Linda, A Facón & A Rastra - Pure Nostalgia
Thursday, April 02, 2015
Sometime in 1999 I went into the Marble Arch and sat at the bar. Jorge the barman looked at me and placed in front of me a tall glass of soda water. This was my usual and I never had to pay for it. Jorge was Mexican.We spoke in Spanish. I felt very much like Humphrey Bogart in one of his films where he lived in a city that he belonged to. While I now feel alienated in a Vancouver I can no longer relate to, I felt then that if I could go to a bar and be recognized and to be offered “your usual” I belonged.
At another bar I had not frequented for a few years I went
up to the bar tender and I said, “I want to see …” The man looked at me and replied, “Go
upstairs and knock on your left.” I did just that. I entered a room with two
men sitting at a table. One of them was an Asian wearing a huge Rolex. On the table was the
largest pile of big denomination bills I have ever seen. ... the other man introduced me to his companion, "This is Alex Waterhouse, Vancouver's most famous photographer because he has photographed me."
In that first bar … (the owner of the establishment) came
up to me and asked, “You are Argentine, Alex, aren’t you? I want you to meet
someone you just might have a connection with.”
That’s how I met the very Argentine Linda who had a mouth
to kill for, the same with her eyes and everything else about her.
With Linda, my artist friends Juan Manuel Sánchez and Nora
Patrich and I embarked in an almost one-year project of taking pictures, painting
and sketching Linda. After sessions in my studio or in Nora’s house we would
have Argentine mates (note no accent on that e) and talk about the subject of
our project, our nostalgia for Argentina and Buenos Aires. It was only in that
year that I finally understood what is probably most evident to most people.
This is that you can only feel nostalgia for a place when you are no longer in
that place.
For this photograph (of hundreds, one nicer or better
than the other in some detail) Nora made Linda wear the gaucho bombacha. A
bombacha in many Latin American countries is a woman’s underpants. In Argentina
it is a baggy pant that is tight around the ankles (it is buttoned there).
Gauchos wear alpargatas, an Argentine espadrille. Around Linda’s waist is
a gaucho rastra. For dress gauchos will wear rastras with gold coins. In her
hands is a facón a knife that is used by gauchos to slaughter cattle, to eat or
in 19th (and 20th) lore, the weapon of choice (never a six-shooter)
to resolve conflicts.
After my two years in the Argentine Navy my sailor mates
gave me this facón as keepsake and remembrance of my time served.
On Linda’s magnificent chest the black cloth is normally
used to keep the bombacha in place in lieu of a belt.
You might find interesting if you read here, that my
facón is the actual murder weapon in a novel by Canadian author J. Robert Janes.
