Fantasmas en la casa

As we move from summer to fall in the Northern Hemisphere, it's time to think about tea, fuzzy sweaters, crisp air, and warm fires--or not, depending on your preferences.

Fun Argentine pop group Miranda! will share the moment with us--in beautiful San Carlos de Bariloche no less.

"Pero no, no, no, no, no, no ...."

Dancing with the Soon-to-Be-Behind-Bars

Disgraced former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer
salsas with tears in his eyes

That moment when you realize, nope, I'm indeed completely devoid of shame ...

That moment when you realize it might have been better not to have responded to that email from a Nigerian prince ...

That moment when you hear Mephistopheles laugh and you realize the joke's on you for eternity ...

That moment when you hear an announcer with a British accent intone, "Performing the salsa, Sean Spicer and his partner Lindsay Arnold!" and you finally realize you've died and gone to hell ... and you totally deserve it.

Poultry in motion

"Portrait of Argentine Actress Eva Duarte" (later Eva Perón)
by Annemarie Heinrich. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

So my all-things-Argentina sojourn continues. And--you're forewarned--likely will for some time.

Currently I'm reading this biography of Eva Perón, Evita: The Life of Eva Perón by Jill Hedges, which is really very good, painting a more more nuanced portrait of Evita than you might get from other sources (such as musicals), but not shirking from her stridency, score-settling, and authoritarian tendencies either.

There is lots to recommend the book--it is thoughtful, sympathetic but clear-eyed, well written and well researched. But for now I want to focus on my favorite anecdote so far, one that brings into glorious flower (or do I mean feather?) the Peróns' mid-20th-century pro-level trolling. This anecdote has both a literary connection (Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges) and a library connection (Borges worked as a librarian for a time during the Perón era and then immediately afterwards, too).

Apparently, during the Perón era, Borges made many ugly public and private statements about Eva's origins--as did many Argentinians on the right, left, and center. If you were shocked how mean people, pundits, and politicos were to Hillary Clinton as a woman in power, really, you will fall to the floor in a faint when you read stories about the vitriol directed at Eva.

Eva Perón's origins were indeed poor, murky, and humble--one of five children born out of wedlock, her mother, Juana Ibarguren, was the paramour of Juan Duarte, an Argentine landowner and rancher who had another, legal family. By all accounts, he kept Eva's family to the side and never really provided for them in a significant way, especially not after his death.

Imagine growing up like that--fatherless, shunned, hungry, treated like trash, your mother working constantly to provide for five young children. Imagine how hungry for justice, sincere kindness, and social acceptance that you would feel as an adult. 

Then imagine having to hear famed author Jorge Luis Borges, a man in the 1940s with an international literary reputation, a man of the oligarchy, claim--based on no evidence then or now--that your mother at one point ran a brothel and that you and her sisters were prostitutes in said brothel for a time.

Hedges argues that it was likely quite the opposite, that Eva's mother worked hard, overcompensated, and raised her children to be as good, clean, and proper as possible so that they would not be tarnished for life by their illegitimacy and poverty.

Borges kept telling these tales throughout his life, including (and especially) when Eva and Juan were in power in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Coincidentally, in those days Borges had a government or quasi-government job as a librarian in Buenos Aires. Of the good, the bad, and the indifferent that the Peróns did during their reign, they tended to practice "clientelism," awarding the spoils of war--i.e., government jobs--to their supporters, poor, middle class, and wealthy.

Borges was not one of those supporters, obviously. So they offered him a "promotion": A plum position as an inspector for poultry and rabbits at the Buenos Aires municipal market.

I don't know if he took the job, but he likely wasn't happy about the offer. I imagine that he thought his privilege would excuse his being a jerk but surprise! No.

I do know that there are a number of librarians I've worked with that, if I were in charge, I would promote to poultry inspector in a heartbeat. Who knows? They might be good at it, better than they were as librarians, colleagues, and human beings, but I fear incidents of salmonella and bird flu would skyrocket during their tenure, nonetheless.

All's well that ends well, I guess: When Perón was ousted, Borges became head of la Biblioteca Nacional de la Argentina, the Argentine national library. Years later, he still repeated those stories and continued to display his right-wing, oligarchic street cred as a big supporter of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Maybe a little more time in the chicken coop, stepping around and through all that chicken shit, would have adjusted Borges' attitude some. But probably not.

Poor you, poor me, poor us

Street scene, Purmamarca, Argentina

Is Argentina a poor country?

Well, as far as poverty is concerned, it may all depend on how you define it. Using the World Bank's World Development Indicators from 2018, approximately 7% of Argentina's population lives on less than $5.50 USD per day. That's compared to 1% for Canada, 2% for the US (still shockingly something like 6 to 7 million people), 21% for Brazil, 35% for Mexico, and a whopping 57% for South Africa.

However, viewed another way, according to the the CIA World Factbook (2016, 2017, et al.), 32% of the Argentine population lives below the national poverty line--compared with 9.4% for Canada, 12.3% for the US, 4.2% for Brazil, 46% for Mexico, and 16.6% for South Africa.

Say what? The numbers are all over the map (literally) and don't necessarily translate well when comparing one country to another.

***

Viewed more subjectively, Buenos Aires looks great, like a stunning, slightly funky, "exotic" capital city, every so slightly lived in. At least that's the case if you stay in Palermo, Retiro, Recoleta, downtown, and most of the city proper. (In comparison, tidy Toronto is so un-crumpled, so unlived-in, so anodyne, and quite tedious, so much so that I almost cried upon landing back home.) I'm not sure what Buenos Aires is like in the poorer, more industrial suburbs, although a ride in from the international airport in Ezeiza reveals its share of tenements--but no corrugated shacks or squatter camps, at least as far as I could tell.

If you watch the Argentine news or current affairs programs there, you see your share of people of different income levels and social classes. And inevitably, like much of the rest of the Western world, the lighter the skin, the higher the social class/economic level tends to be (although not exclusively).

Despite the prevalence of Turkish soap operas, there is at least one Argentine soap, El Marginal (which was available on Netflix at one point--but not in Canada), shown on Argentina's public TV broadcaster, that takes a very gritty look at life among the poor, prisoners, ex-cons, petty criminals, and other "marginal" people.

Farther afield, the city of Salta in northwestern Argentina feels like a rather pristine Spanish colonial city with modern conveniences. "Salta la linda" doesn't have the glamor and cash that Buenos Aires does, however. Smaller Altiplano indigenous communities like Purmamarca and Humahuaca look more "developing" with unpaved streets and adobe buildings--but the restaurants at least have wifi.

Suffice it to say that Argentina is poorer than the US and Canada but does not feel desperately poor. Nonetheless, how do you maneuver this as a tourist without looking clueless or insensitive?

I still stayed in nice hotels and ate good food, but I tried not to overdo it or be ostentatious, much as I live in North America. I shopped some, both from stores and street merchants, including those trying to get by selling dishcloths, tissues, candies, and other small items, all part of the more informal economy. Did I need dishcloths while in Argentina? Not necessarily but they did come in handy. And as allergy-prone as I am, tissues are always in season.

I generally gave some money to those on the street, when asked, same as here. The "need" in Canada is sometimes questionable--with young guys on Queen West requesting money "for their band" or street people near my building asking me if I have something "better" than the $1 or $2 coin that I offered. While in Argentina, I didn't constantly pass out cash, only if I was prepared to, able to, and felt comfortable doing so.

***

What was more challenging was knowing how to handle a situation like the one I'm about to describe.

One night for dinner in Salta, I passed by the more elegant option recommended to me by a fellow tourist, instead opting for the old and familiar--McDonald's. Hey, what can I say? I was just feeling a little homesick that night and not very adventurous, especially after my lunch of "cazuela de llama" (llama stew) earlier that day in San Antonio de los Cobres. So I kept it simple: A grilled chicken sandwich and fries, a Diet Coke, all a prelude to some vanilla soft-serve, which I'd been craving all week for some reason.

While seated at a communal table, I vaguely noticed that a young boy sat down near me. But I didn't really focus on him, as I was no doubt scrolling through my Facebook or Twitter feed or reading the news from home, with home still being the US, despite my life in Canada. The boy eventually got up and went to another table where he asked a young couple if they were going to finish their fries and if not, could he have them.

At that point, I paid attention. I hadn't seen that happen before--or at least not in a very long time, and certainly not in glamorous Palermo.

The couple generously gave their fries to him without even a second's hesitation. So I decided to do the same. It wasn't much--there weren't many left, as I'd been eating them absent-mindedly while engrossed in the access to the wider world provided by my phone. But, literally, it was the least I could do.

An image of Eva Perón, downtown Buenos Aires,
exhorting the wealthy to do more for the people of Argentina

I started to leave, making my way toward the ice cream, served at a separate counter. But then I paused. I have more resources at my disposal, I thought; I can and should do more.

But what exactly? If I give too much money, will I look ostentatious? As Americans, we have a reputation for overtipping, and sometimes this can be viewed as showing off, rather than being understood as carrying out an American habit of leaving an inflationary amount for service because we know wait staff in the US have to get by on tips rather than salary.

The boy was young, maybe 12 or 13 at most--and this made me hesitate doing more as well. Being an older man seen giving a young boy cash, would there be the perception that I was expecting something for my money, either by the others around me or the boy himself? I recalled urban legends from visiting Puerto Vallarta years ago, a city with a big gay vacation scene, that young men of unknown age might entice you as part of a sting, with the police nearby, ready to swoop in for a bribe to "help" you avoid jail time and embarrassment. This was not the same situation at all. Nevertheless, on the trip down, I'd also seen posters all over the Atlanta airport about human trafficking and the sex trade. Suddenly the topic felt very real, very present. 

I debated what to do: Give him a generous amount of cash, buy him a meal, offer him a smaller amount along with my fries, or something else entirely (up to and including walking away). I ended up making what I perceived to be the least ostentatious gesture: I gave him about $30 pesos, not even one whole Canadian dollar, my fries, and wished him well.

I'm glad I respected the boy's pride, his "space," and I'm glad I didn't do anything that would appear compromising to him, to me, or to others. But was playing it safe the best I could do? Did respecting someone's pride outweigh momentarily alleviating their very real need--hunger? Should avoiding confusion, embarrassment, and, yes, the appearance of criminality, take precedence over helping combat someone's hunger or destitution?

***

I didn't know then, and I don't know now, and I will likely never know.

I do know, though, that I skipped having any ice cream that evening. Suddenly I was no longer hungry. Instead, I felt ever so slightly more melancholy for the comforts of home.

Argentina, te quiero

Oh, don't mind me. I'm just stuck at home with an apres-trip head cold, feeling melancholy, with too much music on my hands ....