Adventist

The lady who comes to clean my flat twice a week handed in her notice via SMS at 11:30 pm the other night. She’s a hard worker, and in the almost three years that we have been in our particular commercial partnership, she has had to put up with a lot, including hoax (but no less terrifying) kidnapping threats, living with a dog for a few months (a new experience for both of us) and a lot of cleaning up on mornings after. I have absolutely no complaints: she has been loyal and dependable but now wants to spend more time looking after her children. I wish her well.

Now the search starts for a replacement. In other cultures this might be viewed as an entirely pointless exercise: why looking for a cleaning lady when by doing so one is admitting that one cannot clean up after oneself? In Latin America, however, the opposite is the norm: one leads such busy lives that one simply cannot be expected to clean up after oneself. A little lazy, perhaps, but it has worked fine for me.

The problem is finding a person one can rely on. This is an employee, about whom one normally knows the bare minimum, who will be working in one’s house while one is at work. There is hardly ever any personal interaction: I think I saw my previous cleaning lady about ten times in person over something close to thirty months. Every month I left her payment on the kitchen table, and when I came back from work it was gone. I never saw her, but I knew when she had come: my floor was clean, my dishes washed, my clothes ready to be worn, my bed made. This is a person who exists in spaces that are to me entirely intimate and yet I never see her. Trust is therefore paramount: she is an almost total stranger and she knows more about my daily life than most of my closest friends.

One often hears tales of things going wrong with such employees. A friend of mine came home early once to find their employee going through the belongings of someone who was on holiday in the belief that because they had left the country, they wouldn’t be needing their snail shell facial cream; another had a pair of crutches disappear for a week or so only to just as mysteriously reappear; one friend became so convinced that his employee was taking money from him that he set up a hidden camera to catch her unawares.

A colleague recently told me about one of the strangest reasons I’ve heard to dismiss a cleaning lady. His had been working for him for over ten years, was reliable and cleaned very well – a total professional. Once he came home early for a doctor’s appointment, and opened the door only to walk in on a meeting of about fifteen Adventists, bibles in hand. His flat had become their meeting hall; the employee had to go. Cleaning and religion just don’t mix.

Brontosauri

Every morning I am greeted by a familiar sight that reminds me exactly what my journey to work means. I get to the street corner, the sun hits me and washes me in heat and light, and the buses rumble past. Hundreds. Each clad in its own distinctive, often garish colours. They move like a confused pack, each individual unit with its own thought-processes and desires bubbling beneath the surface, forced to follow the same path as the others by the herd mentality (otherwise known as ‘traffic’). When the light goes green, these lumbering beasts charge forward, stumbling at speed, like a pack of brontosauri thundering across a prehistoric plain towards water. These ancient beasts breathe smoke that taints the air and stains our lungs; without them, we would never get to work on time.

The late ariser or lazy commuter is sometimes forced to take a taxi for expediency’s sake. The taxis are nimble, as they must be, for they are forced to travel in the wake and very thoroughfare trodden by the larger beasts. The taxi sees things from the ground level; the bus driver cannot. They are never friends. The amount of near misses alone between these two species alone contributes to the general chaotic atmosphere in the streets of our great city. We would be lost without either of them.

This week, the government of the City of Buenos Aires, in its infinite wisdom, changed all the bus routes. It happened on a Wednesday, for reasons that are not clear. The change also coincided with the return to work of several thousand holiday-makers who had fled the punishing summer heat. In short, it was timed to cause maximum chaos, and it succeeded. Literally thousands of people headed to where they normally caught their bus home, only to find that the bus stop no longer existed. Directions were given to a new stop, which in many cases was up to five or six blocks away, and never in a straight line. The bus routes were altered completely; the commute had been permanently affected.

I waited for my particular bus, but it was clear that the people in charge hadn’t counted on a) +30 degrees in mid-summer and b) the fact that their drivers were also intensely confused by the changes. After waiting at what seemed to be an improvised bus stop but could easily have been another lane on the busiest avenue in the world, burning gently in the afternoon sun, a bus finally arrived. We climbed on, fighting our way through the already cramped space with our heads held high like divers struggling for air.

The man in charge with steering our particular dinosaur was having a tough time from the off, as we sailed past streets that used to be bus stops to be greeted by furious demands by passengers which he could only counter with ‘but it’s not a stop anymore…’ Moreover, the way he was driving and the route he was taking heavily implied that he had no idea what he was doing, or in fact was making it up as he went along – a supposition that was not removed as he drifted from the uttermost right-hand lane to the extreme left of a seriously busy avenue as if he had just learned to drive. All around one could catch glimpses of similarly confused pedestrians and bus-drivers, as the brontosauri launched into new adventures praying that they wouldn’t hit anyone or each other. Once the journey got going, the new route was actually much quicker than the old, but the great plains of rush hour Buenos Aires were briefly filled with the tuneful moans of irate motorists pounding horns, a sound that seemed as old as time.