El Ateneo

When I first arrived in Argentina, freshly severed from a serious relationship, the bright-eyed romantic in me entertained the possibility: “Could I live here forever?”

Rosario, brimming with gorgeous neoclassical buildings, was embraced on its eastern side by the Paraná river. On the evenings and weekends, its shores were populated by groups of friends sitting on colorful blankets, passing around goblets of yerba maté, unbothered by the brisk winter temperatures of June. Every day I met warm strangers, found a new favorite haunt, learned something I had never known before.

“No,” I ultimately told my sister over the phone when she asked the same question newly-arrived-me had asked. A full week had tempered my expectations. “I couldn’t eat this food every day.”

To be fair, the best ice cream and pastries I had ever eaten to date was in Argentina. Apparently Argentinian cows are fat and happy cows, frolicking in free-range bliss all over Las Pampas–but sadly one cannot subsist on ice cream and pastries alone. 

However, limits were definitely pushed, and I partook.

My favorite treat was the plate of two medialunas served at my favorite bookstore, El Ateneo. Amply filled with dulce de leche and buried beneath heaps of powdered sugar, the pastries were certainly meant for two. The cafe noise was absorbed by the walls of shelves, the hardcover books wrapped in paper jackets like presents lined in satisfyingly neat rows. 

Three times a week before I was due at the language school down the road, I ordered my medialunas to fuel my labor through another few pages of Julio Cortázar’s Bestiario. I painstakingly tested each line, coaxing my brain to retrieve translations of familiar seeming words, cobbling barely-sensible sentences together. 

I didn’t see George until maybe my second or third visit to El Ateneo. George wasn’t his real name, but I had christened him thus because he always had his copy of Middlemarch perched between thumb and forefinger. Of all the men who would have been most likely to read a novel subtitled “A Study on Provincial Life”, George would not have made it to the top of the list by appearance alone. 

He was the type of person your eye passes over without interruption, with his conventional fashion, insignificant build, and neutral features. Once I noticed him, there were other small details in addition to his surprising choice of reading material. His hair was closely cropped, but the cast of his brow set a shadow that obscured singularly hazel eyes. It was also clear that while he had the capability of growing out a rather splendid beard, he made the daily effort to be clean-shaven. Lastly, there was a dark splotch inked on the skin of his inner right wrist, but with the dim lighting of the bookstore and his perpetual pose of propping Middlemarch in a reading position, I was not able to determine what it was.

If I were subjected to the same scrutiny on his end, I wondered what he would have noticed. Did he just see the foreign woman, consuming half her daily calories worth of sweets, at her wit’s end with Cortázar? Would he have looked closely enough to notice the three moles, like Orion’s belt, forming a constellation on my chin, or the scar defacing the corner of my mouth?

Whatever the case, it was clear he was making significantly more headway in his literary goals than I was; the pooling of pages in his left hand grew steadily in volume. Soon, I had adopted a small ritual upon arrival at El Ateneo: take a seat after paying, scan the clientele for George, surreptitiously size up what remained of his reading, fan through the rest of my own sliver of a book in comparison. I found this extrinsic, one-sided competition motivating and was determined not to let him finish his book before I did. Keeping a dated log in my notebook, I tracked our dual progress with rough percentages. 

One drizzly Wednesday evening, I had secured a seat by the window. The rain trails on the glass cast shadows on the table as I pulled out my things and gave a quick glance around. While my rival was uncharacteristically absent, the cafe area was fuller than usual with additional refuge seekers. The outside world was a sparkling blue kaleidoscope of hustling figures and headlights, thrown into sharp relief against the yellow-hued warmth of El Ateneo. Perfumed by coffee and brand-new paperbacks, the bookstore exercised a particularly attractive power.

I had flattened my notebook out on my desk when my medialunas arrived. As I looked up to thank the cafe worker, I made eye contact with George from a distance. I registered his unusually rumpled appearance: Rain flecked beanie and coat, a shadow of a beard indicating a missed morning shave. It rather suited him, I thought. 

He was lingering in that awkward moment of having just ordered before realizing that there were no vacant tables left. We regarded each other and the empty seat across from me. I gestured the universal sign of invitation, and he smiled.

“With permission,” he said, pulling out the empty chair.

“Of course,” I replied, my tone thickened with the second-language self-consciousness I still hadn’t fully dispelled. A beat, and then the inevitable question.

“You’re not from here?”

“No,” I agreed, “I’m from the United States. I’ve been in Rosario for half a month. ”

He gave me an expression that was familiar to me by now–a kind of national self-deprecation I have come to expect from Argentinians. “What brings you here?”

“I’m teaching English through an exchange program. I wanted some time to work on my Spanish.” Up close, I could see that the tattoo on his wrist was a small black cat seated like an Egyptian statuette, its slender tail curled in a question mark around his pulse.

“So I see,” he said, indicating Julio Cortázar’s monobrowed portrait on the back of my book. I strained to parse his words through the din of the coffeeshop, anxious that I might not understand him. “I must confess, I was passing judgement on you for taking so long to make it through such a slender book, but now it makes much more sense.”

I felt simultaneously exposed and gratified by this admission, and let myself signal that the observations had been mutual. “To salvage my pride, I had been determined to not let you finish your book before I did.”

He glanced down at my notebook, where I had kept a repository of all the unfamiliar Spanish words I had come across. I realized too late that my scoreboard of our places in our respective books was also fully visible on the page. When he angled his head to better interpret the percentages, I froze. 

“And who’s George?” 

I covered my face in shame. “George Eliot.”

A confused silence preceded a quick rummage through his bag. He pulled out his battered copy of Middlemarch and I grimaced when I saw the dog eared corners. 

We looked at each other, me, still covering my mouth and him, looking quite cheeky having caught me in such a mortifying position.

“Ah, I see–I’m George?”

His coffee arrived at this moment, and I swept up my incriminating notebook to make room for it. George gave his thanks, still looking rather smug, and returned to our conversation.

“You know, it’s funny. I also have the habit of naming strangers.” 

“Are you going to tell me you named me Julio so that I feel better?” Perhaps I ought to have been flattered–cigarette-toting Cortázar exuded a kind of authorial attractiveness.

“Close,” George said, “Though I didn’t realize why at the time, I thought of you as an Irene.” 

“Why?”

“From La casa tomada.” Cortázar’s most famous short story, and the first one in Bestiario. 

Hm… So I brought to mind an old spinster woman rather than the smoldering literary darling. I wanted to convey this thought to George, but was unable to conjure the Spanish to express it exactly. This was the most frustrating part of communicating in a second language; having to dull my personality for the sake of clarity. 

Instead, I said, “You can call me Irene if I can keep calling you George.” He seemed amused by the proposition. 

“All right then, Irene,” he agreed good naturedly, “How long is your stay in Rosario?”

“Just through July.”

“Barely anything! Why so brief?” 

“I have a job back at home? Real life?” They seemed like sound reasons, but here, sitting across from his disapproving expression, they felt feeble. Accordingly, he gave me a double thumbs down and I laughed. 

“So this is all just a short dream before waking.” He gestured to everything around us. For a moment, we two strangers observed the other strangers in the bookstore cafe. We took in the clinking of glasses, the muted palette of winter wardrobes, the series of crossed legs and drying umbrellas on the marbled floor tiles. I thought about how fragile moments are–how this crowd of people gathered in this place would likely never all be in the same room ever again.

When George and I looked back at each other, I saw a pulled thread on the collar of his sweater, a patch of gray on his stubble.

“Yes,” I said at last, resting my chin on my palm. “I suppose it will probably feel like that.” 

“Well, I hope then it is a good dream.” 

I struggled again to conjure a witty response in Spanish, clumsily resorting to a weak smile. 

There was still a threshold here we hadn’t yet crossed, and I felt that we were both keenly aware of it, testing the ground around it. I had come to associate him as part of the background of El Ateneo, as constant as the book displays and pastry cases, someone I was content to observe from a distance. But now, the physical space had been crossed and it was no longer that we just happened to be in the same time and place; there was a locus of togetherness that could now be used to describe our positions relative to one another.  

Yet, we could still just as easily diverge from this place, with little influence on each other’s subsequent trajectory. All of this could easily pass away–yes, like a dream. 

As my mind was drifting indecisively along this thread, I saw a man at another table check his watch. 

With a start, I checked the time, swore in English, and jumped to my feet.

“I’m late to my own class,” I explained to a perplexed George. After packing up my things, I picked up one of the medialunas and shook as much of the icing sugar off of it as I could, prepared to devour it on the five minute walk to the school. “Take the other one, my treat.”

George seemed somewhat taken aback by the suddenness of my departure, but recovered enough to goad me one last time. He waved Middlemarch in farewell. “Looks like I’ll be getting ahead of you this time. Now that I know we’re competitors, I’ll work harder.”

Yes, that seemed right for now.

“Until next time,” I said, feeling confident that at least for this time, there would be a next time.