Canning

Got up at 09:30 to have coffee downtown with the muchachas, having gone to bed at 04:30. In order to make it in time, I would have to forego the daily routines to which I had become unusually attached, I suppose because they are grounding and familiar markers in an otherwise strange, new world. Making café con leche and toasting bread in a kitchen with no electric appliances other than a fridge, where only one flame on the hob can be bothered to light, I get off on finding ways to become ever more efficient and the strict order in which I like to do things borders on the autistic: ablutions, chanting, breakfast, emails, facebook, shower, tidy room, pack, out.

It took ages to get to the assigned meeting place on the colectivo, because the traffic was horrendous and just as I got off the bus at Callao, I got a text message saying they were unable to come because the builders had shown up and did I want to meet later in the day. I headed back, feeling sorry for myself, until I went down the subte and walked past a mother and baby and two adolescent boys asleep (shouldn’t they be at school?) on the ground in the underpass, their cheeks directly in contact with the dirt. I saw people, one after the other, touching a pillar in the subte and crossing themselves as they walked past and realised that embedded in its surface was a tiled picture of Nuestra Señora de Luján, with a prayer to the virgencita beneath. I touched it too on behalf of the family in the underpass.

Then, in the afternoon, Lucy, my dueña and I were supposed to go to a singing lesson (to sing tangos) in the same part of town and I suggested we either walked or took the subte. Lucy insisted it was easiest by colectivo, so we spent half an hour trying to locate the bus stop to catch the right one and then an hour on the bus, as here, the buses really go round the houses. What can be walked in half an hour can just as easily be bussed in half an hour. I know which I’d rather do. So we arrived at the Institute an hour late for the lesson, which turned out not to exist in any case. Still, that gave us plenty of time to discuss the cost of public transport, which has risen by nearly twenty per cent and to admire the personalised interior of the cab of the colectivo with it’s bevilled mirrors, tassels and inscriptions.

Two aborted efforts in one day. These things have a habit of coming in threes, don’t they? I should have known better than to presume to reserve a table for José and myself at Canning. The evening was barely passable, bordering on disappointing, not least because CFBS wasn’t there. Coming to think of it, the highlight of the evening was seeing that magnificent mural again and noticing how many of the people in it I already knew. José said I had sounded so enthusiastic, he didn’t like to spoil my fun, but that if I hadn’t been bent on coming to Canning, we could have gone to the Baldosa, a milonga I’ve never even heard of, where there was an amazing programme including a canyengue lesson, something I’m very interested in learning. Ironic, really. José is for ever saying to me, ‘You know everything about Buenos Aire. Is there anything you don’t know?’ Well, there you go.

I keep meaning to take pictures of the pink blossom which is still on the trees, though only just, what with the battering they keep getting from the frequent rain. There are aspects of the rainy weather that suck – like stepping on a loose paving stone and having slimy, black water spurt up your legs from underneath and Linea B of the maldito subte getting flooded, so the sweaty tube stops are some twenty minutes long at each and every station. Nevertheless, I love this weather. I can’t believe my luck. It has been mild and fresh most days, since I got here. Not a week before my departure, I got an alarming email from Lili saying Buenos Aires is very, very hot.