

The song thrush, turdus philomelos, is on the red list for conservation concern, my brother says, although there are still some about.  My brother’s passion is not tango but birds and so he was up at dawn and lucky enough to hear a thrush singing (twice: a characteristic of this bird, apparently) whilst the rest of us slept.  The thrush’s nest, he thinks, is mud-lined, with four or five spotted blue eggs; doesn’t sound too romantic to me, but then the whole cowboy thing has never appealed to me either.  For that wonderful voice, though, bird or boy, there's not much I wouldn't do.

We leave Norfolk mid-afternoon and by the time we’re back in Cambridge it’s clouded over a bit: rain tomorrow, according to a pessimistic fellow-picnicker at Holme-next-the-Sea.  I’m keeping my hopes up, though; if I listen carefully in my garden here, Andy says, I should be able to hear a thrush sing.    

[You can read the lyrics of 'Nido Gaucho', translated into English and in Spanish, and listen to Di Sarli's 1942 recording here:

    http://poesiadegotan.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/nido-gaucho-1942/ ]

TGI...

As for many, Friday is my favourite day of the week.  Now that I ‘work from home’, though, not for the usual reasons.  It begins with an individual tango lesson, where for an hour or so I enjoy expert professional guidance and the full attention of my good friend.  I leave feeling energised, optimistic and cycle to the Amnesty bookshop on Mill Road for my weekly volunteer slot.  The next two hours are unpredictable – sometimes busy, sometimes solitary, often enlivened by encounters with – well, unusual individuals.  I regularly come away with something new to read and always with a sense of satisfaction: it’s rarely one-to-one, but something about the couple of hours I spend there has that added value feeling.

So I wasn’t particularly looking forward to last Friday’s extra: from Mill Road on the Number 2 bus to Addenbrookes to take part in the ‘microbubble survey’.  Also voluntary, the opportunity arose from a recent diagnosis and I knew more or less what to expect.  Under local anaesthetic, my right breast would be injected with a (colourless) dye which would then be tracked via ultrasound along its route to the lymph nodes, where the first port of call would be clipped.  The accuracy of the ultrasound procedure would be confirmed or not during surgery after the weekend. No direct benefit for me, then, but the potential for developing improved and less invasive treatments for future patients with breast cancer. 

I was up for a bit of pain, although in the event there was almost none.  In fact, it was fascinating, the minor discomforts of squirming round on the bed more than outweighed by watching the dye magically solidify into identifiable grains which crept steadily along to their destination.  In duller moments we talked roses and gardens, so that the sanitised air of the consulting room filled with the lingering scents of last summer.  I was almost as excited as my team of two radiographers when the sentinel node was identified and clipped; I even got a photo of the result!  They treated me as an equal and with friendly respect, a person-centred approach which left me with an extension of that Friday feeling, and which has characterised every interaction with the unit over the last six weeks, so that I’m outraged by the recent clamouring to get on the bandwagon of rubbishing the NHS.  I think of how our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers fought for a public health system that didn’t depend on the ability to pay (my mum still can’t go to the doctor without worrying herself sicker) and of friends of mine who worked for years abroad because they wanted to share the benefits we enjoy with those who had less.  I visited clinics in Tanzania where water had to be boiled.  I remember the day we had a car crash in Mexico and were taken to a public hospital where the police watched our every move, even in the toilets (no doors), and the day shortly afterwards when my genial (private and expensive) doctor sent me away with the reassurance that my stomach cramps were ‘only wind’ just hours before I lost the baby.  A similar tale of health care (or the lack of) abroad in Friday’s Guardian from NHS chief Sir Bruce Keogh highlights just how fortunate we are.

Of course there are mistakes; in a system which employs more than 1.7 million and deals with over 1 million people every 36 hours, how couldn’t there be?  The latest news story (the closure of the children’s heart unit at Leeds Infirmary) is a troubling example but, even if the figures are correct (and Paul Taylor on ‘Rigging the Death Rate’ in the London Review of Books reminds us how misleading such statistics are likely to be), this represents a local and specific failing rather than a failure of the whole enterprise.  I think it’s criminal that stories like this one are used as a stick to beat the health service with.  Imagine how it feels to be working within the NHS, doing a good job in difficult circumstances as so many do, and waking  up to this kind of drubbing day after day!  After years in the classroom I know all about being demoralised.  I remember the horrors of Ofsted, both pre-arranged and then unannounced, and all our sleepless nights, and how we got better only at weathering inspections.  I can remember driving to school in the later years with the radio on and thinking if I hear one more report of incompetent teachers in bad schools, I won’t be able to finish this journey.  Six years after I left, I still have anxiety dreams about being a failure as a teacher.

This weekend we’re in Norfolk.  I come down early to find mum in the kitchen, bag packed, coat on over her nightie.  What are you doing here? she says.  We’re at the cottage, Mum, I say.   Oh I thought I was in someone else’s apartment and I panicked.   If I’d come down ten minutes later, would she have been wandering along the village’s main road?  We’re just about at the point where we need more help and all my dad’s BUPA payments aren’t going to save us any more than they did him.  Perhaps he got his money’s worth?  In his last weeks, though, it was the good old Derby Royal Infirmary that stepped in and looked after him, and us, as if he were a king.  Or rather, as if he and the rest of the family were really worth something just for being human.  When his wonderful consultant Dr Chakraborti arrived on the ward to see him, as he did every day, you could see my dad grow in the warmth of his regard.  Despite the cancer, the NHS gave my dad a very easy death.

Of course there’s cancer and cancer.  Mine, apparently, is ‘Grade One: favourable’.  Here’s how it goes: after a routine mammogram, I get a call-back.  There is a small shadowy area in the right breast.  After much searching, the ultrasound picks up a tiny lump, buried so deep I would never have found it.  There’s a biopsy and, a week later, the diagnosis, delivered in person by the consultant/surgeon and his team.  What happens next is explained clearly, so that I turn up for the operation feeling reasonably confident.  I queue with the others to get into the ward at 7 am.  ‘Passports?’ a joker in the line says.  Actually it’s more like a railway station.  Some are sent straight to beds; others, like me, to a waiting room.  On a wander I bump into my (‘my’!) surgeon in a knot of people in green scrubs.  He is still wearing his jacket and an interesting tie.  O hi, he says.  How are you?  A bit hectic in here this morning, but don’t worry, we’ll find a bed for you soon.  I’m not worried; again, I’m feeling like one of the team.  Everyone I meet knows who I am, where I am.  I spend the morning waiting, reading, striding to other bits of the huge hospital site for an injection and to have a guide wire inserted so that they don’t have to poke around too much to find what they’re looking for.  I make a new friend whose lump is Grade 3 – like a hard-boiled egg, she says.  She has a marvellous tattoo of a bird in a rose bush which winds its way across her hips and up the side of her body.  Shittin hell, she says when it’s her turn.  And then it’s mine.  I get to walk down and into theatre; like a grown-up, I think.

I believe this is a good thing.  Those days of being a patient, lying back and quietly suffering while things were done to you, no questions asked, are dead and buried, or should be.  We know about diet and exercise and have access to a world of information to help us stay healthy.  If you suffer from a chronic condition, it’s easy enough just to take the tablets and get lost in the system but better by far to ask for what you need, make a fuss, take some responsibility for what is, after all, your own body, your present, your future.

Behemoth and Leviathan, watercolour byWilliam Blake
 from his Illustrations of the Book of Job

The following Friday is Good Friday.  And two days later, Easter Sunday, I get to remove the dressings: two neat rows of steristrips; no pain; no swelling or infection.  All set for a complete recovery.  You might think I’m one of the lucky ones.  Of course I am, but I reckon so are all of us.  I’m sure, like me, you signed all the petitions to protect what Bruce Keogh describes as our ‘greatest social icon’.   Whilst he is dedicated to improving the service, he reminds us that, according to surveys, 90% of patients think the service they got was good or great.  Jonathan Freedland, also in Good Friday’s Guardian, suggests that the North Staffs scandal was a mark of human weakness rather than an NHS problem.  Today I feel like focusing on our strengths: if a Behemoth like the NHS can manage a wholly person-centred approach, maybe that’s a cause for celebration.  As well as something worth fighting for.

simply the best

‘World’s best restaurant serves up stomach bug to 60 diners’ (Guardian Saturday 9 March).  Not a good start to a weekend if Noma is your baby.  Even so, I don't imagine the story significantly cut the three-month wait for a reservation, and the Copenhagen team still look pretty pleased with the way things are.  I’m unlikely to see for myself in the foreseeable future: at around £300 a head with wine, it’s well beyond my reach.  I love eating out (as long as the food and company are good) and love being cooked for – but can any meal, however wonderful, really be worth that much? 

Of course it’s all a matter of personal choice.  The other evening, around Anna’s table, we gave up trying to decide whether we preferred our gnocchi with courgette and pesto or blue cheese and mascarpone (both delicious) and drifted onto our reading.  ‘What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year?’ was my question.  I’ve felt wrong-footed repeatedly by critical opinion where the superlatives jostle for supremacy and have just been disappointed yet again by the latest ‘absolute must-read’.  I don’t think this is sour grapes.  Anyway, we agreed that McEwan’s Saturday was high on our list, and we batted other big names about in an unsurprisingly disparate field: Ishiguro and Boyd, Joseph Conrad and Ann Tyler.  How subjective the whole thing is was emphasised when Anna objected to a book I’d recommended on the grounds that it made her cringe!  Well, then.

On a couple of occasions recently I’ve found myself caught up in a conversation about the best dancer.  Unlike book-based arguments, this is not a topic I enjoy.  In fact it leaves me feeling upset, almost.  This is probably not surprising: however hard I work, however well I keep my particular physical constraints at bay, I will never be up there.  Of course social tango isn’t a competition, or so we say; but if there’s a notion of best, then that must imply there’s a worst, and a whole hierarchy in between.  

So I’m drawn into wondering how we measure, what criteria we use.  It can’t be years of experience (I’m 11 years in) though perhaps experience counts for something.  A repertoire of steps?  I guess on a skills mastered basis this might be a way of quantifying what you’ve learnt, and then perhaps a basic understanding of the ‘move’ (immediately I’m back nearly twenty years with my son and his friends practising the kicks and flicks of a Power Ranger) could be further graded according to performance: Level One competent, Level Two fluent...)

I’m sure fluency must come into it somewhere.   Certainly if I’m sitting on the edge of the dance floor there’s a real pleasure in watching a dancer whose movements flow like water or ripple like silk.  Some dancers I could watch for ever and not get bored, but not always for the same aspect.  One favourite displays an enviable poise and thoughtfulness, another you could characterise as playful; grace is a big pull for me – ah, now my favourite graceful dancer knows who I mean!

Pablo Rodriguez & Noelia Hurtado

I don’t honestly know how high the appearance stakes are – there’s little to beat witnessing a wonderful performance – apart from experiencing for yourself a wonderful dance, that is.  So some of our judgement (if judge we must, and it seems we do) must rely on the experience; on how it feels.  ‘Buttery,’ John suggested once. No doubt if you’re a dancer you will have your own descriptors for that magical feeling.  For sure I know that the experience doesn’t always match the impression you might have formed from observing your partner before you take to the floor.  One of my favourite partners is someone whose first invitation I accepted with trepidation.  And of course it works the other way too. 

The biggest disappointment is usually myself, of course.  I can dance beautifully in my head.  I have a keen sense of rhythm, know a bit about the music.  Often, though, a small mistake or a minor wobble on my part will intrude on the moment, and confidence and control evaporate simultaneously; if I were a skier (god forbid) I’d be careering down an icy incline, legs flailing, heading for the nearest tree.  

So I wonder what qualities you need to make skiing an amazing experience, aside from the basics, and whether these qualities are transferable?  Something about focus, perhaps, or control, or readiness for risk?  Perhaps it's more to do with giving yourself wholly to the moment; being as well prepared as you can be, certainly, having learnt and practised, but being able now to put all that behind you, the rules, the worries about what you can or can't or how good or bad you might be, and just go for it.

If skiing is your passion, imagine that moment at the top of a slope, and double it: the anticipation! the terror! the possibility that this descent might be the most fantastic ever!  As I step onto the dance floor and into your arms, I mean to leave behind my insecurities and my judgments and trust that you will do the same.  I may not be the best dancer you have ever met but the next three minutes might, just might, be the best.

The thing about me

Last Sunday I have a visit from Peter: he’s read the first ten chapters of my novel and has some feedback for me.  Whilst I make tea he prowls the kitchen until he finds – well what on earth? his expression says.  He has a way of asking a question with a sideways list to the head which makes me smile.  What do you think, I say.  He hazards a few guesses – a honey-drizzler for someone who eats it by the vat? – and then gives up.

It’s a hot chocolate maker; a whisk, more or less.  It’s made of wood, quite light, and has a slim, turned handle.  The upper half – the whisking bit – is carved, hand-carved I think though the thing itself is machine-made, into a series of notched shapes around the central stem, so that it has a sequence of waists.  Three of the waists are encircled by a loose ring, each carved with a different pattern and held in place by the body above and below but free to spin in its orbit.  If you shake it, the thing clicks and chuckles like a rattle.  The top end is shaped like a double flower head.  Between the two sets of petals is a kind of squashed hollow orb, with a row of little eyes cut into its circumference.  I am sure the whole thing has been fashioned from a single piece of wood but, when I examine it, I can’t figure out how this final embellishment has been made. 

This morning I catch the end of a radio item they call The Thing About You: what is the most precious thing in your life, the one thing you would save if your house were on fire, the item which defines and reassures you?  A man speaks about a carved dog from a concentration camp and tells his father’s story.  I think about my house burning and think I might save this chocolate maker, which has its own odd history.  It was given to me by another Peter on another Sunday 25 years ago, in a market in Tepotzlán, up in the hills outside Mexico City.  It was a holiday weekend, I think, always an encouragement to escape from the capital, and Peter was one of my few friends with a car.  Unlike the rest of us, young teachers from the UK and Canada happy to exist on a shoestring in return for a spell away from the confines of home, Peter had another, proper job as an orthodontist.  Teaching was something he did in his spare time, when he wasn’t throwing wild parties or planning elaborate excursions.  He loved to outrage: one story has him dancing naked with his two Siamese cats; another, less happy, involved him being picked up on the street in San Angel in the early hours of one morning, very drunk, thrown in the back of a car and deposited eventually stripped of everything (clothes, wallet, shoes) apart from his underpants.  

He died some years ago after what I imagine must have been a horrid and lingering illness.  I like to remember him for his excesses, for his odd mixture of generosity and meanness.  I went to the coast with him one weekend and he stayed in the Hilton whilst I battled the cockroaches in a dormitory at the other end of town.  I hadn’t been long in the country and he enjoyed my naivety, I think, watching my reactions as we scoured the stalls for magic remedies – Tepotzlán was famous for its witches – and translating the simplest phrases into Scottish Highlands camp.  This pretty little toy cost a few pesos at most but he presented it to me formally as if it were a treasure: ‘Kate, bienvenido a Mexico – welcome to Mexico.’  

Ever since I came back to England it’s lived in a corner of the kitchen, upended in a Mexican cup, gathering dust, whilst my family of two grew to accommodate a baby and then shrank again.  In the unhinged early days of single parenthood, the chocolate-maker became a microphone we passed between us every time we heard the opening bars of Feeder’s ‘Buck Rogers’, a verse apiece – you know, ‘He’s got a brand new car, Looks like a jag-u-ar, It’s got leather seats, It’s got a CD player (player player player...)  But I don’t wanna talk about it any more.’   The chorus took the two voices, mother and son, shouting our survival into the chipped petalled mike:

I think we're gonna make it

I think we're gonna save it yeah

So don't you try and fake it

Anymore, anymore

We'll start over again

Grow ourselves new skin

Get a house in Devon

Drink cider from a lemon (lemon, lemon, lemon...)

I never knew who Buck Rogers was, and we never made it to Devon.  We’re still going, though.   And the whisk: has lost a couple of petals and I’m not sure I fancy woodworm in my hot chocolate.  It’s a good reminder, though: old friends, far-away places, someone taking the trouble to make a useful bit of kitchen equipment beautiful and a taste of the exotic – cinnamon, sugar, warm milk and dark dark chocolate. 

like love

Given the date, I feel I should have something to say about love.  In fact I have been preoccupied amongst other things with an attempt to learn more about tango music.  Really, I think I should know more by now. After all, I love it, I listen it to a lot and I've been dancing to some of the same tunes for years.  It's frustrating: I've always been quick to pick up what I've been taught but knowledge of this kind just doesn't seem to stick.  

Part of the difficulty comes, I think, from the fact that I'm addicted to words.  So anything with lyrics has instant and infinite sources of distraction: the first mention of noche or corazon and I'm lost.  Even when I think I'm listening, I'm not: in my last lesson, it was only the mention of 'the way the piano holds back' that I was aware there was a piano in the mix at all.  

So I thought, maybe a song a week.  I've chosen a long-standing favourite of mine, one which I almost always recognise, and tried to collect together what I know and find out a bit more.

I love the way it begins!  Even on the page it looks exciting, all those semi-quavers running down so insistently.  It always makes me think of rain, because one of my first memories of dancing to it is a from lesson almost two years ago, when the music was augmented by the sound of torrential rain through the open windows.  

Its origins are a puzzle, though: for some time it was classed as one of a group of ‘anonymous tangos’ based on popular songs.  The earliest recording I've found, by Orquesta Vicente Greco in1910, is just about recognizable.  Eventually (1932) its composition seemed to fall at the door of Feliciano Latasa, a Spanish pianist and violinist who settled in Rosario around the start of the twentieth century and gave his name to various tunes of various kinds but no other tangos as far I've discovered.   By now it had also acquired lyrics of a familiar sort, attributed to Carlos Pesce (who also penned El Esquinazo), and beginning with an address to the ‘old hotel of my joys and dreams’, witness to the narrator’s heartbreak at the rough hands of love. 

The hotel in question is thought to be the Hotel Victoria in Córdoba, and here’s another personal resonance for me: almost three years ago Fred and I were in Córdoba on a research trip for the novel I was writing.  We’d prebooked a hotel that proved so uninspiring when we actually saw it that we trailed the pretty city’s streets looking for an alternative.  Our arrival had coincided with some kind of public holiday, so there were crowds and market stalls and the pavements were cluttered with merchandise spread out on blankets.  The favourite seemed to be socks – calcetines – you know, the five-for-a-pound nylon variety that you would never let anywhere near a dancing foot.  We picked our way through the bargains to a grand frontage on Avenida 25 de Mayo, the Hotel Victoria itself. Unfortunately, behind the facade it was in the throes of a major rebuild.  They did offer us a room, the kind of room you would envisage, with two balconied and shuttered floor-to-ceiling windows looking onto the sock-sellers below.  Even for a romantic like me, though, the roar of the reconstruction and the layers of brickdust would have been, as the song describes, golpes de piquet, pickaxe blows (honestly!) to our poor old hearts.  We went back to Plan A.

As for the song, there appear to be getting on for 30 different versions, several by Orquesta Juan D’Arienzo (el rey del compas, the ‘king of the beat’).  As well as a driving four-beats-to-a-bar rhythm, he was famous apparently for his extravagant performance as a conductor.  According to D’Arienzo, tango is ‘above all rhythm, nerve, strength and character’.  I found one recording, possibly later, which positively romps along, whilst his 1935 standard is more measured.  Some djs favour Canaro’s version, also 1935, slower still and a real plod by comparison, but it has delicious twiddly bits on what I think is a muted trumpet that kick in half way through.  This version is best also, I think, at the hiatus that occurs two or three times in the song.  I don’t know the technical term for this, but it’s a point in the music that makes the dancer, wait, savour the moment, just for a moment –before stepping on. 

And if, like me, you really want the words, I think D’Agostino’s 1945 recording with Angel Vargas singing is the one.  Even though the sentiments are heavy, the music has at times a delightful lightness, lovely if you can capture the feeling in your dancing.  Personally I like a chance to get the measure of the song a bit, to feel my way into its nuances before moving, so I favour the Buenos Aires convention of standing around for a few bars at the start, though I know others get impatient with the delay.  Whether or not you’re a slow starter, though, the lugubrious last four lines are left to your imagination, or your memory, pickaxe blows and all.

What has all this to do with love?  According to Pesce, love leaves us with only recuerdos amargos, bitter memories.  Some lovely tunes, though. 

    

Identity Fraud

‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.                                                          

On Sunday Kaddy and I shop for a new frock for the launch of her first collection of poems, Milk Fever.  We reject all the safe choices and Kaddy goes for a lovely crepe knee-length dress in teal – apparently this is the name for the subtle greeny-blue of the cloth.  We choose it because it blends nicely with the colours of the book cover.  Kaddy likes it also because it’s different, and because it suggests the possibility of a new self: ‘I’ve never worn anything like this before,’ she says.  ‘Do you think I should wear my hair up?’

This morning I’m at the hairdresser’s.  ‘How are you?’ Steph asks.  I’m – what?  Looking forward to seeing the chemically restored real me emerging in the mirror.  At my back (I watch her reflection) another customer is trying to explain to her stylist the meaning of ‘solipsistic’.  That’s Cambridge for you – no nonsense about holidays and Christmas shopping in the gossip here.  But I’m feeling out of place.  Since returning from Argentina, I can’t find the Cambridge I loved as a dreamy twenty-something, or the person I was – or thought I was – forty years ago, or even forty days ago when the last trip began.

In fact, nothing is as it seemed.  Those we made our idols prove to have feet of something nastier than clay and the list of names of fallen heroes continues to grow.  The weird thing is, no one is surprised.  It turns out everyone knew all along.  Everybody I speak to has a Jimmy Saville story.  Today, walking back from the shops in a blustery dusk and watching the leafless giants swaying along the edge of Jesus Green, I remember a children’s television programme which taught you how to shade the trunks of trees, and think of all those fresh-faced presenters in that innocent black-and-white world.  How many more are we going to have to re-evaluate, to look at with eyes of experience and say, Well of course, I always knew something wasn’t right.

I suppose we all pretend, or try to fashion an identity that sits right with the setting, time or place.  My first memory of the Portobello Road dates from my student days, when a girl I hardly knew glanced at my oversized black sweater and Indian scarf and said ‘You look like you belong here’.  It wasn’t intended as a compliment, but I remember feeling perversely pleased.   Buenos Aires is famous for its addiction to analysis, which I guess might be about discovering the real you, and also for its reliance on cosmetic surgery.  One regular face on the tango scene there (although no more Argentinian than the rest of us) is notable for its immobility, the skin stretched to a fixed, open-mouthed grin.  It’s easy enough to distance ourselves from such obvious nips and tucks.  Still, those of us in thrall to the tango addiction squeeze our feet into exotic creations with five-inch heels, women who wouldn’t be seen dead in stilettos in the cold light of a Cambridge or Cumbrian afternoon. 

I believed in Jimmy Saville.  For longer than I should, I believed in fairies, and then god, and then the communist party.  Contrary always, or so my mother would say, I continue to defend the much accused, suggest that their good works, whatever shape they took, can still count as good, rather than be dismissed as fraudulent; or even, which finds still less favour, that those capable of a dogged attachment to evil are also capable of good.   As I hold forth, with examples, I watch the face of a friend crumple when my list of perpetrators includes one of her all-time greats.  ‘I had no idea,’ she says.  ‘I think I’ll choose not to believe it.’

At the other end of my contrary continuum, I cling to a silly belief that those closest to me are as I wish them to be: true to their word, unswervingly loyal, immutable in their regard for me.  I don’t know where that word – immutable – came from.  It’s not in my usual lexicon, but it has me scouring the bookshelves for an old paperback copy of Shelley’s poems.  I know it’s there somewhere because I remember reading his ‘Mutability’ at the funeral of a dear friend whom I loved, in my intense and erratic and ultimately faithless way, all my life.  We are ‘as clouds’, Shelley says, or ‘like forgotten lyres’: the only enduring quality we have is that we can’t stay constant.   I had forgotten that the book was a gift from this same friend.  I find his unmistakeable handwriting on the flyleaf: For being there, it says. 

I was sort of there, although I’m still disappointed by the mistakes I made, the small self-deceptions that enabled me to – well, live with myself.  In pretty much the same way, perhaps, as any abuser of the truth will construct a narrative that sanitises motivation, and helps sleep to come at night.  Being an unreliable narrator in my interior world, I’m drawn to the convention in fiction.  I’ve just devoured MJ Hyland’s wonderful Carry me down and This is how and marvelled at the way her central characters begin to learn to tell the truth about themselves, to themselves.  I’m hoping I’m haven’t left it too late.

I search YouTube for a glimpse of The Who performing ‘Who are you?’  Written by Pete Townshend (another fallen idol) and based partly on his alcoholism, the song has long been a favourite.  The video features an impossibly young Roger Daltrey and is intriguing for the evident embarrassment of the band around the business of backing vocals.  I’m particularly struck by Keith Moon who in my mind earns every adjective given to him – crazy, exuberant, destructive, creative, furious, posturing – but who here shows an endearing sense of mischief, infectious laughter.  The album, also ‘Who are you?’, was released in September 1978, three weeks before Moon’s death.

Did you have a fantastic time? Is it nice to be back? Kaddy asks.  Well, I’m not really back, I say, not really here.  Or perhaps I mean not really me.

a question of colour

Our last few days in San Telmo and the city explodes into colour.  On Avenida 9 de Julio rhe jacarandas are suddenly in flower, so the lanes of traffic speed or stall under a cerulean cloud.  The ceibo, the national tree of Argentina, has blossom which flames coral pink in the fierce spring sun.  It's so hot that we risk flip-flops, negotiating the slithery cobbles and cracked tiles and tram rails of Estados Unidos, where the young trees that line the pavements are covered in buttercup-yellow buds.  In the botanical gardens, we spot a humming-bird just feet away, a fizzing pebble of shimmering viridian suspended in mid-air and then instantly gone.  From the bus window we see a girl in shorts and huge electric-turquoise platform sandals.  I miss all those different faces, Joan says after she and Dennis move to a new area.  In Palermo, everyone is so white.

Fearing we are running out of time, we sign up for a tour with Buenos Aires Street Art.  Fast-walking, fast-talking Matt from Oxford takes us on a train to the outlying barrios of Villa Urquiza and Saavedra Park, where we spend three hours battling heat and mosquitoes (Matt rummages in his back-pack and produces a giant bottle of 'Off!' which we pass round like addicts) and marvelling at the work. The paintings are typically technicolour, intricate, elaborate, massive.  Often collaboratively done, they involve artists from various countries, most notably the Bologna artist Blu whose enormous world-within-a-baby (is it a baby?) covers the side of a building and features in his amazing animation (see his website blublu.org).  Closer to home, we watch artists at work on a new intervention round the corner on Tacuari.

The battered silver trains of the Subte have been transformed by the spray cans and rollers of the graffiti artists - some 400 out of some 550 units are painted, Matt tells us.  Although steamy, dirty and sometimes impossibly crowded, the underground system seems to work efficiently, although our friend Juan thinks differently.  At least it's cheap, I say: 2.50 pesos a journey seems like a bargain. Not for us, Juan says.  I have to rethink: five pesos a day, so 30 per week for someone working six days out of seven; about £4.  We push our way through the milling crowds on Callao.  In front of the brash storefronts, a clutch of children with a man I presume to be their dad are curled like kittens in the midday sun.  The city's rubbish collectors are on strike, so piles of stinking garbage spill into the streets.  The authorities spray the heaps with insecticide and declare a yellow alert on account of the heatwave.  If £4 a week is expensive for a successful businessman, what of the jugglers and the thieves?  Bob Dylan sings in my head: there must be some way out of here.

But of course we don't want to leave.  We buy our bottles of Malbec, dark as liquid garnet or slow-flowing blood.  We exchange contact details with new friends.  We have a final breakfast in Las Mazorcas on Peru.  How are you? I ask the lovely proprietor.  Oh fine, she says, just calorada, like everyone else in this heat.  We pay twenty pesos each for an ice cream from a different Dylan, also on Peru and surely the best ice cream in the world.  The raspberry flavour is a livid pink.  The taste, though? It transports me straight back to my great granda's garden, Francesca says.  On the way back to the apartment to collect our cases, I take a last photo of our gomero tree, and one of the empty house next door, painted by the Columbian artist Malegria to protest against homelessness.  Our driver Daniel berates us for our masses of luggage.  What's wrong with travelling light? he says.  Of course we won't all fit into his car.  When we accept his suggestion - that he take me and all the suitcases, and that the others pick up a taxi and meet us at the airport - his fury abates and he apologises for the lack of air conditioning.  As long as you have windows, I say.  Of course, he says, all the windows.  We are onto the motorway before I discover that the seat belt doesn't fasten; the windscreen is spectacularly cracked across its width.  We discuss countries of origin, surnames, tango, the heat.  When we rattle into the heavy goods lane at the first toll point and he abandons the car to help push another vehicle which has crashed into the barrier, I think of other things.  We zoom off again, features of the landscape (There's where they do the selections for the Argentine football team, Daniel says, rolling a cigarette) flashing past like rags and tatters of memory - the light blue of the national flag, the grey cat on Francesca's painted house sign (whatever happened to marmalade?), the shiny silver suit of the demo dancer the previous night at Porteño y Bailarin, that gorgeous first and last dance with Hugo.  It's all over now, Baby Blue, Dylan sings.


Not really, I suppose.  By some miracle we survive the next thirty minutes or so and the rest of the journey passes without incident.  On the way I read Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, about as far from life in Buenos Aires as you can get.  Soon we are back in Carlisle.  It's cold and very wet, and dark by half past four.  Everything works; everything seems pale by comparison.  Friends still in Buenos Aires email with news of a massive power cut which we have missed by a whisker and of the latest anti-government manifestacion in the capital the night before.  I look at the photos of the demo, think about the insecurities of life there, and the passion for change that seems to motivate many of the city's inhabitants.  Is this something we have lost in this country, or something
we have never had?  I remember the hot pink of Club Gricel's neon sign, the blaze of bougainvillea outside a pavement cafe, the kids playing football and taking drugs on the corner by the kiosk, where
the fat lady on the wall reminds us never to settle for simply existing.