Two Mornings on Avenida 9 de Julio

Drew Blanchard

Steady rain fills the streets of Buenos Aires, summer dust now wet and earthy. Under the canopy of the Café Viridita, pigeons, fat and lustrous as passion fruit, peck the rain-washed sidewalk. As I move towards them, they rise for only a moment, and cooing, they land around me, spread out like a bluish-gray sea. Further on, outside the Teatro Colón, under an umbrella, a man opens two suitcases, puts up a sign: “Troca con Leandro”— busts of Eva Perón on pins, leather wallets, Italian pocket watches, and postcards of La Recoleta. I pick out a watch—tarnished silver, the chain long and golden. Leandro shakes his head, no quieres eso, es viejo. Aquí, aquí, éste es mejor. I buy the old one—the warm circle of it in my palm feels, in a way I can’t explain, familiar—not like walking home from work past the same neon lit store fronts, the same brick houses, the random purple door, no longer random, and into the sound of your children shrieking above the evening news; it’s something different. Or maybe it’s not familiar at all—maybe it’s that I hope its years can unfold a city that is a mystery only to me, or that it will make me not seem like the newest thing here; Leandro laughs at my choice and throws in a pin of Evita. I open the watch, wind it, set the time, wait for the tick-tock-tick. § Across the charge of traffic a young boy lies on his stomach on the boulevard’s matted grass, his arms, a tripod, his hands like wings, v-shaped under his chin. In front of him on the damp green, two oranges, sticky along thin breaks of skin, a green apple, bruised brown. When the lights turn red he jumps to his feet, moves from car to car juggling the fruit high into the air. He closes his eyes, does not miss. Then a woman, talking on her phone, her high heels clacking against the pavement, knocks the child down, fruit rolling under a car, ¡Maldita! she yells, and hurries across the street. Stunned, the child gets up just before the lights turn back to green.