Retiro Train Station photographed with a panoramic Widelux

Buenos Aires was my home from 1942 (when I was born) until 1952 when my grandmother, my mother and I moved to Mexico City. I returned to Buenos Aires in 1965 to serve as a conscript in the Argentine Navy. In spite of such few years in my Native Argentina (I am now 83) my life there was ruled by trains and subways, mostly built by the English. My neighbourhood of Coghlan (we were 7 blocks from the station of that name) was named after an English railway engineer. 

My friend poet Rubén Derlis at the Coghlan train station

In my quite a few trips back to Buenos Aires in this century I can attest at the efficiency of the system. The main downtown train stations (replicas of the large ones in London) of Retiro an Constitución have connections within them to the most efficient subway system called “el subte”

During my stint in the Argentine Navy because of the usefulness of my English I was placed in the office of the US Naval Advisory Group. Because of my lofty job as translator I was allowed to live in a pension and I did not have to be in a military barracks where I would have been at the mercy of nasty corporals.

Retiro

This meant that I went daily to my office in the train line called Bartolomé Mitre. My train stopped in Coghlan and then it stopped in two more stations before I arrived in the huge Retiro Station. From there I took the subte and I only had to walk a couple of blocks to my office which was next to Navy Secretary. As a penniless conscript (our military pay was one dollar a month (they had not modified the payment since 1902, I did not have to pay the train or the subte. Sometimes the guarda (the ticket guy would demand my ticket) and I would get off and take another train.

Retiro

Now at my ripe old age I have been thinking how that train defines my present life. I get on my train as if I were a boy. In the next two stations people get off and by the time I arrive at Retiro I am the only passenger on the train. This idea reflects that most of my contemporaries and family are all dead. I get off in Retiro and there my dream idea stops.

Lavalle Subte station - Photograph by Rosemary

Of late I have found another way of looking at it. I get off the empty train at Retiro. But that empty train boards new passengers, all alive, to the trip back to Coghlan and beyond. Is my entry into Retiro signify that I am dead?

I cannot finish here how once in that train when I was in the navy I had my sailor cap under my arm. I thought it was polite to take it off in the train. A well-dressed man came up to me and said, “Conscript put on your cap.” I answered, “I don’t want to.” The gentleman then pulled an ID that said he was a general and a member of SIDE (Servicio de Inteligencia del Estado). He demanded my name and conscript identification number. When I got to my office a friendly Argentine Marine Corps corporal asked me. “Alex what have you done? An arrest order has arrived and you are going to the clink after work every day for a week.” When I finally finished that arrest I can attest here that I was full of lice.