Farida F. Alvarez

Don’t Cry For Me, Quarantina. Lockdown in Argentina, parrots and paranoia in Primrose Hill. 

Jorge sits in his cool, tastefully decorated Buenos Aires apartment, and prepares to take on the Brad Pitt Milanese. It’s a delightful ensemble of ham-wrapped beef fillet, topped with mozzarella cheese, two fried eggs and a strip of grilled red pepper. A generous portion of fries accompany the protein feast. Buenisimo, says Jorge in between triumphant mouthfuls. The Brad goes down a treat. Que bueno.

He orders in on most days. Food is good here and so cheap he says. The Brad meat is from a take-out place called ‘Arrivederci’ and it seems, a lot of their dishes are named after celebrities. Tomorrow he’s going to order the Meryl Streep.  

Jorge’s Airbnb is a one bedroom mezzanine apartment with vertiginous high ceilings in the upscale district of Palermo. Unlike its Sicilian namesake, Argentine Palermo is subdivided into several neighbourhoods including Palermo-Soho and Palermo-Hollywood (where the celebs live). Jorge is in the somewhat less boastful Palermo Alto. Huge, blue marine-life themed paintings are mounted mid-way up the walls. One in particular of three sharks swimming towards the foreground catches my eye. Jorge says it makes him feel serene when he looks at them. The herringbone varnished wood floors lead to a huge bay window with metal piping overlooking the calm, leafy residential street below. The autumn afternoon sun casts tree branch shaped shadows on the walls. As quarantine hangouts go, it could be worse. 

Jorge, a Spanish (as in European) national, arrived in Buenos Aires on the 12th March. Prior to that he had been in Sao Paulo for two weeks; his Brazilian adventure cut short when things started to get real. Argentina looked like his safest bet since numbers reported were still low, and Brazil was starting to look a little risky, in particular with virus-denying Bolsonaro at the helm. 

2020 is his Work Remotely World Tour year, having successfully convinced his bosses to let him do it, and having obtained, from a well connected friend, what’s known in the aviation industry as a ‘golden ticket’. That’s when you get to fly for free and at very little notice, only paying airport taxes. 2020 was gonna be lit. 

Argentina was not necessarily Jorge’s first choice. Sure, it’s in Latin America, which is sexy enough in and of itself, but it’s a very Europeanized nation, encyclopedias, websites, travel blogs and Argentines themselves always hasten to add.  It’s weird, there are no black people here, Jorge messages me. And I don’t see any gay men anywhere…. This is straight people’s paradise, he jests.

Jorge is one of my oldest friends, and we chat almost daily. He is, as he frequently tells me ‘on London time’ despite being in a different hemisphere. He awakes everyday at 4.20am local time- enough time to hop in the shower and slap himself out of his night time stupor before work begins at 5am- that’s 9am British summer time.

Since arriving in Argentina, he’s experienced extortion, discrimination and the threat of being kicked out but he takes it all in his stride. He is smart enough to realise he is privileged. I keep telling him, half seriously, to message the BBC’s Have Your Say (that online, feels-milking platform for Home Counties whingers). At the weekend, we decide instead to conduct our own interview:

So what was the situation when you first arrived in Argentina?

I remember, when we landed, there was a soldier, a military officer at the door of the plane..not inside the airport, by customs, but actually right by the door.  We were previously given forms to fill in on the plane- we had to state what countries we had visited in the past 14 days, our personal details.. and our seat numbers, I guess in case any of us were infected. 

Why was the soldier there?

He was there checking that all our forms were filled in properly. I remember there was an old lady there arguing, shouting “I don’t want to do this, I don’t need to, I’m coming home to my country”. It was a shambles.

Everything took a really long time. So I was really late for the Airbnb host who’d been waiting for me, and I could see he was such a paranoid man -when I met him, his face was like …I’ve never seen anyone like that- he looked so frightened. He told me outright that this was the last time that he was going to be renting the flat out on Airbnb because the whole building was complaining about foreigners coming into the building. 

I think there’s a very special kind of xenophobia here in Buenos Aires; they don’t have economic migrants so much- so they’re just not used to foreigners anymore- it’s a bit like Spain in the 90’s or before even. They seem to have no issues with being openly xenophobic, I would say. 

At this point, the nationwide lockdown had yet to be enforced, but his landlord had explicitly said that he would not rent out the apartment beyond a week. Jorge spent that time attempting to locate a second place. He found one. However, on the very same day he made his reservation and completed the payment, Brazil was added to the list of countries to which Argentina was to ban all travel; a country from which he had travelled in the last 14 days. The host immediately contacted Jorge and said that he needed to cancel.

Everyone was saying sorry we’re not renting to foreigners. 

They would say to me, “what are you doing? This is wrong! You shouldn’t be looking for places now! You’re foreign! You should be in quarantine. You came from abroad. You know you’re breaking the law, don’t you?”  That was the most frustrating thing. Having to explain to people that I hadn’t just arrived from Spain, and that I arrived from Brazil before it had been ‘blacklisted’ so to speak. 

The news is really sensationalist – everything is about scandal. There was a story about a guy that went on this boat that goes from Buenos Aires to Montevideo,and there was this 25 year old guy that had symptoms, and then it turned out he tested positive- they took the 450 people on the boat and put them in a hotel for 14 days to be in quarantine – but then that 25 year old was shamed in the news, his whole family was shamed, people were throwing stones at the family.

It seems like a witch hunt

It is. There was also that story of that guy who went to buy bread and got shot at by the police with rubber bullets for supposedly breaking the quarantine rules. It’s insane.

There are two types of people that are seen as the virus spreaders; first of all the foreigners. But people on the Left are saying that it is the rich who went to Europe on their travels, that only they can afford, there’s a huge rich/poor divide here, and they brought the virus back with them. Even the president has said that it is the rich elite that have brought the virus into Argentina. They’re blaming people for a virus. It’s like a military dictatorship. 

Image from Clarin.com police brutality in Las Pampas for buying bread.

He eventually found a new place to stay, hunker down and work in the Palermo Alto district of BA. The landlady told him straight up that it was going to cost more because the other tenants didn’t want any foreigners in the building. Trying to find a taxi to get there was also a challenge- he found one, but the taxi driver charged him eight times the regular fare. Overnight, extortion had become the new norm. 

So what’s it like in your new apartment building now? Do your neighbours know you’re Spanish? Have you had any interaction with them? 

I know that the neighbours have gone somewhere else- I live in a well-off neighbourhood. They’ve just pissed off. They’ve just taken the car and gone down to Patagonia or wherever. The building feels empty. I haven’t seen anyone. To my knowledge, I’ve only got one neighbour downstairs. 

His daily outings, like Argentina’s southern European counterparts, are limited to supermarket trips, no more. It’s an average of a 40-60 minute queue to enter. It’s also commonplace for cops to do random stops and ID checks with passersby on the street. 

Are you scared about what might happen if the police stop you? In particular if you’ve strayed away from your local area slightly?

No. I’ll just tell them that my local store has run out of paracetamol. 

What about when you read those stories about that guy who got shot at with rubber bullets by the police, or the couple who got handcuffed and arrested for dancing in the street?

I just don’t think those kinds of things would happen here in Palermo Alto. Honestly. I feel safe. 

It was your plan this year to be a ‘digital nomad’. Since you can’t exactly be nomadic right now, why don’t you just go back to Spain?

Spain doesn’t feel like home. My parents’ house doesn’t feel like home; that’s their home. Maybe I can’t travel right now, but I’m still working and living in a different country.

So you would rather live, in your words, in a military dictatorship, than at home with your mother?

….Yes. 

What have been your best and worst experiences of your Argentine quarantine so far?

My worst memory is seeing the look of fear on the Airbnb’s host when I first arrived in B.A. He wouldn’t shake my hand and he looked so frightened. 

My best memory is when I spent one night in between Airbnbs at a hotel- the night before the lockdown . The receptionist was so funny and kind. Always making jokes. She gave me a facemask and really helped me out. As soon as I’m able I’m going to go back to that hotel and give her a bunch of flowers.

Has there been any talk of a lockdown end-date in Argentina?

People are talking about the end of April. To date there have been only 42 deaths – the rate is currently one a day . I think the only reason they are being so stringent is that the government doesn’t have the money to cope. If people start getting sick, Argentina’s hospitals are nowhere near as prepared as Italy or Spain. So things would get really, really bad. It does look like they’re starting to lift some of the restrictions. Taxis have begun to run again which is a good sign. 

So, no regrets?

None. In many ways I’ve never been better. Now I have my own place. After nine years of Bethnal Green…. To be honest, a room in a cramped flatshare in Bethnal Green felt like more of a prison cell than being quarantined in Buenos Aires. Except I could go out of course.

Among the countless memes and links Jorge and I exchange every day, the banality of one particular BBC article by Rory Cellan Jones, (the presenter of Click, a tech programme aimed at Boomers loyal to Windows ‘95 and Picasa) really stayed with me.

“Imagine if this had happened in 2005”, he asks, with about as much depth as puddle. It was a sort of lazy, half-arsed throw-away comment your Whatsapp-obsessed mum would make at the dinner table whilst only half listening to what you have to say in response. I send the link to Jorge via webchat on the information super highway like the cyberpals we are so we can mock it together.

The hastily put together visuals; the classic flip phone, an IBM notebook with a hella noughties vortex screensaver, Huw Edward’s steely gaze and his postmodern pixelation-patterned tie; I want to put them on a t-shirt and gift it to my imaginary 16 year old Gen Z cousin. I think they’d like it.

(Sidebar; I went down a rabbit hole after Googling Huw Edwards to see if he was still repping at the Beeb, or worse, like a twisted reality show, if he was the latest added to the list of Corona Celebs. Turns out he’s fine and super into boxing now, but since becoming buff, he’s not getting as much fan mail which makes him feel sad. Apparently people prefer his doughy, Welsh toby jug kind of face.) 

Noughties nostalgia aside, Jorge agrees, it’s a garbage article, whose main thrust is how 96% of Britons now have Broadband, employees can work from home and we can get our weekly shopping from Ocado now so that’s really good, isn’t it. In 2005, Ocado were only operating at 3% of their current output now, so you do the maths.

I take a step back from the scorn when I reason the article was written through the lens of a privileged Boomer for Boomers, trying to put a positive spin on things to give them something upbeat to say as they potter about in the garden in between cups of tea. I’m no scandal-making Argentine president, blaming the elite for this pandemic; but the broadband-powered Work From Home Revolution only favours a certain kind of worker; everyone else has been precariously placed on the precipice of the great unknown. To boldly furlough where no man has furloughed before.

Back in 2005, since only eight million households in the UK had a broadband connection, and even then their desktop computers could only access the internet at speeds of a pissy 10 megabits per second max (thanks Rory from Click)- it’s very likely that a great deal more of us would have been furloughed completely. In which case, yes; it’s rather good that this happened in 2020. For the Treasury.

Jorge’s quarantine cell. Minimalist sea monsters and ghosts keep him company.

Poundland Bandit; middleclass and nonsense detractor on Instagram makes a good point.

Returning back to my London life, and without fear of reproach nor rubber bullet attacks from the Bobbies (yet), I head over to Primrose Hill – a good thirty minutes’ walk away at a steady pace. 

I see a man taking his domesticated parrots for a ‘walk’. They take turns leaving his arm to take flight around the flat end of the park; flashes of vivid blue, yellow and red in the sky and between the branches, larking around in their temporary liberation. I climb the hill and survey the metropolitan panorama; the air noticeably fresher. Temporarily liberated children too, run freely up and down the hill while adults Facetime friends and take wonky panorama shots of the city. At the summit of the hill by the lookout, I see them again. One parrot was still sauntering from one tree to another- he emerges from a tree flying low; talons extended in preparation for landing, except it isn’t a branch he chooses to land on but the collar of an dapper older gentleman’s Mackintosh, squawking wildly as he briefly scrapes the man’s neck. The Mackintoshed gent hunches his shoulders and lets out a shocked whelp- the parrot responds with a second squawk, as if to say psyche!, and flies off back up a tree. People are amused, though it feels like nature kind of sticking it to humanity. Social distancing rules do not apply to the airborne.

Walking on, I think I overhear another man on the phone talking about social redemption. But it might just be the effects of quarantine and echoes of Catholicism in my mind. Easter is upon us. Salvation is close. But not too close.