Buenos Aires, 2005
I spent a year in Palermo, on Calle Borges, writing a novel about a man and his daughter. I was going to call it Your Daughters Are Looking at the Moon, but I never did anything with it, and I think it’s still somewhere in The Wall®.
But I wrote all day, and I read books by the antepasados whom I thought would guide me into the landscape of my fiction, Baudelaire, Lorca, Poe.
At night, when I wasn’t working, I became restless.
I left my building and walked along the spine of Borges into the commotion of Plaza Italia, as if searching for something.
I stumbled into cafés for a beer and a shot, and I used the toilets to blast merca into my nose, and after what must have been a few hours—only sparse images stay with me now: a streetlight slashing the face of an old man, a woman dressed in white yelling at the dead—I ended up on the stoned streets of San Telmo.
At the corner beneath the full moon and a youth hostel, the windows of a café pounded with rock music and desire, so I went in.
It was packed with young Europeans and Americans, the conversations mixing languages and tones like a flock of geese, and the scent of patchouli oil was thick enough to slice and eat.
Some of the patrons had their giant backpacks next to their table, as if they would continue their journey after a beer or two.
I ordered a Quilmes and stood invisible in the dark corner, drunk, watching the people have fun, and I got sad. I said to myself, Just go back to your country!
I remembered my brother Ricky in his twenties, a beautiful boy, but shy, and when he got drunk at a bar, he took off his shirt and flirted with women.
He looked like a Native American hunk in the velvet paintings white people buy at tourist markets, his chest of polished wood and his long, black hair shiny like a model in a shampoo commercial. All the white girls wanted to touch his pecs and run their fingers through his hair.
I was forty-three now, and maybe I was just lonely, but a voice whispered to me, Do like Ricky and take off your shirt.
So I did.
I did like Ricky and I took off my shirt.
And when I took off my shirt, I wandered through the tables, introducing myself in three languages, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, telling my name,
I am . . . Me llamo . . . Je suis . . .
I worked the room like a king.
And all the people saw my jiggling man-boobs and the blubber hanging over my belt. And all the people could see the black-widow-spider-legs-of-hair on my chest.
And all the people watched me walk to them, Quilmes in hand, smiles and smiles. Crazy American, they said. Crazy Mexican, they said.
Crazy Chicano! I yelled.