I hope the ten post cards I sent will get to their destination. The Internet Cafe I use, seconds as a post office. Five of the first six days I was in BA were holidays. Good Thursday and Friday, Saturday and Easter Sunday, and Monday, the 24th of March, so I couldn´t mail the post cards I´d written the second day. This morning was finally a regular work day. The Internet clerk looked at the post card addresses to Israel and the USA. He said, “4 pesos each that will be 40 pesos.” I stood there waiting for the estampillas; he stood there holding the post cards and repeating “quarentas pesos”. I gave him the money for which he thanked me holding the cards and not putting stamps on them. In all the other countries, they couldn´t wait to sell you the stamps and made sure you did the licking. All I could do was smile and think: why wouldn´t he mail my post cards? What is he going to do? Pocket the $40 and wallpaper his garage with them? He must have a special person in the back that has the job because he or she has an enormous tongue and lots of saliva and is willing to live on minimum wages.
If you ever visit BA and are at or near San Martin Plaza, at the end of Avenida de Santa Fe, don´t fail to go into the American Express office under any pretenses and then ask where the baño is. It was funny to me, but you gotta do it for it to work. My meanderings finally took me to Modero Diques (boardwalks) along an ecological garden and some restaurants that were converted from factories. I had been told about a nice museum in the Edificio Catolica de BA, a Catholic University at the end of the diques. The receptionist apologetically explained that the museum was to have been closed Monday, but since it was a national holiday, they´d opened it, so they had to close it Tuesday. It sounds like Miller´s book, Catch 22, doesn´t it? But she asked the guard to see if a teacher explaining the drawings to a class of children would mind if I walked around. These two lovely people let me in. The show was by several painters, unknown to me; the general theme was about active working life in Argentina, all charcoal etchings beautifully representing working life.
There´s nothing like being in a country to get a sense of the people, as dangerous as one encounter can be when you generalize from it. Two days earlier I had lunch in a modest restaurant. A family of four were eating across the way. The younger of two teenage sons began carousing with his brother and as he got louder, their mother gestured for him to lower his voice. He did. I concluded that Argentinians as a rule respect other people´s privacy in a restaurant. The proper middle class behavior until the next day when another family of three had a bit younger child screaming at the top of his lungs in a rather chic and expensive restaurant and neither parent did anything about it. I guess the only thing I learned from those two instances is that you really can´t generalize and feel you´ve learned something about “a” people, and that people are pretty much the same all over with very slight variations.
The two teenage girls walking out of a Maxikiosko with ice cream they´d just bought discarding the plastic cover and disdainfully flipping it over their shoulder in what appeared a contemptuous gesture (this was one of the richest looking neighborhoods) made me think that whatever they´d learned home or in school (it was 3pm) did not include that the street belongs to them also.
