Friday 8th of October, 2004
S?r Clueless has firmly re-entered la casa
Rise at 6:30, which gave me a bit of a surprise, I have to tell you, strip the bed and take the blanket and pillow to the Ballroom, where I do the Tai Chi exercises and Sit. Most of the other people come in at 7:15 as usual. Return to the room, shower and do the remainder of the packing.
At 8:00, there's breakfast as per usual, and I find myself volunteering for Level T, with absolutely no control over my arm. The arm volunteers.
I'm in a team with Carolina, and we do the toilets by the dining room, and the Level 1 corridor, which I've been calling the Old Corridor, and which is a sort of descent into hell. I offer up a prayer of thanks to Mariana for not putting me here.
The next few hours are spent completing the house, sweeping the bedroom, tidying and ... um ... playing Alain's Warr Guitar. I now want one, of course.
We gather in the Dining Room with mat? and group by group everybody says goodbye until there's only those of us who are staying in Mendoza, and Tom and Terry, on the last bus out.
The second-to-last bus out carries us to Mendoza (we snap lots of pictures from the bus window on the way) and deposits Leo and I at Hotel Carolla, or more properly Hotel Princess. For some reason the first thing I do is turn the television on. Even more mysteriously, I find The Marat/Sade by Peter Brook - wonderful late sixties histrionics. I leave it running, because this may be the only opportunity I get to see it at all. However, I fall asleep. My dreams are not untroubled.
Leo wakes me up by knocking on the door, and I have a slightly-less-than-coherent (on my part) discussion with him.
At 15:00 or thereabouts we set off to find moneychangers and lunch, in roughly that order. The former are difficult to find, the latter quite easy. In between I find a bookshop where I buy a map of Mendoza (or at least a photocopied guide book with a sort of map in it) and a Spanish-English dictionary. The Lunch. We settle on a large steak with papas fritas, somewhere in downtown. Several people approach us asking for things (principally money) or trying to sell us things, in particular one boy, who keeps turning up. I'll point them out as they occur, several times during our meal for a start. Long debriefing on Lunlunta.
As we're finishing the meal, everybody from the Villa Ines walks past and we join them. A long session spent browsing in music shop: I find a DVD of a concert in 2002 that I actually attended. A number of screens are showing Roger Waters Live. I've always found Roger Waters' solo career to be something of a puzzle.
Thence to a cafe, where we meet Horacio Sairafi, coffee with him, the mendicant boy passes on his rounds, then I wander away to, well, wander. I fail to say goodbye to Horacio, as I think I'll be seeing him later. This is a mistake. Sorry, Horacio. A tarde.
The weather, which had started the day raining grimly, then brightened up, has shut down into greyness again, the skies darken and the shops, such as are open, light up.
I return to the Hotel and call Leo. Eventually it's settled that we go to Martin's for quarter to nine. It takes us forever to find a cab - If they had someone in, then they weren't free. OK. This was true even if the Libre sign was lit. OK. Empty cabs with the Libre sign lit, were also not, apparantly, available. Eventually we get one. I know not how. We get to Martin's half an hour late, but it's OK as the information we received was faulty and we are actually half an hour early. I hang in the Dormitory upstairs with Leo, Dani, Alain, Ignacio and Al. The others accumulate downstairs.
We set off for the Radio Station. Sorry, haven't I mentioned the Radio Station yet? How remiss of me. It's on the top floor of the local University. Classes are still going on at ten o'clock on a Friday night, which is remarkable. After a short wait, we're ushered into the studio.
Lots to observe here, but I won't bore you with many details. Suffice to say:
- Many of us are called upon to make comments.
- I am one of these people.
- This interaction with the media is what I believe is known locally as un frac?so total
I've sort of been paying attention to the conversation (which is in Spanish and appears to be fairly wide-ranging). At one point I receive a question along the lines of "Why are you in the Yellow House?". What? What? My mind goes blank. I begin to talk very slowly, repeating things and using words like work and opportunity and, God help me, discipline. I desperately want someone to help me, but on the whole would prefer them to kill me and get it over with. Hern?n, presumably not wanting blood on his hands, steps in, brings in Ignacio to translate and whispers to me: "This is live radio".
Yes, Herni. I had noticed. I realise that this might be difficult to believe, but it's true. In fact I might say that I was painfully aware that it was live radio. Ouchie.
I commence a fast, loudly spoken, ultimately content-free rant that begins with the phrase "Hello Live Radio..." Heroic Ignacio does his best to keep up. I lapse into silence, and that curiously triumphant humiliation that ensues after one has not only perpetrated a fracaso total but in front of a large audience, one of whom is Martin, probably recording the whole thing for posterity. I expect if I ever step out of line, Hern?n will have the recording handy.
(In retrospect a very useful experience, in an it is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering sort of a way. The current take is that the initial failure was the result of the slow-moving thinking centre attempting to run the show, with less-than-hilarious consequences. After S?r N provided a shock to the system, the persona took over, which was more lively but probably content free. If they could learn to work together perhaps such events would be less fracasante in the future.)
(And I asked Dani what he'd say if someone asked him what he did in Kiel, and he said "I get up; things happen; I go to sleep", which I think is brilliant and I wish I'd thought of it.)
It has to be said, and I say it several times over the day, that since the final meeting, S?r Clueless has firmly re-entered la casa.
Interview over, we go off for some serious asado. Very serious indeed. If you are in any way interested in beef, Argentina is the place to be. Very late, I catch another cab (again, after a bit of a wait) back to the hotel and go to bed.
