How far away do you have to go to call it travel? The Argentine writer Hebe Uhart, who died in 2018 at the age of eighty-one, had a long career as a short story writer and then turned to travel writing in earnest in the last decade of her life. She went on plenty of trips to other Latin American countries, but mostly she liked to stay close to home. In A Question of Belonging, a selection of her crónicas (literary journalism in its Latin American incarnation), she finds much to interest her in Argentine towns, cities, suburbs, and her own Buenos Aires neighborhood. As a travel companion, Uhart is unorthodox. Her voice can be as pleasingly prosaic as a conversation on the phone with your mother, but she is also canny, wily, funny, and even biting. The steeliness of her delivery creeps up on you.
Take, for example, the brief piece “Good Manners,” about a ride on a city bus. “Yesterday I was riding the 92,” it begins. A woman gets on and sits down next to Uhart. After a while the bus driver says something about a girl crossing the street where she perhaps should not have. A conversation about traffic etiquette and the behavior of bus passengers follows. There’s nothing remarkable about it on the surface, but Uhart grows more and more bothered by her seatmate, who expresses her views in ways that Uhart interprets as hostile. The initial description of this seatmate provides some clues, both to the impending friction and to Uhart’s storytelling methods:
A woman of about sixty or seventy caught my eye. It was difficult to get a sense of her age, or her social class. Could she be poor? No, but she didn’t seem rich either, nor did I pick up on any of that visible effort the middle class puts into their appearance: dressing neatly, in complementary colors. Her clothes reminded me, more than anything, of someone trying to go incognito. She didn’t come off as a housewife; I decided she had the look of a government inspector. She sat down beside me.
This is unprepossessing and even a little daffy (“dressing neatly, in complementary colors”). The facts do not add up, despite Uhart’s tone of objective observation. Yet she comes to her conclusion. The woman is the inspector type: judgmental, censorious. A silent war has been declared.
The inspector woman and the bus driver trade remarks, and Uhart feels the need to join in. She tells them how nice it is to see a passenger and a driver exchanging greetings. The inspector woman shuts her down with a curt “It’s good manners.” This invocation of manners gets under Uhart’s skin. It seems like a marking of boundaries designed expressly to silence her. It’s as if she’s a foreign visitor in the land of the 92 bus, its norms of behavior alien to her. The piece comes to an uncharacteristically neat conclusion when Uhart, inspired by memories of a childhood bully, turns the tables on the inspector woman and shows that she won’t be cowed by good manners: she doesn’t say good-bye to either of them. Whether anyone notices or not is another question—it’s a comically mild-mannered act of rebellion.
More typically digressive is the delightful “Irazusta,” which also finds the foreign in the near at hand. It begins invitingly: “Once, when I did not have the money to go on vacation, I saw a TV ad for Irazusta.” Uhart’s excursions are often impromptu, and even when they aren’t she makes them feel that way. The tiny farming town of Irazusta is a few hours’ drive north of Buenos Aires, but in Uhart’s telling it seems as impossibly remote and fantastic as Oz. To get there she makes her way to the city of Gualeguaychú and then takes a taxi. The driver asks incredulously whether she plans to stay. She says yes, in her “most innocent voice.” The first woman she meets puts her up in a house that fortunately turns out to be charming. “My room did have a window in it, a low one the height of the bed. It gave me the feeling that the outdoors was at an arm’s length. Every once in a while, a grunt from a nearby pig.”
In Irazusta she meets locals who fill her in on the clever behavior of the town pigs, cows, and horses (“The cows moo like crazy when something serious happens”). Uhart is in her element when it comes to animals (see Animals, the other collection of her crónicas available in English), but the human fauna is at least as interesting. It turns out that Uhart is one of twenty tourists lured by the village’s marketing coup. She attends a dinner for all twenty, then wanders around town talking to anyone who’s game. Encounters with strangers are irresistible, despite the frequency with which they end in miscommunication or mild mutual dissatisfaction. But nothing can go wrong in Irazusta. While Uhart is on her rounds, a history teacher asks whether she believes in God:
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I figured that [the teacher] did, so to stay on her wavelength (and because the rain was giving me cramps) I cooked up a theory about finding God in one’s neighbor that landed fairly well. I was proud of myself, as if I had stitched together a delicate embroidery. What’s more, I thought there’s no way I’ll be sent out into the rain and mud while we’re on the subject of God.
This conversational triumph is followed by another: a man with a bushy mustache reports that Uhart and her fellow visitors are not the only exotic travelers to land in Irazusta. A man once came from Holland and asked lots of “language questions”: “You should see how well he learned Spanish here in Irazusta!”
This Dutchman clearly struck Uhart’s fancy, because he appears in the short story “The Wandering Dutchman.” (Uhart’s stories and crónicas are undated, so it’s impossible to say which came first.) The fictional Dutchman has traveled all around the world, but Argentina throws him for a loop. He is also obsessed with language, and he marvels at Argentines’ funny way with words, frequently consulting his dictionary. It is through him that Uhart delivers her most succinct verdict on travel:
The first day one arrives in a new place isn’t like the rest: on the first day everything seems disconnected, rough around the edges…. By the third day, even the sky, which at first seems strange and unknown, becomes friendly, as if to say: I am the same sky covering the whole planet.
The Dutchman, too, ends up in Irazusta (though here it is called Iramain), and he meets some of the same people and animals Uhart meets. Though the story is quite a bit longer than the crónica, even less of consequence happens, and the mood is more quizzical than cheerful. As the Dutchman’s stay drags on, a Beckettian traveler’s limbo sets in. By the time the townspeople bid him farewell, he has lost track of what it means to move on, and he asks himself, “How will I ever return to a place I’ve never left?”
A generous selection of Uhart’s short stories is available in English in The Scent of Buenos Aires (2019), translated by Maureen Shaughnessy. Until 2003, when she was nearly seventy, Uhart was published by a patchwork of small houses. Around that time she was picked up by the publisher Adriana Hidalgo (who also had the prescience to republish Antonio di Benedetto), and she began to be read by a younger generation of writers, like Mariana Enríquez and Alejandro Zambra, who became her friends and champions. In recent years she has become something closer to a household name in Argentina. Her voice is recognizable across genres, but in the stories it is more distilled and thus more radical, allowing the reader to form a theory that her birdlike, distractable hopping from one thing to another—so easily disguised as an organic reproduction of unmediated human thought—actually signals an urge to pick and poke at logic itself. But it’s easy to enjoy Uhart without theorizing, just relishing her off-kilter way of seeing the world and her companionable presence.
On her travels, Uhart is like the Dutchman, listening carefully to the way people speak and collecting phrases like souvenirs. She’s especially interested in popular sayings, advertisements, and the vocabulary of local newspapers. This fascination with language is necessarily a little muted in English, but the translator Anna Vilner’s judicious, low-key handling of localisms and assorted vernaculars works well. Uhart’s account of a trip to Cartagena, Colombia, in which she carefully records the verbal quirks of the Cartagenans she meets (particularly a persistent series of necklace vendors), is a good example. Vilner doesn’t try to match every colloquialism, but she finds humor and color where she can (“a fat and squat moocher of a bird”) and uses the occasional simple gloss (“in a local accent, the man asked”). Elsewhere she manages to keep some lines in Spanish (as when Uhart is intrigued by Mexicanisms like “ni madres”—or “no way in hell,” in the pallid standard dictionary translation). Plenty of the humor would land in any language, anyway. Uhart to the necklace sellers:
“I’m not buying anything today because I’m sad.”
Miraculously, it worked.
As the old man went on protesting, another member of the group said, “Can’t you see that she’s sad?”
Uhart’s interest in the quirks of language has its roots in her childhood. She grew up on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in the city of Moreno. Her grandparents (Italian on her mother’s side and Basque on her father’s) were among the first to settle the nearby town of Paso del Rey, and her family maintained an uneasy equilibrium between humble roots and a more prosperous present. As a girl, she often visited a mad aunt whose behavior was frightening and fascinating. In a long interview with Enríquez, her fellow Argentine, who contributes an excellent introduction to A Question of Belonging, Uhart describes her aunt’s habit of keeping chickens captive in the house and dousing them with buckets of water. This aunt, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, could be violent. But Uhart took an almost gleeful interest in her unpredictability, as well as her curious relationship with language: “Seriously, she was a master of language, because she said some really strange things. And she had an aversion for certain words. ‘Tenant’ made her frenetic. ‘Jacket,’ too, because she had been taken away in a straitjacket.”
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Uhart studied philosophy at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and she later spent time as a country schoolteacher and a college instructor of philosophy. She also ran a popular taller, or writing workshop, out of her Buenos Aires apartment, where she taught generations of students. Some of her most memorable short stories are set in classrooms, in which teachers, far from being authority figures, are seized by passions as turbulent as their young students’. In the crónica “The Preparatory School,” she describes teaching Latin at an elite public school in Buenos Aires, where she feels as though she is being held captive. To lighten the mood she discusses the bathroom habits of Romans, causing such a stir that she flees to a café as soon as school is out. “The café seemed extraordinary to me,” she writes, “the street like a sanctuary, and the waiter a prince.”
Uhart wrote relatively few personal essays (they make up just a small fraction of her one-thousand-page collected crónicas in Spanish), and nearly all are included in A Question of Belonging. Two funny-sad crónicas give glimpses of her unsatisfactory relationships with men. The first begins with one of her characteristic deadpan kickoffs—“About thirty years ago, I had a boyfriend who was a drunk”—and goes on to describe the pair’s adventures in apartment hunting: “Before long we came to an old but giant apartment with a long hallway…. But there was something strange about it—the wall dividing the apartment from the one next to it was very low (about ten observers looked at us from the other side).” The second ends with a scene in which Uhart takes a ripped pair of suit pants to a tailor while her boyfriend (another drunk, or the same one) cowers pantsless in bed. The pants are too badly shredded to be mended, but Uhart reports that she “wanted the salesman to raise them toward the light, with a stick, perhaps,” in a comic but haunting attempt to understand what’s gone wrong (with the pants but also—we presume—her life).
It’s common for reviews of Uhart to praise her childlike openness to the world. Occasionally she bridled at that (“Naif, they say, as if I’m not all there”), but her work does gravitate toward people who operate according to their own rules, out of sync with conventional expectations. In a brief profile of an acquaintance, “Fabricio,” she writes about a man whose utter lack of materialism fascinates her. Fabricio is clearly a bit mad, and his notions of traveling light are extreme: “Instead of a coat, why not smear yourself with oil or tar?” Yet his compulsion to keep moving seems akin to Uhart’s: “He believed that if he stayed in the same place for too long he would deteriorate and shrink up.” A thread of irony runs through her innocent curiosity: the reader is compelled to read and reread, questioning what exactly she makes of Fabricio. Her guilelessness is real but also strategic. Despite her protestations, she owns naiveté, making it rigorous.
Some of the best examples of Uhart’s unsatisfactory conversations with strangers are on display in “Off to Mexico,” the longest piece in the book, in which she visits the Guadalajara International Book Fair and Mexico City. There’s the grandmother of one of her minders at the fair (“I try my best to make conversation with Luz, but nothing sticks”), and a rural anthropologist insists on interviewing Uhart rather than the other way around: “He asks me things about my past travels and laughs at everything. And I get the sense that his laugh is a reply like any other.” Uhart ties her observations of these strangers loosely to Octavio Paz’s theory about Mexicans’ tendency to mask their feelings. This is one of her more thoroughly researched essays—which can sometimes be dry, as she dutifully recites facts in book-report mode—but here she finds a harmonious balance.
Wherever she goes in Mexico, she is very aware of distance and scale: everything strikes her as large and difficult to traverse. In Guadalajara it takes her ten minutes to get from her hotel room to the lobby, and the book fair itself is so big that no rendezvous is a given—it’s expected that friends will get lost on their way to you. In Mexico City she makes it to the artisan market and the enormous Library of Mexico, though she is on her own without her friendly Guadalajara minders, and she’s limping from a fall. There’s a poignancy in her vulnerability. She is, after all, an old woman on most of these trips. Nevertheless, on the way back to the hotel she “use[s] two buses, a subway, take[s] a short cab ride, and walk[s] four blocks,” all the better to tell us about two fellow passengers eating out of Tupperware containers.
The title crónica, “A Question of Belonging,” is one of several in the book about visits to indigenous communities. Perhaps out of a sense of deference to her subjects, Uhart sometimes removes herself from the frame, retreating into descriptions of folk art or anthropological studies. As soon as she exits the narrative, we miss her voice. But her interactions with actual humans are as awkward and unpredictable as ever, which gives these pieces an interesting prickliness. “A Question of Belonging” throws the reader off balance from the start. It begins with a big letdown: Uhart, curious to see how Bolivia has changed since a few youthful visits, decides that traveling at altitude in La Paz would be too onerous and instead plans a trip to a Bolivian community on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Then comes a series of smaller letdowns: hardly anyone she approaches will admit to being Bolivian. Finally she finds her contact, Beba, who explains that people deny where they are from because they’re afraid of being taken for country folk. She asks Uhart whether she’ll stay for lunch, but Uhart leaves, “whistling softly.” The Bolivians have successfully resisted her amateur attempts to make them subjects of anthropological inquiry, so she turns the tables on them in an almost invisible gesture of rejection, reminiscent of the withheld “good-bye” in “Good Manners.”
The last crónica in A Question of Belonging, “My Bed Away from Home,” describes Uhart’s stay in the ICU of a small hospital, near the end of her life. Though her fortitude and humor must have been under severe strain, her voice is indomitable. She keeps track of the things nurses and patients say to one another, and she even finds it possible to joke about the indecent exposure of her nether regions. “We all have asses, Hebe,” says a visitor, reassuringly. This strikes her as a Socratic truth. “Indeed, Socrates, we all have asses.” When she returns home from the foreign land of the hospital, her students are there to welcome her. Among other things, they’ve organized her towels and sheets, something Uhart had never done for herself. “And I poured everyone a bit of wine I had lying around.”
Uhart is an expert in human connection—or, more specifically, the kind of warmth that solitary people seek. In “The Stories Told by Cecilia’s Friends” (from The Scent of Buenos Aires), a few friends visit Cecilia and sit around the table telling stories. When it gets late, they take their leave:
Once everyone was outside someone said: “Cecilia never talks, she just listens to everyone else.”
“I’ve never even heard her speak,” said one bald man.
“It’s as if she weren’t even there—but she does make delicious coffee,” said the lady with her hair in a bun.
The story later takes a mildly surreal turn (a mysterious spot appears behind Cecilia’s ear, mirroring one of the stories her friends told and giving her a pleasing sense of being chosen), but what lingers longest in the reader’s mind is the cozy, rambling conversation around a table, where Cecilia—who is tired—can “just sit back and listen.”
