Caras y Caretas (day 21)

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.