The Long Haul, The Writing on the Wall, and Sometimes a Bicycle is More than a Bicycle:

Three Months in Argentina

( 29-30 March 2008/Mendoza, Argentina)

Traveling for a weekend or a month or a day is qualitatively different than wandering in the world for several months. As I write this, I have reached the mental state of a long-haul traveler. For most of three months of traversing Argentina, I had clear plans or, at the very least, clear alternative plans for future destinations. Recently, though, when I reached Punta del Diablo, Uruguay, I discovered a point (the point of the devil?) at which I no longer knew what the next destination would be.

When I first arrived in Argentina in mid-December, my twenty-one year old daughter Ari and I inhabited an apartment I had rented for a month in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires, the first three weeks sharing space, time, and cultural experiences. She has a solid command of Spanish, and I often referred to her as “my translator”. We regularly got lost while discovering the grand metropolis while wondering at people, parks, and the customs of life in this city of approximately 13,000,000. But Ari could dig us out, and I was lucky to have a companion with whom I could speak in my native quirky tongue.

With camera in hand, I snapped away, sucking images into digital form for future reference, the better to focus my eye and my attention to the world at large. Sometimes I saw the big picture, always impossible to squeeze into a frame, other times I wanted to capture Ari in action or repose (occasionally to her dismay), and at moments of grace either Ari or I would notice photographable details we both felt compelled to study and then transform into bits. One day, while meandering to Mitre Parque, Ari noticed a wall of beautiful, sometimes strange graffiti stencil art, and we directed our feet past the cabbie washing his vehicle to get to the wall of stencil images we didn’t really understand but appreciated as a kind of art created without profit motive or clear ego motive. Serial pictures of Vespas, Black soul singers, a native woman, a man with mechanical wings, a woman who had the sixties Black girl-group look, and many other compelling pictures, sometimes in color, made me alert to the possibility of peoples’ art around the city. But I didn’t understand how pervasive the form was until I left Buenos Aires, was walking in the city of Cordoba and saw another set of stenciled images that included a rat with an umbrella, Charlie Chaplin on a soapbox, Carlos Gardel, George Bush in a Mickey Mouse hat, a beautifully detailed pigeon, a skull-and-crossed-bones Bush, Che, an image of a plane flying into the twin towers, sixties Bob Dylan, green frogs on a pink wall, television or comics characters (some specific to South America) and many more surprising visual messages.

From that point forward, in every city, town, or pueblo I stopped to capture stencil art, popular or political or self-aggrandizing. All of the barrios of Buenos Aires had their share, with a concentration in Palermo, but every population center had some, from Buenos Aires, to Cordoba, to Cosquin, to Mendoza, to Salta, on up to the small towns of the NW (Humahuaca, Tilcara, Purmamarca, and even Iruya), each place presented walls that needed to speak. I recalled the saying, “Read the writing on the wall.” Where official venues are not available, the dispossessed, the oppressed, the repressed, the irrepressible, or a more dangerous fringe will write or paint on walls to express collective dreams. Cafayate, Puerta Madryn, Calafate, Bariloche, Iguazu (Cataracas), Montevideo, and Rosario—images continued to surface on the walls, and I felt compelled to photograph them.

For the first three months, I always had an itinerary into a foreseeable future, but in March, when I got to Buenos Aires with my wife Sheila, fresh from our three weeks of whirlwind touring, I no longer saw much beyond Sheila’s return to the United States. Possibilities still abounded, but I had made a run at many regions within Argentina, and I needed to think about where/what was left that called my name. From the earliest considerations of travel in the lower hemisphere, I considered exploring part of Uruguay, with Montevideo at the top of the list; I also wanted to depart from cities and towns to clear my head at a beach. Neither Mar del Plata in Argentina, nor Punta del Este in Uruguay interested me. I didn’t want glitz and glamour; I wanted a rustic beach where I might disappear, leaving crowds and mindless, stupid sounds behind. I’d been in Argentina long enough for the rose-colored specs to vanish, and tiresome lines, the ubiquitous ham sandwich on white bread, dogs and dog shit, broken sidewalks, thumpa-tsk-tsk electronica everywhere, and noise and pollution in BuenosAires, made a ferry over to Montevideo and then ocean time in Punta del Diablo very appealing.

I made the decision in Buenos Aires, but I really didn’t know exactly what I would do after Montevideo. I at first thought I’d go to Rocha, and then on to Punta del Diablo, but I was making my travels up on interesting word of mouth, snatches of research from my guidebooks, and intuition. I also let go of the necessity of always having a pre-booked accommodation. My Dutch pal Arvid had recommended a few spots in Montevideo; I decided to go with her advice and to cab to Palacio Hotel upon arrival. Something was happening before I realized it. I was becoming a cloud in the wind. Maybe the cloud thinks it knows where it’s going and then comes to understand how foolish that is and realizes the wind is driving its direction. I’d drifted into the mind of a long-haul traveler and let go of needing to project very far ahead, in favor of trusting that each destination would help to inform my direction and clarify my travel desires.

Following Punta del Diablo, I returned to Montevideo and Semana Santa craziness of jammed bus terminal and a city seemingly without an available room or bed, but lucked back into digs at Palacio Hotel and, after a day, tickets to get me to Rosario via ferry from Colonia to Buenos Aires, and bus in the afternoon from Buenos Aires to Rosario. I even easily nabbed three days of reservations at Che Pampas Hostel in Rosario. Each leap had its landing, even though some leaps weren’t always exactly smooth.

While in Rosario, I decided my next destination would be Valle de la Luna, via busses to San Juan and Valle Fertil. Before leaving Seattle in December, a couple I’d met in Zeitgeist Coffee, one of my haunts when on my home turf, spoke of the valley in glowing terms, and when I mentioned the possibility of the valley as a destination, many Argentines responded with typical enthusiasms, clichés I’d grown used to hearing: muy lindo (very beautiful), muy tranquilo (very tranquil), precioso (precious), etc., but several people expressed genuine excitement, and I craved a large change in environment, which Valley of the Moon (Parque Provincial Ischigualasto) promised with its otherworldly formations. But Semana Santa week kept me planted in Rosario

Rosario Stories

Any traveler who runs without a tight itinerary knows that it’s what happens unexpectedly and who you meet along the way that is the meaningful substance of the journey. To only experience preconceived satisfactions results in empty travel calories. Piquant moments occur in the hiatus between the known and the unknown. If, for example, you go to Machu Picchu and it is everything you hoped it would be, just what you thought it should be, I would wonder whether you actually needed the experience because you insulated the unknown within a shell of clear expectations, keeping contrary perceptions at bay. Machu Picchu performed as expected. Sure, you could tick off another wonder of the planet, but what was missed? On the other hand, it is also possible to wander to Machu Picchu in ignorance and miss the depth of its history and place. The concept is good whether the destination is an alluring, exotic location or the marketplace down the street. We want our expectations satisfied, but without new, sometimes contrary events, travels feel rote. It’s important for me to find ways to invite the correct balance of knowledge and receptivity to the unknowns. How do we make up new realities, given who we are, where we go, and the unknowable grandness of stepping out of secure zones? The long-haul traveler asks these questions as the journey makes itself up. We were never really in control anyhow.

And as I remained in Rosario, circumstances led the way. My decisions resulted from lack of accommodations and lack of transportation options; and those glitches determined the quality, provided opportunities to know people and to inhabit places I would have otherwise ignored on my way to the next destination. I had no choices. The busy Semana Santa week left me without accommodations after my three days at Che Pampas Hostel, and busses were sold out until after the holiday week. Grace and good fortune made their way in through the cracks, providing me with lodgings at Posada El Parque Hostel, and the sincere kindness of Virginia, Gustavo, and their teenage daughter Maria Luz. When there were no beds for travelers in Rosario, they went out and bought beds and reconfigured rooms to accommodate those of us who might otherwise have had to stay up all night or sleep on benches in parks. Then, when I decided to go to Valle de la Luna, Virginia offered to take me to the bus station and help with any communication difficulties that might result there. She and Gustavo and I packed off in the car on the way to their supermarket errands, and Virginia acted as translator at the omnibus estacion. She, I think, knew that my travel options might become complicated, and she was correct. No tickets were available for days. I bought the one ticket on the only bus scheduled to leave for San Juan three days hence. Virginia then told me not to worry, she and Gustavo would make sure I would have a bed, even though no more beds were available at the hostel on Saturday night. She said that I could stay at their little house on Saturday and return to the hostel for the remaining Sunday and Monday before my departure. I was moved by this kindness. And later, on my final day before departure, when the throngs of travelers had evacuated the hostel, Virginia patiently related the stories behind the images I had been collecting.

Sometimes a Bicycle is More Than a Bicycle

Each city or town speaks from its walls with its own images and words, sometimes telling a story that goes beyond that city’s boundaries with a local version of national or world events. I had noticed and photographed an impressive stencil painting of a full-scale bicycle that kept showing up around Rosario and thought it was an exceptional piece, unlike the smaller images found on the walls of my travels. Only later, when Virginia and I conversed for hours before my departure, did I learn that sometimes a bicycle is more than a bicycle.

During Argentina’s most recent dictatorship and The Dirty War (a seven-year campaign when the Argentine government primarily targeted suspected dissidents and subversives), thirty-thousand people (a symbolic number) were disappeared, taken away and never heard from again. Men, women, and children vanished. Many were tortured and killed, and some of the children were taken or sold. The full-scale bicycle I had photographed in various places around Rosario represents one person’s pain at the loss of a close friend who was one of the disappeared. The artist associates the bicycle with the lost friend, and in order to remember him and other victims of The Dirty War, the artist wants to paint 30,000 bicycles on wall spaces in Argentina, with Rosario as ground zero.

That would be impressive enough, but the image of the bicycle has grown to tell other stories—sadly, a continuation of previous horrors. In 2001, thirty more people in Argentina were disappeared, five of them from Rosario. Among the five Rosarinos, Pocho Leprati, a Catholic social worker who lived in a middle-class barrio and who attended to and educated children of the cartoneros (those who for a pittance gather paper and cardboard from refuse on the streets) and other desperately poor children, was disappeared*. He worked in the most impoverished barrio in Rosario and acted as a teacher/communicator, educating Rosarinos of all classes about the extreme poverty and degrading conditions, not least of which were the sufferings of children who work through the night salvaging paper and cardboard from curbside garbage.

Following, the disappearance of Pocho Leprati, a magazine called Angel de Lata came out to publicize what had happened, to explain his disappearance and his work. Virginia interpreted the double meaning of the magazine’s title. Angel de Lata, translates as angel of metal, and, read another way, angel delata translates as revealing angel. Leprati’s angel would continue to reveal his truth. The children he’d attended to, cared for, and educated created an image for that magazine that added an angel to the bicycle they had seen painted on the walls of their city. It was stenciled images of an angel riding a bicycle that drew my attention one day on a long walk with new friends Santiago and Daniela as we trekked from the Parana River, down by La Fluvial, all the way to Parque Independencia. At the time I was already noticing a bicycle theme developing throughout Rosario, even felt compelled to photograph a window crowded with actual bicycles, and then spotted a sign high on a different building from which a bicycle was suspended, but the significance of large stencil bicycles or the many stencil paintings of a bicycle with an angel eluded my comprehension. For me, at that stage, the images were just art, graphic paintings that attracted my eye and my curiosity, so I photographed them and wondered. I had no notion of the layering of messages represented on Rosario’s streets. But the writing on the walls doesn’t stop there.

As Santiago, Daniela, and I continued through a shabby neighborhood, I spotted an image that looked familiar, a stencil painting of an older man in a cap. It reminded me of a stencil I’d photographed on several government buildings and streets of the city of Tucuman, but it was different enough for me to assume that it was someone else. Even so, I didn’t know the significance of either image. The image of the older man represented on the streets and buildings of Tucuman was accompanied by the words ?Donde esta Jorge Julio Lopez? Clearly, the man was one of the disappeared, but that was all I could make of his painted presence looking out from so many places in Tucuman, and until Virginia informed me that the picture I’d photographed in Rosario was Lopez, I couldn’t make necessary connections.

I learned that Jorge Julio Lopez represents a new chapter in the horrors that the government of Argentina had promised would never happen again. In 2006, Jorge Luis Lopez, a torture victim and witness to brutalities in a school building in La Plata that served as a clandestine concentration camp**, a holding facility where torture and murder occurred during The Dirty War, had his day in court to testify against those who had snatched citizens from their lives. His damning story helped to convict Miguel Etchecolatz, and promised to implicate other government officials, but before Lopez could complete his full testimony, hours before he was to testify against a former police investigator, Jorge Julio Lopez was disappeared, continuing a nightmare of Argentina’s history into the present.

Today in Argentina, if you see a stencil painting on a wall of the symbolic number 30,000, and below it you see the number increased to 30,001, with the number one in red paint, that one represents Jorge Julio Lopez, and it represents the need to remind ourselves that the past can and has reached its terrible hand out to the present.

A full-scale bicycle painted on a wall, as if someone parked it there for a moment but never came back, is a chilling reminder of living history. We, like Pocho Leprati’s angel, need to get on that bicycle and ride into a future that will always reveal and expose the entire truth, which is the only truth. Only then can we move forward into the difficulties and ecstasies of our individual and shared lives.

Steven Jay Weinberg

30 March 2008/
4th Edit (Revisions 8 April 2008)

*Pocho Leprati was actually shot in public by a policeman. Just the same, in Virginia’s account to me she included him as one of the disappeared, a social/political irritant eliminated by the police.

**That school building/house of torture where Jorge Julio Lopez and thousands of others were held is now ESME, The Museum of Memory.

Note: Tomorrow or the next day I will take a bus to Valparaiso, Chile,

          where I intend to read the writing on the walls.