We’d had a beautiful day out kayaking on the river then relaxing in the sun.
After kayaking, I read my Kindle, basking in the sun beside the calm river whilst my friend Mauricio borrowed my headphones and listened to music and sang along to amusing Spanish lyrics I didn’t need to understand because his enthusiastic delivery conveyed much of the intended meaning.
As always happens when I read, the Kindle nestled into my hirsute chest like a tile resting on foam - and I fell asleep; I was that relaxed.
Micaela had been our patient, bemused instructor on the river whilst I barked pigeon Spanish to Maurcio to ‘stop’ or ‘turn left not right!’ in our two-person kayak. I often said left when I meant right, then somehow blamed him for what was blatantly my bad.
Micaela told Mauricio he had a lovely energy and the two of them bonded. They discovered they shared a love of Reiki. I did an affectionate eye-roll and continued with my book.
They hugged and promised to stay in touch after the motor boat dropped us off. They did the compulsory swapping of Instagram handles.
Handles? I don’t know, I only joined Insta a few weeks ago, and begrudgingly. Every person you meet holds up their phone with Insta open now to connect and they always look at me like I’m clinically insane / pathetically frail when I suggest we instead connect on Facebook. Every club night here and even menus here are on Instagram. I resisted for so long I started to feel like Fran Lebowitz in Pretend It’s a City, wandering around New York without owning a mobile. I’m old school. I like black smudged newspaper print on my sweaty hands and menus that don’t require a Q fucking R code to peruse.
I DIGRESS.
“I just know I’ll see her again,” Mauricio said. “Sure babes” I said, and promptly forgot all about her. We then looked around some markets as the sun started to set.
The train home was so packed, I suggested we wait for the next one; we were both so relaxed and in no rush, this sardine carriage would’ve killed our vibe. The next one became so packed, younger people were sitting in the priority seats. Etiquette by osmosis, we did the same.
I plunged back into my Kindle and heard “OMG! I knew it!” It was Micaela, and Mauricio’s exclamation of vindication.
Just before this happened, I saw two women, both older than us, standing. I asked Mauricio if we should offer them our priority seats. “It might offend them by suggesting they’re old or weak because they’re women,” he said. They headed to another carriage in search of seats.
Micaela and Mauricio were chatting and laughing in Spanish. They’d try to include me where they could, but I was content just observing and smiling. I offered Mikeala my seat but she insisted she was happy standing.
Suddenly, I felt three deliberate jabs in my side. It was an old man in a buttoned up shirt and red flatcap - poking me with his walking stick!
The person in the (non-priority) seat behind us had offered him the seat. I’d been watching Mikeala and Mauricio so hadn’t seen the elderly man. He was evidently saying, you should’ve offered me this seat!
‘Lo siento’ I said in my Delboy Spanish, getting up, ‘lo siento - have esta seat’ - but by this time he was taking his seat diagonally behind us and muttering angrily to himself.
Then he started shouting things across from us, things in Spanish I didn’t understand.
There are men (almost always men) who roam the carriage selling trainer socks for money and one started getting involved. He was pointing and shouting at me. I had no idea what anyone was saying. I saw Mauricio freeze and go very quiet. He later told me he was counting to ten, over and over again, to contain his rage.
Micaela then lost her shit. She shouted at the sock seller till he pissed off to flog his socks in another carriage, hurling abuse and looking me right in the eye as he left.
“Fucking foreigners” he was saying, when my new friends translated for me. “Fucking foreigners coming over here thinking the rules don’t apply to them.”
This is exactly why this kind of attitude makes me deeply uncomfortable when I hear it in the UK. He didn’t know the irony of that context. That I’d wanted to offer those two women my seat, and simply hadn’t seen the elderly man in time.
The elderly man was still shouting and pointing at me. ‘No entiendo’ I was saying. ‘No entiendo.’ He sounded very angry and looked disgusted. I went to stand up, to leave the seat. Micaela pushed me down. ‘You are not getting up for him’ she insisted.
The shouting got louder and the woman behind us got involved. It was Micaela and this woman shouting down this old man who just kept shouting back, pointing at me and Mauricio.
“He is saying we are disgusting fucking gays” Mauricio, eventually, said under his breath.
I felt myself going red. It felt like the whole carriage was staring at us after the commotion. I didn’t know if my face was flushing from humiliation or anger. Possibly both.
“FUCKING gays” he was apparently repeating to the entire carriage. “Putos de mierde.”
Puto. It’s the same name as the local gay bar two blocks away from me, which brings me such joy (spelt phonetically to avoid offence). Context changes everything.
Maybe it was a perceived ‘ladylike’ cross of the knee rather than a square-on one. Maybe it was a limp wrist here, a push back of hair there. I don’t know; I’d clearly let my guard down as Micaela was chatting and laughing with us, and something I’d done had given him this impression from afar, and in another language. My robust gayness transcends both borders and generations, evidently.
The rest of the journey back was deeply uncomfortable. There were some stares from men which made me feel intimidated. I felt paranoid. We held our ground and stayed in that carriage, but I was right back on my feral school bus again, a den of lions repelled by the gayboy.
I haven’t really told anyone this story yet as, to be honest, I was too embarrassed. We got off the train, tried and mainly succeeded to forget all about it, write him off as a dinosaur and get on with our evenings.
A bird shat on Micaela’s head at the train station when we got off which was the most welcome distraction as we helped her mop the sticky crap out of her luscious Argentinian shiny brown mane as she squirmed. Maybe it is good luck after all.
But in my 40s I want to be devoid of shame and all its toxic impacts. I’m going to speak about these things even if it makes others uncomfortable, because that’s their problem, not mine. In this case the shame is the old man’s, not mine. I’m writing this blog to rid myself of carrying that shame, the same shame I carried for the first two decades of my life.
I call these ‘microaggressions’ because this walking-stick poking man exists in every ‘liberal’ big city. He exists in London and in Sydney. I meet him pretty much every month in some form or another; often less brutal than this encounter.
I’ve moved on now; I was rattled for a few hours and then put it out my brain. When you’re shame averse, you’re resilient.
I choose instead to remember the woman behind us who, instead of sitting by and saying nothing, told him to shut the fuck up. Micaela apparently said she’d kick his head in. LOL. Maybe that bird was this widower’s dead wife getting involved and shitting on her head for threatening a pensioner with violence.
The next blog is going to be all about the gay nightlife in Buenos Aires. Out of context it might seem hedonistic, even vacuous.
But if anyone questions why gay people still need safe spaces like gay-majority nightclubs where they can be themselves, cross their legs and flex their wrists and lift their shirts however the fuck they like without someone perceiving that and shaming them for it, then, well this incident is why.
Plus. Putos de mierde have more fun anyway.