Chapter 2
I had never been on a flight like the one I took to Buenos Aires. There was a stop-over in Madrid for eight hours and I used it to leave the airport, go to a bar in the city, drink ten small but powerful beers and compose a frantic letter to Sarah that during the time I was writing it convinced me I could make everything all right again. I posted the letter, got on the wrong Metro line back to the airport and nearly missed the plane. When I made it just in time I was drunk, but I was not alone. For the duration of the twelve-hour flight it seemed that nearly every passenger remained standing with a beer in their hand, wandering between other groups of upright and talkative Argentines. It was like a giant pub in the sky. I can’t remember if we sat down even for take-off; it wouldn’t surprise me if we hadn’t, or if there had been barbecues sizzling in the aisles. The first half of the trip was a blur. I woke up, four hours in, sprawled across three seats, and immediately had to be sick. No one seemed surprised as I ran to the toilet with my hand over my mouth. Afterwards, I lay back down and hugged myself, crying freely but quietly, until an air hostess from the 1970s shook me and encouraged me into an upright position. We were about to land.
The taxi driver didn’t understand my painstakingly prepared phrase-book instructions. I was asking for the Avenida de Mayo, which I pronounced like –ayonnaise.
‘Que? Que?’
‘De Mayo!’
‘Que? Que?’
I pulled my piece of paper out and showed it to him. He read it and slapped me on the shoulder, spraying spit across the windscreen: ‘Avenida de Mazcho!’ And then he was off.
It was a bright sunny morning I did not belong in. The driver carried on a conversation with the radio as we sped through wide cracked roads lined with grand municipal buildings. It looked like Paris then Madrid then Milan; I couldn’t keep track but I felt like I had been here before. I began to cheer up but when I arrived at my hostel at 7 a.m. they had no idea who I was and explained to me, thankfully in English, that they were full up. That was that, then. I had done my best. I asked them to order me a taxi to the airport because I was going back to England. On hearing this, they rang around and found me a place at a sister hostel and so, another taxi ride later, I arrived at the Tango backpackers hostel in Palermo. I’m not sure how the driver knew it was the right one because I learned later that every hostel in Buenos Aires is called the Tango backpackers hostel. In the foyer was a small young man behind a reception desk. He looked up eagerly as I came through the door then looked disappointed, a look I thought was caused by my not being a woman. I felt sad for him too. Behind him was a wide bar, with fridges full of enormous bottles of lager labelled in the national blue and white. There was a music playing I had never heard before: chilled-out ambient beats and accordion solos. Electronic tango. At the time I found it quite beautiful, but I had been travelling for thirty hours and was delirious with strange emotions. I was to learn that no music but electronic tango played in the bar, for twenty-four hours, every single day of the week.
There was one private room left, a small white box just off the building’s roof terrace. It had a single bed, a clothes rail and a window almost completely obscured by an air-conditioning unit which didn’t work – a perfect monk’s cell for me to begin my penance.
I had half of my redundancy money left and had applied for an Arts Council writing grant. If that came through, I could live like this for months. I would redeem myself through hard work, honesty and self-control. Honestly.
For the first few days I kept myself to myself and didn’t explore far from the hostel. Without Sarah, I was in a state of shock, left to face head-on the reality of having lost my job and way of life. I suffered moments of vertiginous panic, but I can’t claim I spent all my time realising hard truths. It was confusing. The hard truths seemed to have nothing to do with my being here in this airy hostel lounge, sitting at a table listening to endless accordion over crisp backbeats and earnest conversations between Americans. Not that all the voices were American, nor even the loudest. There were Scandinavians, Israelis, Aussies, English, Europeans, all sorts. There were even some Latins, though they were mostly staff. Over those first few days I divided all the guests into two categories: the Kids and the Broken. Well, I had nothing in common with the Kids, with their tattoos and gym-muscles, their slender limbs and colourful clothes. They talked about mountains and beaches and marijuana. They were gap-year students, recently graduated and other idiots. I begrudged them their innocence, especially when they started to philosophise, which they did with a forthrightness that was difficult to ignore. But my greatest disdain was reserved for the inevitable moment when one of the Broken would take them seriously and offer his own opinion on the happy peasants of India. It was a point of faith for many of the Broken that there was nothing separating them from the Kids. The poor broken men (they were nearly all men). I refused to accept I was one of them in spite of the evidence. It helped that they were mostly slightly older than me, men in their mid to late thirties, fleeing lucrative careers in IT, accounting or management consultancy: lonely, dog-eyed men in checked shirts and baleful smiles looking all day for good news from Apple laptops, the very latest models, peering over the top for anyone to talk to. Looking at them, I realised that I had left a job and a life that I had loved. And so after two days of shock I could no longer bear to be around them.
I was staying in Palermo Viejo, an aggressively cool neigh-bourhood full of hipster boutiques, leafy streets and bar-lined squares where the late autumn sun dappled onto outside tables . . . all of that gloss. It would have been a wonderful place to be with Sarah. If she had been speaking to me. She had made me promise not to call her for the first two weeks and while there was still a chance she would forgive me I was determined to do whatever she told me. The nearest square to my hostel was Plaza Cortázar and I took this at first as a good omen, a perfect place to sit and read and write, to plant myself in the city’s literary soil and try to grow something. Unfortunately the right books I’d packed were completely the wrong books: translations of the Argentine masterworks I had naively assumed would help me feel at home on arrival. Borges’ gnomic, deeply un-reassuring stories made me want to weep every time I attempted them; there were times when I could not even get to the end of a story’s title. Cortázar’s supposedly read-in-any-order novel Hopscotch made me feel scared I did not know my way back to my bedroom, even when I was in my bedroom. I was too fragile and unplotted for either of them. I craved English realism to anchor me, but the books on the hostel’s shelves had been left by children and hippies and the only readable novel I could find was Bleak House by Charles Dickens, an enormous over-corrective to the Argentine canon and the worst book in the world to read while watching the sensuality of Buenos Aires streetlife pass by. Fog, soot, grotesque characters and a saintly narrator. I recognised none of this around me. The guidebook mentioned an English-language bookshop, but when I went to find it one day it had moved. Borges loves this about Buenos Aires, his imaginary city, the image of which he says is always anachronistic. I gleefully hated him and resigned myself to Bleak House.
Though I had yet to start my novel, I was nevertheless writing something: daily emails to Sarah. I should have taken more care with these. I can’t remember exactly what they said and I will never have the courage to look back at them in my sent items folder. But, hell, I know what they will have said, they will have said, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, and though I will have tried to be clever and present a compelling case for why it would have been better for her and not just me if she’d stayed, she would have seen straight through my manipulations to the real message: that I was selfish, that I was needy, that I was work. Whatever I was, I wasn’t what I had suggested I was to begin with. And so it was that after a week I received a devastating response.
Before Sarah told me that it was over between us, for ever, completely, she told me how ‘tired’ she was of my ‘silly romantic language’ that didn’t ‘begin to redeem’ my ‘excuses and lies’. I was ‘addicted’ to trying to make people ‘feel the way you
