A few years ago my partner and I spent a couple of months in Argentina. The idea before we left was that we would spend the first month in Buenos Aires and in addition to sightseeing would also each get some work done, before touring around for the second month. Unfortunately, the apartment we rented turned out not to be so well equipped for productivity. The only potential work surfaces were the high kitchen counter, an old Singer sewing machine (the kind built into a cramped little table) and a cabinet ledge. All the chairs were either too short or too tall. Jordan made do, but eventually I moved on to try cafés. The problem with those was that the Spanish that had felt so fluent at home began to seem a bit lacking once we encountered people who weren’t asking us specific questions for which we had rehearsed ready answers. The location of the baño, for example, or whether our cash was in pesos or dollares. Whiling away an afternoon at a café meant tripling the number of times I’d have to order something only to be answered with a question that didn’t ever seem to have anything to do with coffee or milk or foods you might want to have alongside. The added stress of this meant I wasn’t getting that much written out of the apartment either.
Late in the month I finally hit upon the rather obvious idea of working at the public library. The branch nearest our apartment was at Guemes and Uriarte streets, and one afternoon I went and found it, a grey, vaguely tubular corner building that from the outside wasn’t particularly welcoming, though it did have the library’s coat of arms painted on it. On the whole, though, it seemed a little indifferent to patrons, or at least to one who needed to have her hand held and be coaxed inside, preferably in English.
This was a smaller branch, with just one large room, but I liked it immediately. It felt established, with dark wood armoire-type shelves with plants on top of them, full-grown ones and little upstarts in water glasses. Of course I wasn’t there to read any of the books, but I was pleased anyway to see a large section dedicated to Lituratura Hispano Americana. Near the window there was a bust of Sarmiento, who was Argentina’s seventh president, and, I later discovered, modernized the country’s postal system and railways, and promoted education for women and children – all things I support. He seemed to be glaring at a disorganized corner of the room where there were stacks of books waiting to be shelved or discarded.
I chose a big table toward the back. There was an awkward moment when the librarian on duty tried to give me a piece of paper that I assume was a request slip and I responded with a series of muttered nos and thanks yous and a helpless shrug that I hoped translated roughly as “Señor, if you hadn’t guessed it already I am incapable of reading even the picture books in your fair country.” But then I settled in and, miracle of miracles, wrote for a while.
Around three a bunch of kids in school uniforms arrived and made very good use of the request slips. There was a window open near me and I would catch an occasional whiff of cigarette smoke from the street, and see the whale backs of buses going by. April is fall in South America, and when we arrived it felt strange to be experiencing what to us was unusually warm spring weather when everyone around us was buckling down. But that afternoon I remember feeling a bit more in step with the season.
I only ever went the one time before we decamped to explore some of the rest of the country, but have always thought that if I went back I would make the Guemes y Uriarte branch my headquarters. I need to believe there is a successful writing vacation still out there waiting to be had.
