We find a restaurant close to the apartment. My sister, traumatized by the ants, continues to flap her arms like the insane. Thankfully, because of the perpetual downpour, we don’t encounter many Argentinean pedestrians. Her blisters are also problematic, which makes that tiptoed walk of hers appear more unbalanced. “Speak loudly,” I encourage them. Onlookers, when hearing the strange language of English, will assume we’re being cultural. We walk up the street playing hop-scotch on the broken sidewalks. Eventually, we decide on a restaurant with a purple awning.
“The meat should be tasty here,” I say, and we funnel into the place.
At the restaurant I encourage them to drink heavily because I read somewhere that ants are allegoric to insobriety. After a few glasses of wine and some of the best beef in the world, my mother and sister return to calm. They are sitting across the table from me.
“We have begun a new tradition,” I say. “Every year the three of us – and maybe dad – will explore the wilds of uncharted civilization.” Wine has a positive effect on my family. “Italy next year?” This was my original plan. I was going to take my sister to the Umbrian hill towns I know and introduce her to relatives of ours, but I decided on Buenos Aires instead. All the time people ask me, ‘if you love Italy so much then why visit Argentina”? I have this conversation with myself on occasion.
I want to study places influenced by Italian people.
But aren’t you just going about it wrong? Italian people live in Italy. Argentinean people live in Argentina. If you’re going to spend a year in Argentina, then shouldn’t you learn something about it?
It’s the eighth largest country in the world. It says so in the guidebooks.
And what else do these guidebooks say?
They quote Borges. No, they paraphrase him. He says that Argentineans are Italians with Spanish surnames living in French apartments and studying English. I may not have it completely right.
So this is why you’re in Buenos Aires?
I see the people here as Italians with an identity crisis. This is also how I see myself: an Italian with an Identity crisis.
“You’re strange,” my sister says. “You just said you’re an Italian with an identity crisis?”
“Out loud? You know I really want to go to New Zealand. What if I move that way?”
“I’m not visiting you in New Zealand,” my mother says. “And you don’t have to visit places for a year at a time.” But that is what I need to do: visit longer and longer and longer until I’m not really visiting. Of course, this doesn’t explain why I chose Buenos Aires. Even to my mother I can’t explain this. I think about it enough.
I used to have this ability. When I was four or five – I can’t remember exactly – I used to close my eyes and TELEPORT to other places. I didn’t understand the natural way I collided with the world, like a superhero, even though that is what I was. It occurred by accident the first time. All I did was close my eyes and when opened them I was in a different house. I remember that the rooms were light and noisy and I heard children playing. I wanted to join them, but I was afraid their parents would find me and yell at me for trespassing. Because when you TELEPORT places, you have to explain yourself, I thought. I couldn’t believe that I moved my body through space and time. The problem was I was too afraid to do anything about it. So I closed my eyes and returned to my bed. And maybe when I did that I lost my ability. I lost the magic that made everything easy. Eventually, I learned about the rhythms of things. Then while I was half asleep in the arm chair one day, half asleep in front of the television, half asleep in every manner of speaking, something like daggers came over my body. I remembered that I had once known this extraordinary magic that I lost at the customs house of adulthood. And whatever seized my body by the television set was the beginning of a condition that no sane rhythm could cure. I needed more than to exercise or to find a hobby or to drown myself in the waves of television shows. I needed to teach myself the art of TELEPORTING because the current rhythm of my life – fast mornings, slow days and weekend blurs – was NOT the rhythm carved in me. I realized this. And when you realize that you’re living someone else’s life, that you’re another zombie on the highway tapping your feet to FM radio, that you’re following the same breadcrumbs that everyone else follows and that the world no longer belongs to you, then there’s a word for it: BUNK. And once you learn this word and truly appreciate its meaning, the world turns more absurdly and fills with meaninglessness assaults on the definition of sanity.
“I’ll visit you in New Zealand,” my sister says. My mother allows herself another glass of wine. The real reason she disapproves of New Zealand, or Buenos Aires for that matter, is she doesn’t like airports. At least, she doesn’t like saying goodbye at them. It’s that simple. Maybe I won’t go to New Zealand for six months, but maybe I will. Either way it’s important to consider places. It’s important to consider possibilities. I want to explain this, but rhythms are difficult notions to make words of.
“I want money,” I say. “I want kids and wife to make them with. I want to walk down the street with a suitcase and give high-fives to other guys walking down the street with suitcases. But I want ‘to want’ these things. I don’t want to go after them because everyone says so. And why do people always make excuses NOT to do what they should? ‘I don’t have the money’ they say or ‘I don’t have the time. ‘I just want to make sure,’ they say. But really, they’re afraid. I’m not saying that I know better or that I’m not afraid. For me, it’s more important to face it. I want to try, at least.”
My mother and sister drink their wine. I don’t say anything else. The world is a balloon filled with toxic levels of laughter and my object is to burst it. Insane measures are necessary, but I believe in insanity as much as I believe in the world. And if it is a bunk place, then insane rhythms are often lost to sane ones. I know as much, even if it’s easier not to.
When we get back to the apartment the ants have moved out of the bathroom and into everywhere. But the three of us are too weighed-down by the lightness of insobriety to notice. We sleep soundly in the rhythms of the rain.
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