Saturday, June 11, 2011

I enjoy Wednesday mornings. It is winter now, but it feels more like fall as I walk out of the apartment to the slight smell of smoke. I can see the yellow haze that comes from somewhere, that hangs above San Telmo, and that doesn’t seem like smog. As I walk down the stairs to the underground, I put the smoke to the past and the stuffy concrete scrawl that is the C-Line becomes my present. I search my pocket for pesos and I pay the peso-ten that it costs and I stuff my self in the tube.

When I emerge, I am miles away from where I started and the smoke is gone and I see the red, blue and white flowers that are being sold outside the train station and, sitting quietly beside is the Chacarita Cemetery. Tall palms guard the entrance to the graveyard and atop the train station large single orange letters read Frederico Lacroze Estacion. They remind me of the Miami Airport in the sixties, at least this is how I imagine airports looked in the sixties. It doesn’t have the turn of the century feel of the other Buenos Aires Train Stations. I walk inside, passed the Pancho and Magazine stands, and I wait in line for my ticket to Villa Lynch. I walk to the platform and board the train.

I sit down on the baby-puke green vinyl seats across from a man who stares at a newspaper. I’m not sure if he is reading it or if he is only looking at it to make me think that he is reading it. I begin to write this when the whistle blows and the doors slam shut. The hollow cabin putts down the line, passing the Doric columns that provide entrance into the cemetery between high-stacked skeletal remains that have been locked inside concrete mausoleums for a century or more. The tranquil train takes me between highways and old universities with green greens and old brick buildings, between soccer fields and city busses, and between fields of crops resulting from some sustainable living college program. I listen to Argentine conversation that I don’t understand. And we cross intersections where cars wait and we, the train, slow and stop and I think only about the coffee I will drink when I reach my class.

And then I think about naked girls.

No comments:

Post a Comment