The Foreigners Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part I

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  Part II

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  Part III

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Maxine Swann

  Also by Maxine Swann

  Flower Children

  Serious Girls

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Maxine Swann

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Swann, Maxine.

  The foreigners / Maxine Swann. p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54768-7

  1. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 2. Buenos Aires (Argentina)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.W356F67 2011

  2011009413

  813’.6—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  to P

  Part I

  one

  The amount of pollen that comes in on travelers’ sleeves is vastly disproportionate to the number of species that hold. However, once an invasive species takes root, it can become voracious. An apparently innocent figure can topple whole ecosystems. Consider, for example, the rosy wolf snail of the southeastern United States. Or the case of the Iris pseudacorus currently taking over the Argentine wetlands, threatening to annihilate the habitat of the Curvebilled Reedhaunter and the Asian privet.

  The foreigners in Buenos Aires come, searching as they always were, for a kind of utopia, though the definition of “utopia” varies. They fall into categories. There are the South American neighbors, Bolivians, Paraguayans, Peruvians, who come to work as maids, construction and agricultural workers and send the money home. The Belarusians come because there is an accord with their country, still now, papers delivered unquestionably. There are, apparently—it has not only been rumored but confirmed—whole communities of Africans. They are being taught the language so as to insert themselves. But where they are inserted remains a mystery. They are never seen. A black-skinned person on the street is an anomaly. Everyone, however furtively, turns and stares.

  Then there is the other type of foreigner, coming out of curiosity, for a lark, backpackers, tango dancers, often the lark-seeking obscuring deeper, more complicated, half-conscious reasons, escape from overdetermined social trajectories, troubled families, marriages or lack of prospects. This group, in turn, bifurcates. The tango dancers conglomerate among themselves, into bigger and bigger masses. Friendships are light, turnover expected. The tango life is exigent, starting at two, three in the morning. You’re out until dawn, sleep through the mornings, then pick up some odd jobs in the late afternoon hours until the night begins again. In general, this crowd isn’t picky, nor that interested in money. Their lives are centered around one goal.

  The motives of the other group are more complex. They arrive, Europeans, in the new world. “I’ve discovered the continent inhabited by more peoples and animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa itself, and I’ve found that the air here is more temperate and sweet than in any other part of the world we know,” wrote Vespuccio in 1507. “I hereby name it Mundus Novus.” The new world today seems to hold all the promise it ever did, exotic fauna and flora, potential for exploitation. Like the Belarusians and the Asians, these foreigners are taking their chances, only in a different tier and what they’re after is more fleeting—glamour, big wealth, upper-class status, things they can’t find at home, because they don’t make the grade. But in Argentina it’s different. No matter what their origins, by virtue of being European or American, as long as they’re basically decently physically assembled, they’re immediately endowed with a certain sheen, upper class unless proven otherwise, instead of the reverse. In the case of ugliness, of course, as always, other strategies must be sought. They learn to speak Spanish sufferingly well, with smatterings of other languages slipped in—among upper-class Argentines this is par for the course.

  Though the potential for circulation is one of the great virtues of Buenos Aires, revolving city events, everyone goes, this particular group is interested in exclusivity. While at the end of the nineteenth century the places to be seen among the Argentine aristocracy were balls, dog walks, church masses, and above all the promenades of Palermo—on Thursdays and Sunday afternoons, four lines of cars would drive back and forth along the three blocks of what is now Sarmiento Avenue—and then later in the 1920s, the river islands of Tigre, where significant yachts would cross each other on the tranquil muddy waters, now the viewing places, as this particular breed of foreigner soon assesses, are museum openings, opera galas and cocktail parties. They can soon be seen at all the requisite events, typing contacts into their shiny cell phones.

  For all its supposed glamour, the milieu ages you. Even the younger women look older than they are. The foreigners, starryeyed, don’t realize this yet. They still can’t get over having maids. They marvel secretly to themselves that they would ever have a maid, someone to fold and arrange their clothes, they who grew
up the way they did, although here too there’s a cultural conundrum—every basic middle-class Argentine household has a maid. But they soon not only behave as if, but begin to feel that, they could never live without one. Still, their two main concerns are the concerns of most of us, commerce and love.

  As for me, I arrived in Buenos Aires in 2002 in a peculiar state. was thirty-five.

  My marriage of nine years had dissolved the year before. Around the same time, I’d switched jobs. My husband had been a theater director. When I met him, I’d started working in stage design, but I now found myself disenchanted with that world. We lived in Seattle, where I had grown up. While looking around for a different line of work, I signed on as the assistant to a botanist I met at a dinner party, as an intermediate step. Still, I had yet to get my bearings. It wasn’t that I’d been happy or unhappy with my husband. But the devotion I’d felt for him had been entirely absorbing.

  My parents, divorced themselves, however amicably, were concerned. My father, a lawyer, had friends of his take care of my divorce paperwork. My mother, a social worker, suggested counseling. I did go to see a counselor; our conversations were interesting, yet they did nothing to prevent that in January of the year following my separation, I started fainting inexplicably. It would begin in my ears, sounds seeming to come from far away, then my vision would go into high-contrast mode, the brights blinding and the darks almost invisible for being so black. Once I had fainted a few times, and I knew what these signals meant, I could sometimes lie down in time to keep myself from going under. When I did pass out, it would seem like an eternity. Sometimes, I would shake as if I was going into convulsions or pee myself. One day, it happened on the street in Seattle. The next thing I knew I was down on the pavement throwing up like crazy, surrounded by firemen and paramedics. That time, I had gone so far under, I really felt that I had died and I heard this drumbeat filling my head getting slower and slower (the nurse said later that it was my heart), until everything came rushing back again with ice-cold liquid filling my veins from the IVs they’d stuck in me (it was winter and the stuff was cold from being in the ambulance). I was a mess, covered in vomit, pee and poo everywhere, but I actually felt exhilarated when I woke up. Riding in the ambulance to the hospital, I remembered being in Spain as a college student and imagined myself as one of those huge religious sculptures they carry in processions.

  They kept me in the hospital for almost a week and did a million tests, blood tests and epilepsy tests, tests of my heart, an MRI of my brain, another test where they attached electrical probes to my head and sent shocks to different parts of my body. But it was finally concluded from the tests and repeated tests that there was nothing organically wrong with me. The head doctor came into my room one day on the neurology ward to report this and say that they could find no further justification for keeping me there.

  Later that afternoon, following a visit from my mother, my friend Brian stopped by.

  “You know what you should do?” he said, after hearing the news. “Take a trip.”

  “A trip?” I asked, vaguely surprised. I had traveled with my husband to Portugal, Morocco and Greece but, apart from that semester in college when I’d lived in Barcelona, I’d never gone anywhere on my own.

  “Yeah, anywhere. Just go somewhere. I know,” he said. “I’m on this board now. I can arrange for you to get a grant. But it would have to be in urban studies.” That was his field.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter if you do it. The point is to get you some money to go somewhere. Let’s see. You speak Spanish, right? Yeah, I think I can work it out.”

  This was how I found myself one month later in the airport on my way to Buenos Aires with a grant to study the public waterworks of the city. They say that every hospitalization is a journey. They also say that when people enter the hospital, they leave part of themselves outside. Maybe the conjunction of these two elements explains the estrangement you feel on leaving. Part of you has taken a journey, of which the other part is ignorant. Part of you returns, reencounters the part you left outside. The two of you do what you can to proceed. It was in this state of estrangement that I set out.

  My stint in the hospital had made it clear how little is actually known by doctors, by ourselves, about the human condition. “We’re all tapping along in the dark,” as one neurologist who examined me put it. In the airport, waiting for my plane to board, I was leafing through a magazine when I glanced up and caught a glimpse of what looked like the head doctor from the hospital. He was standing in profile, about ten yards away. Then he turned and approached the set of seats where I was. Now I could see, it was definitely him. He was small, with green eyes set somewhat close. I had never seen him out of his hospital gown. I immediately had the reflex to hide, as if I was doing something wrong, as if, if he saw me, I’d be forbidden to leave. While before I’d felt somewhat baffled by my actions, suddenly it seemed quite imperative that I leave. I ducked out of sight, put on some new sunglasses I’d bought whose lenses were especially, even too, dark. The trip took on an air of the forbidden. Although I hadn’t been aware of it until this moment, I seemed to be living it as a renegade expedition.

  My first days in Buenos Aires were sufficiently disorienting to absorb my full attention. It was April, autumn, and the city seemed to have a lugubrious air. All the stereotypical melancholic idea was there, pervasive, stinking like the waters in the La Boca zone, and this even more so because of the recent economic crash. My own financial situation was steady for the moment—along with the grant money, I had some savings, and since the peso had been devalued, everything was cheap. I was staying in the house of a woman in her late sixties named Cecilia until I got my bearings, also an arrangement made by Brian.

  The apartment was on the second floor and, as I would later learn, like all middle- and upper-class Buenos Aires apartments, had a balcony with plants. Outside on the street, the very loud buses went by. The plants fluttered. The tiny china plates on gold hooks on the walls quivered. The polished dining room table was never used. On the sideboard was a large crystal liquor container surrounded by crystal glasses. The furniture, Cecilia liked to say, was French. The upholstered couches and chairs, salmon pink, were covered in plastic so as not to get stained by people who never came. When you sat there in warm weather, the plastic stuck to your legs. There were life-size portrait photographs of Cecilia’s two children receiving communion. The rooms were kept ready, waiting for the children, someone, but no one ever came.

  In the meantime, Cecilia, like many others, had had all access to her savings blocked by the recent bank debacle. The money was floating in some unidentified place, who knew if ever to be seen again, which meant that she either had to sell her apartment and move to a smaller, humbler place or go out and get a job. The only thing she had was her apartment. She had decided to get a job and worked now in a travel agency, long hours, five days a week.

  It seemed to me that there was in this woman’s life a shadowy flickering of my own, hopes suspended, though her case, of course, was more extreme. Still the resemblance would sometimes make me feel that I was drowning and I’d wake up in the night in an appalling state, feverish, with the sensation that a substance was flooding my lungs. Lying there, I’d picture the streets of Buenos Aires flooded with dark water, up, up over my head. I’d see Cecilia trying to make her way home from work, battling against the current, now well past her thighs. Another time, on waking, I had the distinct impression that a being was holding me from behind, a sort of fiend, clutching me tight, which later struck me as an almost miraculous embodiment of some allegorical idea of death. The life-size photographic figures of the absent children would dance before my eyes. Or else I’d dream of crowds.

  An aspect of the city, especially prevalent at the moment, was protesting crowds. They could be found on any given day. All you had to do was step out into the street and listen. They were often around the Pink House, the residence of the presiden
t, but would also move through the streets. I found myself gravitating toward them. People would be milling around in one location, sometimes banging pots and pans. Occasionally the crowd would erupt, the police arriving, everyone running. But it was strange because, while for me the crowds during the day offered solace—I would find myself drawn toward them and enclosed there—in my nightmare visions, they did not. The crowds in my mind took the form of insects, reptilian animals, they were crawling over me, invading my bed, or simply a repeated pattern, of light, squirmy shapes, seething, retreating, coming forward again.

  Apart from these visions, there was nothing particularly notable about my loneliness, or rather it was all that there was, all that was there. Go back? That was not an option either. Utopia has been defined for many as not what you go toward but what you get away from, utopia because it’s not the old life. No matter what it offered, Buenos Aires was in that sense utopia for me.

  I did have enough lucidity to realize that my living situation was degrading my outlook. Cecilia, despite her dire straits, refused to accept any payment for the room I was using. This, combined with the bizarre visions the apartment was provoking in my mind, led me to set about looking for a place. From the newspaper I contacted a real estate agency and was assigned to an agent named Olga.

  Olga was Bolivian and had a face that looked like it had been carved onto a coin, large olive-colored eyes with visible lids, a straight nose, her long light brown hair tinged with gold pulled back in a ponytail tight from her face. She took me around in taxis, was quick and efficient and her English was good.

  “Argentines say this is the widest avenue in the world,” Olga said as we crossed the 9 de Julio. “But Argentines say a lot of things, like that they invented the artificial heart.”