Argentina and Chile 2003–2004: A Twenty Years’ Retrospective

By Barry Pomeroy

Remembering my first trip to South America meant going through old photographs, talking to Silvio about what he remembered, and reliving some of those vivid experiences. Although I’d been overseas before, I’d never visited as a guest in a family, and that brought its own delights and pitfalls.
Join me as we sit around the family table, run from rabid relatives and friends, and make enduring friendships out of the rough clay of a more than two-month visit. As much a record of family drama as it is a travel narrative, this return to Argentina and Chile is meant to capture a country still reeling from its 2000 market crash, a traveller coping with culture clash and bad manners, and the savage enjoyment which results from the urge to pack a bag and buy a ticket.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Oct 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781990314346

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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Argentina and Chile 2003–2004

A Twenty Years’ Retrospective

by

Barry Pomeroy

Remembering my first trip to South America meant going through old photographs, talking to Silvio about what he remembered, and reliving some of those vivid experiences. Although I’d been overseas before, I’d never visited as a guest in a family, and that brought its own delights and pitfalls.

Join me as we sit around the family table, run from rabid relatives and friends, and make enduring friendships out of the rough clay of a more than two-month visit. As much a record of family drama as it is a travel narrative, this return to Argentina and Chile is meant to capture a country still reeling from its 2000 market crash, a traveller coping with culture clash and bad manners, and the savage enjoyment which results from the urge to pack a bag and buy a ticket.

© 2023 by Barry Pomeroy

All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

ISBN 13: 978-1990314346

ISBN 10: 1990314341

Table of Contents

Introduction

Silvio's Uncertainty about the Trip

Silvio in Boston

Time to Buy a Ticket

Arriving in Buenos Aires

The Bus Ride South

The First Day with the Family in Neuquén

A Daily Schedule

Meeting Locals

Griselda

Villa la Angostura

San Martin de los Andes

Chile: Pucón and Temuco

An Argentinean Quilombo

Back to a Kind of Normal

Christmas in Neuquén

Driving to Mar de Plata

Mar de Plata

Back in Neuquén

Last Trip to Mar de Plata

Flying Home

Epilogue

Introduction

I first visited South America twenty years ago. Although at the time I mostly stayed with Silvio’s family—now scattered over separate homes—and involved myself in their internecine struggles, that other visit coloured my way of thinking about the continent, rather like dark clouds suggest but don’t guarantee a downpour.

The most significant moments from my first trip to Argentina and Chile were fleeting and largely overwritten by my attempt to grapple with a culture that could be very isolating. I laughed with Silvio at rude tourists we met on our trip across the Andes to Chile, grimaced with him through the awkward confrontation with his cousin, marvelled at the way in which people in the coastal city of Mar de Plata dealt with organ trade child abductions in the past and the mark that had left on the culture, and ran with him when his rabid cousin pursued us for over four hundred kilometres.

Necessarily, more negative impressions from that first trip fed a reluctance to return, whether in print or in person, and it was with some difficulty that Silvio persuaded me to come back to South America fifteen years later and travel in his RV. The trip promised to offer more than a hard chair at a noisy confusing table, and although Silvio and I had shared road trips before, he had organized the venture to take into account our changing circumstance.

We had driven to western Canada a few times in my old car, but that way of traveling suited me more than him. Tent camping doesn’t represent privation for me, and cooking over a fire is a relatively familiar procedure. Silvio likes the clamour of crowds and meeting different people, and endures discomfort with little grace. His RV project promised to satisfy both of our requirements, and he was more than a little excited to show me what he had accomplished.

That first trip to Argentina and Chile still hovered behind his request however, both a warning and a threat, and it was some time before I agreed to return. Silvio urged me to visit ever since my first trip twenty years earlier, and I had put him off, but he had spent both time and money ensuring that we could travel for thousands of kilometres in a way that he would be comfortable—and thus happy—and I would be assured of a method of traveling that at least in part suited both my temperament and inclinations. Eventually I gave in, and Silvio and I went to Chile, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. I have related those stories in my trip journals, and in the meantime, while traveling by RV, Silvio became interested in stories of my adventures in the Cook Islands when I was younger. Most people care little about the travels of others, but other travellers are curious, and Silvio asked enough questions that I became aware that I remembered more than I thought about that most seminal of trips now almost forty years ago.

Although the other earlier trip to Argentina had largely receded into memory, such ruminations—as well as the books I wrote about my later trips to South America—evoked that earlier adventure. I recalled how little effort Argentineans make to include someone with faltering Spanish, and the idiosyncrasies of the culture—as well as my attempt to interpret them—became once again part of my way of thinking about the country. Although I hadn’t recorded my almost three-month 2003 trip to Argentina and Chile, it still existed in the stories I told about the people we encountered and the events we witnessed.

Silvio’s Uncertainty about the Trip

Rumours of the adventure actually started the year before. Silvio wanted me to accompany him to Argentina in the summer and I was certainly keen. The best way to see a country is visit with a local, but I’d known Silvio long enough to wonder if he was actually going to go. His plans could change on a whim, and he also normally followed the Argentinean tendency to claim he would do something and then not follow through.

Accordingly, I told him that when he had arrived I would buy a ticket. No, he told me. That would be too late to get a good price. His tickets came from his sister Vanessa, who worked for the airline, so were cheaper, but I would be paying full price.

I never bought the ticket that year, luckily, for my suspicions were correct. Silvio never went to Argentina after all. When I mentioned that to him the next time he suggested that I buy a ticket to Argentina, he asked what he could have done. Could I really go to Argentina to see my family when they were coming to Winnipeg? A good question, but entirely beside the point. My main question was about the dependability of his plans, not what had made those plans change. His inability to understand that distinction fueled part of my distrust. He couldn’t see why I might be reluctant to buy a ticket on the basis of his wish to go somewhere he might never end up going.

The following year, in the late summer of 2003, I was visiting in Winnipeg when he invited me again. One of the selling features, according to him, was that my Canadian money was worth so much more, since the country went down as he called it, in 2000. The currency was sinking by comparison to other world currencies and widespread inflation was just beginning.

I told him definitively no, unless I either saw he had a ticket, or he was in Argentina and I talked to him on the phone. He found my demands a bit precious, and argued that he would definitely be going. It was his father’s seventieth birthday and he had no choice but to attend. I wasn’t entirely convinced by those assurances, however.

I’d met his father in Winnipeg a year earlier, and we’d shared the delightful moment in which he’d come to look at my car under Silvio’s urging. He was horrified when he saw my twenty-year-old Honda. He imagined a university professor would have a Mercedes, or, like him, a BMW. He exclaimed, "Eso es el auto? No tiene verguenza, el chico." He has no shame, he told Silvio. Our lives seemed to be worlds apart, even setting aside the linguistic difficulty, but in fact his father appreciated my lack of pretention. He’d been a poor taxi driver in Buenos Aires before he saved enough to invest in his building supply company, and by dint of effort he built it into a multi-million dollar business.

I respected Juan Carlos as well, and I would have liked to attend his seventieth birthday, but I was still reluctant to trust Silvio’s plans. Would he actually be there when he claimed?

I carried on with my summer, sailing on the boat I’d built into the fall on the Strait of Georgia. After I packed away my boat at my sister’s place in Kelowna—she graciously allowed me to use a corner of her levelled area on the mountain—I drove across the country to Boston visiting people along the way. I went to Prince George to visit Ibrahim and the family, Saskatoon to see Lynn and Randy, and spent almost a month in Winnipeg. It was late fall when I drove through Toronto and arrived in Boston.

Silvio was still committed to his South America trip, and claimed, once he’d finished visiting in Chicago and Minneapolis, that he would meet me in Boston. He said then that we could plan our winter escape by flying to Argentina’s summer. I still made no solid plans, since Silvio could easily go right back to Canada from Boston if the whim took him, and so I waited to see his ticket.

Silvio in Boston

Even at the bus station Silvio was excited to greet the Bissell family, and wound up about his trip. He wasn’t going straight to Argentina, of course, but using the occasion to travel around the North American continent and see people he knew. Even after being in Boston, he planned to go to New York City and see his cousin.

Silvio fit into the family well, for they were delighted to meet the friend I’d spoken so much about, although we did experience a very Argentinean moment when he first arrived. Biss knew that Silvio was sensitive about nudity, and that he came from a homophobic culture, so Biss got out of the hot tub and came nude and wet to hug Silvio hello. A troll at heart, Biss would have hated it if someone were making him uncomfortable as soon as he arrived at their place, but he couldn’t resist teasing Silvio. They’d met before in Winnipeg when Biss came to visit me some years before, so at least they had a bit of a relationship beforehand.

Cynthia was more hospitable. She offered him some coffee, but when he said yes, he turned to me to ask for leche. He was shy about asking them, and I merely gestured toward the fridge. Cynthia asked what he wanted, and when I told her, she said that he should help himself.

Cynthia wasn’t interested in being a host who has to wait on her guests, or in this case, my guest, and it was perfectly normal for her to have Silvio open the fridge and take the milk he needed for his coffee. This social circumstance is fraught with difficulty for an Argentinean, however, especially for Silvio. While others might cope with the different social surround, the training of his youth forbade opening another’s fridge. That is true, regardless of relationship, in Argentina. Even if someone is a long-time friend of the family, they can only enter a house when invited, must stay in that room until gestured into another, and must ask to go to the bathroom. Helping yourself doesn’t exist in Argentinean culture. That set of social rules is the polar opposite of how I was brought up, for in eastern Canada, if you are not at ease once told to make yourself at home, the host is to blame for alienating their guest.

Argentineans purposely alienate their guests, but they also allow people into their homes that Canadians would not. Therefore, the strict social codes ensure that those people do not open cupboards or enter rooms in the rest of the house. Those rules weighed heavy on Silvio, so he reluctantly said permisso and opened Biss and Cynthia’s fridge to serve his own milk.

Argentina is a teasing culture much like the Maritimes, so I took the moment to say to our hosts, They do help themselves, don’t they?

Silvio grimaced. He knew it was a joke, and that everyone was well intentioned, but it still cut him to the quick. It brought back all the nonsense of his youth about having to ask permission to go into someone’s home. We laughed about the joke, and moved on, although my levity came back to haunt me later in Argentina.

Silvio came from a teasing culture, but Biss and I overwhelmed him. We were inadvertently tag-teaming him, making joke after joke in an endless stream—exacerbated by the fact that