#19: Crime, Longing, and Hopscotch in Buenos Aires
I play Hopscotch with my own memories. Please indulge.
Walking around Church Street in Bengaluru, Ania and I entered Bookworm, a lovely bookstore. While browsing through the Classics section, I saw a book that took me back to Argentina: Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar.
Crime
Five years and a few months ago, I got off a bus in Buenos Aires, and was walking toward my friend Esteban's house when I felt something splash onto my backpack. A bystander told me whatever had fallen was smelling really bad, and I better get it off immediately. I took off my small backpack and put it on the ground. A lady who was passing by behind us asked me what was wrong.
Side note: During this interaction, I was feeling quite proud that I had learned enough Spanish to understand these guys.
The guy explained to her what was going on, and she started rummaging in her purse for a napkin to wipe the stuff off. She laughed as she took out a cardigan instead of a napkin and continued searching. When she handed me a napkin and I turned around, the guy and my backpack were gone. In the backpack were my passport, most of my clothes, my kindle, and my laptop.
I turned around again and the lady was gone too. I thankfully still had my phone and my wallet. Another guy standing close by told me that they ran into the subway, and I could leave my big backpack on the ground. He would take care of it while I ran behind him. "No thank you," I said to him and walked sadly to Esteban’s house.
Visits to the police about this matter were amusing. The constable was amazed that I was so calm and polite. Once, my laptop cropped up on the "Find my Mac" app along with its exact location. The guy was amazed at this technology, but refused to do anything because it was out of their jurisdiction.
Spoiler alert: I never saw that backpack or its contents again.
The Indian embassy was another source of a similar kind of amusement. I was told by the consular officer that the embassy couldn't print an emergency passport for me because their passport printer wasn't working. He couldn’t issue an “Emergency Travel Certificate” because they hadn’t complied with some recently updated passport security restrictions.
I mentioned to him how I had met a traveller from England who had her passport stolen. She had been given a new emergency passport with special visas (special since she wouldn’t have needed visas with her ordinary passport) for the countries she wanted to travel to, all in less than a week. The officer barked back at me. I had no idea of the constraints the embassy was operating under. Just because I had spent some time abroad didn't give me the excuse to treat him like he owed me something.
The next day, in true Indian style, he apologised and took me out to lunch. He was new, and was still getting used to the job and how difficult it was to find good Indian vegetables in Buenos Aires.
The Girl
Let's call her Pil. I met her in Mendoza a month or so before I came to Buenos Aires. She was visiting to spend time with a boy she had travelled with before. She told me about a time in Berlin when she and her friends had partied through the night and showed me a video of them playing dry autum leaves in the morning. I thought the video was extremely beautiful. "I like living in places and having opportunities to do things, but actually doing nothing", she said once. She had this effortless way of sneaking profound things into easy conversation like it was nothing.
She taught me skateboarding one night. Later, when we were sitting on the sidewalk for no reason, she told me to try my luck with Neri, a girl who worked at the hostel. I told her she was the girl I really liked. As if anticipating my own reactions, she made a sad face, and then laughed.
We forgot all about all this and went partying. At the end of the night, everyone was high on something or the other. I sat on the edge of the dance floor and watched that crowd of beautiful rainbow coloured people in amazement.
The next morning, before I slept for one hour and caught a bus back to Chile, I gifted her the scarf I’m wearing in the picture below. She made me promise I would collect it from her when I got to Buenos Aires.
After all my things were stolen, I met her and she expressed a more appropriate level of anger than either Esteban or the police. She told me that if I wanted to sue them or something, she could put me in touch with a lawyer. I refused, but felt a bit better.
Hopscotch
Pil and I went to a bookstore where they sold English books. I asked her to recommend books written by Argentinian authors. I walked out of that store with two books: "Labyrinths" by Jorge Luis Borges, and "Hopscotch" by Julio Cortazar.
Labyrinths was okay. Borges was probably a pioneer in his time, but the themes he explored in magic realism and fantasy have been extended and deepened a lot by future writers. Due to the default sort of time travel, I read those books before his. Because of this, I found Labyrinths a bit disappointing.
Hopscotch, on the other hand, was quite a trip! There is a relatively linear story if you read Chapters 1-56, but — true to the name of the book — the chapters are meant to be read out of order. There are stories within stories, dreams, philosophy, love and so much more. It's hard to describe. There's even a chapter where you have to read alternate lines for the sentences to make sense.
Okay, Just a Little More Hopscotch
My mind is really playing hopscotch now. I am remembering my time in Buenos Aires, where I stayed three extra weeks while waiting for my new passport: I managed with exactly three t-shirts and one pant that I bought in a thrift shops, made new friends, met old friends who I'm still in touch with, saw a ballet, ate the most expensive steak I've ever eaten (even at a backpacker's offer of 50% off), cooked, danced, and then left.
Losing almost everything I had was quite a nice experience.
While searching through my emails to find the police complaint because I wanted to post a picture here, I found an email I had sent to a friend talking about how my postponed flight back to India turned out to be quite an interesting affair.
At the Buenos Aires airport, the fact that I didn't have a visa in my “new” passport caused trouble and I had to go to a special place where they checked my passport and went through my police complaint in detail.
At the boarding gate, I had to go to the cargo hold area because my backpack had a cooking gas canister. At my first stopover in Brazil, I was supposed to pick up my bag, but couldn’t because I wasn't allowed to cross immigration without a Brazilian visa. No one had cared enough to mention this to me when I boarded my first flight. When I finally got to my gate after being told I had no choice but to trust that the airline employee would take care of my luggage, I was told I couldn't board the flight because I didn’t have a Yellow Fever immunisation certificate.
After a lot of talking and many frantic calls to my brother, I found out that — funnily — the Indian government didn’t require this certificate if I flew through Chennai instead of directly to Bangalore. With ten minutes to go before take off, I added a stop in Chennai and flew back successfully. I had no idea what this would mean for my luggage, but I just wanted to get back to India. I guess there wasn’t that much luggage in any case, and for what it’s worth, I came back to India. Five years a few months later, I wrote this entry.
Couldn’t help adding this in here. See you all next week!
P.S: Here’s a quote from the book to end this post:
"And the world will not have to be converted to an Orwellian or Huxleyan nightmare; it will be much worse, it will be a delightful world, to the measure of its inhabitants, no mosquitoes, no illiterates, with enormous eighteen-footed hens most likely, each foot a thing of beauty, with tele-operated bathrooms, a different-coloured water according to the days of the week, a nicety of the national hygiene service,
with television in every room, great tropical landscapes, for example, for the inhabitants of Reykjavik, scenes of igloos for people in Havana, subtle compensations that will reduce all rebellions to conformity,
and so forth.
That it to say a satisfactory world for reasonable people."
- Julio Cortazar (Hopscotch)
I loved so many things about this piece. I loved the line 'I play hopscotch with my own memories', the description of your experiences with the Indian embassy, the vivid pictures that you have painted of the people that you met.
Cool picture! ;) :D