Nervous at Heathrow

The anticipation of playing in a big poker tournament is added to, or subtracted from, the joyful anxiety of visiting a city that I’ve never seen before, the prospect of solitary, self-determining travel.

I fixed upon Buenos Aires as my spiritual home long before hearing tango, before I ever saw Maradona play–but I’d always cheered for the underdog and never for England, so in the world that I entered as a six-year-old American interloper in London, where identification through football was a passport through an otherwise bewildering playground, the England World Cup-winning side had a central place in the myths of origins of the now. I built my own unofficial version, in which the Argentinian captain Rattin was a wronged, dignified figure, contrary to the official vilification of him and his teammates as ‘animals’.

And when, too early, I read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, I fell for, as I was meant to, as the author had before me, for the outlaw figure of the gaucho Martin Fierro. That positioning of myself, in relation to gaucho-outlaws, to football, to England, and so forth, was a way of announcing who I was in terms of who I was not: I am not English, I do not admire the Bobbys Moore and Charlton; my exemplars would be darker, more troubled, more honest.

Here I am now, at Gate 42, waiting for my plane to board, Buenos Aires via Sao Paulo, and I wish my ears and ears could distinguish the Brazilians from the Argentinians around me. I shall read some Cortazar, drink a bloody Mary, swallow a sleeping pill, and wake up far away.