At Café Victoria

At Cafe Victoria, Recoleta (photo taken by a tourist at the next table)

BUENOS AIRES, April 12

It’s another week of loss and regret in Buenos Aires.

It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting at the Café Victoria across from the Recoleta cemetery and I have just resolved a drama. I noticed before I left my apartment that I didn’t have my U. S. cellphone. I tried calling it with my Argentine cell phone, but it wasn’t in the apartment. I knew what had happened. Disorganized and spacey, my mode this entire visit, I had left my phone in the coffee shop across the street. I went there and tried to call the phone again. There was no sound. I couldn’t recall the Spanish words for “Did you find my cellphone?” The shop owner thought I wanted to use a cellphone and tried to hand me his. An American man was sitting there and his Argentine girlfriend decoded the situation. The owner shrugged his shoulders. The American started singing the song from THE SOUND OF MUSIC, a song so cloying it always sets my teeth on edge, “So long, farewell…”

I went home and dialed the cell again. This time a woman answered it, “Hola.” “Hola,” I said. “Hola?” I didn’t even try Spanish “¿Hablas inglés?” She put a man on the phone and he asked me my name. We both laughed when he identified himself as Osmany, my Cuban friend who works at the café. Of all the people who would find the phone in Buenos Aires, he is the one who would be most likely to save it and return it to me without ransom or reward.

Osmany and I have grown close. Against all advice from my language advisors, we chat amiably in English each morning about a variety of subjects. He is a new father and he is married to an Argentine. He has some difficulties with the change in culture. “I want you to know my people,” he says. “We help each other. If you need something, anyone will help you because they know you will help them. It is not like here where people look at me only as a waiter and they treat me like I am…a piece of paper to be thrown aside, or something.” He misses home. “Our freedom is not the freedom just to take a trip. Our freedom is to be yourself.” Pointing to his head he says, “Our freedom is here.”

Cuba has always fascinated me. The music, the atmosphere, the food, and I have to admit it, the cigars. I want to visit. I met an American here in Buenos Aires who said he had been to Cuba some thirty times. No one gives him any trouble and the Cubans stamp a landing card, not his passport. When I mentioned this to Osmany he looked troubled and I decided to instead be one of the first wave of American tourists once the embargo is lifted. I have visions of smoking a big cigar, eating black beans and rice, taking beautiful pictures of an aging city, dancing to the rhythms of Cuban music.

We talk about the embargo and the first signs that the U. S. is considering normalizing trade. “Ojála, Ojála,” he says. “Cuba is in the perfect place to trade with both the United States and with South America.” We make plans to meet in Cuba one day where he will introduce me to his family and his people. He will show me the happiness.

I have brought my camera to the café in Recoleta. I thought I could get someone to take my picture looking writerly for this post. (see above) Three girls, probably in their early twenties, are at the table next to me and they are speaking English but in a non-American accent. I ask them to take my picture and find out they are from Australia. They have been traveling all over South America. It is their second time in Buenos Aires and they say they are “not loving it.” This surprises me since this is such a young city and from what I can see people of their age seem to make friends very easily. Their favorite city so far has been Rio de Janiero, a city that I have been reluctant to visit because of the crime, but I do not tell them the reason. “It is so beautiful. The mountains jut up from the sea and the Christ standing over the water is magnificent. The best views are from the poorest areas” I speculate that since they are from Australia that perhaps it is because Rio fronts the water. “We were very interested in the crime,” one of the girls say. “We were at a football game and we were right in the middle of a riot. You know, it was great. Australia is so bloody safe.”

I explain that perhaps the reason they don’t like Buenos Aires is because it has a bit of a sad quality. Tango music is all about loss and regret and unfulfilled love. The dance is romantic and passionate and many of the lyrics are about separation. The girls blink at me and are interested as I talk about my project, but they can’t imagine going anywhere without knowing someone or having a companion. “Don’t you get lonely?” “Of course, but that is part of the experience.” Again, interest but incomprehension. I try to explain why unfulfilled passion is the most romantic love of all, but they are from a sunny culture and aren’t old enough to understand music in a minor key. It would be difficult to explain to them why ROMEO AND JULIET is more romantic than CINDERELLA because they still think of true love always leading to happy endings.

The other night I watched the fantastically self-aware SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, in part to read the Spanish subtitles, but also because I am a sucker for the story. In one of the final scenes, Lord Wessex, Shakespeare’s rival for Gwynneth Paltrow’s Viola asks Queen Elizabeth: “How is this to end?” The Queen responds, “As stories must when love’s denied: with tears and a journey.”

As the girls leave the café to go see a football game (perhaps hoping to find another riot), I think about how strange my conversation must have seemed to them, but I have had thirty more years to love and lose and to see others experience the same process.

Somehow, the sad stories can make you feel happier. Also, as the theatre manager says to his investor in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, “Strangely enough, it all turns out well.” “How?” “I don’t know, it’s a mystery.”

A old woman shuffles by my table and spies the leavings on my plate and asks if she can have them. “Please!” I reply. She takes the rest of my hamburger bun, fries and the bacon I have rejected and scoops them into a plastic bag. As she walks off with the bag, I feel both pleased and ashamed of myself, sitting fat and happy on a Sunday afternoon, lecturing girls about life and love and loss as if I know something special, and somehow believing it will all turn out okay because I gave the rest of my high-priced lunch to someone who is hungry.

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