20/1/09 1500 hours Buenos Aires

(pre warning: in Argetina the symbol for pesos is the dollar sign. I will never, ever pay 7 dollars for water. Cartañeros are people on a government recycling/employment scheme, for a pitance they sort through the bins of argentina separating plastics, paper etc. They always travel with a hand cart or shopping trolley to take glass, cardboard and plastic to claim the peso back or anything worth having. Also first time I´ve tried to write this blog in this style. I would appreciate comments, pointers, love and violent abuse)


I was getting tired of tourism. 3 weeks is more than enough of that, especially when you have another 2 weeks in a city. But the active search for a soul and a beating heart in Buenos Aires was leaving me a little jaded and tired. My decision to hop on the Subte at the nearest station and to get off wherever felt about right was, I hoped, the cure. I wanted to find something more than our little apartment in Belgrano with it´s half a dozen cats and pedigree pooches to cling onto.

I got a seat on the train, something I always consider a small personal victory and waited for a stop to call to me. Nowhere did. I got off anyway. I was somewhere in Palermo, a wealthier barrio, and greener than most. I had some Swiss friends living somewhere round there who threw solid parties and had their own private pool. It probably wasn´t the place to hunt for anywhere´s soul.

Rising out of the underground grime I was confronted with another Avenida. You get tired of Avenidas quickly travelling through Buenos Aires. I took a back street and plonked myself down at the café with the least leather chairs and the most wisened locals sat on them. They charged me $7 to drink water from a wine glass and the ashtrays on the tables were sparkling, individually hand somethinged glass. The waiters all wore sparkling shirts and their trousers were sparklingly pressed. This wasn´t my stop. So I hauled my sorry arse back towards the main road.

Across from the station was something I´d not registered before. The first real patch of green I´d stumbled across in the city. I had work to do I´d been trying to ignore in my bag, and I´d been missing green. It turned out to be a sprawling park full of the local flora and little plaques. It´d for a seat. Shame really it took ten minutes of being hounded by a tour guide for my number and ten minutes of cursing mooning couples and baggy-looking backpackers before I found one. A sagging, green bench under what I´m reliably informed was a Yaquiri Husu tree. There was a school trip of 6 year olds who clearly didn´t care for botany nearby, and an old man washing his feet a few benches away. It might not have been a beating heart but it was natural. I laid out my books and got scribbling.

After a while one of the multitude of cats I´d seen that must´ve lived in the park came to join me. It was only a kitten but it had a strangely pleasent look of mange. It´s grey fur either was matted or sticking out like a back comb Patricia Morrison would be proud of. It nuzzled my legs for a while before joining me on the bench.

We sat there for a long time, girl and cat. I busied myself with my Spanish notes or putting on suncream, it kept itself entertained attacking leaves or licking it´s own arse. The whole thing had a nice atmosphere.

We´d been there half an hour when I heard the trundling of cart wheels. It couldn´t be cartañeros here, or someone else dragging their life in a suitcase. Not in our little zone of tranquility. How could I not look up to glare in the direction of whoever was coming?

But it was only two little girls, no older than 6. They were dragging one of those toy pushchairs. I say it was a toy, compared to their stature it looked huge. But that satisfied me, children could maybe be allowed to shatter zen, as long as they were quick about it. I settled back down to conjugating the verb to smoke, and then the wheels stopped. Right next to the bench.

I looked up. They didn´t look at me, only at the cat. They had strolled right into our little ball of zen and weren´t being quick about leaving, and whilst it´s not easy to pick up malignance in the eyes of a child in a gingham school frock something told me it was there. Something told the cat too. It began to move from the bench.

All the while they whispered between themselves, glancing around, checking out the surroundings. It took a final glance, assumably to confirm a lack of police presence, before they dived at the kitten. One at each end, they picked it up and hurled it into the pushchair, like hurling a body into a lake. The cat screamed for a second but the one in the school frock held him while the other tickled its belly and that was that. It was like rohypnol. It was drugged, out, completely pliable as he lay there in his carriage to the devil knows where. I felt as though I´d been caught short at a Columbian bus depot in a bad part of town. I should be greatful it wasn´t me hurled into their vehicle. I don´t suppose a five year old much goes in for kidnapping gringos but I didn´t want to risk it. They gave me the stare like they would. The ´go to the police and you´ll live to regret it´stare. I raised my hands innocently. And then they were gone. Silently, incriminatingly. The wheels don´t trundle at getaway speeds.

It tok me a few minutes to get off that bench. I wsn´t sure of the correct authorites for a kidnapping. Is it terrorism? I eventually resolved the best plan would probably be to not risk my own hide. You see little girls everywhere, but you never see if you can trust them. I would simply get a slice of pie from the next bakery i passed, hop the next train out of there and maybe try to work out where my stop really is.

My land lady here is Catholic, I may ask her to pray for that cat tonight.