Only in Buenos Aires

This evening I went out for dinner with my friends Tom and Geraldine at a nice spot in Palermo called Las Cabras. We met at 9, had a lovely meal together, and left around 11. Tom and Geraldine took a cab and, having firmed up plans to meet Tom in the morning for a final run before he and Geraldine depart Buenos Aires tomorrow evening, I started towards home, about a 1.5 mile walk through a very safe neighborhood, most of it along Avenida Santa Fe, one of the main arteries of the city.

As I rounded the corner from Fitz Roy onto Santa Fe, I saw a couple running towards me, pushing a shopping cart between them, and laughing. They were youngish, and the woman was carrying a baby under her arm. They were accompanied by a scrawny looking dog. They were obviously pretty poor, and what many here in the city might refer to as negros de mierda. The term "negro" in Argentina has no real racial connotation, but there certainly are undertones of classism involved. Anyway, I remember thinking that their childcare skills needed some serious help, as the bouncing up and down as they ran along could not have been doing this poor baby any good, and it looked pretty distressed and bewildered. So was I, I guess.

When I say the woman was carrying the baby, I mean to say she was carrying it the way a running back might carry a football, though with significantly less protection. I rather suspected that if she had "fumbled the ball" she'd have been more than happy to let the opposing team take it and run it in for a touchdown, or wherever else they might want to take it. Although I count myself among the left leaning of the world, I recognize that this kind of criticism is likely to invite a knee-jerk reaction from a lot of those who believe any criticism of a "subaltern" group is absolute sacrilege, and that whatever kind of destructive behavior those people might exhibit is surely the fault of some privileged white male sitting somewhere, and not the fault of the underprivileged individual in question. To some degree, and in many cases, I can get onboard with that...to some degree. Life is complex, social problems are complex, cause-and-effect-and-cause-and-effect is complex. I get it. I, however, choose to assign the lion's share of this woman treating her child like a ragdoll to the woman herself.

Anyway, it was a disturbing sight, and I wondered what could possibly have been the hurry, and assumed they were probably trying to catch a train or something. In other words, I gave them the most possible benefit of the doubt I could with a good conscience. And then I saw Fernando come around the corner.

Of course, at the time I did not know this stranger's name was Fernando. All I knew was that he was covered in blood, it looked to be coming from a gash on his head, and he was shouting, "Which way did they go? Which way did that cowardly little bitch go?" Suddenly, I realized the two parent-of-the-year candidates were not running for the train, but had instead just committed an assault and were fleeing the scene. I yelled, "They just ran past, there they go!" and, as I am wont to do (and much to the chagrin of...everyone?) I joined in the chase.

This is the way I look at it: This is a city full of people who, understandably, abide by the mantra "no te metas" (don't get involved). Just a couple days ago I had seen a typical display of this as people walked past a boy beating and robbing another boy on the street. Let me reiterate that, intellectually, I absolutely understand this approach. The city, while not that dangerous, certainly has enough dangerous people lurking around to make it a real risk to "get involved." So I really can't criticize those who prioritize their own personal safety in the face of potential danger. I'm just not one of those people.

What's more, I think that if we let those who are willing to do harm to others have their way without putting up a fight, we're all doomed to be victims of those who are more willing to do violence. And that idea sickens me. Put aside the more global ramifications of that statement for now (and I'm well aware of them, trust me). I'm talking about on a person-by-person basis. If we're all willing to roll over and play dead when those aggressive individuals prey on us, and if we're all willing to turn the other way when someone else is being preyed upon, we're essentially giving up. Again, I get it. I understand the value of personal safety, and by no means am I trying to say that I don't value my own. What I am saying, however, is that I'm not willing to be a victim, and if I can, I want those would-be predators to understand that there are those of us out there who will, if struck, strike back. And there are those of us who, should we perceive a situation in which an innocent individual is being victimized, are willing to step in.

In this case, when I saw Fernando, covered in blood, running after his assailant, I thought, "Here's a man after my own heart." We chased this guy a solid couple of blocks (Fernando lagging behind, being injured, older, and slightly heavier) when I saw him pick up a glass bottle and turn back to threaten us. I was quickly gaining on him (the street punks who can outrun me, I imagine, are few and far between), but when I saw this, fell back a little. He continued running, and I continued running after him, but at a safer distance while I looked for my own weapon. After a couple blocks of winding west, north, west through Palermo, I found an empty wine bottle, and picked up the pace, closing the distance. Fernando was quite a ways behind, yelling at the "fucking coward" to stop and face the music. The guy rounded a corner, I rounded the same corner a few seconds later, but he had disappeared. Fernando caught up, panting, exhausted, and bleeding like a stuck pig. We walked together back to Avenida Santa Fe, and then back the way we had come. We crossed his attacker's "mujer", and Fernando informed her that she was living with a little piece of shit coward, and that when she was 40 years old, she could remember this night, and tell her child what a pussy his father was. Pussy in all capital letters, he clarified.

We walked together for a few blocks, and he filled me in on what had happened. He was standing, waiting for the bus and talking to his wife on the phone, when the young man and woman had approached him to ask him for some money, the man holding the baby. He told them he didn't have any, at which point the man sucker punched him, and an unseen assailant hit him over the head with a stick, opening the gash. Fernando, an ex-Marine, did not go down, but instead hit back, causing one of the brave young heroes to run away, and then delivered a kick to the other's kidney, causing him to hand the baby off to the woman (yes, he had punched Fernando WHILE holding the baby) and run. Ostensibly, the woman took off beside him and that is, more or less, where I entered the story.

Fernando was absolutely incredulous that anyone had helped him at all, and was extremely grateful, inviting me a coffee with him after he changed shirts and washed up. I gladly accepted. When he found out I was an American on vacation, he was even more flabbergasted, and showed his appreciation with a pretty manly hug. We sat for about an hour at a cafe and talked.

Like most Argentines that I know, he was very conscious of his heritage, and came from Dutch blood on his mother's side and Arabic on his father's. He had dropped out of high school and joined the marines, serving 5 years as an infantryman before getting out. He now worked as a waiter at a restaurant in Belgrano, and was just on his way home from work when he was attacked. We talked for quite a while about Argentine history, and I was surprised (but at the same time, not so surprised) by his grasp of both 19th and 20th century immigration history, and different conflicts the country had been involved in. This conversation branched into a discussion of various aspects of Argentine culture, child-rearing, and the economic interests of the British in Las Islas Malvinas, all of which he had very interesting and well-informed perspectives on. It was a fascinating conversation, one that you couldn't have with many high-school dropout waiters. But, you know, this is Buenos Aires.

As we left the cafe and walked back to his bus stop, he thanked me again, pointing out that in this city, it is a rare thing that a complete stranger comes to your aid. He invited me to go eat at the restaurant he works in tomorrow night, which I'll be sure to take him up on. I thanked him for the coffee, and told him I was glad to meet him. It's not every day, I said, that you meet such a nice guy under those kinds of circumstances. He laughed, gave me another hug, got on the bus, and said he'd see me tomorrow, and maybe after we got off work, we could see if those fucking cowards weren't lurking around the neighborhood again.

Little Boy from Fuerte Apache

Look, unless I can come up with some kind of gimmick, I have to accept at least one of the following realities:

1. I'm not interesting enough to regularly write a blog, or
2. I'm not self-indulgent enough to regularly write a blog.

Either way, as you can see, I'm having no more luck this time around at maintaining a blog than I did the first couple tries. Ah, well.

Anyway, last night I went to Villa Devoto to go to the movies with a friend. I screwed up and got off the bus at the wrong corner (though, luckily, only a couple blocks away from where I was supposed to get off). As I was waiting there, I saw what appeared to be two boys playing on the other side of the street. They appeared to be wrestling around. I watched with more than a little curiosity, having enjoyed a childhood wrestling match or two myself.

Since I'm now a "trained" intelligence analyst, I'm pretty conscious of a lot of the mental processes that most people unconsciously go through when trying to evaluate something, whether it be a difficult problem, a news story, or simply a puzzling situation they are witnessing first hand. Watching these two boys go at it was no exception. Let me give you a blow-by-blow of my analysis:

Hey, look at those two little kids wrestling. I remember when I used to do that!

But, it's kind of dangerous for them to be wrestling there right on the corner with the traffic passing by so closely. What if one of them falls in the street?

Wait a minute...there's a grassy park right there, why aren't they just playing in the park?

Shit, they might actually be fighting. They're both really little, maybe 8 or 10
years old. They can't hurt each other that badly, but maybe I should cross the
street and break them up anyway.

But wait, there are people over there, responsible adults, just walking by without saying or doing anything. I really haven't been in this neighborhood before, maybe this is just how kids play here.

Besides, there´s no yelling or anything going on. They're obviously just having
fun.

Oh wait, this one is pulling that one's shirt off...and now he's turning his pocket inside out...and now he's taking his money. And now he's kicking him and crossing the street. Damn it, I should have gone and broken it up.

The miniature robber crossed the street, and started to walk by me. "Hey, kid, what are you doing?" I ask him, so he starts to run. I started to run after him but then thought, "What am I going to do? Beat up a 10 year old and re-steal the money?" so I just let him take off. I instead turned my attention to the little boy across the street, trying to get himself dressed on the corner.

When I reached him, I saw that he was quite a bit smaller than his adversary, which I hadn't noticed when they were just a tangled ball of little kids a few moments before. He was crying, swearing at himself. I asked him what happened, and he told me the bigger boy had just grabbed him and told him to hand over everything he had, and he'd tried to tell him that he didn't have anything, and that's what prompted the beating. I asked him if he lived nearby, and he told me he lived in Fuerte Apache, which is, depending on who you ask, the most dangerous neighborhood in all of the Buenos Aires urban area. I asked him how much money he lost, and he told me $19 pesos (a little less than 5 bucks). He had probably already sized up the situation and was lying through his teeth to me, and I was conscious of this but didn't care. I took $19 out of my wallet and handed it to him, and told him to be safe on his way home (I sure as hell wasn't going to walk him to Fuerte Apache, even if I hadn't had arrangements to meet a friend).

It's hard telling what he'd had to do to get that money. Although there are some pretty young little criminals, he obviously didn't have a weapon and was far too small to present a credible threat to someone, unarmed as he was. He probably had just begged it, or sold gum, or something. The typical stuff that little poor kids have to do here that will almost certainly prevent them from getting a proper education to ensure that their own kids won't be the victims of a Liliputian street-corner assault and robbery 15 or 20 years from now. $19 pesos is a pittance, but for a little boy, especially from Fuerte Apache, it was probably quite a bit, and I got the feeling that he was expected to go home with something to show for the day he'd spent out and about.

He didn't thank me for the money, but he seemed a little relieved and had stopped crying. As he was walking away he stopped, turned back to me and said, "You sure made that asshole run!" He smiled, then turned back around and headed home to Fuerte Apache.