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| A oil painting of Pedro Figari depicting Candombe dancers (oil on canvas 75 X 105 cms.) Costantini Collection. Wikipedia sourced image, here. |
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
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 Uruguay
In Uruguay
My companion from the American
place starting with ‘M’ asked what I thought of Uruguay Uruguay Uruguay
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
He was surprised I was going
to Bolivia Bangladesh Bolivia Bangladesh La Paz
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
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
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
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
It was on the Monday I arrived
by small passenger ferry, across the river, back in Argentina
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| Candombe by Pedro Figari (Uruguayan painter, 1861-1938) Image from wikipedia. Here. |
Continue your journey, towards
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
