Buenos Aires, Argentina

Friday, January 28, 2005:

I was running late for my evaluation test at the ILEE offices and had to catch a cab to make up for lost time. The driver took one look at me in his mirror as I settled into my seat and ventured a confident guess:

"American?"

I don`t get this a lot. I get "Canadian?" "Russian?" "French?" and "Italian?" Sometimes I just get ignored, which is fine by me. In any event, this is the first time I can remember any curious cabby getting it right, and quickly at that.

"New York," I told the driver. "Not Texas." He smiled and broke into a brief political monologue that can best be summarized as follows: "Bush is crazy. War, war, war. What is it good far? Absolutely nothing. Huh!"

Although I tried to engage him in Spanish, the driver seemed intent on practicing his English. A wide range of it too, in a heavily Italian accent.

"You like-a da girls in Buenos Aires?" he asked, jamming a thumb and a leer in the direction of Jennifer Love Hewitt Look-Alike #247, who was walking a muppety-white toy poodle on the sidewalk. As I tried to think of some sufficiently sarcastic quip to offer up, he began to share his innermost feelings with me. "I like-a da girls!" he said. "I old, old man but I like-a da girls!" Then, as an afterthought, "aaaaaaahhhhhhhh!"

Isn`t that special? I thought. And isn`t it also quite special the way he just slowed the car down to a crawl in the middle of a busy four-lane major street in order to stare some more? Cars were flying by us on both sides. J-Love seemed to notice the arduous attention she was receiving and turned her nose up and away as she walked. Meanwhile, her muppety poodle turned its nose down and sniffed spastically away at an enormous pile of doggy doo. (There are hundreds of thousands of dogs in BA and they leave thousands of pounds of presents along the streets of the city each day. The sight of professional dog-walkers walking 10 or more dogs at a time is quite entertaining, but you need to watch where you`re stepping, particularly if you are witnessing this spectacle from behind the procession of dogs.)

Fortunately a large bus separated the leeror from the leeree before I was forced to think of a tactful way of getting the driver`s attention back to the tiny little detail of driving me to my destination (for example: "Hey Perv, move it!"). We resumed an unreasonable speed on the high end, rather than the low end of the spectrum. I could say that the cabbies in BA drive like maniacs but the simple fact is that after Honduras, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, they seem quite competent. In only a few short days here I have noticed a quality in them that almost approaches an actual Will To Live. Almost. My driver briefly removed both of his hands from the wheel in order to trace an hour-glass shape with his palms. For the first time he muttered something in Spanish. I didn`t hear it but I`m sure I would have needed a dictionary to understand it.

As we neared the ILEE offices we passed the immense Congressional Palace. Modeled after the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., it features an 85 meter dome and wound up costing twice the budget that was set for it.

"Casino," said the driver with a limp wave of his hand at the building. His delivery was so dry that nothing stuck to it. No bitterness, no anger, not even the hint of an effort at humor. Casino. That was that. I laughed but he didn`t say more. He could talk my ear off about GWB or "da girls" but he didn`t want to talk about Argentinian politics.

As I got out of the cab in front of the ILEE building, I thought about what my driver the day before had said. "There are some crazy sons-of-bitches out there," he told me. "Especially other cab drivers." How true.