When Under Lockdown, One Dreams of Immensity
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Locked in my house for many months, I imagined Route 14, its landmarks, green signs, and infinite horizon. It was impossible to go out, so the day-to-day became fully myopic. Only the recurring existed in the short-term mindset of lockdown.
One December day, I locked my house, the place that had protected me for so many months, full of guilt and fear. I got into my car and sped as I crossed the still sleeping city. When it’s hot, Buenos Aires looks different in the early morning. Its brightly shining colors are distant, as if the intensity were too much for her when just waking up.
On the highway, the city receded, giving way to the suburbs. There were gated communities, picturesque and affluent, mixed with industrial zones and working-class neighborhoods. The landscape from one moment to the next became completely rural and I saw myself surrounded by horses, cows, and windmills. The city had disappeared and I was farther away from it than I had been for 12 months. I felt adrenaline, as if instead of doing something mundane, I was suddenly doing something definitive, something that would change me forever. There was no turning back.
When I was younger I would take this same route with my parents and would ask, time and time again, how long until we would arrive. I was interested in the immediate, I didn’t notice the greenery along the way or how the day goes by while on the road. On this occasion, the time passed unchecked as I made my way to my mother’s house, crossing two Argentine provinces and six Uruguayan districts.
I was thinking about all of this around mid-morning as I sped through Talavera Island, when I saw the names Alberto and Cristina, drawn in broad brushstrokes in black and blue. The sign was as outdated as the elections were more than a year ago. No one had bothered to paint something else, as if time had stopped in March of 2020. In the middle of the bridge, in the same lettering, it said “We’ll beat the virus together.”
The first time I drove on this route was when I had just gotten my driving license. My dad was alive then, my designated co-pilot. He was constantly offering advice, and as per usual in these cases, the limits of our relationship were being tested. He believed everything was more dangerous for me and I craved freedom, exhausted by his excessive concern. My father had been born in the province of Chaco and grew up in Santa Fe. Perhaps for that reason he placed so much importance in pointing out all the trees of Argentina’s river valleys. It was different from the flatlands we were accustomed to—it was more lush, more green, and at its core, more wild.
Now, these trees—which I can’t name due to an excessively late stage adolescence—reminded me of him. My father navigated life calmy, maybe that nonchalance had been what allowed him to stop and admire the trees of Entre Rios. The problem with life happening in the same place was that sometimes you needed to let go of some memories in order to move forward.
When going to Uruguay by bridge, first you have to cross the Zárate Brazo Largo bridge. Technically, there were two bridges. First, you left Zárate and crossed the Paraná River. There, you drove through Talavera Island and then went over the Paraná Guazú to arrive in the Entre Ríos province.
To me, borders had always been susceptible to being crossed. That’s why they never existed very clearly. Before, they were only imaginary lines that could be crossed with the right documentation, but since March, almost no one could cross. But in my lifetime, during the peaceful and democratic years that I lived, it had always been possible to come and go from Argentina. Then, a decision by politicians in gray suits changed my life. My mother lived in Uruguay, and by December, as I drove across rivers, it had been several months since I had seen her. Since March, borders had ceased being some abstract reality—a river, a mountain, or a mere imaginary line—and became an emotional obstacle.
In Ceibas, I stopped to stretch my legs, pump gas, buy coffee, and talk to someone in order to remember how to be human after so many hours in silence. I left in a hurry after spending too much time roaming around aisles with regional food items.
The GPS didn’t have signal and I had to trust my memory not to miss the exit on Route 14. Suddenly I saw the sign that said Route 14 Bridge General San Martín. Nearly overwhelmed by my good memory and sense of direction, I kept driving until a policeman signaled for me to slow down. I stopped the car and began frantically looking for my travel permit, the car insurance, and even the registration.
The policeman dressed in blue and with a hat reached my window and said:
—Miss, your lights are off. How long have you been on the road? It’s very important.
I didn’t want to explain to him that it had been 12 months since I had been on the road, five in which I hadn't left my house, and a long time since I ventured out of the city. That from March to May, walking more than five blocks was almost illegal, that my myopia had gotten worse...None of that made sense, the laws were still the same.
I got out of the car and followed the official to a maroon shipping container. Inside it looked just like a police station, it had white lights, an Argentine flag, a regional map, and computers with Windows 98.
Showing restraint, the official typed in my information and apologized for the delay. He explained that if I paid the fine there they would give me a 50% discount, and if not, I could pay it in up to six installments. In my country, there were payment plans even for paying fines, such were the effects of constant hyperinflation. I told myself that accepting that others were right would be the fastest solution. I opted for the first option and gave him my debit card.
As I was leaving, it was drizzling lightly. The rain and landscape of the Entre Ríos province complemented each other. I remembered to turn on my lights and play with the radio dial. The stations kept changing along the route, which was full of static as I drove through open country. While I crossed Gualeguaychú, “Diamonds and Rust” by Joan Baez began playing. In an outburst of love and sadness, the melancholic voice of Joan said “And if all you're offering me is diamonds and rust, I've already paid.”
The song was about Bob Dylan, explained the radio host, but Joan had admitted it only recently. Diamonds can’t be destroyed, they are hard, the hardest form of carbon.
“Those are allotropes,” I thought while the horizon turned into the forest that surrounds the road until reaching the bridge. Allotropy is the ability of some chemical elements to exist in different physical forms. For example, carbon can be both coal and diamond.
It had stopped raining when I started seeing trucks waiting in line. The Uruguay River came from Brazil where it also functioned as a border with Argentina, and unloaded the entirety of its force 1,800 kilometers later in Río de la Plata. It wasn’t full of sediment like the Paraná, nor was it blue like in that one song, all that water running below the concrete. Then I knew, somehow all of that stillness accumulated over the past months had taken me to this bridge, as if the pandemic inertia would cure its monotony. The bridge, which was 5 km long and at its highest point 45 meters tall, joins two border cities: Gualeguaychú and Fray Bentos.
When I was able to cross, the day looked gray, but the sun was still shining through the clouds. After a moment of silence and static, I began to hear ads for CONAPROLE, a dairy company from the Oriental Republic (as Uruguay is also known). I stopped to have lunch at a rest stop and on my way out I went to the bathroom. While in the white melamine stall, I overheard them. I understood that if I went out they would feel interrupted, so I extended my stay in that tiny stall to hear a bit more.
“There’s an Argentine car outside. A girl just stepped out of it.”
“It’s been a while since we’ve seen any of them.”
“I haven’t seen my cousins from Gualeguaychú since December.”
It was one of those comments that could only be understood in 2020, like social distancing or face masks. Uruguay in the summer used to be a country full of Argentine tourists. The income from tourism in 2019 represented 8% of Uruguay’s gross domestic product and between 15% and 20% of exports. A year without tourism had affected everyone, a foreigner as news in a border city was almost ridiculous. One out of every two visitors to Uruguay in 2019 were from Argentina. For that reason, hidden in my stall, I understood the magnitude of the anomaly. To be Argentine among Uruguayans was only unusual during a pandemic.
I opened the door and they looked at them. I greeted them:
“Hasta luego, pasen bien.”
It was a way of disguising myself linguistically as Uruguayan, since in Argentina you would say ‘que tenga un lindo día’. One’s homeland is established during childhood, and somehow the first things we learn to name become part of ourselves. I had known since I was young to code switch to disguise myself. Reality becomes unambiguous when we name it. I learned how to read with a green chalkboard my father bought me when I was four in Uruguay. In a way, reading held the possibility to know everything. From understanding the signs and through that process, finding meaning. Back then borders were still hazy and childhood was self-contained, it didn’t understand geography and much less politics.
As I traveled down empty Uruguayan roads, I thought of the tridimensional clouds of Uruguay that you always see when driving. Uruguay seemed like the same country, but differed in crucial ways.
That night I arrived at Punta del Este exhausted by the heat, the distance, the inertia of lockdown. A city that was synonymous with sophistication and banality, a beautiful city, perhaps the most beautiful of the south Atlantic. I had left twelve hours prior from Buenos Aires, a demographic explosion where 14 million people lived and now I was going to sleep in Uruguay where only 3 million lived.
I thought for the first time about the meaning of this city where I had learned to read. There were two cities that coexisted: one that was shown in magazines where celebrities went and this city where this house remained, with a patio made of gravel that contained my childhood. A city of excess and inequality, and a simple place full of hortensias, freshly bathed children heading to mass, and my neverending childhood.
In Uruguay, man-made lakes were called tajamares, children were called gurises, and sneakers were championes. Differences were subtle, only trained ears distinguished the importance of how they diverged. In Uruguay, you slow down and stop for anything. As if it was an insult to live as fast-paced porteños (name for inhabitants of Buenos Aires). I was confined for seven days, because that was what migration authorities required. Those days of self-isolation were insightful. The stillness of the street and its routine helped me understand what went on in secret.
It was then that I saw Nico, that I really looked at him. I saw him after so many years as he carried a gas canister. Every day he would go about his daily tasks in the gray house in front of me. He was always wearing a red Chicago Bulls jersey that said Pippen. Nico and I had been friends in the 90s, and that shirt was like an allusion to our common past. Days passed and I would always see him at two in the afternoon with the precision of someone working through the siesta hours.
Inscribed on this street which this kid crossed day and night was the most encompassing period of my life, my childhood. All the kids on the block only saw each other in the summer. We went to school in Buenos Aires, and they, in San Carlos. We played Nintendo, hide-and-seek and ding-dong ditch when the sun had set. There were five boys and me, all Uruguayan except my brother and I. Running on the red gravel on summer nights, it didn’t matter who was Argentine or Uruguayan. Nationality was an abstract concept.
After the bureaucratic formalities like quarantine and tests, I was finally allowed to go out one day. I decided to go buy ice cream for Christmas.
There was no one else at the ice cream store. I ordered quickly and asked the owner if he noticed a dip in tourism. His response was that of an expert in the field:
“No one orders the dulce de leche tentación flavor, there just aren’t any Argentines.
We Argentines would say that dulce de leche had been our invention, that it was invented in La Caledonia on Juan Manuel de Rosas’ land in Cañuelas. Orientals (another name for Uruguayans, known in Spanish as the Oriental Republic) claimed it as their own and had their own origin myth, they claimed that slaves had first prepared it during the colonial period. This dispute between the Orientals and Argentines went on and on. We believed that San Martin was born in Yapeyú, Corrientes, while Uruguayans asserted that he was born in Calera de las Huérfanas in Colonia. The same thing happened with Gardel, the most important tango singer of all time. Río de la Plata was a common territory shared by both countries for over 200 years, when the differences were harder to perceive.
The ice cream store was Argentine. In the supermarket they sold candy from the Argentine province of Cordoba, and I thought of the trucks held up waiting to cross Fray Bentos. Those trucks must have gone through the same journey as me. Trucks that arrived from Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. Trucks loaded with a different idea than the one held by politicians in gray suits, South American solidarity formally assembled into a trade bloc, the Mercosur.
On my way back, driving down my street, the sound of the gravel assured me that sometimes the years are meaningless and that sounds can transport you. There was Nico pushing a wheelbarrow in his black shorts and red jersey. I rolled down the window and waved to him. He waved back, but didn’t recognize me. He had assumed it was just the friendliness of foreigners. I was no one, just another Argentine there for the summer.
Allotropes are chemical compounds that are the same, but manifest themselves in different forms. In the real world, they are very different, but their scientific abbreviations are similar. This is the case of diamonds and coal, ozone and oxygen, why not Uruguayans and Argentines, too?
Celina Arreseygor was born in Buenos Aires, where she still lives. She spent part of her childhood between Uruguay and Cañuelas, Buenos Aires (province). She graduated from Austral University with a degree in communications and now works for a food production company.