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.