[March 6]
Machine Gun and I passed a rather befuddled day yesterday in Montevideo before transit to Buenos Aires, where nothing quite went as planned but everything worked out fine. In the morning we had a look online to check the ferry times and then went out to see if we could catch a few museums. We returned to one from yesterday called the Museo Romantico – we’re very liberal guys – and found that it was closed. That means I will probably never get to see the giant lady’s travelling case that is mentioned in the guidebook, and I found (and find) this more irritating than you might imagine. The museum around the corner was open though; we must have been in the right orbit of the moons of Jupiter. There was a pleasant collection of odds and ends, including two cannons which I enjoyed immensely. One day I will have a house with a garden with a cannon in it, which I may have already noted. There was also a picture of a bearded guy with long grey hair sitting in a chair and holding a shotgun or similar weapon, and I christened this one Future Mick.
There was another museum on the map called the Museo Numismatico, which reminded me of a word I could not quite place, and we walked the seven or eight blocks to it in thick, cloying heat. I suppose I would get used to the heat it if I lived here, but it would take years. Despite the map we could not find the place until we eventually realised it was inside a bank which we could see, and that it must be related to coins. Mike noted that the building we were looking at was the most closed-looking building he had ever seen.
We decided to adjourn for lunch and give up the museum hunt as a bad business, so we had a sandwich and coffee at the place we had been before, and then left for the hostel to get our stuff and head to the ferry. When we bought our tickets we found they were three times the price mentioned online, and I went to ask why that was so. The young lady said ‘tarife con web’ or something along those lines, and her expression invited me to try and do something about it. No options presented themselves other than being irritated, which I duly was.
The journey was comfortable and passed quickly, first a bus back to Colonia and then a ferry to BA. There is an incongruously large ferry terminal in Colonia and it seems to be the main crossing point from BA, rather than the Uruguayan capital. We got a taxi from there to our hostel. Machine Gun may have taken my comments on his hostel-booking abilities somewhat to heart as this one was near the top of the scale, but alas it was overbooked. They had booked us a room elsewhere, and were somewhat unapologetic about the situation. They asked us to pay for the following night, even though they could not put us up that night, on the basis we would come back. We regretfully declined, pointing out we would be better off staying two nights in the place they were sending us to. The level of apology suddenly increased, and we all parted on very friendly terms, but we made no promises and did not pay.
The new place turned out to be a long way further out from town – Mike estimated 7km on his phone. It was slightly more expensive, but the original hostel had given us the money to cover the difference. You did not get a lot for your expenditure though, and we decided early to stay only one night. We were starving by that point, and asked if there was anywhere around we could go for dinner. We were directed to a pizza place two blocks away. If you looked at it on a satellite view, I suspect it would appear as the sole bright spot in a field of darkness.
We waited a while and then got menus, then waited another while and they took our order, and then we waited a very long while in which nothing happened. Neither of us had a watch or a phone so I can’t say for sure how long it was, but it was certainly nudging over an hour end to end. I was unusually hungry, it has to be said. The napkins were starting to look tasty. Then one of the two pizzas we had ordered arrived. We shared it on the basis the second may never emerge, but much to my relief it did. By then I would have eaten a third, but if I was greedy enough to order it I would probably be sitting there still.
This morning we found a new hostel nearer the city centre and moved there, and like all logistical things that took much longer than you would think it should. Mike suggested that we walk the distance to Recoletta, which was about 4km. It wasn’t too hot and we even got a bit of rain on the way, and it was a stimulating and orientating stroll. We stopped for lunch and then arrived at the Recoletta graveyard.
I had some idea in advance what the place was like, but it’s so far out of the usual run of things that any non-pictorial description is difficult to visualise. The entire graveyard is composed of elaborate mausoleums, most of which are like single-room dwellings created with the benefit of wealth and taste, some of which are the size of small churches. A few have spires. Many have statues. The La Paz tomb has elaborate carved angels looking upwards with pained and tearful expressions at the man himself, whose carved image sits on top of the tomb. And there is not just a few of these massive monuments to a life lucratively lived, but hundreds. The graveyard is arranged around wide central paths, down which two cars could pass each other, but off those are narrow alleys through the tombs. Other alleys intersect with those, so the whole effect is of the blocks of a city in miniature.
It really is an extraordinary place. Eva Peron is buried there in a relatively simple and austere black grave, but it’s still a marble construction the size of a room in a graveyard where the elite of Argentina are buried, so it’s hardly low key. Her tomb is sealed with a marble door and there are no windows, but in many of them there are windows and a door and you can look through to see the coffins inside, generally raised off the ground on stands. Some that I saw had the piece of furniture you see in churches to allow a single person to kneel, which I don’t know the name of.
I may have already noted that as I have been wandering around these last few months I have seen dozens of statues and monuments to people now little-known or rarely celebrated. But to have a statue in your honour means your life impacted the lives of many others. You probably carried out deeds of note even in the overall torrent of human affairs, be it in battle or business or arts or exploration. And now those people are forgotten. When we look over the past it’s only the colossi who stand out: da Vinci and Franklin and Shakespeare and Brunelleschi and Lincoln and Plato and all the rest. We may be able to sit down and name person after person from field after field, but those we can remember are a near-invisible slice of even those who were great enough to have a statue or a park or a road named after them, or who were wealthy or celebrated enough to be buried in the Recoletta graveyard. Almost everyone dies in anonymity.
It was with such melancholy thoughts that we left the graveyard to find a band playing upbeat trumpet-driven music just outside for the tourists, which felt like adding a guitar solo to a Gregorian chant. The Gallery of Fine Arts was our next destination, which was a little harder to find than the map indicated, but not long later we found ourselves standing outside a blocky building of stone and pillars and time. It hasn’t changed since it was built in the mid-1800s, according to the guidebook, when it was apparently originally created as a waterworks plant. Who knows what elegance the builders would have brought to bear had they originally intended it for its rarefied current use.
We got audioguides so as not to be hampered by the lack of English signs, and set out. There are two large floors covering world and Argentinian art across the ages, with some religious paintings from the 12th and 13th centuries, running right up to within the last 50 years when things get inaccessible for me. There was also some sculpture, of what I would consider varying degrees of interest. One piece was a hollow stone that had been carved with various holes in places, with the holes lying on planes that were either concave or convex. That meant, according to the audioguide, that there was a ‘dialogue’ between the alternative hole types, and in what way this makes sense is entirely beyond me. The overall shape was supposed to represent the curves of a woman’s body, but again to my eye we were back to seeing stories in the arrangements of stars. It did though occur to me that writing explanations of modern art for auidoguide scripts might be a temporarily engaging occupation, and in that vein I would suggest it was a brave multi-spacial interpretation of the alternating energies inherent to creative thought.
The pictures I liked were those that were more accessible, and my favourite was that of a meditating monk. His face was under a cowl and invisible from up close, gaining definition in the most delicate of shades only when you stood back. It had no mention in the audioguide, so I assume it was unremarkable in the scheme of the field, but I loved it. There no copies for sale in the gift shop, but if there were I would have one now.
We went to each room in the place and by the end of it I was very tired and my brain was not able to accept any more visual stimulation or new information, which is always that way I feel at the end of my time in a large museum or gallery. That often makes me wonder about better ways of experiencing these things. We sat on the grass outside for a while, and then went to a café that is famous for various artists hanging out there, none of whom I had ever heard of. Approximately half the tourist population of Buenos Aires was there. I paid the equivalent of six euro for a slice of lemon tart and a further three for a coffee. We stayed for a while though, as it was pleasant in the shade of the table umbrella watching the people go by on the square.
I checked the guidebook for somewhere to eat and identified a place nearby, but when we got there it was somewhat above our state of dress and intended budget, so we went to the place next door instead. The steak was excellent, rating over a nine on the SSS, though still overshadowed by La Plata. If it was in Dublin, though, it would be the best place in town.
We had a nightcap in the hostel but were in bed in time to allow for an early start to get the flight to Iguacu at the end of a tunnel of Argentinian territory in the north-east corner of the country. We’ll pick up the story from there.
