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.
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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