Tango, Tango

Day 14, Friday, January 3, 1997

We walked by the war monument at Plaza Islas Malvinas one last time. I could only vaguely recall the war, granted that I was only twelve when the war was fought. I was intrigued by that chapter of history. One thing traveling reminds me is how limited my knowledge is. I observe strange clouds; I observe strange rock formations; I observe strange birds and plants; I observe monuments and statues; yet I don't know nearly enough about meteorology, or geology, or zoology, or botany, or history, to have an appreciation of what I am observing. People can crowd around the much hyped Mona Lisas and Davids, but it's far more personally satisfying to recognize a Holbein, while most other tourists hurriedly pass by to the next hyped painting, all because I had read a few chapters of an art history book and learned a few things about the artist. Knowing what I see enriches the experience.

On the other hand, seeing new things also prompts me to learn about them, a no less enriching experience. After I got back from the trip, I read two books on the Falklands War, and got a much better sense of the significant roles Ushuaia and Río Gallegos played in the Argentinean air campaign during the War. Coincidentally, the March 1997 issue of Condé Nest Traveler had an article by Simon Winchester, a British journalist, about his visit to Ushuaia fifteen years after he was jailed there for espionage. The LP frequently refers to Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, so I went to Cambridge Public Library and borrowed a books-on-tape version and heard the book on my drive to New York. After the trip, Ed poked around in encylopedias and newspapers and books trying to find out why the glacier ice we saw at Moreno and Lago Grey should look blue.

At the Maritime Museum, we bumped into the young Argentinean couple and their baby, with whom we had chatted over breakfast earlier at the hotel. The museum was once Presidio de Ushuaia, a prison. The exhibits include some model ships, some old navigational charts, and a photo display about the indigenous Indians. Some of the descriptions of the Indians defy common sense. It's said that they wore no clothes and were completely naked when found by the early Europeans. But we know that the winter weather here is extremely harsh and that there are sea lions in the region. Other descriptions seem to be a carry-over from a different age and downright insulting. Ed and I both caught the caption that says the Indians walked like apes. Darwin himself had erroneously thought that they were the missing link between men and apes.

There didn't seem to be all that many cells. They occupy two levels on either side of the building with a long galley running down the middle. Some of the cells have been renovated to house exhibits. Many of them are about the lives of the prisoners who once lived and labored here. Some are on other topics like the leftist hijack of a plane to the Falklands in the seventies. Other cells were left in somewhat dilapidated conditions. The cell area felt cold and damp compared to the maritime exhibit area. At the far end of the galley, construction was going on to renovate a hall, most probably for the many tourists that come here.

There was still some time before lunch break time, so we hit Museo Territorial Fin del Mundo, End of the World Museum. It's a cute little museum with several small rooms containing wildly different collections. One was a collection of stuffed birds and animals found in the region. Another was a collection of typical daily items from the early settlement period.

We had lunch at a local fast food restaurant. I wasn't too sure what la porcíon along side with a price at the buffet bar meant at first. There were lots of different dishes that I had never seen before, so I tried many. Well, la porcíon doesn't mean flat price. I found out that much when I had to pay at the register. The extraordinary thing about this restaurant was that it sold Pepsi, rather than Coca Cola. Pepsi is about as rare as Coca Cola is ubiquitous in South America, or at least at the places that we visited. Very recently, Coca Cola staged a major marketing coup in Venezuela by converting the major Pepsi bottler there. The Pepsis we drank were bottled in Europe. With globalization of commerce nowadays, it's pretty hard to go to a place and not be reminded of American consumerism.

There wasn't much more to do in town, so we picked up our stuff from the hotel and took a short taxi ride to the airport, our second and final taxi ride on this entire trip. Earlier reports and the characterization by LP suggested that the approach to Ushuaia Airport wasn't for the faint of the heart. Being a student private pilot, I was rather looking forward to seeing it for myself. I wanted to see whether the claim was true or a mere repetition of exaggerations. Our flight into Ushuaia several days ago was anything but exciting. Ushuaia is situated on the northern bank of the Beagle Channel at the foot of some mountains. Our LanChile plane came in from the west over the Channel, flew in a standard left-hand traffic pattern, and landed on a west-east oriented runway into the prevalent westerly wind. Absolutely nothing was out of the ordinary. Sitting in the airport cafe, sipping Coca Cola, I had more time to observe the layout of the airport. The small terminal building seems to be at the beginning of runway 16, a north-south oriented runway. It is a little odd why a runway like this was built in the first place given the local topography and the prevalent westerly wind. It would indeed be a more difficult and visually exciting landing to fly into the mountains, turn, descend fast, and land with lots of cross wind. My guess is that it was probably a matter of money, i.e., it was cheaper to put together a runway like this, especially since not a whole lot of planes come this way before. Shuttle buses now ran parallel to the old runway 16 to ferry passengers to the planes. The new terminal building was still under construction, but the new runway was operational. It was so new that I didn't see any markings on the tarmac. No numbers, no runway centerline.

Ed made use of the time on the flight to jot down some notes in his travel journal. Ed said that when he was at Ushuaia Prison, he had felt the presence of those prisoners. I had felt that eerie presence too. Looking at the cells, one couldn't but wonder what it was like years ago when convicts occupied these small damp cells. We were separated in time but so closely connected in space. Ed and I both thought of Dachau. Walking through the gas chambers, looking at the ovens, how can one not quiver at the thoughts of being inside the chambers or of operating the ovens alike? When in France, I skipped visiting Waterloo. There is nothing but a piece of pasture and a monument there today. Earth shattering events took place throughout history. How much presence of those events can we feel today? When you take a breath, how many of those molecules do you think are from Caesar's last breath?

Ed, being a chemist, knew the Avogadro's number by heart. There are 6.023 x 10^23 molecules in one mole. One mole of gas occupies 22.4 liters. Ed and I disagreed on the volume of a breath. I thought the lung capacity of an adult was about three to four liters and a breath was about two liters. We agreed that a very conservative estimate would be one liter. Maybe Caesar died on a very shallow breath. Approximate a little, and Caesar's last breath should contain about 3 x 10^22 molecules. Suppose that over the millennia, Caesar's last breath has been evenly distributed around the atmosphere by now. I don't know if this assumption is at all valid. A lot of molecules might have escaped into space or been absorbed by the ocean or trapped in plants. I know that the earth has a circumference of about 40,000 kilometers. A handy approximation that I always use is that one degree in latitude is about 100 kms. The diameter of the earth is then about 13,000 kilometers. Since air becomes thinner as we go up in altitude, I used 20 kilometers as an approximation for the thickness of the atmosphere. The volume of a ball is (4/3) x Pie x R^3 from basic geometry. The volume of the atmosphere is then about 4 x (6520^3 - 6500^3). Basic algebra says 6520^3 - 6500^3 = (6520 - 6500) x (6520^2 + 6520x6500 + 6500^2). This is approximately 20 x 3 x 6500^2 = 60 x 4225 x 10^4. So the volume of the atmosphere is about 1 x 10^10 cubic kilometers, which is 1 x 10^22 liters. Suppose you also take a shallow breath of 1 liter in volume. Actualy, exactly how many liters there are in a breath doesn't matter. It gets normalized away. On average, for every breath you take you'd breathe in 3 molecules from Caesar's last breath. Okay, so we made some assumptions, but you get the idea of the order of magnitude. Anyways, that's not the point. The point is that we were bored on the flight to Buenos Aires. By now you should also be bored by the nerd-speak.

We could already feel the heat at our stop-over in Trelew. Arriving in Buenos Aires, we were back in summer. We went straight to Hotel Córdoba. We didn't get the same room we had before, but one at the same position on a different floor. It was a little weird to feel like coming back home and knowing exactly where everything was, even though we were still very much strangers in an unfamiliar city. It was still early, but I was rather tired and was ready to call it a day. Ed, on the other hand, was feeling better, could again talk, and wanted to go to Café Totoni to see a tango show.

Café Totoni was recommended by the Irish couple we met on the tour in Torres del Paine. Built in the nineteenth century, it was modeled on some famous cafe in Paris. A thick feeling of decadence from another age floated in the warm summer air, under the tall ceilings, out of the old woodwork, and around the slick waiters. In the back of the deep hall was a side room where some performance was going on. That show was full but there would be a tango show in an hour. We sat ourselves down at a table right outside, ordered some desserts and drinks, and patiently observed the various musicians and singers in and out of the room on their way to the adjacent room for preparation. The lead female singer seemed to be in her late thirties. She wore a sexy blue dress that showed quite a bit of skin and curves. She sang and received a lot of applause and bravos. She came out and chatted with various people, while a group of guitarists went in the show room. She went into the side room, came out in jeans, still curve-fitting, and left.

I worked on my dessert. The angel cake was far too sweet for my taste, especially since I had a big lunch and a filling airline dinner. The guitarists played. In came a man and three slim young women. They caught my attention. Something set them apart from the other people milling around the area. The man, in his ensemble of dark suit jacket, white pants, and black and white patched leather shoes, looked as if he walked straight out of a The Untouchables movie. His hair was combed back in so much grease that a fly wouldn't be able to hold onto it. It's so oily it looked like some unfortunate bird had just fallen through an oil slick. The woman in black had a tight mini-skirt on. The skirt kept rising. She kept pulling it down. The second woman was in tight midriff tops and tight lime green pants, pants so tight the panty lines showed. The third was in tight black pants, but showed no panty lines. I tried not to guess what might or might not be underneath, and continued to work on my overly sweet angel cake. The air was still and with more than a whiff of cigarette smoke. For a moment, it felt a little like a house of disrepute.

As the show time drew closer, people began to gather around. Some were a little edgy and impatient about the wait; some eager to get ahead to get the best seats. Many must be tourists. The room for the show was rather small. Every square foot seemed to have been taken up by the tables and chairs, save the narrow passage for the performers to go from the door in the back to the stage in the front and for the lone waiter to take orders and deliver drinks. Seated a bit far in the back, we never got the chance to order drinks, which suited me just fine. After the angel cake, I didn't think I could take anything more.

Tango carries a certain mystique in popular culture, fanned by its portrayal on the silver screen and its historical origin. The social tango we usually know has branched off and evolved into a form quite different from Argentine tango. For instance, the hold in Argentine tango looks more compact as if the man and woman are crouching into each other. Argentine tango is also much more than the dance itself. It is also the music and the singing. The performance at Totoni opened with a few songs, sung in a deep and rich voice by a tall handsome man with a pony tail. I could only imagine what the lyrics were saying, but there seemed to be more than a few mentions of corazón, the heart. On came the man from The Untouchables and the woman who was in the black mini-skirt. She had by now changed into a spagetti strapped dress. They tangoed. A lot of fancy footwork; a lot of swivels; a lot of fast back kicks; some jumps. It all looked so much more remarkable given how small the stage was. The other two women seemed to be their friends and helpers, applauding and cheering loudly in the back.

We never got a chance to go see the forty-dollar tango show at La Casa Blanca in San Telmo the next day as I had originally planned. So it turned out to be a wise call on Ed's part to want to check out the ten-dollar show at Café Totoni. Between this and the free performance at Teatro Colón, I could leave Buenos Aires feeling content. We came to Argentina to see tango; tango also came to America to see us. In April, Ed and I saw the twenty-dollar Forever Tango at the Wilbur Theater in Boston. The same greasy hair for the men. More varied costumes for the women. A lot of the fancy footwork, the kicks, and the swivels looked familiar. It was fascinating to see all the variations and different interpretations of the dance. Forget the forty-dollar tourist shows in San Telmo.