Our next-door neighbor in apartment #5 had been watching TV for twenty straight hours. It started at around 5am on Friday night/Saturday morning and didn’t stop until after midnight the next night. Until that point, we had only thought ill of our other neighbor: She sings warbling songs with her band twice a week and uses an annoying “all major scales, all the time” method to teach her voice students. She is also training her dog in an unusual manner; from here it sounds like she’s saying the Spanish word for “bitch,” over and over.
Life here isn’t perfect but I’ll be sad to leave our little loft in Palermo.
The bedroom and bathroom are perched atop a flight of stairs, yet to call it a “loft” oversimplifies this compact and complicated pile of materials. Opposite our front door, a brick wall rises from the sunken concrete floor. It’s one meter wide, one brick deep, and it runs almost the entire height of the apartment. The bricks are a pinkish color and seem even pinker surrounded by thickly applied pink mortar. The wall nominally buttresses the kitchen ceiling/bathroom floor, but really its role is more symbolic than supporting, announcing a bit too proudly: “This is a Loft!”
Despite this not being the most beautiful wall ever built, despite the apartment’s being put together in a way that is less than exact, it is cleverly constructed. Por ejemplo: On the loft’s upper level, a bridge connects the wood floor of the bedroom to the tile floor of the bathroom. A square-shaped panel of gray metal wire reinforced with a few metal bars, this bridge is connected to the brick wall on its third side and has a waist-high metal railing on the side that overlooks the front door. This floor panel creaks when you step on it, but only yesterday I realized that this translucent bridge allows more light to pass from the skylight above through to the kitchen below than an opaque surface would.
Clever, no? This way, at least some filtered daylight falls onto the kitchen’s twin marble countertops. The marble and the brick are two conspicuous material displays of luxury in this otherwise unremarkable concrete apartment, and they help the owners market the place to us extranjeros. To rent this furnished apartment in Palermo Viejo for a month costs a little more than seven hundred US Dollars. As with so much else in this country, what to us seems reasonably cheap looks shockingly overpriced to the locals.
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Before we go to a new city and a new living situation with new idiosyncrasies, I’d like to mention a few more details from our apartment that have added dashes of unexpected color to our life here.
Garbage goes out to our metal garbage tree, a wire box mounted on a steel post stuck into the sidewalk. The Buenos Aires city government’s TV commercials tell us to bring our basura to the curb between 8 and 9 pm, Sunday through Friday nights (and never when it’s raining) so official trucks can make their pickups overnight. Far more frequent are the cartoñeros, people who troll the streets at all hours collecting cardboard and paper. The carts vary from smaller pushcarts that look like converted supermarket models to larger rickshaw-style ones mounted on car tires complete with hubcaps. These latter carts are often laden with impossibly large nylon bags brimming with paper, cardboard, and broken-down boxes of all sorts. Occasionally a group of garbage-pickers will ride by in a horse-drawn cart, retrieving metal and other recyclables from this city’s refuse heaps.
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Let’s talk about water. Our water heater is a 30-liter gas-powered cylinder that sits under the kitchen counter; every time it starts working, we can hear it fire up. This is one of my favorite sounds ever since the week when we didn’t hear it. We saw our handyman Ricardo every day that week when he came to relight the heater’s pilot light.
Opposite the water heater is a small washing machine. It takes all day to (loudly!) wash a load of clothes, and the better part of another day to dry them. Rebekah found a laundress on our block, Cristina, and she’s become one of our best friends in the neighborhood.
We have other fun appliances: A bidet in our bathroom that gets dangerously hot when the sink is turned on in the kitchen. (Think about it.) A voltage regulator powering our twin Macs that occasionally sighs mechanically beneath our feet. A stove that we light with matches, wooden stick matches that are sold in red boxes of two hundred and twenty two.
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Much of this will change; some of it will not. In any case, we’re off to Cordoba tomorrow.
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