The next morning we wake like up like zombies in the rain. My mother discovers a broom and sweeps up flying ant corpses scattered here and there. I want to tell her about my conversation with the ants, but I hold off. She already thinks I’m crazy for moving to Buenos Aires. ..
“Did you and Megan drink ALL this?” Empty bottles of vodka and wine are all over the place.
“Dudley Moore drank most of it,” I say. And I tell her everything: from after the museum to the Michelangelo sculptures. My mother just looks at me. She doesn’t roll her eyes like my sister does. She doesn’t bury her face into her hands like my father. She neither admonishes me for strange dreams, nor does she encourage my strange ways. For better or for worse, she embraces it: however it is I interpret the world.
“What today?” She asks.
“Coffee,” I say.
I take them to this cafe on the corner of Humboldt and Santa Fe. The owner is a very old man named Carlito. It’s one of those places that feel primordial, part of a past nearing extinction. The old man sings from behind the counter or while he serves coffee. A radio plays Spanish opera from somewhere. Conversations between regulars occur in full symphonic dynamics. And I don’t mind waiting for his coffee either. Drinking it explains everything.
When we get there, a few of the regulars are sitting around the table by the window. Half of their faces are illuminated from the light that shines through it. The rest of the café is like my apartment: dark in absence of electrical light. We choose the second table closest to the window, and while we’re waiting for the coffee, we talk. We laugh about the flying-ant insurrection, and my mother, remembering the Texans, suggests that we forget “CALL-en-a” and head strait for “Mount’ah VID’eeoo”. The regulars give us alarming looks. They do this on occasion. If I could speak Spanish I would tell them that ants are crawling all over the place. I would warn them that they have nothing to worry about. I don’t know, but the coffee is exceptionally good that morning. The three of us agree that the old man’s café is best part of the Buenos Aires.
The rest of the week follows the rhythms of the first few days: mornings with coffee, days with rain and nights with flying ants. I compose an e-mail to the landlady:
- Hola. My mother and sister are visiting this week. We’re having a great time of it too, except the apartment is infested with flying ants, the air conditioner broke and Carmen forgot to clean. And can you do something about the rain? Thanks. Todo bien. –Michael
The trip ends where it begins: at the airport. It seems bigger than a week ago: a little more than a Texan helipad. Still, we all feel smaller, which means that either the three of us have shrunken or the world has grown some. When it comes time for goodbye, I have no idea what to say. But words aren’t so important. My mother knows the rhythms of my heartbeat, and even if she doesn’t fully understand them, she can feel them better than anyone else. And the difference between knowing and understanding seems slight at the airport.
The cabdriver is less of madman than I’m used to in Buenos Aires. He talks and talks, one of the great conversationalists on the Argentinean highways. I’m not sure exactly what’s he saying, but it sounds like music, perhaps a movement to an unknown Mozart piano concerto. So he talks and talks and I tap my feet in the back of cab, unaware of anything around me, his voice or the cars fading into and out of focus on the wide superhighway. The cabdriver’s too busy listening to himself to notice that I’ve lost my mind, and he continues to talk and talk… And I close my eyes and try to remember whatever it was that I lost in childhood…
The cabdriver raises his voice to bring me back to consciousness. I must have fallen asleep. No, I must have TELEPORTED. Because a moment ago I am saying goodbye to my mother, pretending that it is “no big deal”. I will see her soon enough for Christmas. I turn away quickly. I don’t want her to see my eyes moist.
“Todo bien?” The cabdriver asks, holding out his hand.
“Todo bien,” I say with a perfect accent.
I take the elevator to my apartment on the second floor. TELEPORTING, after all, is an exhausting way to get places. Before I take my shoes off, I fall onto my bed and sleep for days. And maybe I did the same thing in childhood before I knew about the juke box deep inside the world. Because when you’re a child you intuitively move to that music, unaware that everybody follows something else.
“That’s bunk,” I say before I fall asleep with the television. When I wake up I’m in Buenos Aires with my shoes on, feeling very tired but also very light. I hear the juke box in the middle of everything, playing Mozart. I understand. The insane rhythms on the world aren’t the important ones, because inside, where the real rhythms are, there’s a picnic table the size of Texas, and a flying ant-likeness of Dudly Moore waiting there, with a bottle of vodka or some Nescafe, waiting for me to drink with him.
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