12:05 a.m.
The night is chilly, a little unusual for Buenos Aires this time of year, but inside the FM La Tribu bar, it’s hot. Or it’s warm. Or, better said, it feels warm. We’ve just come from the last reading of the year hosted by Ciclo Carne Argentina, a series I’ve been helping to curate for the past seven years, with my friends, the writers Alejandra Zina and Julián López.
Three young writers, Nicolás Correa, Claudia Sobico, and Mariela Gouiric, closed the evening with what one might call their “that’s how it is literature”: hard, honest, and deeply beautiful. We’re all moved and happy. That’s why we’re hugging one another so much. That’s why it’s so hot in here.

9:00 a.m.
We wake up with Grillo, have some mate, a few medialunas, skim the literary supplements that come out on Fridays. I forgot to buy food for the cats, so Larsen, the persistent feline hermit that he is, incessantly pierces my hung-over head with his constant meowing: he doesn’t understand – though I’ve explained to him quite nicely – that the guy who sells the cat food doesn’t open up shop till 10.
The day moves along at half-speed, as it always does when we stay out late on Thursday night. As it always does, bah. But in any case, I sit down at my laptop to do some editing.

12:00 p.m.
I make myself a vegetable broth: cabbage, leeks, green pepper, parsley, celery, pumpkin, ginger, one beef stock cube. When it comes to a boil, I process the vegetables and throw them back in the pot. Then the final touch: a dash of oats.

2:00 p.m.
After a short restorative nap, I get back to the computer. But I don’t feel like working anymore. I go through my email. There’s a message from my friend Pablo Cruz. A few days ago I sent him the first thirty pages of the novel I’m writing. Pablo’s a careful reader and he’s familiar with the book’s basic premise: a group of men fishing on an island off the coast. So he sends my draft back with a few corrections, a few suggestions, and, to my great delight, he says he likes it a lot, that Enero Rey is an endearing character.
My entire afternoon devolves into Facebook, “liking” things, posting links to songs, chatting with friends. Thinking once again that I should get off Facebook, that it eats up all my time, that it’s garbage.

8:00 p.m.
I take a bath. I discover, thanks to some pantyhose I bought a few days ago, which happen to be of the “control top” variety, that I can once again wear a dress I like a lot but which for the past three years I haven’t been able to fit into. I get on the 99 and go to meet Grillo and a few friends from Santa Fe in a bar I’ve never been to, but which seemed good when I checked it out on the Internet. And it is. Really good. Tapas and beers.

11:00 p.m.
We show up for the end of a book launch at a bar packed with people. We find friends, the beer is warm, and to top it off, it’s served in disposable cups.

11:45 p.m.
Finally we end up at a somewhat classy bar. The San Bernardo. A huge place, built in the early 20th century. They say it’s where Macedonio Fernández wrote some of his novels. That for years it was the default meeting point for the poets of the 90s, Martín Gambarotta, Alejandro Rubio, and others. The bar is falling apart, and in many places, the peeling plaster-cast tin ceilings are patched up with wood slats. A bunch of bags of cement and sand sit off to one side, and that area, seemingly under construction, is blocked off by a black tarp. It’s been that way, “under construction,” for thirty years, they say. There are pool tables and ping pong tables, ash tray stands, old cab drivers, old clerks, really young men, and I ask myself, indignant, how it is that I’ve lived in Buenos Aires for ten years and have only just found out about this place.
Friday, November 30th ends how it began: celebrating with friends. There is nothing better, more beautiful, nor more necessary in life than friends.



See also:
[Israel Centeno] [Maximiliano Barrientos]