Even before I could refuse to accept an American identity I had already been blazoned to be black, fit and young. I like Nadia’s family, I do, as much as an Inca warrior is supposed to enjoy a family of industrious German-Jewish émigrés joining for dinner on a massive circular table in the penthouse of a tower in Belgrano, Buenos Aires. The room inflamed every time the thunderstorm drove a ray into an adjacent building, at first we cheered but after a while I sat out on the wrap-around balcony to blow cigarette smoke into the clouds.
Honestly, it was a little odd. Eyre-ian even, no pun intended, just Berthian, mad-woman-in-the-attic half Inca this time, this time an alliance between what? Corn syrup and steak? Good thing it was sushi we were waiting on for dinner.
Then Nadia’s cousin’s boyfriend came out to speak to me about free verse because he heard that I had studied poetry in college. Apparently rhyme-schemes were still a thing for Argentinans, or rhythm had resurfaced, I don’t know. Were they talking about me in there? He was definitely Italian. He started naming poets with Germanic last names who wrote in Spanish and I just let him speak, compared a thing or two to Borges because what else was I supposed to do? Being strong and tan only means I can work the land. Being smart in another language does not conversation make, and how the hell was I supposed to know what iambic pentameter sounds like in Spanish?
I wanted to have sailed into the Rio de la Plata myself while eating dinner with the Berendorfs, but having trailed down the Andes from its northernmost point only made me more of a mountain person and a drifter. Metropolitan that day must have meant light-skinned and tame, and exaltedly speaking on abortion. In New York we can abort is all my opinion was, so I said something about Spring Awakening which was dumb, or too modern for their taste. I can’t make out an ignorant chuckle from a Nazi one.
Stutter after stumble after fuck up, the blacony’s many doors were closed and rattling from rain. I looked at Nadia and all I saw was the perfect goodness of the world, not spiritual, not resolute or looking for candor. Could her family have believed that because the dollar was so high I’d consume her? I couldn’t possibly have talked about the economy: can you imagine? Every week the peso goes down I go to the supermarket and get us a salmon. Or the first day I was here we bought a brick of weed sold it in a week and rejoiced!
Every time my Spanish failed me I’d look at Nadia and she would say what I meant with as much passion as if she had lived it herself. I was too full to be drunk, and the conversation kept going. Her patriarch uncle sat in this stunning red Eames throne, jumping his feet over the ottoman into all the circles. Her dad was humbler, in a soccer jersey, jeans and never looking out the window. I still think he was proud of the idea of a green card marriage between his daughter and I, imitating my accent and hugging me instead of the customary single-kiss. His sunglasses business depended on the value of the dollar. Then Uncle Berendorf turned to us and said All the kids these days want to go to America to make a decent living, I could see thunder hitting buildings in Puerto Madero almost 10 miles away, at least she’s in good hands.
Good hands? I looked at them and they did not respond with gratitude, just darkness and strength. I thought about Quispe Sisa, princess of the Inca Empire, being married off to Francisco Pizarro, the main conquistador of Peru. I thought about the Conquest of the Desert, Argentina’s genocide of native tribes. I thought about Nadia holding my face in her hands and telling her cousin He’s American but obviously he speaks Spanish, just look at this Latino face. Good hands, good hands, and on our way back to Almagro I composed this poem In Good Hands:
Gah! Tremendous apartment!
Once daytime fills the wind with
Light I’ll see you all warm!
Not blue with thunder.
The inevitable penthouse floats
And the guests look down at the lice
In the head of Buenos Aires--
What sushi to fly 18 floors up! What
Simple order to button a shirt and talk
Over wine when the dollar is up. No,
Down. What really is the difference;
Inevitable! Someone must have it,
I think it’s lovely to sit here with
You all and share a laugh and talk
And smoke and talk and play no music--
But through the night I have less
To say! If my voice won’t txsch enough
I might never see a sunrise over
Belgrano, and just be myself
That loser, that bus-taking heavenless
Inca, whose one night in the clouds
Brought rain and no treaties with my people
3/5/2020 1:46PM