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.

say this city

Say this city has ten million souls
Some live in mansions, some live in holes...

W.H Auden: Refugee Blues

Auden's poem, written 70 years ago, explores the hostility felt by refugees from Nazi Germany in the country of 'welcome'.  Many inhabitants of Buenos Aires hail from elsewhere: new arrivals from Bolivia and Peru perch on the fringes of one of the bulging villas, shanty towns; almost everyone you meet has an English cousin or uncle or great-great something.  Yesterday we visited Maggie, a friend from Cumbria now on her fifth six-month stay, in her flat on Avenida Nueve de Julio.  Escaping the English winter, her summers here often seem beset by problems.  Still, she keeps coming back.  She takes us up to the 14th floor of her apartment block to look at the view.  Cars on the complex intersection above San Juan zip along like crazy toys below us.  The jumble of ugly apartment blocks and crumbling splendour spreads before us.  On a clear day, Maggie says, you can see the river, boats appearing to glide over the rooftops, occasionally a big ship from somewhere far away.  She seems to feel at home here, as we do.

The issue of Las Malvinas rumbles on, the protests in the Plaza de Majo a permanent fixture apparently.  Even so, we rarely encounter any hostility towards the 'enemy', and any mention of Inglaterra is likely to elicit an enthusiastic Que linda! The exclamation serves for almost any situation: a fine day, a milonga, a piece of music, that last dance.  Francesca is building a repertoire of lines to charm her partners between dances, a crowded dance floor como una lata de sardinas and the latest, an economical Mmm mmm with the stress on the second mmm.  In Rino's class, Fernando wraps me in his huge embrace, rubs my arms and shoulders,  and punctuates every small success with Muy bien, niña. Muy bien!  Struggling for dances in the milonga, I see Rino striding the length of the floor towards me.  Francesca, I think, or maybe Nancy.  But no, he's coming for me.  We dance to a lovely Donato set, including m favourite Sinsabor, the troubles of love.  At the finish Rino says something I don't quite catch then translates laboriously: I - love - you.  I love you too! I say.  It's true.

You wouldn't expect to find love on the Subte, I suppose, though we meet some interesting people. Last Sunday a young man with an interesting haircut and an armful of tattoos stops us on the pavement and asks for directions.  We clutch our bags warily in front of us, all those warnings echoing in our minds.  Alejandro turns out to be a web designer-cum-surfer who travels the Americas in search of available work and the best waves.  Come to Cornwall, Francesca suggests.  It would be cold, he says.  Although he lived here for six months a while back, he has forgotten all he knew about the underground system so he tags along with us.  Suddenly we are experts.  He invites us to visit him at his home in Bogotá.  His lifestyle makes it hard for him to have a girlfriend.  Pero viajo con dios, he says: I travel with god. 

Travellers on the Subte can buy just about anything: tissues, pens and pencils, a screwdriver.  The other day I encountered a man selling head torches.  One morning a young girl - twelve, thirteen maybe - gets into our carriage.  She has one arm round a baby.  The baby, stiffly upright, gazes at the passengers.  The girl moves down the aisle, stopping in front of each traveller and holding out her right hand as if for a handshake.  If you offer your own hand, you receive that street greeting of a palm-to-palm slap followed by a gentle knuckle punch. Most do.  Then she leaves a matchbox-sized pink card on your knee.  Amor is printed in a heart on one side; on the other, a few lines where you can write a message.  I return the card with a few coins.  Her smile is faint.  The baby looks away.  I wonder where she lives.

The city has a variety of undersides.  One afternoon we play at tourists and follow the guided tour of El Zanjon, a building which charts the course of San Telmo's history.  Built almost 200 years ago as a single dwelling for one of the city's wealthy families, it later became a conventillo, housing over a hundred people in 23 bedrooms.  It fell into disrepair and in the 1960s was condemned by the government.  Twenty years later it was bought by the current owner, who wanted to turn it into a restaurant.  The initial excavations uncovered first a huge cistern below ground, and then the remains of an earlier home with a lookout tower.  The old tunnels where the stream-cum-sewer had been bricked over after the yellow fever epidemic were dredged, removing tonnes of debris.  The owner abandoned the restaurant idea and began a thirty-year restoration project, turning the building and the tunnels beneath into a museum.  The tour is fascinating, taking us from wealth to poverty and back: El Zanjon is now available for hire for corporate events.  We ask how much.  Think plenty, our guide says.

A few blocks from here, holes in the ground of a different kind.   Francesca and I rediscover, eventually, the  site of the old Club Atletico, under the flyover where Paseo Colon meets Cochabamba.  In 2002 archaeologists discovered intact the basement torture centre where 1800 prisoners were 'disappeared' during the Dirty War of the 1970s.  When we found the site in 2010, we watched as people with trowels walked down the short flight of brick steps and disappeared below ground.  Parts of the excavation, now complete, had been landscaped and paved, and a memorial created; parts were still to be begun.  Two years on, we think there has been some progress, though the whole thing has an abandoned air. A cycle lane now runs along the perimeter fence.  The memorial park with its seats is firmly behind bars.  And the mention of the site has disappeared from the guidebooks.  I imagine the area being bulldozed to form the next carpark.  Francesca disagrees.  They couldn't get away with it, she says.  There would be a public outcry.  I'm not so sure.   Whilst investigations continue and the trials of the perpetrators reach their conclusion, I have the sense that this memory has been packaged and preserved elsewhere, in the elaborate monument on the other side of the city perhaps, leaving reminders like this one buried like the polluted waters below El Zanjon.

Back in our mansion, we look at the holes in the glass at the top of the building, the damp on the walls.  We hear talk of the rules of the building and government regulations which make restoration or resale difficult.  There is much chatter about politics, corruption, the economy, the difficulty of buying dollars.  Not everyone is of the same opinion.  On the day after the latest mass demonstration which stitches up the traffic for hours, we listen to an Argentinian friend dismiss with scorn the pot-banging middle classes whose anti-government feelings are rooted in a desire to avoid taxation.  The friend (who was in prison for three years during the 1970s military rule) reminds us of what the present government has done on behalf of those most in need.  Still, there is no housing benefit.  The latest 'land grab' sees around 6,000 squatters staking out a piece of land in the Parque Indoamericano, with protests from local residents torching tents and chanting racist slogans.  Nothing is straightforward in this Through the Looking Glass world.    We have only a few days left before we return to what we regard as normal.  This morning the sun is tempered by a cooling breeze.  'I LOVE this city,' our friend says, 'in all its uglinesses.'