Buenos Aires

Hey Dad,

I made it to Buenos Aires.

It’s a real city. Clean, impressive, beautiful architecture. It feels like Italy in the upside down world. A parallel universe where Italian people had an alternate future. They eat pizza, pasta, and milanesas and the streets look like Paris or New York. They speak a Spanish that sounds like Italian and they even do the “fugeddaboutit” hand thing.

I’ve been on the road for so long, my mind has begun to play tricks on me. Last night I was riding down Av. 9 de Julio, looking up at the big white obelisk against the black night sky. For a moment, I thought I was in DC. But no, I am here. At the end of the earth.

I am here because of you. Because of the Argentinian movies you showed me. I remember when we got actual DVDs from Netflix delivered to the house in Arlington. The floppy waxed plastic envelopes with some esoteric titled etched on it. We’d sit in the basement and go through this week’s haul together. It felt like traveling from the basement. We’d follow some con men through the streets of Buenos Aires or drive through the otherworldly highways of Salta. Ever since we saw those movies, I’ve wanted to come here. When you were sick you said this was the one country you had always wanted to visit.

I rewatched El Secreto de Sus Ojos the other night. Ricardo Darín (your guy) is a retired detective, haunted by an unsolved murder from earlier in his career. There’s one scene where he and his partner go to the Boca stadium to search for the killer. It starts with an aerial shot from above, pans across Buenos Aires, then the camera swoops in, landing on Darín and his assistant Sandoval in the middle of the stands, shoving through the crowd, beer spilling on their starchy suits. Suddenly, they lock eyes with the killer just as Boca scores and chaos ensues. They chase him through the bowels of the stadium, back and forth through bathrooms and hallways. Finally, the killer jumps over a wall and plummets twenty feet, breaking his ankle. He limps out onto the field and collapses. It has to be one of the best shots I’ve ever seen. Somehow, fifteen years later, it still feels familiar. I remember when we watched it and you grabbed the remote and paused it to add your commentary, “I mean, wow!”

I’ve been getting signs from the universe down here. I was reading a novel about a man in Switzerland who takes his drugged-up mother on a road trip to give her money away. In the final scene they visit the grave of Jorge Luis Borges — the Argentine author. After I finished the book I went for a walk, pausing after a few blocks, I looked up and saw a street sign half lit up in the dark. Borges street.

I walked through the cemetery and saw the grave of Adolfo Bioy Caseres, another author. Then I went to El Ateneo, a massive bookstore in an old theater and bought his book. Borges wrote the intro. Then, I get home and open my phone to play some music. Right in Spotify, there’s a podcast in Portuguese about the book I just bought.

There’s an older lady in my Spanish class, pretty with blue eyes and wiry white hair. She’s traveling alone through Latin America too. I was telling her some story about Portugal and she leaned back and said, “Wow Michael, you’re very well traveled!”

I wonder, is that a good thing?

Another one of my friends got engaged this weekend. It seems like everyone I know now is either married or engaged. I don’t want to have wasted years searching for this “perfect place,” only to have missed out on crucial years where you just pick somewhere and move on with it.

My friend Natalie chided me on the phone last week: “Why do you have these fantasies? You will never be Argentinian or Portuguese. You’re American!” Maybe she’s right. I don’t like eating dinner at 10pm and I am pretty sure I don’t like dancing. I definitely do like fried chicken and chocolate ice cream. So, what does that make me?

I love Buenos Aires.

There’s something about being in a big city that makes me feel alive. It feels like you’re a part of something bigger. I used to get that feeling in Brooklyn, standing on a friend’s roof smoking a cig, looking at the skyline. There’s a Porches lyric where he sings, “Today I was good at the city.” It makes sense. The city is big, it’s mean, it doesn’t care about you. Just living your life is a small act of defiance. Taking the subway, riding your bike, buying groceries. These things demonstrate you can tame the beast in some small way.

I get that feeling here. Going to the gym, buying pasta from some nonna, riding the Subte. These are the parts of travel I have come to love, just being somewhere, not doing much, being normal.

I called Mom the other day and I picked up the phone to call you next.

On the last day of Spanish class, the lady said, “I’m here because I just can’t take the loneliness.”

It’s been almost six months since I left Portugal. I’ve been in Virginia, Mexico, Colombia, and now here, alone. What good are the memories if there’s no one to share them with?

Fall is coming. It’s chilly in the evenings. You need a jacket. Some people travel so they can have two springs. For me it will have been two falls. It’s my favorite season. I know it was yours too.

I went to a famous lunch counter the other day. It was built in the 1920s and has huge wood-paneled mirrors lining the walls. Buenos Aires businessmen have been coming here for over a century. When your order is ready they mumble over the intercom and slide your overflowing plate down the scuffed glass countertops, etched by thousands of skidding plates over the years. Your sandwich barrels toward you, bouncing over the wooden ridges, dropping fries in its wake.

As I walked in I caught a glance of the sign with the daily specials. There was a drawing of this giant sandwich with a red sauce dripping out, majestic and delicious.

I looked closer.

Sándwich de albóndigas–I found it, your meatball sub.

You would have loved it here, Dad.