In my wild and naive youth, when I believed that it was actually physically possible to find a TEFL job in Buenos Aires, I got together with a group of other English teachers in a small bar near to Congresso, with the dual purpose of making new friends and talking shop. The one thing that I remember most about that bar was that it had reasonably priced Guinness on tap, (the first that I had come across in all of South America), and after four months starved of the ebony nectar, I drank several pints in quick succession, after which the room began to recede and blur. The others were no more abstemious, and as so often happens in such situations, things got a little heated.
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I was too far gone to remember exactly what the argument was about, but soon a shouting-match was in fierce progress between two very tipsy Englishmen, one of whom eventually turned on the other and bawled "You twat! You fucking twat! You've been here almost a year, and you've got no Argentinean* mates, and you don't even speak a word of the language!" A hush descended on the gathered company, and it was generally accepted that the death blow had been struck. What interested me most about the whole affair was that the guy who had been on the receiving end of this insult, had no real interest, as far as I knew, in learning the language. With more than enough friends in the ex-pat community, he had absolutely no need to. No doubt he had come to Argentina to teach, see some beautiful scenery and eat some damn-fine beef. And yet the general assumption seemed to be that he had failed in some undefined duty.
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You notice this assumption in a more acute form, of course, in the younger back-packers stomping their way through the continent. Among these "motchileros", (especially those from the UK), the assumption seems to be that unless you have converted to Catholicism, learned to speak Spanish fluently, and had a torrid affair with a tango-dancer by the time you leave, you're time in Argentina has been wasted. I think that most of this attitude has come about as a guilty backlash against what was the European (and especially the English) attitude, up until fifty years ago, to what was yet to be dubbed "the third world". Africa, Asia and the Americas were there to be exploited, and nothing more; the wealth of their culture, etc, was either patronisingly admired as "surprisingly sophisticated" or simply ignored. (And of course, as always with the English, the reaction to their previously wrong-headedness is typically over-the-top.)
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And yet I think that there is some sense in this attitude, for reasons that are simply aesthetic. It is not easy to explain this fact in words, but there is really a wealth of difference between your enjoyment of food, people and nature in a country to which you feel some sort of intimate connection, some sort of belonging, than one in which you are totally a foreigner. I think that I subconsciously knew this even before witnessing the fight in the pub, and had worried about it all the while that I travelled through Bolivia. My problem was simply that, despite being an English teacher, I have a very hard time learning language. I knew very little Spanish, and didn't think that I would ever know much more. My chances of making real contact with portenos, therefore, seemed slim.
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After three months back in Buenos Aires, I still don't know much Spanish, but something happened this week that made me rethink the whole situation. A combination of sharply dwindling funds and a strange new job working all night at a hostel* meant that by Friday, I was starving hungry, had not showered in three days and had not slept properly in two. In this generally tramp-like aspect I went to Palermo to meet a friend, only to find myself lost in an extremely posh neighbourhood. Seeing two very-well dressed young women coming towards me, I stopped and asked them for directions, only for them to walk right past me without so much as a blush. I suppose that being talked to by ragged beggars is one of those things that the very rich have to learn to deal with - these two were obviously very well practiced in their art.
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I was just giving up hope when a young man, spying my dismay and my ostentatiously Ashkenazi nose, asked me if I happened to be Jewish. I answered that I was, and after a hurried conversation and a couple of phone-calls, he told me that I was invited to a Shabbat ("Sabbath") dinner at a "friends" house the following day. The "friend", as it turned out, was one of the richest men in Buenos Aires, and the dinner was long and varied, and attended by a whole host of posh young people who chatted away with me (in a strange mixture of English, Spanish and Hebrew) as though they had known me their whole lives.
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One young guy, probably in the (incorrect) belief that all Englishmen are expert footballers (or futballers), invited me to join his team. And as the evening wore on and I found myself accepted into this strange upper-crust like some sort of returning prodigal son, my worries about ever finding a connection with the city began to dissipate, only to return as I was beset by new doubts. Was this new circle of friends, the genuine Argentina? Or was I like some white-suited empire-builder being welcomed into a clap-board British Club in a corner of colonial Africa, and foolishly thinking that he now has some connection with the continent? (Perhaps one of you can answer this question for me?) I was considering all this, and eating a delectable dish of smoked salmon chunks in a savoury-caramel sauce (yum!), when I heard a solicitous female voice asking if I was the Englishman everyone was talking about. Looking up, I found myself facing one of the girls who had strutted past me with upturned nose, less than twenty-four hours before.
*Should this have been "Argentine"? I still don´t know...
*This eventually fell by the wayside, for reasons that I won´t go into...