The sound of the alarm startles me out of something. It could’ve been something other than a dream, because when I woke up I was completely unable to recall any of it, and I suppose it’s possible that we are capable of doing other things in our deep sleep other than dreaming. I couldn’t find the phone that the alarm was coming from. I dug in my pants’ pockets coming only across other items that in my state registered only as complete abstractions, Keys: hard and somewhat sharp; Wallet: misshapen leather brick; papers and money: whispery intangibles blurred around the edges like the state I had just awoken from. By the time I finally found the phone, improbably in a pant leg, I was awake enough to get up and start the coffee.
At the early hour, in recognition of the holiday weekend, the streets were nearly empty. The sun had already been up for at least an hour or so, but it had yet to completely clear the tallest buildings downtown so the resulting light was largely mottled in appearance, bright and dim at once and not yet complete; it still looked very much like early morning despite the fact that it was nearly eight o’clock. On the sidewalks there were newspaper vendors still readying their wares for sale; tying and untying the great bulwarks of paper that had been left for them on the sidewalk. There were teenagers still out from the night before, having a last coffee at the McDonalds before going home to sleep the day away and to dream about the advances they had made in their status as teenagers. At an intersection, I stopped at a red light, a little past the crosswalk and a cab driver on the perpendicular path yelled and made an unintelligible gesture as he drove slowly through the intersection. A few blocks later the skyscrapers of microcentro rose up around us and the cooler wind, longer steeped in the dark interstices between the buildings brought up the hackles around our necks and down our backs. It was a light, autumnal cold that otherwise just touched our knuckles and ears.
The Microcentro area terminates on a slope that jettisons bicycles and cars and anything else that carries enough momentum across a wide avenue before Buenos Aires’ river port with the somewhat ironic name of Puerto Madero. We ferried ourselves safely across one of the many bridges that span it and stopped at the edge of the nature reserve, where despite tidy landscaping and frequent trash cleanup, the place has an almost third-world kind of appearance owing to the presence of scores of sloppy parilla shacks painted in pastels that have been coated with a patina of wood smoke, meat fat and dribblings of all the mayonnaise-like sauces of Argentina. One such parilla shack with a coarse painting of the Falkland islands on it was already laying out its plastic tables, cooking its onioned meat and piping its tinny pop music out as if it could somehow conjure up a Saturday evening on a Friday morning by just creating the ambiance.
We were told that the park was closed, but rather than risk it we decided to wait around near the gate with the coffee we had brought. A large and dirty black cat sidled out of the park and over to us with the mien of still having a thrashing bird in his mouth. He sought our sympathies in vain as he was too bold for me and too dirty for Gina and took his leave when he saw a park worker arrive that he had no doubt earlier seduced into his aloof affections. When we heard a similar rustling from the other side of where we were having our coffee we were both surprised to find a kind of amalgamate bird standing there, a species that I had been telling Gina about since before she had arrived. About the size of a small pheasant, this bird has a russet-colored breast, dark wings (that it doesn’t seem to use) a bright green beak and bright tea-colored eyes. I would guess it to be some kind of waterfowl since the reserve is mostly marshland on the Rio de la Plata.
Twenty minutes after we had been told that the park was closed the gates were opened and we, along with everyone else who had had the tenacity to wait, entered. In the morning when the park is still it feels more wild that in the afternoon when it is full of joggers who seem to take some kind of perverse pleasure in running around the last vestige of un-urbanized Buenos Aires with headphones, dark glasses and spandex, ignoring all the details of the park or perhaps just preferring the encounter them quickly and move on. We rode slowly though the park, one moment finding ourselves washed in sunlight and the next plunged back under a cold umbra of leaves. The rocks of the trail crinkled under our tires and the birds called out to each other above our heads, our worlds so close as to be overlapping but entirely unknown to each other. As usual, I tried to greet the joggers and other bikers in the park as one does in the United States, even in large cities, in the morning, both parties acknowledging the similarities in their characters that have taken them out of bed so early in the morning. I received no reply. The people here don’t seem over eager to conspire about the merits on getting up early with strangers.
On the way out we stopped at a building site to watch a group of puppies finish their breakfast of garbage and to duck back under the fence where their mother has safely herded them. We watched until the last one frolicked out of sight, reminded of the large numbers of animals that we had once enjoyed watching back in Arcata, California in much more suitable surroundings.
With the last couple swallows of coffee in the thermos we sat down in another park to linger for a few more minutes. A man with three greyhounds approached us and pointed to a bird mira al pajarito alla…. He went on to explain with no further introduction how the bird we were now all looking at together mimicked the sounds of all other birds and as soon as he had finished speaking the bird, seeming to sense its introduction had drawn to a close piped out a perfect medley of about 13 different bird calls, one after another. We watched and listened entranced, so much more so because it seemed as if the bird had down so on command after the man’s description. When the arrhythmic, but strangely beautiful song had ended the man repeated his claim again and walked away. We he had gotten about thirty feet away he stopped and asked ustedes son extanjeros, no? I replied that we were from the states and he paused a moment before adding tenemos muchos pajeros en Argentina and walking away.
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