Montevideo sketches

The first view we had of the city was of the ruined wrecks of ships, lashed together like a mountain of scrap metal at the center of the harbor.  The harbor front wasn't much more attractive, but it was the downtown itself that the rusting hulks most resembled.  The streets were lined with beautiful old colonial buildings, now left into crumbling ruin.  It reminded a lot of Havana, yet without any of the Cuban optimism. 

Uruguay could never be considered one of the continent's wealthier countries, and a deep poverty was on show, huddled beneath these edifices of ruined splendor.  Five of these buildings had been designated as memorial sites of sorts, but it seemed little different than having a rusting old Edsel in your backyard, and calling it an antique auto show.   

But it was pleasant to stroll the streets, lingering a little in the green and open spaces of the plazas.  Here, people walked dogs which bowed down before one another in a certain deference that served as metaphor somehow of years spent under military dictatorships.  But I know I'm projecting.

We reached the Plaza Independencia eventually, with the 1927 Art Deco rocketship that predated Buck Rodgers. This heart of the city gave evidence of a parallel between the cultures of Uruguay and Argentina, right down to the color and iconography of their flags. It was a delight to stroll back toward the harbor through the pedestrian streets, which started clean and tidy near the plaza, but it felt that by the middle reaches they'd given up, as structure after structure was simply boarded up and abandoned. The economy was not very kind here.

Ironically enough I spent most of my time in a memorial to a disaster of a different sort, one dedicated to the Uruguayan rugby team that had been in the Andean plane crash in 1972, made famous in books and films.  I had always remembered it that they'd been a soccer team, though the cannibalism part I could never get wrong.  I remember reading Piers Paul Read's Alive, probably when I was a boy of no more than 11 or 12.  I remember being haunted of a photo of Susana Parrado, who even at that young age I found a certain beauty, an image that perhaps was guiding me toward pubescence. It was a bit shocking to be wandering through fragments of airplane, which I at first thought were taken from the wreckage itself, but they'd simply replicated parts from a plane of a similar vintage.  Nothing apparently remained of the old wreck site, as the fuselage that had been their home for 72 days was burned shortly after their rescue.  There were a few odds and ends that had been picked up by mountaineers about 30 years later.  Most interesting to me was getting a follow up to the story, four decades after having read the book.  It was haunting to learn that the entire site where the plane once lay has been overtaken by the glacier.  

And I again saw metaphor, as a sluggish economy slowly encroached to overtake the glory of a once elegant society.                              


On the turntable:  Jeff Beck & Eric Clapton:  "Exhaust Note"