Los Perros de Piriápolis
In 1890 a man named Francisco Piria founded a resort town at an auspicious location a hundred kilometers east from Montevideo. The coastline juts out there into the Rio de la Plata, and on either side are long, curving beaches. Just inland is a roundish green hill, Cerro San Antonio, and ten kilometers inland is Cerro Pan de Azucar, a hill that looks like a mountain. Piria was an architect and developer who happened to also be an alchemist. Naturally, the vision for the town that bears his name was to harness “bioenergia” and provide its visitors with spiritual well-being. He laid out a grid plan, built a sturdy promenade above the beach, and a grand old hotel which at one time was the largest on the continent. Until the rise of Punta del Este forty kilometers further up the coast, I think this may have been the beach destination for the fancy people of Argentina and Brazil. The past forty years seem to have mostly passed it by in favor of its glitzy neighbor, and it now feels quaint.
Last Saturday I took a day trip here with my friends Clint and Lili, who were visiting from Perú. We did not climb Cerro Pan de Azucar as we intended, but we did meet Capybaras, or Carpinchos as they call them here, visit Piria’s castle home, walk the promenade, and sit on the beach and drink yerba mate on a golden afternoon. It was enough for me to say that I hadn’t seen enough of Piriápolis.
A few days ago I decided it was time to leave Montevideo, as I was not really getting anywhere and rapidly burning through what little money I have left. I think I am headed back to Argentina. There are a lot more potential opportunities for jobs, the cost of living is lower, and it is a warmer, friendlier culture — an important factor for a person who arrives as a stranger. But Argentina is a very big country. The only step that’s certain is to take the boat back across to Buenos Aires, and that happens to be a very expensive place, though less than Montevideo. I’m also not quite ready to leave Uruguay; after such a long journey to get here, I feel like leaving after three weeks might be rash. I needed a cheaper place to wait things out until my direction becomes more clear, and Piriápolis was beckoning.
I landed in this town yesterday for the second time, late in the afternoon. From the bus terminal I walked a couple kilometers away from the beach, to the outskirts where the streets turn from pavement to gravel and dusty dirt. I had booked a site camping at a hostel on the edge of town, the single cheapest lodging option I could find. It turned out to be a little family house. The front couple rooms comprise the “hostel” and a patch of ground just big enough for a tent in the front yard has been roughly flattened and called “camping”.
I didn’t really want to sleep in this family’s meager front yard, right on the street. But after walking all this way bearing the ongoing burden of my bags, I wasn’t going to seek out somewhere else. Karol, a woman in her thirties who runs the place named after her eight-month-old son, was friendly. She showed me around the modest accommodations and at least made me feel welcome. Sometimes that goes a long way. The camp-spot was mostly shaded by some palms and banana trees; there’s a kitchen I can use, and it is certainly cheap, at least for Uruguay. Resigned to my fate, I cleared the larger rocks from the campsite and pitched my tent. There is no wifi or toilet seat, but I suppose you get what you pay for.
After setting up I walked back down through the town, without the distractions of bags, finding a place, or uphill walking. Piriápolis is charming, and has a sleepy wind-sun-swept feeling, all the colors slightly bleached. Could almost be New England, like a Latin American version of Maine. All the way down, past the residential district, to blocks of vacation houses, mostly empty, to the restaurants and hotels along the waterfront, to the beach. I found a good place to sit on some old concrete steps, weathered smooth by age and elements. This is my daily Uruguay ritual, taking my mate by the Rio de la Plata, while the sun sets. To sip deeply of that bitter green elixir which gives me the strength to carry on through all these days and nights in unknown parts.
A dozen street dogs came out to stride and sprint on the beach, to see about the end of this day. For perros callejeros, they seemed relatively well-kept and fed. It’s one way to judge the wealth of a place, the condition of the street dogs. After a while, one of them with an olive-colored coat came right up and lay down on the steps beside me. When I scratched him behind the ears, he laid his head on my knee and went to sleep. A very sweet boy. He stayed there for almost an hour, and I took it as a sign of welcome from the place. I had more or less decided to adopt him, when he sensed that his pack was moving on, and in an instant ran off without looking back.
On the walk up I started singing a new song — or rather it kind of sang itself. I was very much mired in the moment, being the third time I’d walked this mile since late afternoon. My thought was that one step in front of the other is how you get home. There was no one around on this block, so I started to sing, slow and plaintive, though not too loud. “One foot in front of the other, is all I can do.” After a few times through, it suddenly found its legs, picked up the pace double time and became about everything. Inequality and Trump and Police Brutality, Immigration and Climate Change, how we deal with all that. “One foot in front of the other, may our steps be true.” It worked, at least towards my initial goal of getting me through a chilly walk. Sang myself right home; home being a relative term, in this case being the place where I was sleeping in a tent in the yard.
While I waited for the family to finish their dinner so I could cook mine, I sat on the little covered patio out front and played guitar. I was taking that melody from my head I’d been singing and translating it into actual music, chords and notes. This is a difficult juncture for an embryonic song — in order to figure out the music, you have to hear the song in your head, but as soon as you start playing it’s very easy for the original melody to get drowned out. It’s like what I’ve heard about memories in a neuroscience sense, that every time you remember a memory, you alter it a little bit, like the grooves on a record getting worn with use. I think I managed to get the song down without too much wear and tear, and I just might have a keeper, a real song that sticks. It strikes me that this is a good place for music; perhaps it’s the bioenergia after all.
By nine o’clock, the kitchen was free, and I cooked some things I picked up at markets on the walk back. Rotini pasta with chorizo, string beans, tomato and onions. Ate it sitting on the porch accompanied by Traci, a gigantic, good-natured if intense German Shepherd right at my thigh, watching me eat. Well, her mouth was at thigh level, but her ears went up almost to my shoulder. It was a little disconcerting, as her head is bigger than mine. My commands in various languages elicited no response from her. I didn’t want to push her away, so there she stayed. To her credit, she didn’t eat my dinner, or me for that matter.
With no wifi, there is a lot of time to think. My mind drifted to the play my Dad is writing, about an assisted living home for the elderly and the people who work there. To the novella my friend Eric has finished but feels negatively about, the story of a sort of mentally challenged American boy with a significantly dysfunctional family. A vacation to Italy goes horribly wrong and the boy becomes some kind of demonic prince. Both of them are comedies. Both are good, but weird. Weird in a good way, but still, unquestionably, weird. The endings are problematic. My Dad’s play ends with a multi-song musical medley where the staff, who are almost all people of color, perform the history of the United States for a resident’s hundredth birthday party. Their performance is very much from a white-person’s history perspective, with pilgrims and Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and so forth, but it’s not clear to me that it’s actually any commentary on that history. Eric’s novella ends, if I remember correctly, with the anti-hero kid being frozen underground into some magical forever trance which maintains the equilibrium of the dying little Italian town above.
It was a rough night of sleep that night in the yard. A very jarring strobe effect was created by a streetlight that kept switching on and off, above palms swaying in the wind. There were so many perros barking and barking, and a steady stream of moto traffic. Many of the motos seemed to stop right near my tent; I realized at some point that they were all going to the house next door, which was probably only fifteen feet away.
✦✦
Sitting with my back against the sea wall just below the promenade, as much out of the wind as I can manage while still being on the beach. The end of another day is marked by the dramatic vertical exit of the sun. There is not another person as far as I can see in either direction, only the seagulls and me. Even the street dogs have thought better of coming out tonight. It is windy and cold and damp, and generally gray except for the colors of sunset, and those are muted. We are definitively in Fall here at thirty four degrees south latitude.
The plan today was to climb Cerro Pan de Azucar, but late last night the weather broke into a cold rain. The morning was drizzle with dense cloud cover, clearly not a good day for a hike. I took the morning slow, slept for as long as I could in the tent, then took shelter on the porch to drink some tea and write in my journal.
Around midday I was heading down to the main part of town, with my destination the Casa de Cultura, which among other things houses the library. Along the way, I was bitten by a dog. Not so bad, not enough to break the skin, but it was plenty disturbing. A couple blocks from where I’m staying, I passed by a corner house where the unfenced dogs have been very clear about their feelings towards me. This time they were bolder, and came charging out of the yard shrieking, with mean ugly dog faces, all flashing teeth.
While I was yelling “No!” at two of them confronting me from the front, the third, a little weaselly medium-sized dog, snuck around behind and bit down on my calf. Hard. Of all the crazy dogs I’ve met in Latin America, this was the first to close its teeth on my body. I jumped forward and it lost its grip but was still lunging at me, so I kicked at it hard and it leaped back. Now the other two were closing in from behind, one a bigger dog. This was terrifying. I spotted a good-sized rock, took a desperate swinging kick to give myself space and grabbed it. Praise God.
Dogs understand a rock in hand perfectly well, and they all backed up on their heels, still staccato machine-gun barking, while I backed away, faking like I was gonna throw. I didn’t turn my back on them for a block; even after I was out of sight I could still hear them. The adrenaline was flowing for a good half hour. Now every time I leave the hostel gate, the first thing I do is look for a rock.
By the time I made it down to the town center I had mostly calmed down, and proceeded to camp out in the library for most of the day. I wrote a mass email updating friends and family on my situation, confessing that after coming all this way to Montevideo, I don’t think I’m actually going to live there. Maybe no one will be surprised. I also included a request for any kind of work that I might be able to do remotely. Writing, editing, something like that. With no sign of a job on the horizon and diminishing funds, it’s time to humble myself and put out some messages in bottles.
Put some time in on my writing project at the moment, a blog chapter about the border crossing from Colombia to Ecuador along with ten thousand Venezolanos. I’ve been working on it for a few weeks. For their sake I feel obligated to attempt to do justice to how insane that situation was. To give some reflection of the dignity and humanity they maintain in the face of being exiles out on the face of the earth. Out of everything I’ve witnessed and written about on this journey, this is something that is real, and worth telling about.
That a country on the verge of the first world could absolutely break down, so that millions of people, by some estimates twenty percent of the country, would find themselves dispossessed and without enough food. People from all walks of life except the very rich, traveling for weeks with only the things they could carry, their currency worthless. Taking buses across the continent, sleeping at border stations and bus terminals, heading for countries whose people don’t want more Venezuelan immigrants. And all the while, the vast majority remain decent, kind, even generous humans. I don’t imagine that my countryfolk would fare half as well.
In late afternoon I ate my lunch, a tuna sandwich I’d made in the morning, sitting on the steps of the building. It had stopped raining but the ground was still wet; next to a trash can I found a dry cardboard box and sat on that. School had just gotten out, so there were streams of kids and teenagers walking by, many on their way to a rec center next door, others dallying and congregating in a vacant plaza/park across the street. Some of them would check me out with skeptical looks, and I saw myself as they saw me. Some old guy with a grey beard hanging around in the off-season, clearly not from around here, sitting on a cardboard box on the steps of the public library, eating a sandwich. I probably looked homeless, and really I’m not so far from it. I’m camping in someone’s yard on the edge of town, am very close to running out of pesos, and today I was bitten by a dog.
A humble beginning for the third leg of my migration. The first leg was ten months from the northern border of Mexico to Arequipa, Péru; the second, twenty-two days through Chile and Argentina to Uruguay. Not only am I lacking in resources, I don’t even know where I’m going. Although for the moment I have an eastern trajectory, up the coast towards Brazil, I know I’m not really going that way. It’s only two hundred fifty kilometers from here to the frontera, but there’s a visa entry fee of a hundred and sixty dollars, and obviously they speak an entirely different language. I’m still working on Spanish; the prospect of starting with Portuguese at this point is a bridge too far.
I am as directionless as I’ve been in years. All along, however things were at the moment, at least I knew I was going to Uruguay. And I always assumed that meant Montevideo. Now, on the other side of that, I have nowhere to get to and no schedule, with the only limiting factors being money and my energies. Here in Piriápolis I’m spending less than I was in Montevideo, mainly on housing, so at this rate I still have eleven days until my money runs out. I am just out in the world somewhere, making my way, trying to find where I’m meant to be, just like everyone else. Except different. Since I started writing, I have been passed on this cold beach by a couple walking their dog, then two street dogs chasing each other, though all of them have long since gone. It is nearly dark and time for me to go see about some dinner.
✦✦
Today, my third in Piriápolis, I accomplished at last Cerro Pan de Azucar, the third highest peak in Uruguay at three hundred eighty nine meters. I had hoped to climb it last Saturday, but Clint had only brought flip flops, and if we had scaled this massif we wouldn’t have had time for our idyllic mate on the beach. Then yesterday it rained. But in mid-morning I walked down to the terminal, caught the local bus and got off at the foot of sugar bread mountain.
Of course first there was a requisite stop at La Reserva de Fauna to visit the Carpinchos. They remain endearing with their stiff walk on webbed feet, and relaxed disposition. During their program of casual grazing punctuated by frequent rests, some of them would look up at me at the fence and make eye contact. It was a searching and inquisitive kind of look — “what kind of creature are you?” and then they’d go back to their munching of grasses.
I did see my first glimpses of unrest in the Carpincho kingdom. Several times I witnessed the bigger ones grunt and feint at medium sized animals who were grazing too close to their feeding area. So all is not rose-colored glasses for the juvenile carpincho, though the very young do appear to be exempt from these policies. To be fair, they are in an enclosure in a wildlife reserve — I can’t expect them to be perfect in every single way.
The emus and miniature country deer didn’t hold the same fascination for me, and I passed through their areas relatively quickly. At the foot of the path up the mountain, by a giant boulder I came upon a family of three, speaking English with American accents. I said “I assume you’re from the states?” and the woman said “good guess” in a laughing way. They were from Connecticut; Jim and Jen in their forties and Addie their eleven year old daughter, on a two week trip to Uruguay.
I had met a few US expats living in Montevideo, but these were the very first American tourists I’d met in this country. “We wanted to go somewhere off the beaten path,” Jen said. They have found it, here in Piriápolis. “Two days in Buenos Aires and we couldn’t get out of there fast enough.” They asked what I was doing, and when I told them they said “sounds like a book.” I said I was working on it.
We all walked up the little mountain together, though there was no agreement that we were walking together, just an implicit understanding that we were happening to walk up the mountain at the same time. Sometimes we’d split up as the path wove its way through myriad boulders, which required a bit of scrambling, and I managed this much faster than they could, or someone would be ready for a break. But not too far up ahead our steps would merge together again, and we’d pick up the general conversation where we’d left off. It felt so American, this slight background weirdness while pretending that it wasn’t weird. To be outgoing, but at a distance. I am so far gone from the US that it feels almost exotic to be with Americans, who seem as a whole to embody this strange combination of being extroverted and very private. All that said, it felt familiar and almost comforting. These were my people, and they were decent folk.
It took us about an hour to reach the summit. There was an immense concrete cross with a well-worn concrete building at its base, doused with graffiti and trash. Unlike all the other mountaintop crosses I’ve found on my journey, you could climb up stairs inside this one and look out from the cross of the cross. The little viewing holes made it look something like an observation post or fortified tower, and the combination of military and religious connotations felt vaguely ominous. I have to confess that crosses generally creep me out a little bit; as a non-Christian it has always seemed strange and morbid to me that the symbol of this messiah is the way he was executed. I mean, if you were going to build a religion around Martin Luther King, would you choose for its symbol the gun he was assassinated with?
I walked away from the ominous cross structure and found a good wide flat boulder to sit on and look out from there. Looking was the best thing to do, out to the blue of the sea, into the patchwork greens of the interior in three directions. The family of three sat on another big boulder some ways away. They ate their lunch and I ate mine. Occasionally we would call out comments, but not so loud as to be yelling.
In the end I couldn’t help myself, and before I walked back down I climbed up inside the cross, despite my reservations. The fifty foot higher vantage point did not counteract the feeling of a narrow dilapidated concrete space, and I didn’t stay long.
✦✦
A little before midnight, and I’ve just returned to the hostel where I am haunting my regular spot on the little front patio. The pinche perros are ceaseless. All night long, at least for as long as I am awake, they are barking and crying into the darkness. It’ll get calm for a minute, then somebody will start, ar-ar ar-ar, and the whole neighborhood goes up in dog madness again.
I have decided that the house next door to the hostel is the local weed hookup. That would explain the comings and goings of youngish men on bikes and motos at all hours of the night, the frequent sound of people coughing. Random guys appear at the gate, yell for Karol, then ask in low tones if I want to buy some flores, baratos. Marijuana being legal in this country doesn’t appear to have changed things very much. I wouldn’t say I smell it walking around any more or less than in Argentina, and there are still people selling it on the street, so legalization obviously hasn’t killed the black market. A guy I met in Montevideo who grows plants on his patio reports that there’s less crime involved, and the quality has improved — it’s not just bricks from Paraguay any more.
At this late hour I have just returned from the Argentino Hotel, where I spent the evening in the casino. As previously mentioned I am on the verge of running out of money, so rationally I had absolutely no business going to a casino. My general rule is to not gamble what I can’t afford to lose. But sometimes when I’m in a dire money situation, without a good prospect of work, I actually become more likely to gamble. It’s some kind of flaw in my cognitive processing system. I guess on some level I still see a casino as a place you can go to make money, even though at least half the time I don’t.
I have also decided that tomorrow I’m going to ask my best friend Chris for a favor: a convoluted loan where he deposits some money in my bank account in the states and I pay him back immediately through paypal via a payment from my credit card. It’s basically a way to turn credit into cash — I’m not sure it will even work. I could just go to a bank and try to get a cash advance on my card, but the interest on those is obscene. Either way I have decided that there’s no way around it but to take on some debt, and I’m confident I can do that one way or another. This takes a little bit of the edge off my money troubles.
For better or worse, I’ve felt drawn to the casino in that grand old faded hotel since Clint and Lili walked in there last week on our way out of town. I was even conspiring then to maybe play one hand, but the casino was closed until Friday, which is today. I’ve had it in the back of my mind the last few days to go tonight, and was just looking for an angle to justify it to myself.
Last July when my friend Adam came to visit me in Arequipa, he hand- delivered a collection of letters from New Orleans. One envelope contained an invitation to the wedding celebration party of my friends Andrew & Allison who had eloped to Sri Lanka. By the time I’d received the invitation, the party was seven months past. A keepsake. Tucked into the envelope were two US ten dollar bills, with no explanation. As I’ve gotten close to running out of money, I started thinking that maybe that $20 was lucky, and had good New Orleans vibes. When I found out there was a casino at a venerable old hotel in this town meant to collect bioenergy, I knew this was the place. By dinnertime I’d decided I was going to try my luck. Maybe I’d lose a day, maybe I’d gain a day. Regardless, I wasn’t going to make it very long on the money I had.
After dinner tonight I put on all my warm things, a sweater and a fleece and windbreaker to guard against the wind and damp, and set out for town. Carried a rock in hand the entire way. I am ready for los perros.
At the Argentino, there was some kind of party in the ballroom, older middle-aged couples dancing the tango, and a room half-full of tables of people from the same cohort watching. The casino at the end of the main hallway was an old gambling hall, a bit shabby now but still dignified. Pretty damn charming as these places go. A couple tables each of blackjack and roulette, a lot of aged slot machines. Other than the presence of actual table games, the best parts were that the machines were silent, only ringing out when someone won, and that the room was non smoking. Even as a smoker, I prefer not to sit in a room full of other peoples’ smoke.
At the cashier I changed my twenty dollars American for six hundred and sixty pesos, and sat down at the cheaper of two blackjack tables. I was the only player, and the handsome young dealer looked bored. This is usually a bad sign for me — I don’t often do well when the dealers are very good-looking. He told me that the minimum bet was a hundred pesos, roughly three dollars, which sounded fine, and the chips could be bought in increments of five hundred. So that was exactly what I did, and put down a black hundred peso chip and he disinterestedly dealt the cards.
When you’re the only player at a blackjack table, the hands come fast, and there’s not a lot of time to think about cards, just a series of rapid-fire decisions. It’s much nicer with other players, so you can watch them make their decisions, and let your mind rest from its exertions meanwhile. I was losing most of these fast-coming hands, getting beat when I had nineteen, twenty; pushing on a soft twenty-one. So much for the lucky bills. After a couple minutes I was looking at two chips in front of me. This was too fast.
One of the worst things that can happen at a casino is to come in on a bad foot, and just lose all your money in a steady stream. That way you don’t even get the entertainment value of playing. I picked up my two chips, got up, took a lap around the room, decided this wasn’t enough — if I sat back down I knew I’d just lose my two chips consecutively. So I walked out, back down the long hallway, paused to watch the party in the ballroom. Nothing had changed since the first time I’d seen it. Might as well have been the same tango still playing. There was nothing fancy about their dancing, but they all knew how to dance the tango like it was the most normal thing in the world. I continued on out the hotel doors, had a smoke sitting on the steps looking at a dark sea. Anything to change my energy. Breathed deep of the night air, and went back in.
At the blackjack table there was a different dealer, a guy about my age, and he was less good-looking and less bored. Better. One of the floor managers with a big belly was standing there talking to him. I sat down and put one of my chips in the circle in front of me. Suerte, the big man said. I felt different, got a seventeen and the dealer busted. They looked happy for me. And then I started winning. Not every hand, but most of them. I was calmer now. Soon I was even, then had doubled my money. When I was sitting on fifteen chips, I began telling the two of them in Spanish how sometimes you just need to take a walk, go outside to change your luck.
They seemed to disapprove of my tone, not that I was offending them but that it is unlucky to talk much about luck. The universe also seemed reproachful of my quick-won hubris, and suddenly I was losing again. I was busting when I’d hit on a twelve or thirteen, and the dealer was always getting exactly the right card to beat my hand. “No es bueno hablar de suerte,” I said. They nodded. When I was back down to ten chips, double what I’d bought in for, I stood up, said “bastante, mi suerte ha cambiado,” and cashed out. They bid me buenas noches, and seemed to agree this was the right thing to do.
Sitting on a bench by the water down at La Rambla de Argentinos, I thought about going back in. I had five hundred pesos of house money in my pocket, and felt like I should gamble it. That’s what I’d walked a mile to do. But this was exactly the moment I would regret later, when I could have walked away up on the night, if only modestly. I thought I heard the voices of Andrew and Allison encouraging me to go play some more — though that could have been the deceptive voice of my inner compulsive gambler. I went back in for the third time.
At the blackjack table the first dealer was back, the young guy, and he seemed happy to see me for another try. By the end of my first run he’d been sympathetic, and was rooting for me. Mejor suerte? I asked. Espero, he said. Traded my winnings for chips and quickly started losing again. I’d seen this movie before. Took a long pause before putting my last chip on the table, and a deep sigh. Cards came down blackjack. My luck had turned again. For a good while, every decision I made was the right one, doubling down on a soft ten, staying on fourteen while he busted. I got a pair of nines and the dealer’s up card was an eight. On a hunch, I split, and he dealt me an ace and a ten. Beautiful. His hidden card was a ten. Even better. It was a surreal feeling of clockwork: the cards would come out, I’d make the right decision, the dealer would put a chip next to mine then take the cards away, and I’d put the chip in my stack.
Got up as high as twenty two chips, slowly whittled back down to twelve, and decided it was time to leave well enough alone. Gave a chip to the dealer, who by this time was the older guy again, and cashed out for good. Outside a thought occurred to me that I should try to get those two lucky ten dollar bills back. It is very dangerous to walk back into a casino when you’re done playing, but I thought I had it in me. The floor boss with the expansive stomach gave me a perplexed look as I walked in: “what is this gringo up to?” At the cambio counter, the lady said she only had one of my billetes left, so I bought that one back. The other bill has passed into the world of Uruguay.
I didn’t even look at the blackjack table, firmly resisting the faint voice of “just one more hand” and “how about one spin of roulette” and walked out of the casino for the fourth and last time, up twelve hundred pesos. I’d won myself a couple more days. At the end of the hall I paused to watch the tango dancers one more time. Time did not exist in this room. I had the thought that if I am going to live in this part of the world, I will need to learn how to dance like that.
When I got back to the outskirts where the streetlights are intermittent, it was time to walk the gauntlet of dogs. When I saw the first one up ahead I picked up three rocks. I’m not messing around anymore.
