Mosler - Driving hungry: a memoir

Where can I take you? said the taxista, picking up the mate gourd in his lap and taking a quick sip through a metal straw as he glanced at me in the rearview mirror.

I flipped through my planner, wishing Id thought to memorize my new cross streets. Avenida Santa Fe y How many times had I looked at that map on the internet? Santa Fe, y Bulnes, I said, brushing a bead of sweat off my temple. I rolled down the window. January was to Buenos Aires what August was to Miami, and stepping out of Ezeiza airport and into the ten a.m. sunshine felt like walking into a sock, or falling into a vat of broth.

Bueno. The taxista nodded. Santa Fe y Bulnes. He pulled away from the curb, cruising past the other cabs parked in the arrivals areamostly Fiats and Renaults, yellow on top, black on the bottom, they looked like toy cars that might be swept away by a strong wind. Santa Fe y Bulnes, the taxista repeated, glancing at me again in the rearview mirror, a coy smile hovering in the lines around his eyes, which were deep-set and dark brown. We might get caught in a traffic jam, sabs?

I slid closer to the open window, wondering how he could stand to be wearing a long-sleeved shirt. Bueno

Bueno no es, said the taxista. Good its not. We pulled up to the parking booth. Che, Juan! Como ests, viejo? He handed the attendant a few pesos, and the wooden barrier arm rose in a slow, unsteady upward slice, as if reluctant to let us leave the airport. The piqueteros, he said to me, waving around his mate gourd as we drove away from the parking booth and coasted along the curves of the road to the airport exit, are marching downtown.

They are? I stuffed my planner back in my purse. Do you know why?

Who knows? The taxista sipped his matethe green-tea-like beverage that takes up more shelf space in Argentine grocery stores than coffee and tea combinedthrough a silver bombilla until he made a slurping sound. Piqueteros have a right to express themselves, he said, setting the mate on the console, in front of the gearshift. But I also have a right to drive the streets of my city in peace, dont I?

He grinned at me in the rearview mirror, where he had hung a wooden rosary, and a ribbon in Argentine blue and white that fluttered when he merged onto the autopista, which was empty but for a few other taxis. I gazed out at the pampa, shimmering in the midday heat, an ocean of tall grass stretching to the blue-brown horizon. I could comprehend its vastness no more than I could comprehend that I was here, at last.

What are you doing in Buenos Aires?

I looked out the window, not knowing how to answer him. We were driving past a villa miseria (shantytown), where the sun glinted off the corrugated tin roofs and clotheslines sagged between cinderblock huts. Just beyond the villa was a billboard with a slogan painted over the stripes of the national flag: Argentina: un pas en serio. Argentina: A Serious Country.

I wiped another drop of sweat off my temple and thought back to the Night of the Inviolable Oysters.

Youre too slow! the Sorceress shouted at me from the pass-through window, her normally stoic brown eyes magnified and wild behind her rimless glasses. You cant even shuck an oyster!

The Sorceress was a forty-year-old, stringy-haired, pot-bellied chef who was addicted to painkillers and probably under their influence when she decided to name her high-end San Francisco French-Asian fusion restaurant Vertigineuse. I called her the Sorceress because anything she cookedwhite gazpacho, foie gras with mango butter, seared hamachi wrapped in shiso leaveswas impossible to stop eating, whether I was hungry or not.

Now she was trying to woo a dozen VIPs at table 11, starting with oysters on the half shell. I tried to wedge the knife into the shells wavy crease without mangling its contents, but the oyster kept its mouth shut, tightening its seal. The Sorceress rolled her eyes. In that unshuckable oyster, she was seeing all of my ineptitude.