urgent
sunday caught up with me again, headachy and cold, angry in that impotent way at the weather, the usual search for coffee and sustenance taking more of the day than it ought to. i went outside once only, at three o'clock, to find that nobody had emailed me. i returned wet and cold and resolved to stay inside the rest of the day.
as the hours passed i found spread on my table a book of stories by isabel allende, my spanish dictionary, yesterday's paper, coffee cut with almost-spoilt milk, soda crackers and dulce de leche, mate, my notebook, a book on Argentine history and one on globalization.
my constant itch to be in motion won over my resolve to read and study, finally, at eight-thirty. i left everything as it was, lights on and dishes waiting, rushed out the door and found again, as every night, someone outside methodically going through all the trash from the apartment. i walked up to her, deposited my feeble bag of useless trash (what was she looking for, anyway?) and walked off to my internet cafe.
every night an army of 30 to 40 thousand people rifles through all the trash in the city to survive.
i still feel dislocated, not quite at home, something churning in my head or my gut, biting my nails, searching. i travelled 10,000 miles to get here. How far am I from civilization? How far from the place where mothers and fathers don't recycle garbage to survive? How do I find the words, how does it change me to find them, what do I say to the woman as I drop my trash at her feet? What would you say?
at the edge of spring in argentina i plod through the muck, my spanish stumbling through the daily papers. they say argentines think the worst of this depression is behind us, we are beyond the worst.
Today with my papers and my coffee and my book on globalization I would like to know how a nation's hunger came to this? When did these terms became the terms of existence, in this city, or in any city?
How would I explain these terms to the family who gets my trash? How would they explain the terms to me?
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?
[adrienne rich]
previously there was Castellano
afterwards you have Trabajo
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