9/19 and 9/20 -- Tilcara, Argentina

The mountains were wrinkled and modest around Tilcara, and the buildings were single-storied and cracked earthtones. The sidewalks often rose several feet above the ground -- steady and level, as the dirt road beneath it dipped and twisted -- and it could make a Quechan baby girl and her pre-pubescent brother the same height. Perfect for walking lessons. I found myself tripping over edges and missing sections of pavement here, as I did in Buenos Aires and as I will do when I burrow my way through Chile and into Peru. In this place, though, everything around me just looked too much a part of itself to have to worry about my feet.

I was walking towards another basketful of empanadas when something in the sidewalk halted my thoughtstream. It was seated on a stoop that was carved out of one section of the sidewalk I was swaying down, and if my eyes had been more cultivated by the earth (like these peoples` are) I might have at first thought it needed to be swept away. But no, this was a stiff-billed hat like coddled topsoil on top of a dusty face with a scorched-tan jacket and pants like roots. It was a man, but it was a man who looked as if he had come directly up from the ground below, the ground that his feet could not even graze from his perch. And I barely realized I was staring at him until I was gone, on the other side, my rhythmic feet being unburdened from my attentions.

I thought little of the man for the rest of the day, mostly about my plans to go dancing with two Buenos Airean girls who worked at homely little Tilcara Hostal. It would have been better to think of good things to think about, though, because once we arrived at our little dinner-and-live-music joint my friend the Language Barrier showed up once again, and with an impressive collection of unnoticeable little knives. The music had a beat and the beer kept my throat lubricated enough that swallowing my saliva was a perpetually winnable battle. And then the hour passes and the Man From The Earth comes up to our table, from some corner or some ancient trap-door, I didn`t see him come in and I didn`t see him in my neck-craning glances of solitude either but I am immensely glad to see him. He is a state of belonging that I have lost in a maze of spontaneously-elected locales. He is anywhere from 45 to 70 and thus seems nowhere between the two. He stands next to the girls and tells them stories with a voice that`s misty (on top of the amplified acoustic guitar and patterned xylophone improv) and the girls laugh and dart glances to each other with the silent conveyance of offbeat amusement that I think must be shared between females of all cultures throughout time and the earthman strings them along as if he has been a part of all cultures throughout time and pays their looks as much mind as distant bolts of thunder. They call him Chiqi. Chiqi Chiqi Chiqi. I smile at him discreetly and excuse myself to a bathroom made of pipes with exposed walls.

Then that`s done and I come back to hear the man at the microphone ask Chiqi to come sing. The room erupts in cheers, even the corner filled with cigarette smoke and soft-bearded old boys with berets wants him to sing and so he does. He comes up to sing one song and is urged into singing three by his local groupies and their touristic copycats. He sings tango, direct and pure, as the leadman paws along with his guitar. It is not the tango I heard in Buenos Aires . . . it does not dip and sink with orchestral flourish, it does not incite flesh to meet flesh out of hazy necessity, it does not outline the shape of a beautiful woman far away who must twirl her loss towards her even as her hands grow cold . . . this is different. It is a goodbye in musical triptych. Shadows from the microphone he holds slices down the center of his face. The room is darker, for him, or maybe because someone turned some lights off. Ten minutes of obscurity, of the deep delight of a child under a table-clothed dinner table full of legs and secrecy, and I am returned.

He walks back over to our table and I tell him: ``Me encanta la voz.`` I love your voice. But no, that`s not exactly right. I love the voice. In Spanish, your voice and your hands and your head don`t belong to you. They just are. I think that When this man pieced himself together from the elements, in his instinctual mission to Make Simple, he must have brought along some grammar with him too.

I saw Chiqi one last time. It was the next night and I was walking around the dark square alone, trying to avoid a distant voice that cried for the necessity of me needing to be around people, even if they were people I would know little about. He was backlit by streetlamps, a sharp shadow against the dull gleam of the church across the plaza. He recognized me and told me he knew where the hostal girls were. We walked for two blocks; he wheezed with each step, and I asked him questions that fit the space between immense curiosity and scant language. He told me that Chiqi is a nickname, My actual name is Roberto Carlos (something something) and I am from Tilcara and this block here, it used to be owned by my grandfather. I asked him ``What was your grandfather`s work?`` and he said ``Yes, work.`` I couldn`t agree more with that answer. Then we entered a little peña, a little dance-bar, and I had to be alone. Chiqi took the couch and the attentions of the Tilcara Crowd and I took a seat facing a wall pasted with old Argentinean political pamphlets mixed with pseudo-pornography. The girls showed up a half-hour later and we didn`t talk. Just before leaving I spotted Chiqi propped up against a wall on a wooden seat, the bill of his hat pulled down over his eyes, fast asleep. And I thought to myself . . . well, perhaps underground is a lonely place to go.