Two days before I left for Argentina in August, I was up late at night writing my book proposal for One-Eyed Princess in Babel: Seeing the world with my ears. I opened up Yahoo News and saw a big article about an Israeli University that had created a time machine.

I thought I had lost my mind.

Yes, it was late, I’d been writing a lot that day and I may still have been thinking about things to pack, but were my eyes playing tricks on me? The article looked legitimate. I bet Yahoo News has some sort of quality control people to make sure that science fiction fantasies don’t appear on the first page.

According to this aparition of news, we could go back in time in this Israeli-made chrono-locomotive. I thought the word “loco” meaning crazy in Spanish was more appropriate in this case than the full meaning of chrono-locomotive, meaning a traveling machine.

As strange as the news was, the timing could not have been better. I was on my time traveling journey, care of a frequent flyer ticket to Buenos Aires and Rio De Janeiro for a one-month long journey back to my past life in the Southern cone and for a discovery of Brazil’s Northeast coast.

To make sure that the flight crew did not throw me off the plane for possible “Homeland Security” risks, I did not inform the San Francisco-Houston or Houston-Buenos Aires flight attendants and pilots that I was on a time machine known as American Airlines.

The three seats next to me were empty, so I slept most of the 10 hours from Houston to Buenos Aires.

I awoke to whiteness. I could not see anything through the plexiglass windows. It was a semi-miracle that the plane could land safely. It was as though we landed in the clouds. For me, it was like landing on a clean white slate for me to create my new Buenos Aires.

After 7.5 years, the airport was totally remodeled. I recognized nothing. On the taxi ride from the airport to Buenos Aires’ microcenter (business district), I wasn’t sure that I had really landed in the right country. The taxi driver and I were discussing Argentina’s latest corruption scandal involving the mysterious bag of money found in the Minister of Economy’s office bathroom. (Reports say that the bag contained anywhere from $30-100,000). When I had first read about the story in July, I didn’t know the money was in a bag and I imagined that someone had rolled thousand dollar banknotes into the toilet paper:)

I’ve heard of the metaphor of putting money down the drain, but only in Latin America can one literally find a bag of money planted near someone’s toilet. I doubt the Minister was stupid enough to hide money in her office restroom. She was most likely blackmailed. This does sound like a possible scenario in Latin America, where the bizarre is normal. (See my 1999 email essay,
Life in South America, where the absurd is daily reality

Despite the familiar soap opera like scenario reminiscent of magic realism, nothing seemed familiar to me. The taxi driver pointed out the new construction by the port, Puerto Madero. I was beyond stunned, I was lost

Is memory illusory? Did I really board a time machine that erased my recollection of ever living in this country and speaking with a local accent?
Since I hated Argentina so much when I left, I consciously tried to erase my Argenina “sh” sounds for the “y” and “ll” letters and the overly melodramatic Italian-infused prosody. My Argentine accent comes out loud and clear when I am upset, angry, excited or speaking to an Argentine or Uruguyan. Now my accent changes from sentence to sentence. A Spanish lisp and melody appears along with a more Mexican or Caribbean beat. I am a Spanish language chameleon and people can never figure out where I am from.

I felt like I was a character in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind whose memory is partially erased, but who still remembers certain things.

Have I changed so much and has the city developed at such a fast rate that we’re unrecognizable to each other? I came here with the intention of reconciling myself with Buenos Aires and not carrying hatred towards it. I wanted to see the city with new eyes. Well, my eyes are the same, but I’m not seeing what I saw before.

What did I see before?
I probably saw the same things I see now, but I hated it so much that I rejected what I saw.

The power of the mind is extraordinary. From my vision exercises that require me to use my brain to fuse images to see in three-dimensions, I know that our brains control what we see.
In the movie, What the Bleep do we know, Marlee Maitlin sees things in life that she previously didn’t perceive just by changing her mood. In Down the Rabbit Hole, the in-depth version of the movie, What the Bleep do we know, scientists explain that according to quantum physics, articles and matter don’t exist until we see them. In effect, we create life with our vision. So, if I decide to see the beauty of Buenos Aires, that is exactly what I will see.
I met with my Russian friend Gala at the Microsoft Building where she was giving English classes. She recognized me and gave me a warm hug and kiss on the cheek. So, it was not a figment of my imagination that I lived here. She gave me the keys to her apartment and gave me directions of how to get there. She had to point it out on the map, because I was so disoriented.
I forgot that the street signs were almost all sponsored by the Telecom company and that the small red and orange garbage cans were not on the ground, but suspended on poles.
My first clue that I had in fact lived in Buenos Aires was the feel of rolling my suitcase on the sidewalk. Unlike in the US, Buenos Aires sidewalks are not even surfaces. They are made up of either square plates with 25 or so mini-squares or big rectangular plates. With either of the two, it’s very noisy to roll a suitcase on the ground like I used to when I carted my laundry in my suitcase to the laundrymat.
When I got to Gala’s apartment, I wanted to take a shower. I turned on the red knob thinking I would get hot water, but only very very cold water came out. Thinking the water would heat up, I waited for a while. But, I was about to shiver from the cold. I put on my towel and went into the kitchen to make sure the water heater was turned on. The flame was burning. I returned to the bathroom and tried the bathroom sink. The sink’s knobs corresponded to the typical “red=hot and blue=cold”.

Could the bath’s red knob actually be for cold water and the blue one for hot water? Wouldn’t I remember something as weird as this?

In 1999, I wrote an email titled, You know you are living in Latin America when… One of the instances I mentioned was when I turned on my bathroom sink and the shower turned on!

Maybe this bathroom also had its own creative plumbing.

Alas, the blue knob in the bath gave me hot water! Oh yes, I have lived in this country before!

It wasn’t the familiar Argentine accent, seeing my friend Gala or even feeling my suitcase wobble on the Buenos Aires sidewalk, it was the cold shower that proved to me that I was once a Buenos Aires resident.

I wanted a warm welcome back to Argentina, but I got a cold shower instead!

2 Responses to “I am in a time machine!”

  1. Anonymous says:
    November 21, 2007 at 12:27 pm

    Os viajantes do mundo que fazem parte de uma comunidade silenciosa, sem símbolos, sem bandeiras, sem cartazes, nem conhecer-se uns aos outros; que por acaso falam umas linguas e não outras, que por acaso nasceram aqui e não lá, e que lêem. Parabéns pelo blog.
    Francisco de la Calle

  2. Doris Willey says:
    November 26, 2007 at 3:55 pm

    Long time no hear, but am glad you are back. You look great!!!
    Love your stories! Is it Armenia time yet? Wuhooooo! Viva el mundo, die Welt usw. Did I ever tell you that I lived 4 years, smack in the middle, of downtown Tokyo? Moto Azabu actually. Some of the best times of my life.
    Doris

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