montevideo notes 1 - ciudad pequeña

The smaller the city the greater the possibility of co-incidence.

Montevideo may not be the smallest of cities, but it’s small enough. Ana’s neighbour, on the landing across the way from her flat, is a man called Leo Masliah. A couple of years ago, in London, John Rattagan put on a playful CD of his favourite Uruguayan musician. Whose name was Leo Masliah. From behind whose front door I occasionally now hear a piano playing, and who hurries past me on the stairs.

The part of the city I’m staying in is not somewhere I used to know all that well. It’s a street called Jackson, on the edge of Pocitos, the barrio where Helena lived. Her first home was in Luis Franzini, where I spent a year sending hundreds of blue aerogrammes. That’s a fifteen minute walk away, and I inadvertently ended up there on my first morning, whilst looking for the feria at Villa Biaritz. (I bought a Uruguayan hat.) Her parents then moved to Cardona, (next to the Jewish school where I will later go to give a class on The Boat People), about twenty minutes away. That’s where I used to stay when I visited. Now I’m informed they’ve moved again, and are nearby. It was only last night, when Anibal pointed out their house, that I realised how near. They’re two blocks up from here, on the same street, a minute’s walk away. I recognised their cars and now the street is rendered by this co-incidence into a different street altogether.

Today I called my friend Jorge and he asked me where I’m staying. It turns out that he’s working on the same street. About a minute and a half away.

Living in London, reading books from another time or place, you feel as though more than one co-incidence in a day or a text is excessive. When the truth is that in most places, people are haunted by the insistence of co-incidence. Our big-city lives are the exception, not the rule.

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montevideo notes 2 - the bookseller

Jorge’s friend, W, returned from living in Europe around the time I first lived here, 15 years ago. I met him a couple of times, but never really got to know him. W opened a bookshop on Tristan Narvaja. It’s a rambling kind of place, but has survived for over a decade, so is presumably successful enough. Uruguayans love books. This morning I visited the local market, dozens of which are peppered around the city on a daily basis. Beyond the fruit and veg stalls, people laid out odds and sods for sale on blankets on the street. About half of these contained second hand books of one form or another.

Jorge told me that lately, things haven’t been going well for W. He’s a cocaine addict, perhaps a crack addict as well, and he’s got AIDS. He’s in constant need of petty cash to finance his habits and he’s losing contact with many of his friends.

I expressed surprise that the bookshop has survived in spite of all this. Jorge pointed out that if W sold the enterprise, as he could, he’d get an influx of cash, but thereafter he’d be left with no ongoing means of support. He then described the remarkable ecology of the bookshop, explaining its ongoing solvency.

The bookshop has two employees. In theory they work for W, but in practice they make the bookshop work for all three. The two employees run the place. They keep the accounts, do all the ordering, sell books, keep the place clean. Everything. W appears on the shop floor now and again, mostly just to get in the way. His primary connection with the place is the small living it affords him to sustain his habit. However, it is never enough, and when in need of urgent intoxication, and short on cash, W will think nothing of taking from the till. It is, after all, ‘his’ money. Fortunately the two employees have learnt over the time how to manage W’s stealing from himself. Every night they remove most of the cash from the till, but leave just enough for W to be able to afford a small purchase. Jorge believes that this has saved W. It has allowed him to maintain his habit, but in moderation. More spare cash would lead to a greater intake of drugs, which would kill him, sooner rather than later. As it is he never feels entirely deprived, but is never in a position to partake in excess. The ecology has saved him, and it also keeps the business running, ensuring the employees continue to have jobs which they obviously enjoy.

Nevertheless, there are some times when W isn’t satisfied with what’s been left in the till. For some reason or another he decides that on this occasion he has to have more – cash and drugs. When this happens, there’s a solution to hand. The bookseller steals his own books. He takes them to a neighbouring bookseller and sells them on at a reduced rate, second-hand.

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montevideo notes 3 - foreigners

Montevideo isn’t on the way to anywhere. To get here you have to make a detour from Buenos Aires or Punta or Southern Brazil. The financial incentive to get here is minimal. And few would come here out of ambition. Anyone who did would soon enough realise that, no matter how cultured the society, it seems destined to always remain a backwater, a footnote in the works of Borges, Pauls or Cortazar.

As a result of this the foreigners who end up here tend to be a strange bunch. When I lived here I knew a couple of people in the language year of their university courses, a Norwegian whose Uruguayan wife was in Norway, a British school contingent who inhabited an affluent, xenophobic ghetto, some US evangelists and a pair of English roses who’d come to the city to create horse sculptures out of bamboo.

The other night Anibal invited me for supper. The other guest was Marcelo, who Anibal said was a Uruguayan who’d lived in New York but turned out to be a New Yorker who’d somehow found himself in Montevideo, via Miami. His mother owns a house some way out of the centre. He lives there alone, practising his martial arts. He’s enrolled in Montevideo university, studying philosophy, the ancient greeks being his sphere of specialisation. The conversation flitted from Plato to Derrida to the inhumane conditions under which students study at the university, four hour sessions in high ceilinged rooms lit by distant florescent tubing.

Marcelo doesn’t appear to have any profound reason to be here. Despite that, and the fact that he claims not to like the place or the people and their conservative ways, he’s stayed here three years already. Every Thursday he goes to tango classes, because it’s the best way, he claims, to get to know people. His ex-girlfriend, a Uruguayan, told him that should they ever have a child together, she would permit Marcelo to live next door. He is cultured, intelligent, touched by a hint of sadness and the sense of being lost within a world which promised something it stubbornly refuses to deliver. He also drinks copiously, socialises as much as possible, and knows when the very last buses run to Carrasco. He clearly loves the climate, the food, and the vida.

With all his contradictions, Marcelo struck me as, in many ways, a quintessential Montevidean.

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montevideo notes 4 - day trip

A relatively recent development in Montevideo is the regular arrival of cruise ships. (To my mind any development since I lived here will always I suspect seem recent.) They dock in the port in the morning and thousands of moneyed tourists stream out, flooding the Ciudad Vieja, before returning to the ship in the afternoon and heading on to their next port of call.

Not so long ago an English friend of Jorge told him that an American friend was going to be arriving on one of these ships, and asked him if he’d mind showing the tourist and his partner around for the day. Jorge, who lives in Ciudad Vieja, said he’d be happy to.

The two tourists caught a cab the short distance to Jorge’s flat in Bartolome Mitre. The friend’s partner turned out to be male, which delighted Jorge. He showed the Americans around the old town. Passing through Plaza Matriz, Jorge pointed out the cathedral, noting that it had little architectural interest, but the Americans expressed a desire to look in anyway. On their way out, Jorge noticed one of the men crossing himself, and asked if he was Catholic, which the man said he was. From Plaza Matriz they ambled down to Mercado del Puerto, Jorge taking great pleasure in pointing out phallic symbols concealed within the cityscape. At the Mercado the three did what any self respecting non vegetarian does, and consumed considerable quantities of red meat. Jorge learnt that the two men came from Wisconsin and Seattle respectively. They exchanged stories of how they came out to their families, and by all accounts everyone was having a suitably high spirited time of it.

After they meal they continued to wander. Only now did Jorge begin to observe that, in spite of all the common ground, there was a great deal that neither man had talked about. Such as what jobs they did, how they sustained their relationship in spite of the distance, even how they actually met.

With the afternoon getting on, Jorge suggested the three get in a cab and go for a drive along the Rambla, as far as Punta Gorda and back. This is the best way to get a handle on the city as it stretches away from the old town, up the coast, rolling around the vast lip of the River Plate. Jorge continued to act as guide, but the reluctance of the Americans to open up began to seem strange, even rude.

On the return journey back to the port, Jorge finally decided he had to ask. Montevideo cabs are a tight squeeze, and from his description the two men were muscular. Jorge was crunched in between them. Summoning up courage he turned to the older of the two Americans, his friend’s friend, and said, in his most impeccably polite Anglo Saxon English : ‘So, if you don’t mind me asking – what is it that you actually do?’

The man sighed and looked away, out over the perhaps sparkling River Plate, named for a promise of silver, and replied: ‘I’m a priest.’ Jorge let this sink in. The man didn’t offer anymore information. Seeing it was all he was going to get, Jorge turned to the younger man, and asked: ‘And you?’ The second man half-smiled, like a kid, then he followed suit, looking out of the window. He said, without looking at Jorge: ‘I’m a priest too’.

A few minutes later, the three men were at the port. Jorge bid them adieu and the two priests re-embarked on their covert cruise ship voyage. A couple of weeks later Jorge received a card from the older of the two priests, thanking him for his hospitality during their brief stay in Montevideo.

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montevideo notes 5 - state within a state

In 1997 Anibal took Helena and I to the piece of land he owns at Caracol, which is just across the lagoon from José Ignacio. On our way we took a short detour, into a pine forest by a lake. Driving off the main road onto a sandy track, Anibal’s white Volkswagen got bogged down. The more the engine revved and the wheel span, the more intractable it became. We ended up camping in a clearing, even though we were no more than a few kilometres from Caracol. We got there the next morning after some locals lent us some planks which gave the car sufficient traction to escape.

On this trip, I returned to Caracol for the first time in eleven years. The last time there was just a plot of land. We found a space in between the trees to pitch tents, and attempted not to walk into the fearsome cacti after dark. Both Anibal and Helena were bitten by horseflies, which lay their eggs under human skin. Weeks later tiny beasts were still emerging. Now, much of the land is cleared. Anibal has built a skeleton house with a beautiful thatched roof and a chimney. Running water is on its way, as well as poles for electricity. The house is still some way from completion – Anibal pitched camp inside it, I slept on the concrete floor – but nevertheless the transformation is remarkable.

However, this is nothing compared to the development of the land on the other side of the lagoon. Not so long ago, José Ignacio was still a fishing village. Now it’s a chic resort. It’s where Martin Amis lived during his Uruguayan sojourn. The road from the lagoon to José Ignacio is no more than a few miles, fronting the ocean. In the decade since I was last there, palatial houses have sprung up across the road from the beach, each on their own generously sized plot of land. These houses are, without exception, built with inordinate good taste. Most seem to owe a debt to Frank Lloyd Wright, with their flat roofs, organic, asymmetric design, and use of (presumably) local stone. They are light, spacious and attractive.

After José Ignacio the highway leads to Punta Del Este. For several decades Punta has enjoyed a reputation as the most sophisticated resort in Latin America. It was a rich person’s playpen as long ago as 1961, when Ernesto Guevara addressed a meeting of regional leaders at a summit there. Wealthy Argentines, Brazilians and North Americans have built vast houses here. It’s a far cry from the development in Spain or Mexico. Only on the periphery of the city do the tower blocks start to spring up, but even these holiday apartments are well designed, without a hint of the tackiness of European hotspots.

The scale of the building and the development over the last decade, in spite of the economic crisis which heralded a new century, is surprising. However, even more remarkable is the fact that, on this beautiful stretch of the Atlantic in the third world, we didn’t pass a single house which looked affordable to anyone who wasn’t at least a dollar millionaire. The transformation of the small villages on the road into Punta reflected this prosperity. Rather than almacens and fly ridden boliches, they contained sushi bars and designer furniture stores.

What has been created around Punta and Jose Ignacio is, in effect, a country within a country. A state with little financial or cultural connection to the capital, even though it’s barely a hundred miles up the coast. This state feels like an aesthetically cultivated paradise, inhabited by a class of people who have nothing in common with the vast majority of Latin Americans.

As we drove back, Anibal pointed out the area we had camped in ten years ago when the car got bogged down. Back then it had been pine forest with a few shacks where some locals lived. Now the land has been cleared. It’s occupied by half a dozen vast houses, their glass frontages flooded with coastal light; their outdoor wooden decking adorned with pot plants and barbeques. The pine trees have vanished, annexed by the state within a state.

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montevideo notes 6 - departure

Sometimes when I visit Montevideo, the last few days before departure are obscured by an almost pestilential sadness. The disease corners me as I shuffle through sun-dappled streets in a daze.

This sadness is, of course, a testament to the happiness my time here, always too brief, bestows on me. I could be Adam pacing his garden just before the helicopters arrive and the evacuation takes place.

Having said which, I realise that Montevideo is no paradise. The harshness of life is more evident here than it is back in London. Last night I took a walk by the riverside at sunset. In a nook between Playa Ramirez and Pocitos I came across a small beach, scattered with a litter of weather-worn concrete blocks. Two white waders plucked at the water’s edge. Deciding to explore I took a couple of steps across a piece of concrete and then stopped, and immediately turned back. A dead dog, small, brown, it’s spine curved round on itself, teeth grinning, stomach bloated, lay foetal in amongst the rubble, abandoned.

My Montevideo could never be a paradise. Rather, it belongs to a parallel universe, evolving alongside my own. In this universe I rediscover the unpredictable, the beautiful and the tragic. When I arrive here it is with the elation of a homecoming. When the final days of my trip are upon me, the reality of reality, the separation of reality, hits; everything begins to seize up, a mechanism grinding to a slow, barely noticeable halt.

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The fact that my marriage to Helena is now over heightens these feelings. This is the first time I have been back since. Our marriage was the product of a delirious year, working and playing here. I discovered her city; she rediscovered it through my eyes, as well as opening her eyes to the possibility of escape from its confines. (For in this regard a city is like family as opposed to friends: the latter you chose yourself, the former chosen for you.)

We never lived here again. Never put the delirium of that year to the test of something more measured, along the lines of the lives ordinary Montevideans live. All of that living, the prosaic, was done within the jurisdiction of London, my antithesis to Montevideo, a place of work and stress and deberes.

In my fortnight here now, with my former in-laws up the road, the pale ghost of my marriage and its abrupt conclusion has haunted me. Any reader worth their salt might conclude that the love I feel for the city has a connection with the love I felt for Helena; just as the love she felt for the idea of escaping the city had a connection with the love she once felt for me. When our marriage ended, I often felt I would never return here, that this city would also be lost to me.

As one day, indeed, it might be. (As I write Ana interrupts to say that the theatre she had in mind for the play next year now seems to be booked for the time we wanted, throwing everything up in the air again.)

However, a marriage has nothing to do with place or time - the things which alter in the course of a marriage’s natural lifespan. It has to do with how the two people themselves connect, above and beyond circumstances, crises, failures, changes. Whether those two people still retain any kind of imperative to continue in the face of alteration.

We, evidently, did not. It’s only upon returning to Montevideo, after the event, that it’s possible to see how little our respective cities had to do with anything. Montevideo and London, it transpires, have as much significance as a favourite flavour of ice-cream.

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montevideo notes 7 - light

Almost every evening this week I’ve walked down the road to Playa Ramirez to take in the sunset.

At this time of year the sun disappears somewhere over the Cerro, sliding out of the sky over the sea before hibernating under the continental lip. The beauty of a setting sun is a ubiquitous, democratic pleasure, so to eulogise the near phosphorent armageddon that occurs on a regular basis on Playa Ramirez is perhaps unnecessary.

However, the one thing I have observed and savoured anew on this trip has been the nature of the late evening light that arrives with the departing sun.

This light has a textural quality, a density. Aquatic and enveloping, it cocoons the passenger. It possesses similar qualities to a warm bath, or a soft hand stroking skin. The light’s shades heighten and obscure the city’s colours, but above and beyond its visible traits, it acts in the role of shadower or guide, holding the citizens’ hands as they venture into a new night, a darkness containing the eternal uncertainty of what the dawn might bring.

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montevideo notes 8 - history

The dictatorship did not end in Uruguay until 1985. The first time I came here, less than a decade later, there was still a discernible reluctance to talk about it. At the time I was giving Shakespeare workshops. I remember, working through one of the history plays, making a crude but feasible comparison between the reign of one of the kings and the dictatorship. No one took me up on it, no one seemed to keen to seek out comparisons.

Why should they? The older people in my class had lived through years of grim repression, and no matter how keen I was, there was no way that a curious young foreigner could really appreciate what it had meant to them. When I asked Jorge, my flatmate, landlord and friend, he just answered that it had been a ‘terrible, terrible’ time. It was still so recent that most, it seemed to me, were still going through the act of forgetting, something they needed to do before they could begin a process of remembering, and evaluation.

Fifteen years later the situation has changed. Several of the dictatorship’s architects are in prison. A spate of films dealing with the dictatorship is appearing, one of which Matar A Todos, I saw at the weekend. The fear – that they will return – as articulated to me on a few occasions in 1994, has gone. The election of 2004, which saw the socialist coalition elected to power without the drastic consequences that many on both the right and left had anticipated, has helped to establish a more relaxed, contemplative attitude towards the recent past.

Last night I asked Ana, who lived through the latter stages of the dictatorship as a student, about her experiences. She had two stories to tell me.

The first concerned an experience which happened when she was about seventeen, at drama school. She told me how the group she hung out with became accustomed to classmates being absent from one day to the next, either in hiding or under arrest. She talked about how they tried to live as normal a life as possible, remembering one time someone who had just been abused in police cells came out dancing with them, his legs so swollen that all he could do was sit in a corner and get as drunk as possible.

Ana decided she wanted to become more involved. A friend of hers set up a meeting with a radical in an obscure barrio. She arrived at the bar and the man she met there looked so like her friend that she realised straight away they had to be brothers, though this was never mentioned. The man was jumpy and watchful. They talked in vague terms about what she could do. At the end of the meeting he paid for the beer, saying she owed him the next one. She didn’t see the man for several years. The next time they met was on the day the dictatorship ended, as people celebrated in the streets. She ran into him amidst the flags and festivities and he remembered her instantly, telling her she still owed him a beer.

A year or two later, Ana was living in Ciudad Vieja with Horacio, a theatre director, radio host and activist. She became involved with a small group which met once a week in another, distant barrio, an hour’s bus ride from the city centre. Upon arrival at the house where they met they had to check a tree to see whether there was a piece of paper attached. If it was there, it meant they were safe to go in; if it wasn’t they knew they should head back immediately. Once inside they spent all night creating leaflets, going out to paint slogans on walls, drinking mate and discussing politics.

One day she got a message from one of the group, simply saying that the ‘upstairs neighbour’ had been arrested. This seemed like catastrophic news. The whole group might have been given away, and they were all in jeopardy. Ana and her fellow activist decided they had to go to the house where they met and see if they could destroy the evidence. She packed a bag, fearing she’d have to go into hiding or else be arrested, then went to find Horacio and told him the bad news, leaving him without knowing when they would see one another again.

The piece of paper was not attached to the tree when she and her fellow activist arrived at the house. They waited outside, anxiously. When it seemed clear that there was no sign of activity inside, they decided to enter anyway, and set about destroying leaflets and papers that had been stored there. All of a sudden someone walked in. They froze.

It was the upstairs neighbour. Who was not under arrest. Who furthermore was furious when he saw that Ana and her companion had destroyed so much hard work. The upstairs neighbour, who was a part of their group, insisted that the police hadn’t been anywhere near. Amidst all the confusion, Ana realised that she needed to go and tell Horacio she was alright. She took the bus back into town and found him at the theatre. They hid away in a corner as she explained everything was fine, both weeping with relief.

Ana later learnt that her fellow activist had got it all wrong. The upstairs neighbour who’d been arrested existed, but was a completely different upstairs neighbour to the one who lived in the house they used. The words ‘vecino de arriba’ had entered his brain and he’d leapt to the worst possible conclusion. When she finally got back to the home she shared with Horacio, she discovered that he’d stuck up stickers leading from the front door to the bedroom of their tiny apartment. The stickers all had one word written on them, a word which doesn’t really need translation: BOBA!

Ana’s political activism continued through the early years of democracy. She had allegiances with the Communists, without ever feeling as though she belonged to their cause – it was more a case of siding with the opposition. (An example of how the Communist ‘threat’ came to be exaggerated in the cold war.) Nowadays she says she’s less ‘militista’. The blacks and whites of the old days have gone, to be replaced by the more confused shades of democracy; and now the socialists are finally in office, it’s they who are contending with the complexities and disappointments of power.

Nevertheless, the difference between Ana’s political engagement in her lifetime and that of almost anyone I know from a similar generation in the UK is evident. For Ana, and everyone who lived through that time, politics was something real, its implications tangible. To take a political standpoint was non-negotiable, even if that standpoint manifested itself as a refusal to get involved. The shadow of the struggle she lived through, despite its lengthening, is still there, shaping her attitude towards the society she inhabits in a way that our political convictions barely seem to.

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montevideo notes 9 - education

Everyone I know is Montevideo is involved in teaching, in one way or another. In part this reflects the fact that most of my closest friends speak English, and if your English is good you can either make or supplement your living by teaching it. However, it also reflects another aspect of Uruguayan culture, which is a near pathological appetite for studying.

This studying never seems to stop. It is driven by the conviction that in order to improve one’s chances of success in a world where the gradations between rich and poor are extreme, the acquisition knowledge (of something, anything) is the most valuable tool available.

There is a downside to this attitude. It doesn’t lend itself to a particularly entrepreneurial culture. Being a student is a status of reduced responsibility: a process of preparation rather than action. I had an long discussion with Fernando, one of the actors in my play, about the seductiveness of thinking of oneself as an eternal student, when he talked about how much he still felt he had to learn.

However, Fernando’s story is instructive. He was raised in Libertad, a two-horse kind of town with a high street, a town square and little more. His parents run the oldest store in town, Los Buenos Amigos, and for a while he followed in the family footsteps, running his own shop, as do his brothers. Meanwhile, he participated in the local drama society, which has been running in Libertad for over thirty years. When I asked him what kind of thing they did, he said a bit of everything. This year the group, of which he is no longer a part, is working their way through the cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays.

One day, Fernando decided he’d had enough of Libertad. He shut up his shop for good and left for Montevideo. He enrolled in a drama school there. Now he earns at least part of his living from acting. In his eyes, the desire to progress as an actor is ineluctably connected to a desire to train, and to learn.

Besides her acting and working on the radio, Ana also teaches literature in high school. I asked her about her 5th form syllabus, which is she preparing now. Over the course of a year she will give classes based around five key texts. Apart from reading and working on the texts themselves, they will also explore the historical context within which the texts were formed. The five texts she’s doing this year are – a Greek tragedy, looking at the origins of theatre in the process; the Bible; The Divine Comedy; Don Quixote; and a Shakespeare. In the course of the year Ana will cover everything from the Romance of the Rose to Marlowe to the Popol Vuh, the Mayan bible. Next year, they move onto the moderns.

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mortgaged to the hilt

You can work for years to pay a debt you´re not even aware of. It´s only when the debt is paid you realise what´s been happening. Then you stand back and discover how much you once owed.

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