Fourteen NYU Buenos Aires creative writing students gave readings at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair last weekend. The students spoke at the U.S. Embassy stand at the book fair. NYU Buenos Airs student Zake Morgan describes the experience:
The Buenos Aires International Book Fair is held in the headquarters for La sociedad rural de Argentina, which is one of the most influential and affluent societies in the country. The venue is enormous and consists of multiple buildings scattered over acres of land in the middle of urban Buenos Aires. The buildings are mostly constructed in a style reminiscent of early 20th century Buenos Aires with long arcades interspersed with arenas and stands for its members to come and showcase their prized livestock before their contemporaries, who come in from all over Argentina throughout the year for meetings and galas to promote the major agrarian and livestock industry that has defined Argentina for centuries. Its presence and significance are undeniable and the book fair extended throughout its multiple main buildings endlessly.
Within these massive halls were the tiny stands that each embassy erected to showcase the works of its respective authors before the thousands of people that pass through the fair every hour. Next to the modest stand of the U.S. Embassy where I and my fellow NYU students presented our work were the Korean, Syrian-Lebanese, Brazilian, and Israeli embassies. The most imposing of our fellow embassies’ stands was the Brazilian, with a towering wooden structure that had Brazilian phrases and photos of authors plastered all along the wall. For our presentations we were all placed in a modern intimate setting surrounded by a wall dividing us from the rest of the crowd. Inside our intimate setting students read short stories and poems on topics ranging from first loves to travel.
I read a short account of a man I had met while I was travelling in Uruguay last semester for fall break. As I read the story, people from the book fair peered over the wall to see what was happening in our tiny space. The story reminded me of why I came to Argentina in the first place. I had come to find something exotic, and to see what South America was, which turned out to be quite contrary to what I had believed it was. Even though Buenos Aires, with its modern buildings mixed with old ones that attempt to mimic French architecture, was a shock and not something I had imagined when I came here, the man I had met in Uruguay and the tiny beach town of Punta del Diablo was what I thought I had come to find. I had always had an image in my mind of rural, messy cities covered in trash and crawling with all kinds of people dressed in indigenous garb, but that is not Buenos Aires. It’s a modern city striving to be European, just like Lima or Santiago. After so long here, I have realized that I came to Buenos Aires to find the tiny towns where people sleep until noon and the roads are still nothing but packed earth. This is what I had found in Punta del Diablo, and the man I met there, Matías, was someone who screamed unique South American. That is why I chose to read that piece, because although my search for what I thought to be South America had been misplaced in Buenos Aires, I was still lucky enough to find it somewhere else.

Here is Zake’s piece:
“La tomé.”
As simple as that. He took it, and then built his house on it.
“Si, soy carpintero.”
I wondered if he had been a carpenter before he decided to build his own house or if he became one out of necessity. Being a makeshift carpenter didn’t seem like it would be that hard of a skill to pick up, hammer some nails here, screw some things there, fasten some nuts to some bolts, use a saw, get a fair amount of sawdust in your beard and caked into you overalls.
There! All of a sudden you have become a carpenter. A gardener, a cyclist, a fan of whiskey(specifically Jim Beam), hand rolled cigarettes, a lover of classical music.
I like to imagine his house nestled into a strange patch of trees right up along the beach. Those tall slender trees that reach forever upward until they spread out their sparse foliage just far enough to touch their neighbors creating a thin canopy that shades his rickety hovel from the blistering Uruguayan sun. There are very few places left in the world where someone like Matías can still exist. Land can’t be taken in the United States anymore, people are too ornery about what belongs to them, what belongs to their neighbor; we have procedures and laws to follow if you ever want a piece of land for “free.” No way that Argentinians would let this fly, Chileans I doubt it, and the list goes on and on. Uruguay is sparsely populated enough, a place where colonies of people still exist that refuse to use electricity and there president lives on a farm(Not a George W. type of farm, but a farm where he still splits his own wood for the Winter).
Matías with his long scraggly beard and train conductors hat would not mesh well with any of these countries either. His teeth are too long and pushed together to smile comfortably in another place. The smile a bit too lopsided. Fortunately the levelness of one’s smile doesn’t force preconceptions on people here, the people are too few to use this classical marker as a guideline. Instead you get him talking and what comes out of that mouth of smooshed teeth will most likely blow you away.
“Yea, he’s pretty crazy, but not really,”
Or at least that’s what we say when we reflect on what he was like. “Único” seems the more appropriate word in this case. Its not necessarily that he chooses to go days without eating, but rather he forgets, or he’s too far, or fixing some part of his house turns out to be more important. His sinewy limbs swim in his baggy shirts that it looks like he stole from Cat Stevens, but its still apparent that his bony hands hold strength behind them. Hours spent sawing and hammering, or riding his bike the twenty KM to the nearest supermarket, all by choice. It builds character, or makes someone into a character.
Also by choice, his decision to learn to play the oboe, which he carries with him slung around his back as he disappears back home over the dirt roads and dodgy asphalt of Northern Uruguay. Back home to listen to Bach on his old battery run radio, practice his new favorite instrument, tend his garden, roll some cigarettes.
All of it for himself.
“Yea, he’s crazy, but not really.”