The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [4]
Apart from these visions, there was nothing particularly notable about my loneliness, or rather it was all that there was, all that was there. Go back? That was not an option either. Utopia has been defined for many as not what you go toward but what you get away from, utopia because it’s not the old life. No matter what it offered, Buenos Aires was in that sense utopia for me.
I did have enough lucidity to realize that my living situation was degrading my outlook. Cecilia, despite her dire straits, refused to accept any payment for the room I was using. This, combined with the bizarre visions the apartment was provoking in my mind, led me to set about looking for a place. From the newspaper I contacted a real estate agency and was assigned to an agent named Olga.
Olga was Bolivian and had a face that looked like it had been carved onto a coin, large olive-colored eyes with visible lids, a straight nose, her long light brown hair tinged with gold pulled back in a ponytail tight from her face. She took me around in taxis, was quick and efficient and her English was good.
“Argentines say this is the widest avenue in the world,” Olga said as we crossed the 9 de Julio. “But Argentines say a lot of things, like that they invented the artificial heart.”
The taxi driver turned and said something to her. She shot back a long line of heated invectives that I couldn’t catch.
“See,” she said, “he hears my accent and thinks because I’m Bolivian he can say anything to me. They’re all like that.”
“Who?”
“Argentines. They think they’re better than the rest of us.”
The taxi driver laughed, enjoying her spitfire behavior.
As we drove around, she told me that she was married but didn’t live with her husband anymore, though they almost always had dinner together. “No, no,” she said, “he’s not someone you live with.” She had a son, twenty years old now. She was a businesswoman. That was her identity and she was proud of it. “My son always gives me presents for a businesswoman, pens, leather cases.”
I liked Olga but one after another of the apartments she took me to gave me an appalling sense of suffocation. They were fluffy white boxes of varying sizes, all in the central area, Barrio Norte and downtown. Even the apartments with more than one room felt close and small, the appliances brand new, the floorboards painted.
Our search went on for a week or so.
“There’s a last apartment if you actually want to see it,” Olga said one day. “I don’t like the place at all. I hate old buildings. I hate everything old. I want everything to be new, new, new.”
We crossed the 9 de Julio again and stopped in front of a building with a large door, incongruous with all the doors around, on Carlos Pellegrini Street.
“I don’t like this place,” Olga said again as we stepped inside, both pressing open the heavy door.
There was a wide passageway with a tiled floor. The far wall didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling, leaving an open-air space. Later, I saw that the hallways on all the floors were like this, partly open to the air. Flowers and leaves would fall inside. It would rain on the floor.
“This place is abandoned,” Olga said. “I never see anyone here.”
We walked up the wide dim staircase to the second floor. The door of the apartment resisted, as if it hadn’t been opened for a while. Inside, the place had a kept, cut-off air. It was silent. Vines lined the windows outside. There was a chaise lounge covered in worn purple velvet. You felt in your own world, cut off from the rest.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Olga said.
But there was something about it I liked.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, exiled in Buenos Aires because of World War II, and then staying on, wrote about the seediness of the ports. In passages of his diaries, where the sense suddenly darkens, blurs, we enter a vacuum, he talks about his activity in the ports, these meetings with young men. It’s the youth of Buenos Aires that intrigued