ANDREW KAYE
Nochebuena
Christmas Eve and what a tonic it is to walk around the eerily quiet city. A city that, much like its plentiful parilla barbecues, sizzles. In its smug southern hemisphere seclusion, I can walk half a kilometre and find Tipa trees with their swannish necks craning upwards, but surprisingly few residents. The latin beats of Bachata music pulsate in Pueyrredón’s flea market. There’s the hum of the port in the distance and little else. I laughingly remember how far I’ve travelled, from the M25’s traffic jams, London’s mid-afternoon dusks, and the hamster-wheel of managerial life. Goodbye to the proverbial day-to-day grind.
It seems everyone in Buenos Aires has either flocked to the seaside or prefers to hide away in their family homes. It’s not too surprising; the city condenses at this time, water dripping from the overspill of air conditioning appliances, tap-tap-tap onto pedestrians’ heads. Then there’s the humidity that seems to settle on you, rising from the Rio de la Plata and embracing you like an unspooling cling film.
First, I wind past the presidential Casa Rosada in Plaza de Mayo, coloured the dusty abode of colonial bricks. I briefly stop to scan the balcony where Eva Peron famously didn’t sing ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’. In university quarter, Montserrat, I vault over cobbled memorial stones to the detenidos desaparecidos, the students and academics thrown by Jorge Rafael Videla’s 1970s regime, hooded and handcuffed, into patrolling cars. Down Calle Florida I go, normally populated by the touts, but since the government lifted currency controls, even they’ve disappeared.
I pass through a near-deserted Puerto Madero, feel the brief respite of the shade besides the city’s few skyscrapers and end, breathless, in the lush Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur. Mosquitoes acquaint themselves with my skin. I too have worked up an appetite, but vow I’ll avoid the city’s street asados with their steaming, hulking cuts of grilled meat. I have an invitation to Wilfredo’s for a Nochebuena dinner on Pasteur street, close to the abandoned city centre. Nochebuena literally means ‘good night’, as in there’s an expectation one will have a good night, or in this circumstance – Christmas Eve – one feels social convention dictates you must seek one out. We’ll see.
I met Wilfredo on a dating app. His tousled hair and cute chops endeared me, as did his tale over coffee that he was a successful contestant on Argentina’s version of the X Factor. A poet with his wipsy black beard, he wears red-and-black check shirts and the hoop earring beloved of male Renaissance artists. Or did they wear pearls?
It’s nine or thereabouts. I insert my contact lenses, place a white cotton long-sleeved shirt over my head, put wax in my hair, and act the teenager; I’m giddy. I’m buzzed upstairs. It’s late for me, but I’m reminded not to arrive too early. This is Argentina, where there’s no point turning up for the first hour of any party. I’m whisked in, Wilfredo greets me, nonchalantly motions a few of his friends, ‘Hey, this is Andrew’. It’s that instant where, attuned to hate parties – I’m hypersensitive and hate loud noise – squares and squiggles compete for my attention. I scan the balconied front room suspended above a street full of kids throwing firecrackers. The scene’s a Wasily Kandinsky painting of unlikely patterns; I anchor my eyes on the reds and blacks of Wilfredo’s shirt. I take a fraction of a second to process anything else.
Rafael, like Wil, is from Caracas. He dazzles with his tight, high-up-his midriff, birch-white trousers. His black hair is bunched up in a samurai’s ponytail. An embrace, a whiff of some aftershave on his long tulip stalk neck? His friend Rodrigo is also a ‘looker’. Yes, I still use that word. He’s swarthy, a bit cocky, and interested in finding a “mature man”. We’re cramped into a kitchen that reminds me of the magically shrinking corridor in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. How small can a kitchen get? Wil and Rafael are a pinball machine, firing questions at me.
‘Cool, oh God, from London, I’m studying theatre, have you ever seen Imelda Staunton,’ asks Rafael, who I notice looking edgily at Wilfredo. I’m not sure what hidden codes they’re exchanging.
‘Oh, he’s talking about Harry Potter again, hey, do you want to come to the balcony and look at the firecrackers?’ asks Wil. I think I’d rather stay with Rafael: to fixate my eyes on his, which are mahogany. With his high cheekbones, and the years of committed practise of English, and despite a peculiar Californian lilt to his voice, he’s the epitome of the ‘Latino’ stereotype I idealise. Possibly for the first time ever, I feel men who are out-of-my-league are competing over me.
I booked my one-way ticket seven months ago, on what proved to be yet another wet and windy May-Bank Holiday weekend. Friends were bored silly hearing me talk about taking time off work. The point, though, wasn’t to leave work. It was the tired act of being a diligent professional that saw me ending up feeling spent; the encore of playing the dutiful son. Saturdays melted into Sundays which soon putrefied into Monday mornings. I wanted to be free of responsibility, which I was capable of assuming but I then wore it like a straitjacket.
Lying in bed prostrate, like a Lucian Freud nude, all it took was a click of a button. I was portly, not full of confidence, consumed in fact with how many matches I could make on a single night on Grindr, how much dopamine would hit in a single fix. In Sartre’s terms, I wasn’t quite existing, I wasn’t being my authentic self.
My daily routine invariably saw me waking up tired after getting too little sleep the night before, grabbing calorific, last-minute snacks on the way to work, and then staying late at work to compensate for arriving there late in the first place. Getting grouchy and pasty, by the early afternoon I’d grab something sugary to give a shock to my blood sugar levels, and finally arrive home around nine in the evening, just energetic enough to ring the local Chinese or Indian take-away and turn on an episode of ‘The Apprentice’. I wasn’t ageing well. In fact, my PE teacher at school’s warning that I would die of a cardiac arrest by the age of 35 was starting to feel prophetic.
I knew I had a nascent desire for travel, not for a two-week holiday here or a long weekend there, but to be away for a long time. I was deeply suspicious of anyone in the office, who on a Monday morning – when asked, ‘How was your weekend?’ – replied, ‘Great, really, really good’. ‘It couldn’t be’, I used to think, ‘it only lasts two-days’.
At Wilfredo’s party, there’s a woman whose name I can’t pronounce, Milagros, which I think means Miracles, and her arms are around my shoulders. There’s someone else who I assume in this company is gay, a mixed-race guy with playful curly hair, and a pale-blue shirt that looks like it needs slipping off. A straight couple recently arrived from Venezuela are here for the festivities. The guy’s admirably ambitious for his new life in Buenos Aires, but I’m not interested. I’m studying Wilfredo and Rafael’s conspiratorial glances in the corner of Wil’s poky living room.
The two Venezuelan guys I met in London as a newly single guy disappointed me. Jota took my money and never gave it back (he had some ham-fisted story of one kind or another, involving a relative in trouble, possibly injured in a car crash). There was a short guy, Edgar, who was a receptionist at a swanky gym, who I took on a date to see the Nutcracker at the Coliseum. He reciprocated with talk of how I was fat and that I needed to get fit. Jokes aside, they were ambitious and needed to be. Emigrating to the UK was hard enough, settling there under Theresa May’s Home Officer even harder. Life back in Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela is hardest, with soaring levels of violence and poverty.
Rafael and I go to the cinema, we keep on texting. New Year’s Eve begins with its Venezuelan influences – again at Wilfredo’s – for an evening of Pastichio with play-dough textured pastry and a flaky Apple Strudel for dessert. Oh, and a dollop of Tiramisu too. Already tipsy on cheap red wine, Rafael, Wil and the gang walk in zig-zags across a heavily cordoned Plaza de Mayo. I struggle to keep up.
Crowds head with purpose to the river. Hugs are offered and fists are raised in ‘little Caracas’, an impromptu gathering of hundreds of Venezuelans close to the Puerto Madero docks. Red, yellow and navy flags gently flap in the clear skies; people embrace one another and chant “V-e-n-e-z-u-e-l-a” as if we’re at a football match. Bottles of rum and cola, with more rum than cola, are handed around a tight circle I’m enveloped in with Rafael. He’s looking at me, there don’t seem to be any hidden agendas, he touches my shoulder. I touch his shirt, gingerly and still too much the Brit, but willing to find new things out. He’s wearing tight shorts. Fireworks whizz and speed above the ultramodern Calatrava-designed bridge. Cacophonous noise fills my ears so nothing else can be absorbed, only, ‘V-e-n-e-z-u-e-l-a’. I tell myself not to drink too much, ‘you know you get drunk easily’. I tell myself to stop being a bore, that I haven’t had this much fun on New Year’s Eve since Dad and I went to Cuba and I danced what must have been Salsa.
There’s a few new friends in the gang, but I try to remain close to Rafael. I like everything about him: his maturity for his age – he’s a good few years younger – and his caring, intuitive glances to check I’m alright. I see myself threading my hands through his wild Maid Marian hair, with its bounce that’s uniquely his, freeing, the antithesis of everything I wanted to leave behind. I escape, momentarily at least. I’m prone to escape, I don’t fit into crowds, I need to know my place, I don’t trust easy promises of happiness. Midnight. The rockets reach new heights in the technicolour sky. Rafael finds me, I’ve created my own pointless path. He leans in, takes my hands into his, and kisses me. I joyously kiss him back as the circle beyond widens, arms stretch out, are people doing a Conga? It’s a wakeful dervish, this daydream. We too spin as we continue to kiss, our gravitational pull in step with the unconscious pulling at the crowds.
I ended the evening vomiting – neatly and punctually – as soon as I arrived at my host family’s house a few kilometres to the west. It wasn’t smart walking home on my own, wobbling, finding my compass only after confusing the pavement with the street. Luckily, I found a taxi, after new drinks were poured, orange soda and vodka, mixed in my palate with warm red wine, drunk from the same shared bottle. Rafael, Wilfredo and friends waved me goodbye, on this Nochebuena; others like Rodrigo and Milagros were held aloft, shouting hedonistically, ‘V-e-n-e-z-u-e-l-a’. It’s New Year’s Day and I wake feeling, ‘this is what I’ve come for’. I feel present, I feel young. The searing heat is rising once more. The clock isn’t ticking.
Andrew Kaye is a teacher, writer and coach whose prose has been published by Queerlings, Clavmag, Untitled: Writing, scissors and spackle, Streetcake magazine and Overground Underground. Work is forthcoming in Polari press’s anthology, ‘Creating in Crisis’, and Babel Tower Notice Board. A genealogy geek, he blogs on families, mental health and storytelling at www.andrewkaufman.co.uk and recently was one of six winners of The Literary Consultancy’s LGBT Free Reads competition in the UK. He tweets at @JKaye82, mostly trying, but not always succeeding, at avoiding politics.