Urban Jungle
by Dominic Hilton
January 2022
Ice baths and power cuts: Dominic Hilton endures a torrid summer in the city of Buenos Aires.
In Buenos Aires, it’s rude to talk about the weather, but there are limits. Temperatures reached 48°C this week. That’s 118.4°F. Hot enough to break ice and spark conversation.
“I understand now why tribes don’t wear clothes,” my flirtatious friend Delfina said to me the other day. She’d come to my apartment to bitch about her latest boyfriend. Now she was slumped across a corner sofa, fanning herself with a fish slice as she toyed with the buttons of her flimsy summer blouse.
I was in swim shorts, prostrate on the floor. “Tribes?” I said, pressing an ice pack to my forehead.
Delfina punted a dangling foot into my hip. “You know. In the jungles.”
“What jungles?”
She sighed. “It’s too hot to talk.”
“Or think,” I said.
That’s been a problem. “ARGENTINA: HOTTEST PLACE ON PLANET” scream the headlines, and the solitary thought I can muster is, Who writes these things?
Because, I mean, who’s working in this heat?
Not me. The newsworthy temperature does at least offer a fresh excuse for my slack productivity. I used to blame Covid-19. Now I worry my lockdown-laziness has gone endemic. Last month, I received my second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine in one of Barrio Chino’s temples. After getting jabbed by an amiable pair of volunteers who made a disproportionate fuss about my being a foreigner, I sat in the makeshift recovery room, staring fixedly at a giant statue of Buddha. “Empty your mind,” I thought I heard it say, ever since when I haven’t had a single coherent thought.
Most mornings, my colleague Luke calls via WhatsApp from London, where he’s busy juggling a scary number of important creative ventures. If I’m awake, I lie naked atop my bedsheets, listening to him complain about his stressful workload. Then he says, “Anyway, what’s going on with you? You sound like you’re stuck in first gear.”
But I know he’s just being kind. Even from seven thousand miles away, it’s obvious I haven’t shifted out of neutral since New Year’s Eve.
The Buenos Aires climate is changing from temperate and idyllic to tropical and insufferable. I feel it’s my duty to communicate this inconvenient truth to as many different people in as many different countries as often as I can. My aim is to crush any dreams they might have of moving here. I share photos of the heat rash that’s newly spread across my chest and the clammy buttock stains I leave on the seat of my leather office chair. “It’s not safe,” I hear myself saying. “Don’t you read the data? South Americans are under serious threat of extinction.”
I’m not sure if anyone quite believes me, but desperate times call for desperately feeble measures. As I write, the government of Buenos Aires is aggressively pushing to attract digital nomads from abroad to come live and work in the city. “Take advantage of the unique benefits of life here in the Paris of the South!” say the bubbly promotional campaigns—the chief benefit, of course, being that Argentina is comically inexpensive for privileged folks paid in real currencies, like euros or US dollars. At the kiosko on my corner, a pack of twenty Lucky Strike will set you back a buck fifty, at most. What graphic designer from Williamsburg wouldn’t find that attractive?
It scares me. A recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Buenos Aires the ninth cheapest city in the world to live in. The least expensive is Damascus, and the second cheapest is Tripoli, where, according to the United Nations, “forces affiliated with different armed groups have been deploying.” Because it’s not a warzone, I worry about Buenos Aires being swamped by an influx of foreign assholes, like me. It sounds bad, but I want Argentina’s capital to be all mine. I feel special here. Exotic, in a perverse sort of way.
One of the big pluses of the two-year-long pandemic has been the near total absence of clueless tourists blighting my city. Regrettably, thanks to the miraculous vaccination programs, they’re now slowly starting to return—Americans, for the most part, who invade my favorite cafés to bark unreasonable demands at the inefficient, gray-haired waiters. They’re always easy to spot, the vacationers, as their color-coordinated outfits are impossibly neat and perfectly new. “Then Tuesday daytime,” I imagine them saying, “I’ll match the polka dot off-shoulder crochet bustier with the cerise high-waist tie-belt linen flowy shorts and the tan wedge sandals. OMG, I’ll look, like, so adorable on my Insta feed!!!”
“If you were a real Argentine,” a born-and-bred porteño named Nano growled at me the other day, “you’d be welcoming tourists back with open arms. Especially the Americans. The dollars they spend are the only thing preventing this country from becoming the next Venezuela.”
I told Nano he was being selfish. Then I poured myself another glass of his delicious wine.
Of course, what really bothers me about the tourists is that I’m so often mistaken for one of them. “Dollars! Dollars!” street vendors holler at me as my lanky legs stride past. Overeager cretins clutching English language menus try to harass me into tacky eateries I’d never dream of entering.
“¡Vivo acá!” I yell at them. Or, when it’s all proving too much, “¡No hablo inglés!”
Not that Nano doesn’t have a point about Venezuela. We’ve been having a good many power cuts here of late: an ominous sign, according to anyone I find the energy to talk to.
“It’s coming,” said my concierge, César, as he held open a door for me.
“What is?”
César shook his head sorrowfully. “You’ll see.”
Vaccination center recovery room, Barrio Chino, BsAs
That day, the thermometers hit 116.6°F just as the power went out across the entire city. I’d agreed to meet my Italian friend Ciro for coffee, and as I walked to meet him, I witnessed several fender benders on the blazing stretch of Avenida del Libertador, where the traffic lights weren’t working. Large, exhausted-looking families were splatted idly on the sidewalks, because it was cooler out there than in their apartments, which had become ovens. The stylish café where Ciro and I had arranged to meet was of course out of action, the tattooed staff dawdling listlessly under a canopy, so we found a less fussy one around the corner. By some miracle, they still had ice, and were willing to sell us bottles of water. We took a rickety table outside, wilting on canvas chairs as Ciro told me a story about one of his ex-girlfriends.
“Are you ready for this?” he said. “We broke up because I didn’t own a comb.”
I tonged another ice cube into my glass. “I’m sorry?”
Ciro held up a hand, like a Roman senator hushing a pleb. “I know. But it’s true. We’d spent a romantic night together in my apartment, and the next morning, she climbs out of my bed to go take a shower. Trust me, when she enters my bathroom, everything is a million dollars, but when she emerges, wrapped in one of my towels, she is on the verge of tears. She starts to blub. “I… I c-can’t find a c-comb!” Now, we’ve been dating for several months at this point, so I say to her, “I don’t know if you’d noticed, but I’m bald.” She just stares at me, blinking. “So what?” she says. OK, so I explain to her that, because I am completely bald, I don’t own a comb—and that’s it: the shit hits the fan. She breaks up with me, right there and then. She storms out of my place, calling me selfish, and saying that because—get this—because I knew she would one day stay over, I should have bought a comb, for her, and kept it in my bathroom.”
“Unbelievable,” I said.
At which point, a familiar voice called out from over my shoulder. “Shouldn’t you be writing a bestseller?”
I twisted round to see Job, a flamboyant Dutch tour guide I’ve known for two or three years. He was straddling a bicycle, grinning diabolically. Behind him, a man and a woman I’d never seen before were also straddling bicycles, also grinning.
“I’m conducting research,” I said, unable to peel myself out of my chair. “What are you doing here?”
“Making magic, darling,” Job said. He gestured theatrically to his companions. “These lovely people are visiting us from the Netherlands, and today I am showing them the many delights of our fair city.”
I stared at his outfit. “In trousers?!”
The tourists laughed. “We are Dutch,” the man said in a vigorous voice. “We are used to cycling in all weather conditions.”
“We find that the breeze helps to cool us down in the summer months,” his wife added.
They were all grinning again. “Breeze?” I said, in a surly sort of way.
By the time I staggered home, it was early evening. The power was still out, and César shook his head at me again. I nodded back at him, sympathetically, unable to marshal any useful words. Upstairs in my apartment, after wringing out my T-shirt in a sink, it occurred to me that I soon wouldn’t have any light, so I searched the cupboards for candles, finding only a citronella candle to keep away the mosquitos on my balcony. Isn’t it always the way? I thought, meaninglessly.
“Anyway,” Delfina said, “the point is that the world probably looks like a completely different place to the men I date than it does to me.”
Eight hours after it cut, the power eventually snapped back on, for five minutes. Then, later, it came back on for real, though I slept poorly, thanks to the steady stream of sweat pouring down my face. The next day, I made the mistake of walking around the city parks. Even the ground beneath my feet seemed to be liquefying and I started to sway like a dipsomaniac in running gear. I’d walked the same circuit countless times before, but it wasn’t until I steadied my sodden frame against a signpost that I registered its official title: the Circuitos Gatorade. I gazed at the sign for several minutes, to check I wasn’t hallucinating. Then I noticed that the entire lake had been fenced off. I wondered if it was because geese attack the summertime picnickers, but decided it was to stop the poor using the lake to bathe and frolic in, like they do all the city’s fountains. Later, though, I watched a dumpy woman in cheap hot pants and a droopy boob tube whacking away a family of hissing geese with a massive palm frond, and I changed my mind again.
After dozing through a minor bout of heatstroke, I rolled out of bed feeling hungry. It was 11pm, so I met Delfina at a local pizza joint so snazzy it can only have been built with dirty money. Delfina was waiting for me at a table outside, clutching an enormous glass of cold white wine, but the moment I sat down, an eager-eyed waiter pulled my chair out from under me. Seconds later, the heavens opened. The storm was biblical, skies flaring with relentless cracks of lightning, the flooded boulevard grinding all traffic to an angry halt. Inside the restaurant, silicone women pressed their dripping curves against impossibly bronzed men, whose Rolexes flashed in the glare of dazzling chandeliers. Delfina was saying something or other about worldview conflict in romantic relationships, while I stared over her shoulder, only half-listening. Two wealthy older men were leaning across a bench, talking in whispers. One of the men looked very like the current President of the United States. Lifting his wispy eyebrows, he handed his smartphone across the bench, saying, “Watch this!” to his dinner companion. The other man shielded the screen by cupping the device in his hands, but from my vantage point, I had a clear view, and he was watching a video of a woman sucking an animal’s penis. I couldn’t make out which type of animal it was, but the penis was long, hairless and red. Possibly a dog, I thought.
“Anyway,” Delfina said, “the point is that the world probably looks like a completely different place to the men I date than it does to me.”
At which point, a petite man with perfect skin and long Rastafarian locks knotted atop his head appeared at my shoulder. “You’re not Argentine,” he said, squeezing my bicep.
“Neither are you,” I replied, wondering if I was still back in my bed, fever-dreaming.
It turned out the man was from Tibet, where he used to be a monk. Without prompting, he volunteered his entire life story as our food turned cold. “Everybody recognises me,” he said, drawing an imaginary circle around his handsome face. “They want to have their photo taken with me, because I was a famous actor in Hollywood films. Of course, this was after the many years I spent in a Tibetan monastery.”
“And now you bus tables in a Buenos Aires pizza joint?” I wanted to say.
The storm swelled outside the window walls, as our new friend started in on the Chinese. “They are genius at doing business,” he said, “but when you look into their eyes, you can see that Chinese people are dead inside. Their souls are dead. It’s sad, because they’re extremely good at making money. But they have no soul.” He smiled kindly, as if he felt genuine sympathy for the one and a half billion people he’d just typecast. “China,” he said, his eyes suddenly darting towards a group of balloon-breasted women in spandex seeking the restaurant’s valet service. “China is the exact opposite of Argentina, that’s what I would say. That’s wisdom for you. And now, I will leave you to enjoy your food. Thank you for listening to me. It has been a pleasure.”
He bowed, before vanishing behind a pillar. I looked across the table at Delfina, who stared at me silently for ten or so seconds. I’d never noticed before, but her eyes are purple.
“Do you have any ice?” she eventually said.
“Here?”
She shook her head. “Back at your apartment.”
“Sure.”
“Good.” She picked an oily red pepper off the pizza and sucked it absent-mindedly into her mouth. “Because I need to take a bath.”
