Mundo de Pedo

Along with the Spanish empire’s long and lofty thrusts across the Americas, came a common language that has permeated areas far and wide.  Learning that language, however, is just a skeleton for then beginning to understand the idiosyncrasies of one region’s use of it. While generally intelligible throughout for all, certain vocabulary and phrases may be household terms in one pocket of Spanish speakers, but hold profane connotations in others. Pendejo in Argentine Spanish describes a rambunctious youngster or punk, but takes its original meaning from the same word in Spain used to mean ‘pubic hair.’ Golosinas which means candies or sweets in Argentina, takes a more sinister spin in Mexican Spanish as it refers to a prostitute. Even Argentina and Chile, two bordering countries, have their linguistic differences. If an Argentine uses the word pico he is referring to a kiss and not, as his Chilean counterpart might misinterpret it, the male reproductive  organ.

While differing translations of the same word reveal one way in which language settles itself down into the nooks and crannies of specific linguistic contexts, we also encounter totally unique vocabularies and word uses in different locations. One of the most intriguing language discoveries I have made in my time here is in an unearthing of the meaning of the mystical word pedo. Unglamorously translated pedo is the literal equivalent  to our fart. Within the Argentine case, however,  pedo is implicated in all kinds of strange contexts and has a complex layering of meanings that goes far beyond simple bathroom humor.

1. Al pedo- [Literal: To the fart Metaphorical: condition of having no plans or obligations] One of the most common appearances of pedo is used to express boredom or having an excess free time. Come on over, I’m al pedo. What did you do yesterday, nothing I was al pedo the whole day. Pinpointing an English translation for this use of pedo proves rather complicated. While al pedo can sometimes evoke a sense of boredom, it more often designates the nebulous and structureless nature of a particular span of time.

2. Al pedo- [Literal: To the fart (#2) Metaphorical: in vain, futile, useless, worthless]. While you may notice this is the exact same orthography as example #1, in certain contexts the same words can give you a radically different meaning.

1. Ex. I went all the way to the mall, but it was al pedo because the store I wanted to go to was closed.
2. Ex. Al pedo I fixed my bike, because it was stolen a day later.

3.      En pedo- [Literal: In fart Metaphorical: f****d up, crazy]. En pedo refers to a mental state achieved  after the consumption of drugs or alcohol and most likely a potent cocktail of both. Examples: Esa noche estaba re en pedo. [That night I was really f****d up]. Equally en pedo can be used to describe someone who’s not thinking clearly with or without the influence of outside substances. ie What a terrible outfit!? Are you en pedo???

a.       Ni en pedo[nor in fart]—Common phrase using the third definition of pedo describing something you would never do. If some young Argentine,[who you have no interest in] is romancing you in a club and invites you back to his/her car/place, your response Ni en pedo!, Meaning—not even if I were totally f****d up would I do something like that!

4. Un pedo- [Literal: a fart Metaphorical: a hangover] Directly linked to the third definition of pedo above, this fourth meaning is the belated result of being en pedo for any amount of time—having a pedo. What a pedo I had this morning!

5. Me mandé un pedo-[Literal: I sent myself a fart Metaphorical: I made a mistake, I really messed up]. In this case pedo’s meaning leans towards something like mistake or error. Sending yourself a fart can cover all kinds off errors from the most trivial occurrences to much more grave situations. With a cursory glance this fourth meaning of pedo seems rather confounding, however, further investigation  reveals some striking similarities between  the ideas of a fart and a mistake. They both can be embarrassing and unexpected and both are rather difficult to recover from if committed in public.  (A little extra trivia: Along similar lines a parallel phrase is used to express the same sentiment interchanging the word pedo with moco- buger. Me mande un moco—I sent myself a buger.)

6. De pedo [Literal: By fart Metaphorical: By a hair, by luck] ex. De pedo we didn’t crash the car just then. This use of pedo expresses something that just barely happened but then didn’t thanks to the grace of god, or pure luck or in this case a fart. A pedo is not something in which one should put a lot of faith; it is after all gas, microscopic particles of fecal matter, and odor, not a terribly trustworthy combination.

7. Una nube de pedos [Literal: cloud of farts Metaphorical: in a daze, in the clouds] El vive en una nube de pedos He lives in a cloud of farts, meaning that cede person is spacey, unfocused, in lala land, got his head in the clouds etc. This Argentine cloud, however, is distinctively more repulsive than the harmless water based clouds we English speakers let our heads float into.

Believe it or not, one could probably squeeze a couple more meanings out of this complex vocabulary word not to mention a slur of related words in which pedo is the root. While the meanings listed above are each distinct, they all seem to lead to one single metaphorical character that is the Argentine pedo. Within this conceptual pedo, we encounter a cloudy, unclear type of no-mans land in which the rules and regulations of daily life dissolve. A pedo’s repercussions are unknown and unpredictable and can disrupt the continuity of regular life. Beware of these Argentine pedos, but at the time one might learn to appreciate them for the vibrant and imaginative metaphors they add to colloquial Argentine speech.

The Sumptuous Decline of Grandma´s Mental Health and Life In General

The dedicated reader to these entries may recall the laughable, entertaining, and even heartwarming deeds carried out by my elderly and severely senile grandma housemate. At one point in her career of being crazy, grandma was content pulling a “I’m more than half naked in your kitchen” stunt or the notorious “let me artfully hide your potted plants throughout the property” one. I warn thee, however, that this colorful and carefree time now hangs unimaginable and inert in my past like a cloudy rainbow dream. These occurrences seem like petty child’s play in comparison to the advanced disaster for which she is now capable of inciting. Grandma’s behaviors, along with the evolution of her lunacy, have taken on demonic, terrifying, and gag reflex triggering attributes; and under an acute combination of stress, exhaustion, and frustration, have been known to provoke the occasional tear.

The least offensive of grandma’s new found ticks was her attraction to hiding spots. During the daylight, her hiding in corners, shadows, or amidst leafy plants is not a very effective tactic due to sunlight. Come nighttime, however, Jesus Christ could she be terrifying. Not only is it a shock to find a pair of eyes staring at you from the shadows, but this specific gaze in particular make her surprises that much more intense—hollow skeleton features, toothless chomping, and boney limbs creaking in the dark. More than once she has literally caused me to jump and left me breathless for minutes after. A particular case comes to mind when, after a jog one evening I had stripped down to my sports bra and shorts. Perhaps narcissistically, I began to gaze into my own reflection in the kitchen window. Studying my buns, stomach, and back, something confusing happened when I arrived at the reflection my own face. I could see my features, but the eyes looking back at me were not my own. I shrieked out loud when my brain wires finally registered grandma from behind the glass, sullen face pressed up against the smudged surface.

              Grandma’s most vile newly acquired habit became shitting in places other than the bathroom or her old person diapers. This was quite a confusing subject when I tried to explain to friends or in-laws the reason why I was looking for other rentals. The first reaction was inevitably to understand “Grandma is shitting in the patio” as some kind of badly translated figure of speech. It generally took several repetitions and rephrases in order to get my point across that the meaning I intended was literal.

Not a day went by without Jere or I encountering either her deep black number 2’s in the patio, or actually catching her in the act—wrinkly buns pressed up against the brick wall in a strenuous squat, ready for take off.

“Señora!” we’d cry desperately, “There is a bathroom!!”

“Oh yes!” she’d reply, hurriedly pulling up her trousers.

“Where?” She would ask, as if the idea of a bathroom had just invented itself in her mind.

The aroma of mal-nourished, old woman feces is unmistakable. It is vastly different from the excrement of cat, dog, baby, or well-fed person—all familiar scents at this point in my life. And so, when that telltale odor reached my nostrils I was immediately on the look out. I had to locate its source so that I would not encounter it unwittingly later under my shoe or smudged up against my clothing. I also wanted to find it so I could see how long it settled into the architecture before someone from the family decided to do something —another piece of kindling in the fire of my burning frustration with home life.

The worst of these poohy days arrived when a whomp of stink bombarded me in the passageway along side the house into the patio. Several entrances and exits later, I remained stumped. Only later that day, I finally discovered the source of my misery. A hand smudge of dark feces ran along the brick, baking in the fiery sun. Doubling my desire to violently reintegrate the contents of my stomach into the outside world, a swarm of inky black cockroaches had decided to make grandma’s excrement dinner.

             Daily assaults on my ability to live a cleanly and poo-free existence were nothing compared to grandma’s war against the things that actually meant something to me, my plants. I had raised my little painstaking garden from seedlings. I had nurtured each the best I could, shielding them from the sun, bringing them inside when the rains or winds threatened their lives. I had rotated their pots, moistened the brick around them, and murmured to them in a mix of Spanish and English so they would feel loved and grow strong. Their spindly roots became anchors to that space. They told me that the sandy earth in which they grew was my home, for better or for worse.

                Perhaps unknowingly, or perhaps vindictively sensing my foolish attachment to beings so frail; Grandma unleashed a systematic attempt to eliminate each and every plant that made up my garden. She would crunch and crack their stems, tear them up from the roots and abandon them in a pile of debris, or rob the pot entirely and hide it so artfully, that by the time I found it few days later, the scorching sun had sizzled it up. In her fury she destroyed my basil, my marigolds, my rosemary, something called a coffee tree, my jade plant, another plant that resembles jade, and a whole host of nameless plants and cactuses I had collected from throughout Luján. By the beginning of December, I was left with nothing more than a collection of different sized garden pots filled with dirt, and the embittered memory of where my little plants had once been.

These reasons along with a fat list of others provoked us to give our notice and to begin searching for alternative living choices. This search is still in the process although we’ve long since left the nightmare of real family living.

Strange Luján

 To some degree, knowing a place goes hand in hand with knowing its characters. While Lujan is a small town, it boasts a disproportionately large number of folks who beat their own drum. Or an alternative explanation, is that the general populous is abnormally normal or “cuadrado” ((square) a term I have often heard used) thus being that the few slightly strange people, appear triply so in comparison.

            In any event, this post hopes to introduce the reader to three of Lujan’s most prominent characters, nicknamed by myself; bike dude, dog lady and time man. This nomenclature describes my own personal experiences with all three of these people, but equally reflects the experiences of others who have encountered them.

            Bike dude is in his late twenties to early thirties and is robust in stature, girth, and in the amount of hair and facial hair that emanate from his lion like head. Bike man can be spotted at all hours of the day throughout Lujan, peddling away ferociously on his thick mountain bike. His outings are never luxurious ones, instead they conducted at sweat producing, heart-racing tempo. As he zooms by one might notice his hands clenched tightly to the fat rubber grips on his handlebars. Where is he going? Does he have a job? A Family? Nobody knows. His relentless biking is not the strangest part of bike man’s profile. Rather that the outfit he wears, literally never changes. Not for seasonal variation, rain, sleet, nor summer heat. Bike man will reliably be wearing a black muscle shirt, black shorts, and sneakers. For spring and summertime this is not a bad choice, however (despite many Americans misconceptions that it is never cold in Latin America), winter invites bone-chilling mountain winds, freezing rains, and the occasional snow. Bike dude, defies the law of the seasons, and hot bloodedly peddles on in his summer ware, laughing in the face of nature.

Dog lady is older, in her late fifties to early sixties, has dry, ex-blonde hair that falls limply to her shoulders. Dog lady is always smoking a cigarette. She wears long wrinkled skirts that billow around her ankles, and she is always accompanied by at least two, and sometimes as many as five dogs. These dogs, like planets orbiting around a star, keep their distance, go on to investigate strange smells or the behinds of other dogs, but always with the gravity of dog lady in mind. They go where she goes. I have never seen her feeding these dogs, although I imagine that where she lives, most likely in some darkly lit and crumbling hovel, she provides ample food and shelter for dozens of street dogs. I picture her chewing on burnt toast and sipping mate, maybe reading the paper, treating the dogs as family members; chastising one when he bits another, comforting the squeals of a pup, rubbing down the sore limbs of a veteran.

            Time man, to my senses, is perhaps the strangest of these characters. I find this to be so, because at first glance he doesn’t seem out of the ordinary at all. He is an older gentleman, cleanly shaved and dressed, with a rotating wardrobe of (unlike bike dude) pressed brown slacks, and well-ironed buttoned down shirts. He often totes a weighted down grocery bag in hand, so his walks seems to be legitimate ones; he is returning from the store, or bringing something to a neighbor, or running an errand of some kind. It wasn’t until the third time that he asked me what time it was that I realized that there was something strange about him. Perhaps the other glaring clue on this occasion was that he flashed me his watch, complete with the correct time, after asking, and then pleaded that I give him two pesos. Since then, I have felt something spooky about his presence. The slow, but deliberate way his walks down he street, and the innocence of his curiosity about the time, now feels like some cheap trap to lure in unsuspecting young women like myself, and then POW… but this is probably not the case. Most like he’s just another defenseless and senile old man, lost in time.

Suck My Napa

Mendoza starred in last Sunday’s New York Times travel section, nicknamed Argentina´s Napa Valley http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/travel/21Mendoza.html?ref=travel . The article recounts the typical tourist experience one encounters in Mendoza; bouncing around wineries, dabbeling in gourment cuisine, trying out various extreme sport activities. The journalist closes his account with an interview from the cofounder of a wine bar and American entrepreneur extrordinare, listed as an ex-washington campaign strategist. Señor son of a bitch Evans declares, “Mendoza is Napa 30 or 40 years ago.” The goal of his business efforts is to ¨create an experience that is a little closer to what you might experience in Napa, but with an Argentine flair.” Evans’ statements become the critical metaphor on which the article is hinged: Mendoza—Napa valley, but cheaper, and thirty years in the past.

Argentine culture, in Evan’s warped vision, becomes an accessory to the more essential idea, which is NAPA. His ideal tourists, instead of having an interest in exploring local idiosyncrasies, culture or language, will be served a more palatable plate of culturally understandable Napa Valley; a dish they can digest, only seasoned with a flair of Argentina. Instead of attempting to see a place, a culture, and a people on their own terms, these elements are forced into a damaging comparison—a sluggish and underveloped version of Napa valley, one in dire need of creative American/European entrepreneurs who can straighten it out, and/or set it in the right direction.

My frustration with this worldview is perhaps tripled by my current experiences waiting tables at one of Mendoza’s poshest restaurants that caters to high brow tourists of all nationalities. I’ve found that Americans of the social echelon who dine in cede restaurant have the most backward things to say about their globetrotting experiences in Latina America. One woman who had spent a considerable amount of time in Europe confessed to me that she disagreed with the stereotypes that Buenos Aires was like Paris. “Apart from Recoleta and Puerto Madero (two of the swankiest neighborhoods in the city) I found it to be really run down.” Surprise surprise! Who would guess that a country, which only a few years back suffered an entire economic collapse, would show signs of poverty or disrepair.

Another couple recounted their stay in Santiago, Chile, and then further north in a small residential town, home to Chilean billionaires. They had been unimpressed with Santiago, but had fallen in love with the small town. The woman with googely eyes recounted to me how excited she had been at the sight of helicopter pads on top of mansions. “It was just like Carmel” she exclaimed… Carmel being the California beachfront home to famous actors and artists.

These comments reflect the same kind of mindset Evans reveals in the New York Times article; comparative thinking that due to radically different histories, cultures, racial makeups, languages etc, has no grounds in reality. If you want to visit Europe, go to Europe; if you want to visit Carmel, go to Carmel; if you want to visit Napa Valley, then go to goddam Napa Valley. Don’t come here.

Luján

PerBac

My first experience with private Argentine health care came early on this morning when I was obliged to, as a prospective employee of the bodega Alta Vista, undergo some kind of physical in order to secure that I was in conditions to work like a dog for them. Mariela, human resources director, had called me the day before, letting me know that I was to present myself bright and early at the clinic PerBac with my passport, a urine sample, and an empty stomach. Having had several encounters with the decaying and understaffed public hospital in Lujan, I expected this private clinic to gleam with newly purchased equipment, freshly painted rooms, and the welcoming smiles of a well-compensated staff. These assumptions, however, proved sadly incorrect.

PerBac was situated in an old stone house, set back a nudge from the main road that runs through Lujan. I rattled a rusty doorknocker and was ushered into a waiting room. The first tip off I received, that this was not the kind of doctor’s office I had anticipated, was the thick scent of stale cigarette smoke that invaded my nostrils. The waiting room was dimly lit, and a few sticky and lopsided plastic stools lined its periphery; I plopped myself in one of them. A urine shade of yellow stained the walls, while a putrid brown tiled the floors.  An old man, whose disgruntled mannerisms and decrepit outlook on life matched the dismal candor of his surroundings, asked me to follow him into an adjacent room. This second room was a lifeless violet, smudged with dark finger and handprints, grease stains, rub marks. We sat on opposite sides of a thick brown desk and he began taking my information: age, address, birthplace etc… His face, eyes and hair were a dull shade of grey, his voice as lifeless and dry as sandpaper. Transpiring skin shone through the thin layer of hair that coated his skull like peach fuzz. Interspersed throughout the questions of my medical and personal history, came the stale and sarcastic comments of this discontented man’s opinion on my decision to live and work in his country.

“Age, date of birth…Why did you decide to come this godforsaken place?”

“Any operations or allergies… Argentina’s a country without a solution”

“Blood type?… I don’t care what they say about Obama, or the economy, you’d have to be crazy to come live here.”

His fishlike, down-turned mouth completed the face of a man more embittered and disillusioned than a fallen solider. I didn’t say anything to his comments, and was relieved when I was sent on to the next of a series of rooms I would visit within my stay at PerBac.

            The second room was for “Electrosis,” a procedure as frightening as the word itself. Perhaps I am a novice when dealing with doctors in general, even in my own country, but this strange machine to which I was hooked, was something I could only imagine in nightmares about archaic medical practices like electric shock therapy or lobotomy. Although, electrosis proved for the most part painless, the process of being strapped in was traumatic enough. It involved four metal clamps, one tightened to each of my appendages, and then an octopus-like collection of tentacles, which were suctioned to various places across my stomach and chest. A needle attached to a pen drew squiggly lines across some graph paper each time I was electrified.

            I was finally ushered into a third room where my x-ray was to be taken. Once again, this process entailed the use of a machine that could have been a prop in a 1980’s sci-fi thriller. A huge metal crane like object hovered above the cot on which I was told to recline. The precipice of the crane was complete with an ominous black lens, without any kind of shield preventing the condemned from staring into its depths. As I lay, awkwardly on a thick piece of metal which contained the photographic paper, I was encouraged to form various strange positions, each more uncomfortable than the next. In the most curious of these, the metal sheet pressed coldly up against my breasts, while I had to extend my arms back grasping my butt cheeks, my face smushed violently up against a raised cushion. Thankfully, the miniature size of the facility let me know that this was the third and final room in my sequence of tests, and it was time to return to the waiting room.

            This time around a dyed-blonde secretary sat clicking on a keyboard, and the gentleman who had given me electrosis, rested on one of the plastic stools. The grey man entered and began to mumble to the other two about how bat-crazy I was, and that I should never have come to this horrible, terrible, hopeless and forgettable country. Luckily the other two didn’t seem to give him much clout, and merely smiled and nodded. After being permitted to leave, I emerged into the dazzling morning light, relieved.

Note to Self:

Selling one's hair is not a sustainable form of income.