A Little Candombe

A oil painting of Pedro Figari depicting Candombe dancers (oil on canvas 75 X 105 cms.) Costantini Collection. Wikipedia sourced image, here.

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Not realising the rolling hills of farmland, the cattle towns and forgotten villages could consume six hours when coming by bus from Montevideo, the capital, I arrived later than expected.  For much of the way it’d been drizzling; perhaps the bus was behind schedule.  It was already Saturday evening when I hiked into Salto, over the railway lines past the shanties where curious eyes watched me and my backpack walk by.  Towards the centre of the town the buildings took on that dilapidated Spanish style that seemed characteristic of Uruguay.

In a side street I found a paint-peeling mansion that had become a hotel staffed by friendly pensioners and with hardly any Spanish I managed to take a room there.  It was large with a high ceiling; the water was cold and the sheets not unequivocally clean.  But I was pleased to have somewhere to store the luggage.

It was in Salto I found gratitude for the South American habit of eating at ungodly hours.  The world over dinner times are a facet of human existence that seems to have defied the forces of global homogenisation.  Norwegians favour a 4.30 p.m. start to their dinners, Australians dine anywhere from 6 – 8 p.m. and when I asked my friend Marina in Ukraine about their custom, I was told that Ukrainians are a strange people who like to eat at anytime they feel hungry.  Bangladeshis eat slightly latish at around 10.30 p.m. but in Argentina and Uruguay dinners can start as late as midnight.  The restaurant was yet to be crowded when I arrived.

The restaurateur was keen to teach Spanish and tried to chat: there had been foreigners in the night before, I understood.  He directed me to a table where I sat alone until another foreigner entered and was shown to my table.  I’m not sure if the restaurateur fancied himself to be a matchmaker; or if he imagined we might have shared, foreign things to speak of; but what harm did it do if she accidentally had dinner with me?

She was a sociology student from Minnesota or Milwaukee or somewhere in the American middle north that started with an ‘M’.  She was at the end of a six-month educational placement in Uruguay.  ‘It’ll prolong my degree and cost more,’ she said, ‘but I wanted to do something different.’

In Uruguay dinner means beef and beef means an enormous slab of steak that overflows the dinner plate on both sides, tender and juicy beyond comprehension, with the potential to clog a human artery in a single sitting.  It’s divine.  It’s nutritional madness.  It’s national cuisine.  And the king of the beef steaks need share his plate with no one: sidelines of salad or fries are ordered separately.

My companion from the American place starting with ‘M’ asked what I thought of Uruguay.  I could tell by the way she asked that she’d grown fond of the country, which I respected since it was much as I would have done, had I stayed there for six months.  I said Uruguay was great but, honestly, seemed a little sad also.  ‘Is it because of the poverty?’ she proposed.  ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen poorer countries that are downright optimistic.  It’s as though Uruguay should be richer; like it’s stuck.’  I added the disclaimer that as my idea was based on less than a week in the country it was most probably incorrect.  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I think what you said is insightful.’  But people from that ‘M’ place aren’t always right either.

Before the meal was done we became three: Benson, another Australian, was joined to us and the meal came to last an additional hour while he ate.  He was travelling around the world and thought to stay in China once he reached there; and it’s interesting that he inevitably did just that.

He was surprised I was going to Bolivia, which I then was.  There’d been political instability with protests, some rock throwing and national shut-downs, what in Bangladesh are called hartals.  ‘All the tourists are leaving,’ he told me, ‘and you are going in?’  ‘Should be no trouble finding a bus seat,’ I joked.  But the situation in Bolivia didn’t worry me much.  There had been no deaths and having been in Bangladesh many times during hartals I knew the worst for the traveller was likely to be the inconvenience of being stranded somewhere and nothing beyond that.  As it turned out the road to La Paz was open and my English teaching job was waiting.  As it turned out Bolivianos are quite considerate when they protest, which is often.  But that’s a later part of it.

It was on the Sunday evening that I got to know Benson slightly more.  Salto was a town where a main street meeting following an afternoon swimming at the hot springs didn’t need to be pre-arranged.  He said he wanted to attend the candombe and not really knowing what that was, I couldn’t argue.  I followed him to the plaza down beside the river port and saw people were gathered there.  It was beyond dusk but not yet Uruguayan dinner time.

Candombe isn’t exactly music, dance or theatre; it’s rather a cultural genre that’s a mix of the three which originated with the arrival of Bantu African slaves in Uruguay.  In its fullest form a candombe performance may feature difficult choreographed dance steps as well as wild improvisation; there can be costumed characters known to the genre such as an old mother, a herb doctor and a sweeper who juggles and performs balancing tricks with his broom; there can be the singing of Spanish or archaic African lyrics; and there is always a troop of drummers.[1] 

We adopted Pablo and his friend who for reasons unclear was called ‘The Duck.’  There was time for chatting as people gradually arrived.  There was a bit of drum tuning, singular beating at first which slowly grew into a low-key rhythm, stopping and re-starting, the talk and the drums. 

Pablo was planning to start a clothing company, he said, and his t-shirt featured an illustration of a giant fork on it.  The Duck was famous among his friends for his trip to Miami, where he’d imprudently arrived on the first anniversary of September 11.  I don’t know if Uruguayan Spanish sounds a little too Middle Eastern but The Duck, he was turned away; and after the solid week of farewell parties that had been in Salto, to the great amusement of his friends within days The Duck was back!

The drums gathered pace, musicians showed considerable skill and soon the crowd was dancing along the street, drums following.  ‘The rhythms are African,’ Pablo said, ‘but there are few Africans left in Uruguay.’ 

With Benson, Pablo and The Duck, I self-consciously and really quite dreadfully danced towards the front, in steps that would’ve shamed any candombe enthusiast.  But I took amusement from being less than a week in South America before finding myself unexpectedly dancing in the street.

It was pleasing to see local residents leaning out windows and clapping in time as the crowd passed; to see the cars and buses waving and jiggling a little from behind their steering wheels as they waited patiently to use the street.  I imagined Sydney: council approval, safety impact statements, noise complaints, insurance issues and ultimately banned.  An event that was so informal and worse, driven by young people, would not last there.  The Duck shared his unoriginal but succinct life philosophy: ‘live for now’ and with that in mind, what could be better than a little candombe? 

It was on the Monday I arrived by small passenger ferry, across the river, back in Argentina.

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[1]Wikipedia sourced information, here.

Candombe by Pedro Figari (Uruguayan painter, 1861-1938) Image from wikipedia. Here.

Continue your journey, towards  

Bohemian Argentina, 

to Mariachi Nica or, 

on the other side of the world, discover

The Song of Chittagong. Travel safe!

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: A Little Candombe





The Deep South: Article Index for articles about Argentina, Chile or Uruguay

The Min Min

 I

He’s never seen the Min Min, but his Cousin Mandy has. 

It was after he got his first car that the country around Coonabarabran finally opened up, when the frustration of having travelled six hours from Sydney only to reach the beginning of the real outback was overcome.  He had his cousin and a green Mazda as willing partners and there were trips, hundreds of kilometres in a day.  Together over a latte at the Jolly Cauli café they planned; together they drew big circles in the sand, to the west and to the northwest.

Mandy would be the model of a farmer’s daughter had her father been a farmer.  Her trim figure, short wavy blond hair and the face that’s seen a season or two: there’s nothing to suggest she’s not a child of the country; and true to her origins she’s a storyteller. 

In Coonabarabran stories have their own life, such that to question the factuality of a narration is an activity without relevance.  City people don’t always understand this, but questioning the actuality of a Coonabarabran story is like trying to count the bulky rural raindrops as they hit the tin roof during a summer afternoon storm.  There was only ever to listen and enjoy, which is what he did when Mandy told him of her encounter with the Min Min.

Nonetheless he’s wondered what the secret to the success of her storytelling might be.  Perhaps it’s in her face that never lights up with excitement or drops in disappointment as she narrates.  She never gets carried away with her words.  He’s wondered if it might be the wheat field accent that, with its elongated and contorted vowels, soothes to make the dramatic sound as clear and obvious as sitting on a rock in the garden of a summer evening with a cup of tea in the hand.  The cicadas are loudly chirping. 

And when the telling gets eerie her tone doesn’t waver; when the telling gets hilarious there’s barely a note of laughter in it.  However she does it, Mandy can make wild statements sound as indisputable as reading off a shopping list.  He admires her skill.

And if she speaks of the city it doesn’t alter anything.  Even when the subject matter turns urban her storytelling remains a rural creature despite the geography of its words.

And he might not be telling it right.  It’s best that she should do it.

They made it to the unlikely Macquarie Marshes to west of Coonamble on one of their sand circles.  It’s a wetland at a junction of rivers in otherwise dry country.  He negotiated his first red-mud road to get there, the road damp from the marshes.  There’d been an eagle, as a human a third as high, sitting in the dry grass of the sunburnt reed lands along the road side.  Eagles can’t take off straight away, Mandy said.  As much as they are kings of the sky they need a run up to take flight. 

A few yards behind that eagle was a fox, pushing itself flat against the ground in that stalking posture and inching forward toward the bird.  What would’ve been the result he couldn’t say, because the dust-kicking rumble of the car scared fox and scared bird.  The eagle took a few ungainly steps and started to unfold its enormous wings while the fox ran away.

The sky grows ever larger in the flat country beyond Coonamble.  It’s blue and weighty when there’s no rain about, meaning most of the time.  The sky pulled them further, or was it adventure, and by lunch the two cousins had reached as far as the small town of Carinda, with its population of a hundred and ninety four.  Carinda seemed to have only one shop, a post office cum grocery store cum café.  There were pigeon holes screwed up on one of the walls with a slot allocated to each household.  Who could be bothered delivering mail when the locals have legs and can walk a few hundred metres to collect it?  To the side of the grocery shelves there was a single plastic table: the café.  They sat there and asked the store keeper for a menu.  But who could be bothered to write up a menu when people can just open their mouths and speak?

‘What do you want?’

‘What do you have?’

‘Well what do you want?’

‘Well what do you have?’

In that country where a flat white is a coffee with milk, they might’ve settled for a corned beef sandwich.

Turning back for Coonabarabran they came across the unlikely event of rain.  It was with city trepidation that he steered along the red-dirt-becoming-red-mud road, wetter than at the marshes, muddier than at the marshes.  It made the car slide sideways a bit as he drove.  A red-mud road was not too much of a worry, Mandy said.  It was the black-mud road that was the nightmare.

II

In another dirt circle to the northwest where the land grows rocky and lifeless, they one day reached Lightning Ridge.  Aunt Mary, Mandy’s mother, was with them then.  Lightning Ridge is a mining town, about two thousand people, situated atop the world’s largest known deposit of black opal gemstones.  Miners come from across the world to settle there, to spend days in backyard-type mines underground, in the hope of striking it rich.  They busied themselves at the mining museum and saw a house made of glass bottles.  By late afternoon they were still on their way home, not much beyond Collarenebri, and they’d chosen a short cut route with about forty kilometres of dirt before Wee Waa.  Well, in that country that doesn’t see much rain, by a city dweller’s luck it came again, as grey clouds rolled in from the west and the first drops started plonking against the windscreen.  There was a problem.  The road this time was black-dirt.

‘We’d better get out of here fast,’ Mandy said as the clouds closed in.

‘What happens if we don’t make it?’ the city cousin foolishly asked.

‘We’ll get bogged,’ the country cousin replied, ‘and it’ll be a week until the road dries enough to pull the car out.  Whatever you do, don’t touch the brake.  Keep moving or you’ll slide and if you go off the edge of the road we’ll never get out of it.’

Suddenly the mere forty kilometres seemed like four hundred as he kept the motion going, as the raindrops became more frequent and the road started to become slippery.  All the while there was the groaning and banging of black-dirt and rocks tumbling beneath the car’s underbelly.  It was the bloody four-wheel drives, Mandy said, that made the deep wheel ruts that made the road all but impassable for city sedans like his.  The rain kept coming.  The dirt and rocks kept groaning and banging.  The car kept rolling on.

‘Problem is,’ Mandy said, ‘if you do get bogged and it takes a week to get the car out, in the meantime there’ll be no one to guard it and whoever does happen to come along might take the tyres, the wheels, anything that can be salvaged.  After a week when you come to get it there might only be a wreck.’  It would’ve been impossible to guard the vehicle in that middle-of-nowhere country.  He was worried.

They took a risk in a patch where there seemed to be a bit of sand to the land and he stopped the car, cautiously applying the brake.  He wanted Mandy to take the wheel as with her knowledge of red-dirt and black-dirt she might be able to get them back onto the tar stretch faster.  It was a road that needed country hands.

It was a deep thankful city relief and a more exhilarated, humoured country one that greeted them when finally they emerged at the safety of the tar.  They’d made it through!  Her husband back in town would never believe how foolish they’d been to attempt that road in that Mazda with rain clouds about, Mandy said.  It wasn’t the end of trouble though.  By the time they’d reached the Newell and the last one hundred or so kilometre stretch back into town from Narrabri, it was the end of evening, the beginning of night.  It’s the perfect feeding time for kangaroos.  By the hundreds they lined the roadside and he’d never seen them so thick.  Any one of them could, with a singular hop and a splatter of blood, destroy the car’s engine. 

The semi-trailers that plied that route down from Queensland don’t even slow down for the roos, he saw, and the semis account for almost all the road-kill carcases along the way; but for his city sedan the impact could’ve been fatal.  With a limit of one hundred kilometres per hour they rarely reached sixty as his nerves climbed new mountains although the land is for the best part flat.  City people like the roos, Mandy said, and think they’re cute.  ‘Well they are cute, but on the road they’re a menace.’

And yet without incident they made it through, that too, they made it through!  The junction of the Oxley and the Golden Fleece roadhouse on the outskirts of town were the final symbols of a safe return.

 III

There and back they tried the Gwabegar Road on another evening, in a convoy of two vehicles.  Mandy’s husband drove one while she drove the other, because of the roos and the faster pace possible without a city cousin behind the wheel.  Along with Mandy’s sons, his sister was with them then and they’d stocked provisions for the evening, including champagne, for the swimming expedition under the stars.  It’s scrubby country out that way, the Pilliga Country of grey-leafed eucalypts and short Pilliga pines.  It’s sandy and rocky in the place where two of his great grandfathers, the maternal ones, had once become neighbours.  And it’s under the land the water is, in the artesian basin. 

They were headed for a bore where water was pumped to the surface to service the homesteads and cattle.  And when it comes up the water is hot.

The cattle dam they knew of was a good hundred and fifty kilometres from town in the middle of an unmarked scrub paddock.  Without any indication they’d reached the spot the cars pulled off the road and stopped.  There was a gate of the typical cattle variety, and after unclasping the chain they drove through, making sure the gate was closed again behind them.  The dam was some metres into the paddock.

It might’ve stunk, that place, of cow dung and the mud might’ve squelched underfoot but the water left no doubt it was mineral, delivering that inner body warmth that only mineral water can; and overhead there was no doubt why the astronomers had chosen Coonabarabran as the site for their observatory: in the scrub country without the light pollution of a single house the night sky was awash with stars.  The champagne cork popped.  Cows occasionally mooed.  The nearest human to their group was who-bloody-knew how many kilometres away.

They laughed at him, the country cousins.  It was on the way back when he couldn’t figure out how to close the cattle gate.  And yet, in the following days the tide turned.  They’d decided to head to Sydney in convoy, with Mandy’s car following his.  She wanted it that way because her car’s engine had the risk of breakdown about it as country cars often seem to; and after five and a half hours they’d crossed the Blue Mountains, with the final descent and the blanket of city smog on the Cumberland Plain of Sydney to the east before them.  It was there that Mandy asked him to take over the driving, while his sister could drive his car.  She was out of practice with city traffic, she said.  It made her nervous.

IV

But about the Min Min, well, as he remembers it, as she told it and as best he can, it was like this:  she was on her way back down from Queensland, it was in those days, and it was night.  She drove the road, without another car or a house in sight, much as they had, when all of a sudden strange lights appeared in the sky to the side of the road.  They were bright and at low altitude and seemed altogether not too far off the roadway itself, somewhere beyond the eucalypts in the nearest paddock.  There is no human factor that could be making lights like that, mainly because there are so few humans around and it was odd because the lights seemed to be following the car, moving parallel to it at some distance through the paddocks.  She could see their shine in the gaps between the trees. 

The lights seemed to be keeping up with the car’s speed easily.  She stopped the car.  The lights stopped.  She accelerated.  The lights accelerated.

Mandy thought it might be the Min Min.  The Min Min light is famous from the Gulf Country south to the start of New South Wales.  Many people have seen it and it’s mentioned in aboriginal legends.  Nobody can explain it. 

She thought it might be the Min Min, true enough, but she didn’t know what to do about it, in that country of vastness, in the darkness of the night without a soul to ask for help, in the days before mobile phones.  And then, after about half an hour, as suddenly as it had appeared the Min Min was gone. 

But he might not be telling it right.  It’s best that she should do it.

Dog house made from bottles

The Min Min Light is hardly the only unusual phenomenon the world has to offer.  Kashem Bhai in Bangladesh, for example, called on the help of Diabula and possibly the Portuguese to get him into the bazaar one day.  In Dhaka there's the phenomenon of the rishka wisdom to keep the wheels turning.  Meanwhile in Ukraine and Russia there's a phenomenon that's a bit more man-made: the cities that don't exist.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Min Min