Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [38]
The problem with youth hostels is that they don’t really want you to turn into a permanent resident. So when the Buenos Aires hostel staff chose to kick Nathan out for having overstayed their three-week limit, and we needed to go somewhere for a few days to relax, we chose nearby Uruguay. It turned out to be a little more relaxation than Nathan, at least, had sought, which is why three days later, within hours of our return to Buenos Aires, we found ourselves in a small, dimly lit underground chamber in the theater district, sitting with three groups of women who were having bachelorette parties and two groups of men who were having bachelor parties, all of us—and most especially Nathan—facing an eight-foot circular pool filled with mud and two wrestlers in thong bikinis that were also, rapidly filling with mud. Darwin probably would have done the same.
In 2005, a Uruguayan pop music star named Jorge Drexler was nominated for an Academy Award for writing a song called “Al Otro Lado del Rio” for the soundtrack of the movie The Motorcycle Diaries. When Drexler asked to sing his own song at the awards show, the producers told him he didn’t have enough star power and that they had decided the song would be better handled by Hollywood’s most recognizable Latino, Antonio Banderas. Banderas performed and Drexler ended up winning the award. His rebellious acceptance speech was to sing, very sweetly, a few lines from his song. The entire affair was huge news in Uruguay but went mostly unnoticed in the United States. A few days later, Jorge’s brother Daniel Drexler told the Wall Street Journal: “We got excited when they mentioned the word ‘Uruguay’ on The Simpsons, even though they pronounced it ‘you are gay’ and made a joke out of it.”
Uruguay may be—and I say this with the utmost affection—one of the most irrelevant countries in the world for a twenty-first-century North American. It’s not in the Middle East or Europe or Asia, it doesn’t participate in or approve of the war on terror, its environmental footprint is probably around a quarter that of Los Angeles’, its socialist leader isn’t bombastic, its two major sports are soccer and rugby, and it has no major tourist sites, ancient ruins, iconic waterfronts, famous cuisine, or (sorry, Jorge) identifiable rock stars.
“Whoever has seen Cambridgeshire, if in his mind he changes arable into pasture ground & roots out every tree, may say he has seen Monte Video,” Darwin wrote after climbing a hill near the Uruguayan capital.
Or, as Nathan said, while slinging his backpack onto a bunk bed in an empty hostel dorm room in Montevideo, “I think Uruguay needs to work on its PR.”
The hostel was a huge three-story house with room for forty-eight guests in which we appeared to be the first visitors. Nathan, having dropped his bag, scanned the room for signs of intelligent life or at least signs of something promising hedonism and, finding none, plunked down moodily on the bed.
“Well,” I said, unloading my own pack in the opposite corner of the room, “what can you really say?”
“Uruguay!” Nathan cracked, perking up briefly. “It’s not Paraguay!”
And yet Uruguay was far more like my home in California than I’d ever have imagined. Montevideo and San Francisco are almost equally distant from the equator (one north, one south), and the average temperatures were within a few degrees of each other. Both Uruguay and California had been colonized by the Spanish, who had nearly annihilated the local Indian presence (leaving the few remnants so scattered and blended by intermarriage that tracing any kind of distinct indigenous history is nearly impossible). They had won independence from Spain four years apart, Uruguay in 1828 and Mexico, which California was a part of, in 1832. Both had carved the land into ranches for wealthy veterans, who had then fought losing battles to keep immigrant squatters from further dividing it. Both had, at one time, relied almost exclusively on trade in cattle—a shorter-lived period