Double Vision

"Most of the places I have gone to dance 
lead a double life"

Carlos Calvo 

Julie Taylor: Paper Tangos

From last year's apartment (Carlos Calvo 846: 1st floor) you could look out past the geraniums to a muddle of old and new.  This year we are in the same building on the second floor.  It feels a long way up.  We cling on to the narrow balcony railing and crane our necks for the same view but the angle is different, so we learn to see both at once: the street view from 2011 is overlaid with our new roofscape of concrete and tile, bits of rooftop garden and the odd line of washing.

San Telmo invites this kind of double vision. Past and present jostle for attention.  On Sunday we walked the few blocks to Puerto Madero, what might pass for the Canary Wharf of Buenos Aires.  The recently regenerated port area gleams with plate glass and polished steel.  We stop for coffee and watch the cyclists and joggers pass in the sunshine.  A young woman on roller blades glides to a halt at the lights.  The waterfront's history survives, though, in the red brick of the refurbished dock offices, the huge cranes, and the eyesore blocks of flats, dating back to the sixties perhaps, half derelict, awaiting demolition presumably .   Heading back, we stop to photograph a piece of graffiti that has appeared since our last visit.  Rather than the hastily-sprayed slogan (though there is plenty of that, voices of the otherwise voiceless, I guess) this is state-of-the-art art, huge, elaborate, often shocking or funny - like the eyes of the enormous cat on the side of a building on Peru which, since it was painted round wall-lamps, light up at night.  Street art is everywhere: along the length of a train on the Subte, across a house wall, once the home of one of San Telmo's burgeoning rich, now crumbling.  It pulls us up short, making us see the past through the filter of the present.

Yesterday we walked the length of Carlos Calvo and Estados Unidos, the sections between the multi-lane Avenida Nueve de Julio and Paseo Colon, which Francesca tells me used to be a river, with streams from San Telmo flowing into it.  We pick our way along the cobbles, slithery with persistent drizzle, and imagine the swampy land that hatched the first big yellow fever epidemic in the 1870s, claiming 10,000 lives and driving out the wealthy settlers, leaving the area to be reclaimed by the poor.  Their splendid homes became tenement buildings.   Now, poverty and wealth coexist here in a way that is never comfortable for the visitor.  On the way into the bank's  cash machines late at night, we step over a boy sleeping on the steps.  San Telmo seems poised on the middle of that seesaw between regeneration and decline.

Two encounters bring this home to us.  Pip books us into a wine tasting (http://www.vinotango.com.ar) as guests of his friend Juan, the proprietor and Juan's mum.  There are nine or ten of us, seated round a table in this beautiful shop.   In front of us, trays of cheese, a silver-coloured tub that I imagine is for the bits we don't want to swallow (in fact, we swallow everything that is put in front of us, Juan and mum included) and two gorgeous plain glass fat-bottomed decanters, into which Juan empties the most expensive reds.  We sample five wines, one white, increasing in price and body.  'We don't know that much about wines,' our hosts say modestly.  These varieties of grape are unusual for Argentina and we are to discover them together.  In between bottles, Juan sings tango.  Apparently, he studied music in New York. The penultimate wine, a Bonarda called El Enemigo, wows us all.

Around the corner although a world away, we stroll down Chile and find the fileatador at work. He looks at us without comment over his spectacles as we stumble in castellano through a request for a traditionally decorated sign for Francesca's house, then laboriously finds four chairs which he arranges at the trestle tables opposite his seat.  The tables are covered with tin cans of paint, brushes, bits of paper, blunt pencils. Almost two hours later (see Pip's blog fatguyinfabioshoes.blogspot.com for a blow-by-blow account of a similar meeting) we emerge dazed into the now dark street, having struggled in several languages through every topic from the derivation of the word hedgehog and the difference between frogs and toads to the potential benefits of nuclear power.  No website here: he hands us a carbon copy of the handwritten order.  
   
It's hard to tell whether San Telmo is on the up, the smart new bodegas and bars a sign that the patron saint of sailors will raise her to new heights, or whether it is sinking back into the swamp.  Visitors can only see the past, not the political and economic pressures which the capital and its barrios face now; so says the owner of El Zanjon, one of the oldest buildings in the area.  The blind leading the blind, Francesca says as we pass two men with white sticks navigating their way along a busy pavement.  Who knows?  Certainly this is an area that will not roll over and die quietly.  On Peru, we come upon a woman, middle-aged, respectable, lipsticking her opinion of the authorities responsible for the violent repression of academics in the 'Night of the Long Canes' (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos) onto a commemorative poster - 'hijos de puta' was her view.  In the Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers and Grandmothers still march every Thursday afternoon to commemorate those lost during the country's 'dirty war'.  As a woman with a megaphone speaks each name, the rest chorus 'Presente'; the disappeared reappear.


I'm sure there are treatments for seeing double but I think I prefer it this way.  Today we visited the Giacometti exhibition at the beautiful PROA gallery in La Boca. The artist began every day, the curator tells us, with the intention to see 'con ojos propios', with his own eyes, rather than let his perception be dulled with preconceptions.  Whilst San Telmo doesn't encourage belief in miracles* it does teach you to look up (there are wonders on every block) but to do so with care where you tread.

*(although our cleaner, Milagros, arrived yesterday)

Journey with maps

Buenos Aires October 2012: Journey with maps

We have come equipped: the guide book, the yellow-bordered tango map from the first trip, plans for various further journeys which we will never make... Pip and Maggi are heading for Tierra del Fuego in a week or so.  Meanwhile Francesca and I struggle to make it beyond the borders of San Telmo.

Part of this is the inertia that seems to absorb us each time we arrive in the city.  Is it something that emanates from the brickwork or the cobbles beneath our feet? Or something that is generated by the country’s lumbering bureaucracy? Pip has come up with the term NFBA to account for the impossibility of ever, it seems, completing a simple task.  It took John and Nancy two days (not including hours of preparation studying the formidable Guia T) to buy a SUBE card.

It’s also easy to get lost here.  Even though the city’s streets are organised on a grid, it’s hard to remember whether Chile or Defensa run parallel or at right angles to where you happen to be. Or you can find yourself walking in the opposite direction to the one you intend, so that suddenly you’re deep into an unknown neighbourhood, reluctant to get out the crumpled map and search for the right section, to identify you firmly in the eyes of passers-by as a tourist and therefore easy prey.

Parts of the city are off limits, so we are told.  They don’t actually appear at all on the tourist maps: look for Villa 21 near Barracas, for example, and you will find a blank space where Calle Luna should be.  And La Boca, its rich cultural history repackaged for the tourist trade, is part of a barrio of real material deprivation.  Stray off the central streets, you are warned, and you are in danger.  In any case the maps themselves seem out to confuse.  One guidebook has street maps orientated towards north, whilst its subte section is swivelled through 100 degrees or so.  Or perhaps it’s the other way round. In most north is pointing out somewhere towards the bottom left of the page.  The dangers, though, evaporate, or are overshadowed at least by – we struggle to pinpoint what it is – something about the way everyone here seems aware of others, us, what we might need.  ‘You can cross now,’ the old woman said as we chattered at the junction, oblivious of the green man. Or a different kind of need: ‘Hola Princesa,’ a man murmured as we passed yesterday.  I’d like to think it was directed at me.

Bus routes form an intricate jigsaw.  The rattling colectivos, coloured from a child’s palette according to line, rattle and smoke along, nudging pedestrians at crossings, squealing to a halt at the corner of a street.  There might be a pole with a sign, or a sticker on a wall, or simply a tell-tale straggle of would-be travellers to mark the stop.  The Guia itself (10 pesos, or 30 for the deluxe edition, spiral-bound) demands serious study, matching maps and number grids and route details in an elaborate through-the-looking-glass bingo. Mornington Crescent? Francesca says.

So we venture occasionally beyond the confines of our small world to a milonga on the other side of town or, as yesterday, braving Cumbrian rain, to Sarmiento and then Arenales for the compulsory shoe shopping pilgrimage.  Mostly, though, we are diverted by the everyday wonders of San Telmo: wine-tasting, sign- ordering, sun after rain and a cleaner called Milagros.

Knot

KNOT

‘He was shaky when he stepped on to the quay with his ropes.  He crouched under a streetlamp, doing and undoing a bowline knot that wouldn’t come out right.  Finally he had to recite, “Over and under and over and round and over and under and through,” a raw cadet again.’

                                                                                                               Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land  

                                                                                                               (1985)

I remember learning knots at Brownies, or Guides perhaps – though why on earth..?  Now I only recall three: the simplest granny, the essential reef knot, and the round turn and two half hitches, the last in name only.  I can make the initial loop, then I’m stuck.  I do like them, though: something about their finicky precision, their predictability, their clarity – unlike most things in life, there is a clear right and wrong.  Get it wrong, and it simply doesn’t work.  Like cat’s cradle, a single mistake leaves you with a tangle on your hands, or sends you back to the start.

Apart from the contorted little knobbles that school embroidery taught me, knots also signal mastery: a male word for what I regard, shamefully perhaps, as a male competence.  They are a part of that world of big ships and technical knowhow, engines and coordinates and hard science, which seems to me resoundingly masculine.  Yes, I know, I know: Ellen Macarthur and Amy Johnson and all my own years of dedicated feminism.  I fought for equal pay, prefer (usually) to open my own doors, will defend the right of women to box professionally.  But strong calves leaping onto the quayside to make fast my (my!) boat seem part and parcel of varnished mahogany boards and splicing the mainbrace, essentially male pursuits.

I am not entirely in awe of such skills.  There is a bar in La Trinité, on Brittany’s south coast, with a glass case of knots on the wall.  It’s a delight to while away a wet hour or two over a glass of beer while contemplating the difference between an Anchor Hitch and a Fisherman’s Bend.  But isn’t there something slightly unhinged about these uniform rows, carefully labelled like butterflies pinned out by their wings?  As quirks go, though, it is of a piece with the same small town’s award system for the annual sailing regatta: the winner in each category receives his (all the champions we saw were men) body weight in oysters and champagne, determined by his standing on one end of a plank until the crates and boxes piled on the other end of the rickety seesaw send him wobbling into the air.  Only a man could have designed such a quaint discriminator.   The opportunity for subverting the system, though, bears the stamp of the women who added the weekly shop and bunches of flowers to their men’s kilos.

Fishing undermines further my already dubious notions of gender.  Fishing flies have the intricacy and attention to minute detail that we might associate with embroidery, essentially in the popular view a female pursuit, although the needlewoman I know best is a man.  The Flyfisher’s Companion (John Buckland 1990) provides an absorbing distraction, drawing on a history that dates back to the third century AD.  The fisherman (Buckland assumes readers and practitioners alike are male) might also have been a peripatetic fly-tier complete with a travelling kit of materials and miniature tools that look as if they belong in a jeweller’s studio or a dental surgery.  Whilst artificial flies these days are likely to be made of synthetics, traditionally the fly-tier might have used fur, feathers, silk, wool and hair to imitate the real food of the fish.  Whether the finished fly is an attractor (to stimulate the fish to attack) or a deceiver (to represent a natural food form), the results are typically fine and delicate, a miracle of shimmering iridescence. 

Non-fishers will be more familiar with notions of attraction and deceit in relation to people rather than trout or salmon, and the knot has often been associated with both positive and negative in human endeavour.  Tying the knot calls to mind the marriage ceremony and probably rests in the tradition of binding together the wrists of the couple, although I rather like the suggestion that the knots represent the web of knotted string that predated the metal bed base.  The knot here symbolises commitment, a promise that the relationship is for ever.  It implies security: like the knot in a climbing harness, it keeps us safe.  But when the partnership sours, the ties that bind can become the ropes that keep us captive, an inextricable mesh of unhappiness:

               JACK    You are a pain in the neck

                              To stop you giving me a pain in the neck

                              I protect my neck by tightening my neck muscles,

                              which gives me the pain in the neck

                                             you are.

               JILL      My head aches through trying to stop you

                              giving me a headache.

                                                                                                                        R.D.Laing Knots (1970)

The natural world echoes the dichotomy.  Japanese knotweed is, according to the World Conservation Union, among the 100 worst invasive species, its spreading roots and vigorous growth crowding out other species of plant and damaging foundations, roads and buildings.  At the other extreme, the knot garden is a model of control, its neat pattern and formal arrangement containing an aromatic assortment of herbs.  If you are a birder, the word itself may well have the connotation of spectacular.  The biggest autumn high tides at Snettisham on the north-east coast of Norfolk create the phenomenon where tens of thousands of the wader that bear the name take to the skies en masse when they are crowded off the mud-flats by the incoming tide.  I experienced this with friends recently.  We got up at 4. 30am to a sky full of stars and trudged and stumbled along the side of the lagoon in a straggle of other lunatics with binoculars and telescopes.  The man behind me had driven the nine hours from Cornwall the day before, just for this event.  Like me, this was his first time.  We stood, watching the shrinking mudbank emerge in the half-light as not mud at all but a moving mass of heads, legs, beaks all scurrying in the same direction, with increasing urgency.  Now and again a flurry of dunlin whooshed across our field of vision.  And then it was happening: swirl after swirl of knot took to the air in front of us and wheeled over our heads into the lagoon. 

 

In some respects this was a modest event: a mere 30,000 probably rather than the 60,000 or 80,000 of the records, and the sun hadn’t yet made it over the horizon so we missed the jewelled effect of the best photos.  Still it was something extraordinary, lit by eos rhododaktylos, the rosy fingers of dawn, to the tune of the background bedlam of the birds cries like the half-heard chaos of a distant party.  And of course the clicking of all those cameras.