Chao, Turista

You know it’s a bad day when a needle is plunged into your arm and you think, "At last, today´s starting to look up."

It was a real Monday of a Monday, this one. I’m talking queues at the migration office, queues at the free clinic, ceaseless construction outside my bedroom window, and pollution so thick I could grab it.

I guess I should have prepared myself. I should have warned my little spoiled wimp of a self that the real world is dirty, ugly, and toilet paper-less. Yet I took no precautionary measures, and as such, I walked toward my 8:30 a.m. appointment at the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones brimming with optimism (yet not prepared to step into the outhouses they call baños). “It won’t take too long,” I thought. “It’s just paperwork, right?”

Some three and half hours later, my faith in a little thing called “South American time” renewed, I left the bureaucracy behind, my certificate of residence — my residencia precaria — clutched under my arm. My status officially transformed in the eyes of the law, I drank in the heavy gray air. Suddenly, I was seeing things that hadn’t caught my eye before — an overweight Argentine (with bad hair, no less); a plastic bottle caught in the putrid muck of the river; a current of lemmings marching into an IBM skyscraper.

I’d been in this physical location before, several times. Yet never had I seen the grimy underbelly that jolted me now. Bienvenidos a tu residencia precaria, I told myself, stepping over a dead pigeon.

So maybe I had held an excessively positive view of Buenos Aires. It’s possible a few perfect empanadas and dirt-cheap liters of Heineken made the real dirt less obvious. That the model-esque residents distracted me from the ordinary folk lurking behind them. It’s even likely that the pink blossoms littering the plazas so enchanted me, I simply couldn´t acknowledge the very-real litter at my feet.

Yet now, the once-pink flowers are dark mauve, their blossoms a pulpy mess staining the sidewalks. The trees are turning brown, their leaves occasionally hitting me mid-stride, jolting me anew of the early-April autumn underway. On this Monday, though, there was only an industrial mix of fog and smog. My eyebrows set in a vicious glare, I traversed Avenida Antártida, a main thoroughfare between the city´s main bus station and the rest of the country.

Flanked by the dismal outlying docks of the Río de la Plata and towering, soulless office buildings, it is perhaps the most hideous street in Buenos Aires. It also happened to be the direct route between where I was and where I had to go. So I walked down its muddy path, pretending to ignore the city sanitation crews’ whistles. No longer was I the naïve American, flattered by their attention. No longer was I even the tolerant American, acknowledging their ¨compliments¨ with a turn of the head. No, with my new official status, I had suddenly adopted the flippant nonchalance of the Argentine muchachas.

Eventually, I ended up at the cramped, one-room office of the Sanidad de Fronteras, the official site for yellow fever vaccinations — a must for anyone planning a trip to Bolivia. “Po-ay?” called the man, summoning me into the cubicle of an examining room. Thirty seconds later, I was clutching a wad of cotton to my arm and passing through the exit. There were no forms to fill out, no questions to answer. I didn’t present any insurance, nor did I pay a centavo.

Such are the benefits endowed upon those with residence in Argentina. Back again on Antártida, something akin to happiness hit me. The kind of happiness that seeps through humidity and exhaust. A tranquility thicker than the ugliness surrounding me. For, at long last, I officially belonged.

I have the paper to prove it.

At the Back of the Bus

“I was going to class when the bell rang?” said the boy, his prepubescent voice inching ever higher.
“Rung,” challenged a second boy.
“No, ‘rang,’ porque es la forma del ‘past participle,’” retorted a third.

With that, I swiveled around in my seat, exposing myself to a writhing mass of grade-schoolers. How the young Argentines, dressed in matching maroon skirts and blazers, got onto the topic of their most recent English-language lesson, I don’t know. After all, that would require me to understand their slang-ridden gibberish. All I know is that these tiny human beings, scabbed knees and all, were spending their after-school commute chatting about intricacies of the English language.

Meanwhile, I was gazing out the window at a billboard advertising some Cartoon Network show. The phrase “Me saco un moco” jumped out at me, under a drawing of a character, his finger plunged up his nostril. Even then, though the picture explicitly described the phrase at hand, my stubborn English brain lurched into place slowly and deliberately. There was nothing automatic, intuitive, or even slightly intelligent about it. As the triumphantly bilingual throng behind me moved onto a new topic, I moped, staring sulkily at the jumble of Spanish that warned me not to stick my head out the bus window.

"No voy a hablar español nunca. Voy a morir sin saber esta idioma estúpida. No hay ninguna esperanza para mí, y no hay punto en tratar de aprenderla."

And then, my forehead furrowed and my lips pursed in a snarl, I ceased my mental tirade. "Wait a second," I thought. "This stream of anger, this geyser of self-loathing, had just flooded forth in Spanish."

¡Spanish!

The thought eased the crease scarring my brow. Learning a language is one of the most impossible, virulent, terrible processes in the world. A process that catapults you into isolation and despair. So how does any stick with it? What makes them persevere? Undoubtedly, the answer lies in the tiny — and I mean tiny — moments of success. Like when I chose not to dangle my body out the bus window, not out of common sense, but because I could comprehend the warning sticker taped in front of my face. Or when I paused my spew of anger long enough to call attention to the fact that it had manifested itself in Spanish.

It didn’t get any easier after I stepped off the bus, immersed ever more in a world of unintelligible ñ’s and oddly placed accents. Improving my language skills is an achingly slow and endlessly demoralizing process. It’s an endless bus ride with confidently bilingual children; a ceaseless parade of laughingly simple cartoons I can’t understand. Yet with each ride, it gets easier.

Or, more accurately, a little less impossible.