El Museo de los Indios, Resistencia, Argentina--August 2000

There wasn’t much reason for us to go to Resistencia, other than that it was a night’s bus ride from Salta, in northwest Argentina, from where we set off, and another from Puerta Iguazu in the northeast, where we were going. As it turned out, it was one of the oddest places we came across in Argentina.
As the bus made its way out of Salta, we passed hundreds of people with donkeys, all wearing bright cloaks and broad hats. It was a fiesta of some kind, and the sun set over it with that kind of nostalgia-inducing dustiness that the very short evenings summoned every night. The bus ride itself wasn’t anything remarkable by Argentine standards – we weren’t stopped by the army, nor did we wake up to feel the bus sliding back down the sandy surface of an untarmaced road – but we woke crossing the desert.
For the first and only time, we were sat right at the front of the bus, above the driver. The seats around us were empty, and so no one had drawn the curtains (total seclusion from the outside world is the general rule on Argentine buses). The sky and the desert were bang up against us, changing colour every second as the sun shifted position and the bus moved. There was so much space! It was as though we were being driven across the world as it was created, with an unformed creature or thought in every shade of blue or gold. The bus driver’s mate brought us some very sweet coffee (this was a posh route), and then we were in the outskirts of Resistencia.
Although we didn’t really see any desperate poverty in Argentina (unlike Morocco and Cuba), the edges of towns were all depressingly similar. Everything at first is built of corrugated iron, and lumps of rusted metal lie in the great yellow gaps between buildings. Then come the concrete outbuildings, decaying and unwelcoming, and then the flats in groups as though dropped in heaps. Every so often there’d be a really smart-looking place, with new paint and a shiny door, but it was almost as though the other buildings were about to gobble it up. Problem was, it was getting hot, and they couldn’t be bothered to move their concrete limbs.
Actually, it was before six in the morning, and, as we discovered as we hurried into the brand new Resistencia bus station, it wasn’t very warm. And nothing we saw in Argentina ever looked very threatening for long unless it was wearing a uniform and carrying a gun. We got into the bus station as the Argentines who’d travelled with us were collected by their families or otherwise wandered off. Nothing was open. It was cold. We had not slept well. In the gleaming narrow channel that ran the length of the station, we sat and debated whether it was worth trying to get into the centre of town. But the guidebook said we were a long way out, and we couldn’t see any local buses. The bus station was our only refuge, with its concrete path leading out across the parched grass towards the road. Even here, surrounded by the mangled concrete of the suburbs, the sky seemed huge, as though God had unscrewed the normal (English to us) one for repairs and whacked one of the Sahara’s spares in its place as a temporary measure.
Fortunately, the station contained the first intimations that we weren’t in some abandoned outpost. Every few metres along the channel down its middle were small plinths, on top of which were statues. This was why we chose Resistencia over Corrientes, about half an hour further on – Resistencia is the city of Public Art. We quite liked the statues we saw, but we weren’t really able to appreciate them, and sat about in a daze until about 8.30. Then other people started to arrive, and we went looking for a bus.

The centre of Resistencia was even more packed with statues. We never really worked out why this town in particular should have so much art lying about, but it was on every street, each piece a few metres from the nest, on waist-high plinths – faces, figures, forms – outside shops, houses, hotels.
We were wandering in the afternoon, baking in the heat. There was no one around because of the previous night’s celebrations, but even if there had been it was difficult to see what they might have done. There didn’t seem to be much basis for the economy, other than the town’s role as provincial capital and the university. As it was, the place was dusty and eerily quiet. The only man we met seemed a bit bonkers, thereby confirming the ancient wisdom about the midday sun. Like all Argentines, he gazed at us for some time, and then asked where we were from. He seemed quite pleased that we were English – but then again, everyone was. He scratched his head, wished us good day and was off again, his blue T-shirt collar sticking up behind his head. We sat on a bench in the central square (normally the preserve of old men in shirts and braces) to take advantage of the shade from the palm trees.
After a while, we decided to go and find the “Park of Statues”, Resistencia’s chief attraction (other than the other statues), according to the guidebook. There was no shade on the road leading up to the park. The pale buildings and glittering windows threw the heat back at us like a wall. These places were well appointed, clean and shuttered. No doubt they had air conditioning. I imagine the people in the suburbs just lay inside their concrete shells – they stay cold for a long time, as we had discovered a week ago in a Cordoba hotel.
At last, the park. A disappointment. It was a rectangle, about half the size of a football pitch, bordered on two sides by high walls, and on the other by car-lined roads. Here were some people, sitting and laughing slowly as though on a stretched tape.
The statues were rubbish. As Claire pointed out, it was as though the Resistencians had dumped all the ones they didn’t like in a corner out of the way. Everything in the park was that sort of grand bland steel abstraction that people who design shopping centres commission to get some kind of tax break. Claire’s theory was given some credence by the fact that there were children climbing up and down on the art without any kind of disapproval from the parents. This was something of a contrast with the total absence of vandalism or graffiti on the statues in the streets.
We sat in the shade again for a while, before wandering back into town. Things were opening by this time – on the frazzled road to the park a number of ice-cream cafes had miraculously appeared. We were tempted, but then put off by the eerie absence of other customers. Argentine Gothic? Where’s Borges when you need him? We had coffee (Claire had Sprite) in a café on the main square and mused in a crispy, overcooked kind of way about what to do next. According to the guidebook (which was becoming a bit like one of those friends who are unfailingly inspirational about each and every idea, but turn out to be a touch wayward in practice), the Museo de los Indios at the university was particularly good and nationally recognised.

Resistencia University is about 45 minutes’ walk from the main square. I led us on a zigzag route as the town got up and went about – children screaming around playgrounds, women leading other children in crocodiles and middle-aged men leaning against walls or driving vast ramshackle pickup trucks, staring at anyone unusual. As the fairest-skinned, fairest-haired people for several hundred kilometres, we counted as unusual. The thing about Argentine staring, however, is not that it’s a challenge, or hostile, or even particularly curious. They just look at you. Men with whiskers, men with rolled-up cigarettes, men with huge bellies. They all stared. Between them, everyone went about his or her business. This was an affluent neighbourhood, and they had a vast church, which had two blocks of land (almost all Argentine towns are laid out on a grid pattern – a hangover from the Spanish colonial days) to itself.
Fearing the wrath of lurking priests, we opened the gate and sneaked into the churchyard. The façade was vast and imposing against the immense colourless sky, but the more you looked, the more you could see paint coiled out from the stone. The red eaves looked as though they were covered in hundreds of tiny pointed tongues. Then the bells rang. I say rang, but it was more of a fuzzy representation of ringing – the chimes were recorded. It was grotesque, because the church had such an air of deflating grandeur – like so many things in Argentina its dilapidated state made you want to write languorous tragedies set amongst a declining nobility – hilarious, and – seriously folks – a bit of a metaphor for Argentina itself. The country’s leaders and their pals at the IMF always promise to offer it modernity, but what it gets is a bunch of electronic bells and economic meltdown.
The university is outside the town grid, facing the houses from behind its fence. There was no staring here. Everyone was young and had somewhere to go or, more importantly, something to say. We passed through the gates and found ourselves in the midst of hundreds of students clutching their books and talking with great animation. It was only after a while that we noticed, dotted here and there on benches under the thin trees, people reading, quietly but with the same intensity as the people speaking. It was very pleasant to be able to amble about, being totally ignored, and explore a side of the country that few people get to see. We were hot, though, so we sat in the shade again and cast about for signs to the nationally recognised museum.
Nope. We went back to the entrance gate, to see if there were any clues on the signs there. Nope. Not even a mention of the nationally recognised museum. We looked for, and found, a door into the central complex (a nice, low pale brick building). No mention of the nationally recognised museum. No signs. Some metal lockers and more students talking excitedly. No one challenged us, which strangely made us feel uncomfortable – if this had been England, we would have been summarily executed by now. We went back outside. I was all for heading back to the centre of town, but Claire was determined (not that she’s ever not determined) to find the museum. We wandered about some more, went into other corridors and came out none the wiser. We looked for any signs at all. Nope. Perhaps the students spend their first term being taught instinctive knowledge of the campus.
Finally, in the distance, we spotted a security guard. “Ask him,” said Claire.
“Ummm…” I said – it would be me doing the asking, in my guise as “linguist”.
“Go on, we’ve spent half the day looking for this museum!”
She had a point. I approached the guard, a tall man a bit older than us and cursed with a brown military-style uniform. He smiled as we attracted his attention, but I was still expecting the kind of “Bog off” response you’d get from a mangy English jobsworth.
“Buenos dias, donde esta el Museo de los Indios?” I enquired.
“El Museo de que?”
“Los Indios.”
“Los Indios?”
At this point I would, had I been learning Spanish for more than six weeks, have mentioned that it was a nationally recognised museum.
“Da me su libro,” I assume he said, but the words bounced off my ears and scurried into the undergrowth. Anyway, I understood his gesture, and showed him the book. I pointed at the heading under which the nationally recognised museum was described. He looked at it for a long time. Then he laughed.
After that, he broke out into one of those bursts of spontaneous kindness that were so common in Argentina but rare as monkey’s eggs anywhere else. He set off towards the university building, motioning us to follow. He plunged into the cool interior, and we trotted after him, surrounded by students and mysterious unmarked doors. After a few minutes, we were beginning to think “Hang on, he’s a security guard, and he’s taking us all round this building, and not keeping an eye on us at all.” After a few more minutes, we started to think “Hang on, he’s got no idea where this museum is.” We were completely lost, and had no choice other than to tag along.
Every so often, the guard would stop and contemplate the doors before turning and grinning at us. It was quite true that he had no idea where the museum was. In fact, it was probably the first time he’d heard of it. What he was doing was trying to find one of the history lecturers for us. He did, in the end, and explained that we didn’t speak much Spanish. We knew this because the tutor turned to us and said “Hello.”
The guard disappeared before we could even try to thank him for spending half an hour of his time helping a couple of useless tourists. The history lecturer also immediately stopped what he was doing, and led us to one of the many anonymous doors. He opened it, smiled, and ushered us in. This was the nationally recognised museum.
The artefacts were interesting, and the fact that there was much at all was informative, because the history of the Argentine Indians from the arrival of the Spanish has been one of almost complete annihilation. It added something to the crumbs of information we’d picked up while in Cafayate in the northwest. It’s a shame that we couldn’t read the labels because there was a lot of information there and the Indians in the north of the country did have the distinction of maintaining independence from both the Incas and the Spanish from the 15th to the 19th centuries. The only disconcerting thing was that the nationally recognised museum was only about the size of a large living room, and very gloomy. While we were looking round, some of the information sheets on the wall swung out at us – it was a door, covered up to make maximum use of the space. A very severe-looking woman emerged, and then went through another hidden doorway, from where we heard the sound of intense conversation.
We spent less time in the museum than we’d spent searching the university building, but it was all worth it. The bizarre and the enjoyable don’t always arrive together, so it’s best to savour it when they do.