Nestor

Wednesday was a peculiar day. It was the day the National Census was carried out, so we all had the day off, provided we stayed at home all day waiting for the 'censista' to turn up. In order to ensure that everyone was in the right mental shape for the exertions, all bars and restaurants were shut at midnight on Tuesday. However, one or two bars worked out a cunning way of getting around this problem by holding private parties - it was illegal for a bar to be open, but there's no problem if it's a private party in somebody's 'house'. So that's where I was until 5 or 6 am on Wednesday. It felt like a Friday night, although it was a Tuesday.

I had set the next day aside for cooking and cleaning, but naturally woke up in the afternoon. What actually woke me was a call from a colleague informing me that Nestor had died. It is hard to accurately describe the thoughts that rushed colliding into my head at that precise moment. It felt like the suspension of reality, mixed with the coincidence that everybody in the city was at home to grieve in silence. My censista turned up shortly afterward to take my details. A sample of the questions: "Do you own a fridge? A laptop? A cellphone? A landline? Can you read and write?", in that order. The Census was also declared to be 'obligatory' but 'anonymous'; how any process can actually be both is beyond me.

After responding these questions, I went to the park to meet my friend Trevor, his girlfriend and their dog. I have never seen a space so devoid of mourners. Not one in sight. Nobody was wearing black; a lot of people were wearing barely anything at all. Music, sun, alcohol, dancing... Reality was clearly still suspended. And then I returned home, switched on the tv: the Casa Rosada, silent, deserted, and the only people walking in the Plaza de Mayo are Brazilian and/or Japanese tourists who haven't read or understood the news or participated in the Census and are bemused by the lack of people in the central square in a busy capital city. This changed, of course, over time, as people returned to the streets. But nothing was open until 8 pm, so that was when the mourning began in earnest.

The President declared three days of mourning; what that means is apparently not a national holiday until Monday, as we believed at first, but flags at half-mast and a lot of wearing black. Latin American heads of state have been rolling in over the last 24 hours. The talk in the streets and in the office is about what she will do next, whether she is strong enough politically or emotionally to run again in the elections next year, or whether it's time to step down and let somebody else take control. The next few weeks will be crucial in terms of defining her decision. Vultures/sharks are circling, depending on where one is standing. Regardless of personal opinions about the man himself, it is clear that, in the last decade, he has changed Argentina forever, and it is possible that in dying he has done exactly the same thing again. We shall see.

Palermo last night was full of life. I met up with a friend in a bar to watch part of the World Series, a sport I do not understand. In the packed bar, there was not one Argentine in sight. I wonder how many of them in there knew what was going on in the outside world. For them at least, reality was and is still suspended.

People Power

As Buenos Aires approaches Spring, the weather is improving rapidly. This week has seen the temperature rarely drop below 20 degrees Celsius, remarkable when considering that officially until September 21st we are still in Winter. With the improved weather, certain unmistakably human and Argentine societal traits are becoming more apparent: girls are wearing fewer clothes, people are happier, and there are more mini-revolutions on the street on a daily basis. And, with the start of the new school and university term, several high schools and universities have been taken over by their students.

[Why doesn’t this happen in Blighty? Is it because we live in a police state where students are terrified of taking over classrooms for fear of being pelted by rubber bullets? No. And in the US, students don’t take over classrooms: they shoot each other. The Argentine version is long-term, non-violent and nationwide.]

Yesterday from the office I heard the explosions first. Mini-fireworks. Sounds like mortar fire. I looked out of the window with a weary sense of anticipation: who could it be today? The cooks? The teachers? The parents? One simply never knows. But no. It was a group of about ten people standing next to a yellow building, identified as a possible customs building, waving indecipherable flags and generally having a rather good time. It was hot, sunny – why not organize a protest?

The relentless grind of demonstration on demonstration on a daily basis is at first intriguing but quickly boring. The results are almost the same every time: nothing ever happens. I suppose the reason this doesn’t happen in the UK is that, while we exist in a democratic state and are all perfectly content to air our opinions and aware of our civil rights, protest just isn’t in our blood.

Blood.

Yesterday two events occurred to remind the people of this great city that reality, beyond the people power, is still there just behind the pantomime backdrop, waiting for its chance to re-establish the balance of power.

Someone was run over crossing the road. Or riding a bike; it wasn’t clear. What was apparent, and there for all the world to see, was the blood stain stretching from the middle of the wide and busy road all the way to the pavement. What had happened to this person was unknown; the outcome was all too evident.

And then a nightclub roof in Palermo collapsed last night. 50 people were dancing; two were killed, which isn’t really a bad return when compared with the Cromañon disaster. But it is bad enough, and real enough. Ours is a city that never sleeps.

Wars

Working for a company that is seemingly constantly at war with the local national government, even though the war has lulled to a stage of infrequent skirmishes and faraway rumblings in the middle of the night, is an interesting experience. At the same time, the government has chosen to wage a separate and much more present war with a local media conglomerate. This war is a nasty and aggressive scrap, seeing the government wield weapons of conscience and reason, although sometimes these weapons can have contradictory results. This week’s surprise assault was no exception: the government yesterday informed one of the (if not the biggest) internet service provider, part of this media empire, that in 90 days it would cease to exist. The reason? It constitutes a monopoly. The impact of this monopoly-busting action, however, is likely to play into the hands of other monopolies, some local, others very foreign. Fibertel, it must be admitted, provide a lousy internet service, but as a result of this latest action, huge swathes of people, myself included, will have to find new internet providers, overloading the competition to the point where they may not be able to cope. But points have been scored, blood has been shed, the company promised legal action and the war rumbles on.

Schizo

A friend and colleague made an interesting observation in the office the other day. We were talking about how to react in different situations, and the difference between British people and Argentines in terms of how we approach things. From her experience of Brits, she saw that we had entirely different behavioural patterns depending on the situation that we were in: we behave differently at work to how we do at home, we don’t have the same way of treating our friends as our family, we act one way if we are at dinner and quite another if we are in a bar.

Surely the same is just as true of Argentines, I said, to which she agreed, but said that the contrast between how an Argentine reacts in different social situations is barely noticeable when compared to the entirely variable behaviour of a Brit. Her conclusion was that in order to maintain a healthy balance between so many different personalities, we have to be basically schizophrenic.

On the face of it, this seems like a facile observation made from the point of view of a country where psychoanalysis is the norm. I think that she is right, that this an aspect of our national identity, if one can be defined, because we exist in so many contrasting social environments that we have to be able to vary our approach to the realities that we encounter. Our upbringing, childhood, growing experiences and education all lead us to react to things differently - but this is a human trait, surely, not a British one. I think what stands us apart is that we entirely believe, have it written into our being, that our ability to successfully express ourselves and convey meaning is inextricably linked to accurately gauging different situations. Relating to different people in different environments is the goal. In order to achieve this, we sometimes can appear a little schizo.

Gay Marriage

After a prolonged and sometimes fraught debate in the Senate, gay marriage is now all but legal in Argentina. Besides the arguments that this is a step forward for Argentina, now one of ten countries that has legalized same-sex marriage, and the only country in Latin America to have done so, the political power plays that have brought this about are also interesting, as pointed out today by The Economist.

On the one hand, CFK still has to prove that her party has power in an increasingly anti-K environment, and picking the controversial but well-supported same-sex marriage bill was a no-brainer: after the first marriages were approved by judges last year, this was always going to snowball into something bigger.

However, what I find more interesting is what this whole discussion says about the role of the Catholic Church in contemporary Argentine society; it really is in a bit of a muddle at the moment. An eroding institution at best, constantly beset by the charges that afflict Catholicism around the world, the Church is often forced to take unpopular and eventually damaging positions due to its very nature. The march of parents and their children to Congress on Tuesday, organized by the Church to demonstrate the integral family unit, came hot on the heels of violent proclamations of “the devil’s work” in Sunday masses. It also severely disrupted traffic, to the point where my taxi driver at the time dismissed them all as anti-human lunatics who should “burn in hell”.

So the Church picked the side it had to pick, and lost. Just. The vote was close, the arguments were tense; the result is undeniable. The fact is, the Church must have known it was always on to a loser, if not now then later, as it has always known ever since the debates about civil marriages, divorce, etc. A colleague today told me that he had read an article comparing the Church’s arguments against civil marriage, divorce and even female suffrage to the arguments employed recently against same-sex marriage, and said that, word-for-word, they were almost identical. Thus the Church, in what remains an officially and openly Catholic country, must face each fresh advance of progress with the same, weary acceptance of inevitability. The Church does not modernize. The Church does not debate. Therefore, the Church will always lose, bit by bit, until it is no more.

Commute 2

A few months ago I posted an entry that talked about a puddle of vomit on a bus on the daily commute and how one unfortunate lady sat in the puddle without realising. To my surprise I found myself on the exact same bus both today and yesterday, and the stain of the long dried sick remained. It suddenly occurred to me this morning, after a fairly long evening in Boedo, that perhaps this was no accident – perhaps some unidentified soul, possibly the driver himself, was marking his territory. Or maybe all the buses have the same stain. Whatever the case, the familiarity of the stain, on the routine commute, made me feel quite at home on a journey that is often long and always tedious. My gratitude pours out to you, unknown vomiter.

Pigeons

Recently, when walking on Tres Sargentos on the way back to work from lunch, I saw an elderly scruffy man with a thick matted beard and a tweed blazer staring intently behind me, who caught my eye and started behaving shiftily, squirming in his seat and looking away. It took me a second to realize what he was doing, but I saw the pigeon on the seat behind me with a surprised look on its face and turned back just in time to see the old chap hiding the laser pen in his sleeve. I then noticed the crumbs around him – so he was luring the pigeons in, and then blinding them with a laser pen. Is that what this city needs? Blind pigeons?