Cry For Argentina - Part One, Introduction
(I was out walking this morning, and as I passed the Campo de Polo, I saw this over the side gate. Ahhh, FC Barcelona versus Real Madrid; Messi and Ronaldo on the field at the same time! Now that will be a football game worth watching)
Where to begin?
I started to say that it's hard to write about Argentina, but that's just not true. Every tourist who ever spent a week here, ate a choripan, and pranced about in a milonga has written about Argentina. What can be almost impossibly difficult is to write accurately and intelligibly about Argentina, for where is truth? In the second book of GoT, after Jon Snow captures Ygritte, she taunts him with a tale about the history of his own Stark family, saying that he bears the blood of the Wildlings through Bael The Bard. Jon says that Bael was a liar, and Ygritte denies this, but agrees that "a bard's truth is different from yours or mine". Think of me then as a bard, and this is my truth about Argentina, though yours may be different.
It is in the nature of Steemit that new users dread being downvoted, for a few downvotes early in one's time at Steemit can do damage to one's reputation which is almost unrecoverable. Probably for this reason, much of what I see posted by fellow newbies here at Steemit is blandly inoffensive. But the whole idea of Steemit is to promote quality content, and quality is not blandly inoffensive. In choosing to write about Argentina, I have taken a serious risk. Politics here, and society, have become quite brutally polarised, as much so as in the USA. (And the US has not been this polarised since the War Between the States). It is almost certain that I am going to get flagged and downvoted a few times for what I will write, simply because some who read my words will violently disagree. Well then, so be it. As Ernest Hemingway said to Robert Ruark long ago, "write what you know, the best you can, and to hell with the critics".
A puzzle wrapped in an enigma
Part of what makes Argentina such an elusive topic is the rate of change. In the final three days of last week, ( May 2nd, 3rd, and 4th), the Central Bank of Argentina jacked the prime rate up to 30%, 33%, and then 40%. In a single day, the Argentina peso lost 9% of its value. Obviously, inflation is raging out of control, and the Central Bank has totally lost control. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
Another thing that makes writing about my dearly-beloved adopted home so very difficult is that the words often mean something different. The neighbourhood called Barrio Norte is nowhere near the north part of Buenos Aires. The word "radical" means extreme, yet the Radical Party of Argentina have historically been Centrists, (though they are now trapped in an unhappy alliance with the Conservatives, it's only because their leaders were bribed into joining that alliance, and sold out their membership quite shamelessly). The carnicero at the market down on the corner calls me "negro", though I am about as white as a white man can be. It's not what it sounds like, it's just a simple term of affection.
The language - WTF is a "posho"?
Growing up in the border country of San Diego County, I was exposed to Spanish from a very early age. When I was in 1st grade, my mom was a fulltime student and and my stepdad was in Vietnam with 1st Mar Div; there was nobody at my house when my schoolday ended. So my mother worked a deal with the mother of my little friend Nicky, and I went to Nicky's house for a few hours after school, until my own mother came home from college. Now, Nicky's mom didn't speak much English, so she set out to teach me Castellano. That first day, she came out in the back yard where Nicky and I were playing, with two big chocolate chip cookies in her hand. Speaking much more slowly and clearly than usual, she said to her son, "Nicky, quieres una galleta?". Being sharp as a whip, Nicky caught on right away, and answered in an equally careful manner, "Si, mama!". Then she gave him a cookie. Turning to me with a twinkle in her eye, she asked me, "quieres una galleta?". Well, hell, I was no fool. I heard how Nicky replied, and he got a cookie. So I spoke right up, said, "Si, mama!", and received a cookie of my own. Munching away happily, I thought to myself that this Spanish business was pretty damn cool. And thus began my adventure in learning a second language. By the time I reached highschool, Spanish class was an easy A, and it also came in handy in everyday life. Unfortunately, this led me to an exaggerated idea of my own linguistic prowess.
When I arrived in Argentina in early 2014, I received a rude shock. I had no fornicating clue what anyone was saying to me! This started at the airport, when the customs agent took my declaration form, tossed it in a box un-examined, glanced wearily at the screen where my bags were presumably being scanned, and mumbled something at me. Puzzled I asked him, "que?". Pointing at the exit sign, he barked at me "EXIT! SALIDA! GO!". In his defense, he had just dealt with a huge queue of arriving tourists, probably 800-1000 people, and all his co-workers had all closed their lanes and gone on break while he, (apparently the junior man), was left to finish up the last few dozen. The poor bastard was probably thinking, "Get the hell out of here, you stupid yanqui boludo! I'm 20 minutes late for my break and I'm dying for a goddam cigarette!".
Ok, fine. I got a taxi, made it to my hotel, dumped my bags, and went out looking for some lunch. After spending some 20 hours in airports and airplanes, I was long overdue for some real food. I found a nice looking little cafe just down the street. The waiter came over, the usual polite small talk seemed to go OK, ("Buenos dias, como estas?"), then he started trying to tell me about the specials. What in the name of Dante's seven hells, I asked myself, is a "posho"? Finally the waiter, visibly amused, tucked his thumbs in his armpits, flapped his arms, and made clucking chicken noises at me. Oh, "posho" is pollo. Well, shit.
The local dialect of Spanish, Español, Castellano, call it what you will, has some peculiarities. The most notable is that all Y sounds, whether from the letter Y itself or from the double-L, are pronounced as an SH.
The other major oddity is that the second person singular pronoun is vos rather then tu as in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. And Argentine Spanish also has a unique conjugation of each verb to accompany this unique pronoun. Thus "do you want?" is "querés?" rather then "quieres?". Not at all difficult once you get the hang of it, but really quite puzzling at first contact.
I think that's enough about the nuts & bolts of the language. I'm an English teacher, so languages fascinate me, but I can easily imagine that many of you are bored to tears by this stuff.
That's amore
The last thing I want to say before winding up this introduction is that I do love this country, quite passionately and sincerely. I have genuine, sincere respect and affection for the Argentinos. They are at heart good people. It is one of the oddities of Argentina, that it seems to have this strange ability to inspire love and loyalty in the hearts of those who were born far away. No society is perfect, no people are perfect, we all have feet of clay, but there is something here in Argentina that feels to me like that elusive concept of home. I get choked up just trying to write about this.