It was only a splinter of a second away from being a blood-fest: the 128 bus nearly took off my right hand on the corner of Salguero and Avenida Santa Fe. Inside the time-splinter I prophetically visualised my hand wrenched cleanly from the wrist, tightly pressured jets of blood shooting from the arm as the bus driver continued to roar through the avenida with my sweaty hand stuck to his windscreen. In that split-second of near bodily dismemberment I also found time to consider the form of human memory and, amid the crude honking of vehicles and shouts of ‘boludo, loco, puta madre’, I managed to construct the following question/s:
How big is a memory?
Can a memory be measured in the way that a leg of a table or an iguana can?
And all this because a girl I had never seen before was sitting down behind the panoramic window of the café on the corner, licking melted chocolate from her fingers so as not to stain the pages of a Cortazar novel. Transfixed, lost dreamily in the sensual innocence of her licking, I was transported, like a ghostly sleeper on an astral plain, away from Buenos Aires to an old house in south London many years before where I first met, in the literal sense, the girl from my dreams.
So transfixed was I, on the heaving corner of Salguero and Santa Fe, that I forgot about my outstretched arm that had been held out into the street to hail down a radio taxi. When the 128 bus nearly sliced off fingers, nails and clammy palm, as cinematic cliché informs us time slowed right down so that a second in this moment was equal to many minutes, even hours in any ‘normal’ moment. And I was left with a question that continued to grow inside my mind.
It took a self-consciously animated ‘phew’ and a shrug of the shoulders to put to rest what had just happened, or nearly happened. Brushes with mutilation and death occur as regularly on the avenues of Buenos Aires as guys checking out culos. But the question that I had framed in that moment sat patiently, toad-like, around my thoughts and interactions for the duration of that afternoon, and I resigned myself to sitting down in my apartment later on to answer the question I set myself, and to investigate what it was that prompted me to ask it.
I got back to the apartment on the eve of dusk. From the terrace the sharp, stubborn daylight craned itself over the jagged tower blocks, and the murmur of traffic eased down to a more patient bustle. There was no food in the fridge except for two empanadas de verdura and half a litre of milk, so I ordered two milanesas with some side salad from a local restaurant and, while I was waiting for delivery, I took out the alfajores from my bag and ate with them with big gulps of the remaining milk. Once the food arrived ten minutes later I opened out the windows to feel the cool air against my face and sat down on the chair in my bedroom with the plate of 7-peso food on my lap. As I finished the last few guilty pieces of milanesa, I got up from the chair and sat on my bed, kicked off my sandals and dangled my toes into the incoming breeze and began to think about the question.
What does it mean… how can you measure a memory?
Brick wall all the way. I couldn’t even see the wall. I could feel the energy field around it repelling me backwards. No, not today, it said. Go out and play, all work and no…
- Yeah yeah ok, I get the hint.
I put on a record. It was by a local Cuban band, the percussionist being one of my housemates. Martin gave me the record a few days earlier before dashing out the door to begin his long journey into the wilderness of north Uruguay, in search for images and interviews that would make up the twenty minutes of magic footage needed to complete his documentary on the pulp mill workers. As I listened to the music, recorded live a month before in a basement in the city district of Boedo, I remembered him playing the drums in the soft glow of candles on the floor, people swaying and clapping their hands, joining in on the vocals. That memory dissipated and I began to imagine him right now squeezed in between cameras and rucksacks in the back of the truck trudging along long paths into South American Nowhere, with just enough change in his pocket for a cerveza. And I wondered if, in the future, my memory of Martin would be of as he was - playing the drums in the half-lit basement or dashing through the kitchen every few days, stopping to chat briefly in his eloquent undulating tone of Spanish, delivering a mini-lecture on anarquistas and why the Clash are the most ‘Latin’ band to have come out of the UK - or would my main memory be from these fantasies of mine; trying to picture him as he could be, wandering the remote pampas and the indigenous villages, drawing people into his documented world to be cut and spliced and edited for a middle-class audience in an art house cinema 1000 miles away. For these imaginings were as vivid to me as the very interactions I had with him: I had immersed myself into the well of mythology that had historically gripped Argentina by its throat and eyeballs and pressed them together so tightly that legends were born from every squeak and cough of its inflamed mouth. How big would my memory of Martin be in the years after…?
It had been three hours of erratic sleep. In the tumble of distant street noises, I was simultaneously aware that I was lying in bed but also caught in the narrative of a dream, in which I was following the swaggering hips and wind riding curls of a voluptuous young woman through the long corridors of an art gallery. I couldn’t catch sight of the woman’s face, but there was something in her poise and motion that reminded me of someone. I walked faster, but the dream world has a habit of making you slower and everyone and everything around go faster, and I was losing ground on the woman, as she floated from room to room, painting after painting, occasionally taunting me by sitting down on a small bench facing a piece of art on the wall, and just as I was about approach her she got up again and someone else walked in front of me, or a child stood in my way… and then I had lost her as I watched helplessly through the glass doors of the gallery entrance as she walked down the steps outside, into the sunshine. But just before she disappeared from view she turned back to face me. I could just make out her features and I started running… I was running out of the entrance doors and towards the woman who was still standing facing me and…
Why did I leave my phone switched on?
It woke me up at 12.34, at the point of revelation in the dream. It was my other housemate, Julieta, calling me. She had forgotten her keys. I went downstairs to open the door in the lobby and Julieta was with her best friend Paolina. I say there were best friends because they were almost inseparable. Paolina was effectively the fourth housemate, and spent most nights in Julieta’s room. I suspected they were in fact lovers because they displayed the kind of familiarity and physical awareness of each other that only lovers share.
‘ STUUUUU, disculpame, stu, I’m so sorry, did I wake you?’ Kiss on both cheeks.
‘ No no, Julee, no te preocupes, escuchaba la musica. Paolina, como estas?’
Kiss on both cheeks. ‘Todo bien, how are you?’
‘Bien, stu, sorry, sorry we forgot our keys.’
I climbed back into bed, listening to their conversation in the kitchen. When I had greeted them, I smelled a faint trace of alcohol on their breaths, and I noticed that they had flushed cheeks and noses. They were far more giggly than normal, and were now making uncharacteristic noise as they prepared their customary night snack of tostados and mate. Slurping their mate through their dogged bombilla, I couldn’t resist interpreting their slurps and brief ‘mmm’s of enjoyment as mutually flirtatious, and a few moments later they were leaving the kitchen and going towards Julieta’s room. I shot out of bed and met them halfway in the living room.
‘Oh Stu,’ said Julieta, ‘Are you going to the museums on Saturday?’
‘The museums?’
‘Siiii, si, La Noche de los Museos.’
‘I don’t know anything about it.’
‘La Noche de los Museos, you haven’t heard of it?’ said Paolina.
‘No, what’s it all about?’ I asked.
‘All the museums in the city are free for one night,’ said Julieta,’ and they are open the whole night. And lots of fiestas at every one. It's so nice, Stu, I think it’ll be a great night for you.’
‘It's this Saturday?’
‘Si, si, este sabado.. La Noche de los Museos.’
Kisses on four cheeks, and an unexpected hug from Paolina. They shuffle across the living room and shut the bedroom door behind them, and soon I hear Julieta strum her guitar and sing a Portuguese ballad.
I strode into the kitchen and stole an orange from the fruit bowl, leaving an unnecessary note to the girls that I would replace the orange in the morning. On my way back to my room, I heard moaning from Julieta’s room. The sound was low, from the chest, and uttered in slow deliberate rhythm, each moan more pronounced and drawn out. I didn’t want them to know I was moving about so I tip-toed like some bumbling slapstick buffoon across the bare living room floor and round the corner into my room. With the door closed I could have easily shut out the sounds by playing some music, but I didn’t. The truth is I wasn’t turned on, but curious. Now they were both moaning, one higher than the other, and there was the smack of wet kisses, and an occasional creak of the mattress. The noises grew louder, and I was inside their room watching them, sitting on their bed, getting into the bed beside them, because the noises were inside my room, and visualising them was so easy; the beads of sweat gathering above their brow as their long hairs intermingled, and the flushed faces stretching in startled pleasure, and the wide, sensuous dance of their hips as their naked waists swirled around each other. In my mind, in my room, in their room, it was all so beautiful and so real, an experience extended to become more vivid and long lasting. I lay back and drew the thin blanket over my legs, with the faint rhythm of their erotic moans interspersing and then accompanying my own mantra:
La Noche de los Museos
Este sabado
La Noche de los Museos
Este sabado
Una noche para vos
La Noche
La Noche de los Museos
La Noche
Este sabado
Una noche para vos
La Noche
De
Los Museos
Will she be there…?
La Noche
I think she’ll be there…
Los Museos..
I hope she will…
La Noche de los Museos
