You Just Have to Pick Up Your Feet
Endings are hard for me. Perhaps they are hard for everyone. To be more specific, I mean the endings of things that you’ve grown attached to, things that aren’t finished. It is both a strength and a flaw of my character that when I set my mind on something, it’s very hard for me to give up on it. After a year and a half and ten thousand miles fixated on this place, when it has come time to let go of the dream of Uruguay, I am finding it quite difficult to do so. On the verge of departure, I can always just stay another day.
I have returned to my perch at the Contraluz Art Hostel on Calle Juan D. Jackson in the Parque Rodo neighborhood of Montevideo. This is my fourth night back in the city after a fifteen day sojourn along the coast, which was supposed to be a week. It feels like a state of suspended animation. Four days? Five weeks in Uruguay? What has even happened in all that time? Hmm. A lot of Yerba Mate.
It is nine o’clock at night, and I am in the library/salon, my favorite room in the place, a draft coming in from the open balcony door. Caught a chill taking my evening mate on La Rambla; a hot meal, cup of tea, and two hours inside have not cured it. I’m wearing a fleece and a wool hat, and I am still cold. There are warmer places in the hostel, but by and large this old building is a drafty place. By degrees of temperature, it’s probably not very cold, maybe in the high 50s, but it feels much colder than that.
Fall in Montevideo is very much like San Francisco weather: a perpetual damp, a blustery chill that creeps into your bones. There it is the cold Pacific and the San Francisco Bay; here the Rio de la Plata, a block from where I sit. It has been cold and gray ever since I got back to the city. There is no question but that we are in fall now, the days getting markedly shorter, and a pervasive sense that it is going to be colder soon. I don’t know if I am ready for a winter. My last winter, technically, was in Perú, which didn’t deserve the name. The one before that was in Colombia, which shared none of the characteristics of winter that I am familiar with.
It is rare to find this room empty, with no humans playing music, listening to music, watching movies, talking on the phone, hanging out or smoking on the balcony. This is the best room in the hostel, and the only quiet one, when it’s quiet. So though I am cold and jittery and not in the most focused state of mind, I have to take advantage of this moment of solitude to write.
Not much has changed at the Contraluz while I’ve been gone. Most of the residents are the same. The Senegalese band is still here, though they’re much busier now and playing gigs at night that I can’t afford to go to. Hassan the Cora player is friendly but doesn’t have time to jam with me anymore. The Colombian guys, the Chilean girl on long holiday, the various women who live downstairs and work in reception, Veronica from Córdoba who likes old jazz standards and works at a bakery at 4 am, the strange cleaning lady who retains her dislike of me, the Peruvian-Argentinian couple who cook dinner together every night and seem always to be making each other laugh, are all still here. Anna la gerenta and her partner Rafael who gives tattoos occasionally in his shop in the attic. This is less of a hostel and more of a shared living space. No one seemed surprised that I was back. They think I’m going to stay. The only real change, other than that the weather has gotten worse, is that the hostel has discontinued the included breakfast, which wasn’t that great anyway.
I suppose the fact that four days have gone by without much of anything happening is a sign that I’m comfortable here, in this hostel, in this neighborhood. It is very easy for me to hang around, cook meals, work on writing, drink tea, play guitar, take an afternoon walk in the Parque or along La Rambla to take my mate. If I was able to make a living as a writer, I could just do this. I would probably get my own private room. But I am worlds away from being paid for my words.
By the second time I came to Montevideo, I had relinquished any life-changing expectations of this place, and could simply appreciate its relaxed nature. My intention coming back here had just been to stay a night or two, to get prepared to cross back into Argentina. In Cabo Polonio, I decided to take a job up in Salta, in the north. A place I know in my heart that I liked better than here. Now it’s just the difficult matter of letting go. Four days worth of difficult, though perhaps this city is also conspiring to keep me. The whole time I’ve been back here, I’ve been turning it over in my head, whether to leave, take the boat back across. To let go of the dream of Uruguay, an amorphous idea that never had much to do with any kind of reality. It was my answer to life’s question at a time when I wasn’t much enjoying the reality I was in. A vision of a happier, sunnier, more tranquilo kind of life, that I imagined I would find here.
We all have these deep convictions that when this or that happens, when you get to some certain point, everything will be different. You will have made it. When you grow up; get your driver’s license. Graduate. Get the job. Meet the girl or the boy. Meet the person you’re meant to be with, write the book you always meant to write, have children, etc etc. Your life will not be the messy struggle that it’s been, rather you will be the person you were always meant to be. But when these big things don’t come around at quite the hoped-for pace, or don’t bring the change we expected, we start to attach significance to smaller and smaller things. Moving to a new house or town, changing jobs; a new relationship, when your team wins the championship will bring happiness, a feeling at least of being on the right path. I chose to place my things-will-be-better-when eggs in the basket of living in Uruguay. It makes no sense; I am aware, but I did it.
Of course, all the while that I was traveling to a place I knew little about; that no one I knew had ever been to, I was fully aware that Uruguay was not the Promised Land, that going to this place would not remedy all of life’s existential anxieties. The insidious part is that my subconscious now had a place, a conceptual target to fasten all sorts of hopes and dreams and feelings to. It was inevitable this would happen. I knew it wasn’t real and I confirmed when I got here that this was just another place — if a decent one — and still I find I am having a hard time letting go of it. This migration has been the construct of my life for so long.
Because going to Salta, while a continuation of many aspects of my journey, will be the end of something. Salta is roughly a thousand miles north, back the way I came. I will no longer be on a Southern Migration. And I didn’t make it to the end. There is a lot of land south of here; including Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Ushuaia is still two thousand miles south of Buenos Aires. The true vision of this journey, though I’d never professed to actually be doing it, would be going all the way down there, over land, to the ends of the earth. I’ve made it maybe ninety percent of the way, but I don’t think I’ll be doing any more this time around.
If I had the money and the energy, I’d go down there. I always knew it was unrealistic, given the resources I had and how damn far it is, but all along I knew the true migration would be to Ushaia or whatever is farther than that, and then to make the return journey all the way back up to the states, por tierra otra vez. A Great Migration, the way the Hopi did it. They did theirs over many generations, but to be fair they also did it by foot. We’re talking about the realm of myth, anyway. At the very least, it was another time, another world. Perhaps no Hopi person ever set foot on Tierra del Fuego, either.
That’s what I find myself wanting, though: to live in a dream, a myth, something different and of different substance than the cold, digital modern world. I am a dreamer; at the same time I consider myself a realist. These two aspects of me don’t understand each other well. I run into problems at the intersection of dreams and reality, and that is what Montevideo and Uruguay have been for me. If I really wanted a dream, to live in a myth, I should have stayed in Cabo Polonio, in that casita on the beach. It was ethereal, dream-like there. Never never land.
An A-frame cabin, for free, with a door that opens out on the sea, water from a well and lit by candles, a trash bag full of weed in the corner of the room. The door didn’t actually open — you had to go in and out through tall windows, and the ganja was dried out and not very good. But who’s looking a gift horse in the mouth? Not me. I loved it. It was a dream. But the truth I found there was that I wanted a real life, not a fantasy. At least not that dream. I didn’t stay. Realism won out. It turns out I wanted a real life, just not the one I had in the states in 2016. Here in Montevideo, the place I thought I would live, the realist is telling the dreamer that it must relinquish the dream. And this is not an easy task.
If I go back up to Salta, I have to let go of Uruguay and Tierra del Fuego and everything that I have associated with those things. That idea feels very sad. My conscious mind has realized it’s not going to work out here. But my subconscious is like: hold on just a second. Maybe tomorrow something will happen.
There is no one I can really talk to about this. Not anyone here — I have realized that Uruguayos simply can’t grok the idea that I would come all this way to live here, that someone would have idealized and romanticized their country. Part of their cultural identity is that they are overlooked; that people even in neighboring countries confuse them with Paraguay, which it turns out is a very different place and not even adjacent. Of course this is not true: millions of Argentinos and Brasileños come here every year, but that’s the idea that Uruguayos live with. So many of them have asked me the question “¿Por que Uruguay?” — but not casually; the emphasis on the “why” part, a drawing out of the word, full of disbelief.
And I can’t really talk to people back home, in their real lives, about my situation, because how could they grasp the significance? It all has to be arbitrary travel decisions to them — should I go here or there? If it’s not working out in Uruguay for you, go back to Argentina, they say. If you want to stay, stick it out. These are people who care, who listen, who want to be helpful. It would be impossible for them to understand.
I would have left today, or so I tell myself, but yesterday something happened. I got an email about a job. It was from a woman named Mabel at a colegio here called Elbio Fernandez. Valentina, the teacher I met at Viejo Lobo in Cabo Polonio when she was on vacation, had forwarded me a job posting for a long-term substitute position teaching high school English. A couple days ago I followed up on it. Then yesterday, while researching transit options on how to get to Salta, I get an email asking me to come in for an interview this morning. I thought maybe, right on the verge of failure this was actually going to work out. Perhaps this was Uruguay’s way of keeping me, the last offer. Figured I should put off leaving for a day and see what this job was about.
After delectable nights of sleep in the casita, my return to hostel world has been a rude awakening. The last two nights I have had as a roommate a man who stays here every Monday and Tuesday. He lives in another city but works part time as a professor at the Faculdad de Ingeniería on the other side of the park. I like him, but he’s a horrible snorer. The sleep apnea, inconsistent-breathing, choking kind. He knows it, too, and is apologetic, but that doesn’t help me to sleep.
This morning I woke up early, very tired, showered and put on my best clothes. Walked twenty minutes to the high school in the Barrio del Sur neighborhood, halfway to the centro. I was prepared to interview in Spanish, at least give it my best shot, but it turned out that the two women, the foreign language coordinator and directora of the school were both fluent in English. It was a good interview, if brief, and the whole thing was very professional and legit, a far cry from all these language institutes I’ve been applying to. The classes were part of an International Baccalaureate program, and it was clear to me that I was under-qualified and would have to work very hard to measure up to this standard of education. If they had offered me the job today, I would have taken it. But they didn’t.
At the close of the interview the directora explained that of course they had a whole process to go through: several other candidates to interview, references to follow up on, etc, and they would let me know by the end of next week, or the beginning of the following week. I would be waiting at least nine days to get an answer, and it’s possible and even likely that I wouldn’t get one at all. I simply can’t afford to stay for nine days in this expensive city, just to wait for a job that I probably won’t get.
All day, hanging around the hostel, sitting on the beach taking my evening mate, I’ve been *this* close to deciding to leave. All I need to do is buy a ticket for the ferry tomorrow back across to Buenos Aires. Close this chapter and start a new one. I have a job offer in Salta for twenty hours a week, and this afternoon I had a good followup conversation with Cecilia, the woman who runs the school. She has been the most welcoming and supportive of anyone I’ve interviewed with. Human in the best way. She is up front about the shortcomings of what she is offering. It doesn’t pay much — the equivalent of six dollars an hour; she can’t offer me full time work; the economy in Argentina is not good. But the cost of living is much less than here; I was very enamored with Salta, and I miss the warmth of Argentinian culture. Next Monday, I could be teaching at the Instituto de Estudios de Ingles on Pasaje Zorrilla.
On this cold evening, I took my mate down on the beach, my back against the seawall for shelter from the wind. When I got back to the hostel, quite chilled, I found a new resident of the Contraluz sitting on the balcony, a lovely young woman named Eugenia. We got to talking; she has just moved into one of the rooms on the ground floor. The thing that really got me was that she asked if I wanted to take some mate with her. This was the first time an Uruguayo has offered to share mate with me in my whole time in the country. Many Argentinos have offered, but I’ve been waiting for someone from this country to show me how they do it. I sat down and told her all that before I drank from the bombilla. That sip felt like a small victory.
She seemed surprised, said she was sorry people hadn’t been more friendly. “Lamento que la gente no fuera mas amigable.” She looked very sad and beautiful when she said this. Because it is so small, she explained, everyone knows everyone, or at least knows who everyone is, and they aren’t used to foreigners. You know who you know. I started to feel like I was conversing with some spirit of the country. When I told her more, about my hopes and dreams for living here, and my frustrations with my experience, she said “que triste,”and looked simply crestfallen. She said she was sorry her country wasn’t what I thought it would be. “Lamento que mi pais no fuera que pensabas.” So much lamenting. Now I was sorry.
“No, gracias a ti por ofrecerme mate. Es exactamente lo que he estado esperando,” I declared, which seemed overly dramatic coming off my tongue, but nonetheless falling short of her lamentations. It was enough. We stopped being sorry and had a good conversation for an hour in the cold damp twilight.
She is an actress, and tomorrow night she is appearing as Hermia in a truncated version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — un Sueño de una Noche de Verano — at a castle nearby. This castle was once the home of an alchemist, a protege of Piria in whose town I stayed on my journey along the coast, and is now a center for the arts. It all sounded good. She told me I should come see the play — asked if I had ever seen Shakespeare in español, which struck a chord. I couldn’t tell if it was a personal invitation, like “come see me”, or just a general recommendation. I told her if I was still in the country I would be there.
Finally I was starting to visibly shiver and I had to go in to warm up and make some dinner. She went downstairs to her room to take a hot shower and sleep there for the first time, and it is likely I will never see her again. Why did I meet her on what is likely my last night in the country? In all the nights I’d spent on that balcony, she had never been there, no one like her had been there, and now this magical delightful woman appears and apologizes on behalf of the whole country, shares mate with me, and invites me to see her play all in Spanish I could understand perfectly. The whole thing just threw me into a deeper state of confusion. Is this Uruguay’s last-ditch attempt to keep me here? But do I stay in this country just because I met a girl at a hostel?
I know what I have to do. I’m just not quite ready to do it. I think I will call my Dad and ask him how you let go of something. I already know what he’s going to say. He’s going to remind me what I told him some years ago, in the Blue Ridge mountains standing above a swimming hole. He asked me, holding a rope swing on a steep hillside, how you start. “You just have to pick up your feet,” I told him, and I know he’s going to tell me the same thing. I need to hear it, and the things he has to say after that.
