Now that I think about it, it could only have happened when I entered eight grade – damn, I forgot I was almost 15 :). This is a classic story in my family!

So, I had to write a short essay-type paper for English class about how I had spent my summer holidays. Like 500 words. Sounds banal and easy enough right? I was best in school at English, having spoken it since I was 3 (I grew up in Romania). In fact, I felt that this assignment was sooo banal and sooooo easy, and ultimately, so beneath me, that I decided to change its terms altogether.

Around this time, I had become majorly, and only somewhat awkwardly, infatuated with Meryl Streep, and in particular with the movie Out of Africa. I must have watched it at least 5 times.

I know I said I wouldn’t go, but I wound up at the Recoleta Cemetery last weekend by complete chance. I really wasn’t going to go visit it. Everyone just talks about its castle style crypts and about Evita’s palace-tomb, so I was already a little sick of it. To be fully honest, I’ve been especially reluctant to visit cemeteries ever since I was caught off guard by the gay cruising scene which had clearly taken over both Père Lachaise and the Abney Park cemeteries. I’m struggling with my thoughts on gay culture integrating famous cemeteries in random sex play – I can see it as a protest against fake morality, and as a form of disrespect to the families of the dead, and as an expression of free loving, albeit a bit creepy. But what I know for sure is that all the horny dudes walking around and checking me out made it difficult for me to concentrate.

So for all these reasons, I wasn’t going to go to the Recoleta Cemetery… but when I realized that the EcoBici office was closed and I wouldn’t be able to get a bike until Monday, I suddenly felt deflated. The heat was really getting to me. I had to choose between going back home and visiting the cemetery, which was literally on the next block. At least this is how my brain processed the choice. It was just too hot to come up with a third thing.

In any case, I decided I’d enjoy a lot more my English class assignment if I simply retold the Out of Africa story in first person, only that it wouldn’t be in the voice of Karen Blixen, celebrated Danish author and main character of Out of Africa; it would be in the voice of an unnamed (1st person narration) male and that most other characters also had switched genders so as to maintain a hetero-normative fabric.

Let’s not dwell here on the obvious irony of how my heightened awareness of who society expected me to appear as was perfectly matched by my complete lack of awareness of who I was. My truth at that moment was Karen’s and I had a story to tell – her/my story, which I wrote down in full detail.

And Mrs Adarov, my English teacher, I thought, would be so proud – I got into it hardcore, I must have written at least 2000 words. I really didn’t hold back. I even included the story of the injury which ultimately leads to Karen’s/my finding out that she/I suffer(s) from syphilis. Not fully understating what syphilis was – you gotta remember I was 14 – I was blunt and deliberate about it: “one morning I fell. When I saw the doctor he told me I had syphilis” were my exact words.

Thoughts and fears of death and dying are everywhere. I didn’t fully acknowledge my own fear of dying until a year or so ago. But then again, I’m ridiculously unaware of myself – some things just don’t improve with age :).

Cemeteries make people uncomfortable for many reasons, but I think it’s basically because they openly display for all to see how ultimately weak we are, and how desperate to live forever – to leave at least a stone with your name on it that says I was here.

But I really think now that my main interest in Out of Africa wasn’t Meryl Streep, or my obsessive identification with Karen Blixen, or my gender fluidity. (Although yeah, ok, that certainly played a part!) Ever since I can remember, I’ve been deeply attracted by the narratives and aesthetics of death, and sadness, melancholia. The way that Meryl played that emotional pain grabbed me and made me wonder about the depths of the soul, in a way in which my family vacation that summer – 2 beautiful weeks of driving around in Transylvania, plus some more time in the northeastern part of the country at a place called Straja, and a couple of weeks at my grandparents’ in the heart of Moldova – all this tranquil time hanging out and voyaging simply couldn’t grab me the same way.

Tombstones are really intimate artifacts – I guess they are a physical representation of how we choose to remember and celebrate a family member or how we chose to be remembered when gone, should anyone remember at all. It feels wrong to show this to the world. It feels like I’m finding out things I shouldn’t know about someone dear, or catch a glimpse by mistake of a loved one in a decrepit, unflattering pose, and I feel guilty, no I feel ashamed I was curious in the first place.

Looking back on it, I wonder what would have happened had I taken my syphilis-ridden homework to school. I'm dying (get it?) to know what Mrs Adarov's reaction would have been. At the time, I was sure I’d get praised for it. And my parents would never usually inquire about my English homework… What I didn’t expect was for everything to go belly-up because one of Mom’s best and oldest friends was visiting from abroad that same week. One of the ways in which Mom and this friend had originally bonded was through a passion for foreign languages. As it happened, Mom’s friend was an English teacher at a Norwegian high school. I honestly never knew (I don’t dare to ask :)) if it was serious concern or Mom just wanted to show off to her friend how well she brought me up and how great my English abilities were. All I know is Mom wanted my homework so her friend would read it and comment on it. I was reluctant, because I knew my parents didn’t appreciate innovative approaches to executing homework. In the end I had to show my work.

Obviously, the homework was labeled wholly inappropriate. I had to rewrite it, only this time the real, happy (and a bit boring) story of my actual holidays, and my work was double-checked. This time by Mom directly, her friend wasn't involved again. What bothered me the most, though, was that in the aftermath, no one even commented on how great my written English was or how far I was willing to go to actually enjoy my school assignments. All everyone could focus on was the syphilis.

This is Part 1 of 3 of the Recoleta Cemetery gallery. This is my confession: I didn’t have a farm in Africa, I couldn’t find Evita’s tomb, but I was here. Also, Argentine boys either have more respect or more creativity than to use the cemetery for frolicking. 

He woke up late that Wednesday. He’d been in a sour mood, which he neither denied nor accounted for, for a few days now. Something to do with small and trivial worries, he couldn’t exactly pinpoint… his normal routine of daily yoga and breathing concentration had been abruptly interrupted when he’d changed houses the previous week. His body hadn’t felt quite right since.

He ran into the art deco bathroom he shared with an accountant from Venezuela – perhaps the second most clean-cut-looking 28-year old he had ever met. He took care of urgent affairs, surveyed his face in the wide mirror, and decided he would just run to school, skipping all ablutions save a mouth rinse. The sun felt more intense that morning than in previous days. Its light felt almost material on his face when he stepped outside. The kind of warmth you only get in the morning, and it instinctually made him think of the beach. He also wasn’t fully aware when he slightly unlocked his shoulders, his body feeling thankful the humidity was still down.

The metro was full that morning, which of course he had come to expect. He didn’t really mind it. He enjoyed feeling part of the city’s rhythm. It felt cool in a very self-indulgent way. And it felt reassuring in a slightly insecure, self-doubtful way. He focused on how matter-of-fact everyone appeared, how close some of them would get to him in the crowd, the various fragrances… During these morning travels, he had caught himself staring at people’s deeply brown eyes. So unassuming, so elegant…

He got off at the last stop – the historic and government district – and walked to his school, not before stopping to get an ice-coffee and a croissant with ham and cheese (he hated gentrification, but would indulge in Starbucks like you and me).

At school he learned that in Spanish there were two ways of saying half, as in half of an apple and that both « ¿queres la mitad de esta manzana? » and « ¿queres media manzana? » were equally correct. He also learned how to say board game in Spanish and too much. He spent some time chatting up the cutest boy in school while eating his lunch. And all the while he basked in a feeling of self satisfaction, as he noticed he was the only one (in the whole group of 10 or so students) responsible enough to have made his own lunch – the rice with chicken, carrots, onions and garlic, which he had prepared the night before. He also felt reassured when he found himself as the only student in the grammar workshop (the teacher’s face visibly dropped when she saw him at 4pm asking about the difference between por and para). She quickly got her wits back and even joked towards the end of the class about how Spaniards speak a more awkward Spanish than the Porteños.

On his way home he started reading issue no 2,328 of « Caras y Caretas – La Revista de la Patria, » a small format magazine from April 2017, which he had 'borrowed' from school, and which was fully dedicated to a 30 year retrospective of the « 1977 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo: Las Mujeres que Cambiaron la Historia. » He was fascinated, and continued to read it on his terrace when he arrived home.

Nuba came closer and smelled the toes on his right foot. She then walked a bit more and submitted to her ancestral instincts to scratch the terrace’s wooden floor with her paws. The scratching noise distracted him, and he raised his head. He thought about how Nuba had no clue why she needed to sharpen its claws and that it had remained in her DNA like her upright ears and her independent spirit, since before humans domesticated her first ancestors. An awkward echo of a life in which Nuba would fend for herself and her life would be without limits.

If you want unconditional love, get a dog. If you want to know the secrets of the universe, get a cat, he had heard someone say. In 1977 a group of mothers exasperated that they couldn’t get any answers about the disappearance of their children staged a protest in Plaza de Mayo. Their hope was that the Military Junta who had assassinated their children would not be able to ignore them any longer. Their small impunity, which caught the otherwise ruthless regime by surprise in its simplicity – just a bunch of moms asking for information day after day in the main square – played a big part in bringing down the military dictatorship.

Francisco, his housemate from Chile, distracted him irrevocably from his reading with a joint, and a chat that started about shitty work mates, and never landed on any definitive subject. He felt good though. He liked Francisco, and he liked his stories, even if they didn’t coagulate into a conversational stream.

He would sit down later and write before going out to see a tango show at half past midnight. He would come back half tipsy on Fernet con Coca and fall asleep calmly focusing on his breath, and finding reassurance that both « ¿queres la mitad de esta manzana? » and « ¿queres media manzana? » were equally correct. That « juega de mesa » is board game in Spanish and that « demasiado » means too much.

this is a test > this is not a test