Buenos Aires, Argentina: From the Other Side of the Tracks
By Austin Edwards

The English class I teach doesn’t begin until half past five, but I am outside the massive steel door ringing the buzzer at a quarter to. The lobby of Avery Dennison is the only air-conditioned room in a twenty block radius, and I can’t wait to get inside. It’s over ninety degrees and tropically humid in the outskirts of Buenos Aires on this late November afternoon.

From across the street three boys walking a single bicycle and some disheveled men fishing cardboard out of a trash can eye me suspiciously. I suppose it’s because I am wearing a mint green button-down shirt with a pink tie and my entire back is dark with sweat. I ring the buzzer again.

A distant sounding female voice finally answers and tells me that my student, Señor Valerio, is in an executive board meeting and won’t be attending our class today.
Actually, she has to tell me three times, either because she speaks Spanish too quickly or I understand it too slowly. Reluctantly she buzzes me in; and as she eyes me up and down, she asks in mockingly slow Spanish, “Didn’t anyone call to tell you the class was cancelled today?” No. “Someone should have called you.” Yeah, that would have been nice. “How long did it take you to get all the way out here?” About forty five minutes. “How awful! Someone really should have called you.”

I tell her that each week at least half my classes are cancelled in this fashion. She just shakes her head and sips at a metal straw protruding from a brown gourd sitting in front of her. She is drinking yerba mate, a loose-leaf green tea that over ninety percent of Argentines drink all day, every day.

“Well, it’s Argentina,” she finally says.  This is probably the fifth time this week someone has said this to me. It is apparently both the Argentine rationalization and apology for everything from chronically late busses to seldom functioning elevators to frequently stolen luggage.

She fills the mate gourd to the top with steaming water from a thermos and offers it to me. I politely decline, try my best to wish her a pleasant weekend, and step back out into the late-afternoon heat. In the gap between two dilapidated buildings I can see grayish-purple clouds pregnant with rain moving towards me. Normally a driver sent by my English teaching institute picks me up after my class, but he won’t be arriving for another two hours.

It’s Thursday afternoon, and I don’t work on Fridays. My weekend has started a little earlier than expected; and I want to get home and out of the heat; so I loosen my tie and begin making my way towards a tiny train station at the end of the litter-strewn street.

I feel relieved that I pass only graffiti covered garage doors and the occasional stray mutt on my way. Blonde haired, blue-eyed English teachers tend to draw unwanted attention in barrios such as these, especially when clad in pastels.

The smell of chorizo sausages grilling over a wood fire seeps out from under a blue tarp, which serves as the roof of a cafe adjacent to the station. The delicious aroma fills my nostrils, which up until now have been doing their best to ignore the odor of rotting trash and dog feces that otherwise permeates the heavy air.

Under the tarp men with thick mustaches and old eyes sit on upside-down metal trash cans eating chorizo sandwiches and drinking tall, perspiring bottles of Quilmes, the local beer. They talk loudly and gesticulate wildly, and they are far too busy telling dirty jokes and arguing about the upcoming weekend’s soccer matches to pay any attention to me as I creep by them, deeply jealous of their food and drink.

A dented metal sign hanging from a decaying outer wall marks the entrance to the station. La Paternal is only three stops and twenty minutes from the heart of Buenos Aires, but this proximity is not at all apparent.

Most visitors never get a glimpse of this aspect of the city, lacking either sufficient time or courage to explore outer barrios such as these. Luckily for me some of the large corporations that can afford to have their employees take English classes cannot afford to locate their sprawling factories and headquarters within the prosperous, affluent inner barrios known as Capital Federal. So here I am, pink tie and all.

In the far cinderblock wall there is a crudely shaped hole that looks like it was created by a drunkenly swung sledgehammer. This serves as the ticket window, but today it appears to be closed. I stand in front of it for a few seconds trying to decide what to do.

When I turn around, I notice an elderly couple sitting on a bench. The man is wearing an old leather hat and a faded seersucker suit that looks like a prop from a film about the Roaring Twenties. His wife is wearing a pleated red dress and too much makeup. She is austere looking and pointing a thin, crooked index finger at something across the tracks. It takes me a minute to understand that she is showing me where to buy a ticket. I thank her; but she doesn’t even nod; she only lowers her hand and then her eyes.

I’ve never had to cross the tracks to the other platform, so I begin searching for an under or overpass. But, of course, there isn’t one. After all, it’s Argentina. I’ve also never observed anyone crossing to the other side, but suddenly it becomes strikingly clear what I am going to have to do.

The drop from the platform down to the tracks is just as daunting as it looks, and I feel lucky to have not sprained an ankle when I land. Now I am face to face with a shoulder-high barbed wire fence separating the two sets of tracks. Luckily, a little ways down there is a gap in the fence big enough to allow two people to pass through it simultaneously.
Once I reach the other side, I begin trying to climb up onto the opposite platform; but it is no easy task. After awhile, a middle-aged man wearing a yellow-toothed smile and a sweat-stained Orlando Magic hat lends me a hand and pulls me up to safety. Then he promptly asks me for money.

I do my best to explain that I’ll give him any change I have left over after buying my ticket, but he says either, “Forget it” or “Forget you,” and walks off shaking his head.

As it turns out, this platform has a more formal ticket window, complete with crudely installed metal bars. I ask the man behind the bars for a one-way ticket to Palermo, but he doesn’t understand me. I repeat myself twice more before he slides a ticket to me, and I am inclined to believe he only correctly guesses which station I am going to based on my appearance.

After buying my ticket, I look around briefly to see what else this side of the tracks has to offer. Nearby, a boy standing behind a wooden counter is selling beer and panchos, the Argentine version of the hotdog, slathered in mayonnaise. The boy grins and talks to the man in the Orlando Magic hat, who has purchased one of each, no thanks to me.

Safely back on the correct platform I eye the station’s clock and wonder if it is accurate. Upon closer inspection I see that the second hand is in fact moving, and I decide that I can’t ask for much more than that.

The clock claims it is 5:09; and so far not a single train has rattled through the station; so I wander over to the train schedule that is mounted behind me. I look at the list of trains headed into the city, and I see that there is an express train that is scheduled to come through the station at 5:17, but not stop. The next local train, which will stop, doesn’t come until 5:29, so I go take a seat on an empty bench.

Immediately, an overweight man with no shirt on across the tracks catches my attention. It is neither his weight nor his lack of a shirt that attracts my eye, but rather the large white refrigerator he is carrying on his back. Granted, the appliance is not as big as you would find in a typical United States home, but neither is it as small as those that you might find in a college dorm room or a hotel kitchenette. The fact that he is able to lift it, let alone carry it, greatly impresses me. I watch him haul it nearly a hundred yards before he finally stands up straight and lets it crash down behind him.

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