Meet the locals: Nicolás Gómez – Post-modernist poet

It is an overstated truism that you meet great people when you travel, particularly if you travel alone. However, less often said is that these encounters occur when you are most down on your luck; when you have endured about as much as you can take. And so it was that I stood in Resistencia bus station at 2.00 am. The cold was the kind that slowly wears you down. The kind that at first you don’t notice; that you don’t notice until it’s too late, until it has got beneath your skin and will not leave until the morning sun exorcises it from your bones.

I had boarded the bus the previous night with naive optimism. No one in Asuncion (Paraguay) could tell me how long the bus would take, or If I'd be able to catch a connecting bus to Salta. “You will just have to arrive and find out” said the clerk far too matter-of-factly.

What I had expected to be a short wait turned out to be an 18 hour marathon. The cold had rendered my plan to lie down and read through the night unviable. Instead I found myself jumping up and down, with an occasional kicking of the feet and clapping of the hands; resembling what I imagine a tramp on ketamine raving to euro-techno would look like – a sight which sadly I have never seen. I was just going into a fresh bout of hand clapping when I heard a voice emerge from the darkness. “Tomas maté”. Embarrassed and slightly out of breath I stopped and looked over. There, about 30 metres away, a man sat in quiet dignity, a book lying open on his lap. “Si, claro”, I responded and wandered over.

As I crossed the short distance to where he was sitting I tried, to no avail, not only to forget how insane I must just have looked but also to suppress the line of reasoning that was rapidly assessing what kind of person would invite someone performing such a ritual to share a drink with them. Holding the warm gourd I greedily sucked up the bitter, boiling liquid – burning my mouth and rendering my taste buds senseless for the rest of the night. We stood and talked like this until dawn.

Nicólas Gomez, I discovered over 5 flasks of mate, is a local poet from Formosa, a city in the north of Argentina on the border with Paraguay. A member of a group of poets known as the Plastificambiantes, he writes about the heavy toll of the digital generation on the relationship between language, thought and reality. I smiled and nodded. With a quiet chuckle, I wondered how I had managed to walk into a conversation on the philosophy of language in a deserted bus station at 3.00 in the morning.  This was far too heavy for my current fragile state, but I continued to smile and nod. The company was good and the mate warm.

“What does Plastificambiantes mean” I asked, attempting to build a conversation out of a monologue. “What does SMS, or computer or cell phone really mean? They are words made up for a new reality. Plastificambiantes, is a made up word that not only refers to this phenomenon but is itself a part of it”. "Wow", was about as good a response as I could muster.

Such a concern with language and identity has long dominated Argentine thought. A brik-a-brak past of destroyed indigenous languages, imported and imposed Spanish and a steady flow of immigrants, particularly Italian, has rendered Argentina a huge and unnavigable anthropological labyrinth.

Only a few hundred metres from Paraguay, Formosa - a small provincial capital of 210,000 inhabitants – is a perfect example of this eclectic past. Sharing more in common with its smaller, tropical neighbour, it has a substantial indigenous population, which has resulted in the continuing survival of pre-colonial native language, particularly Guarani. Yet, recently modern technology has reinforced the political border, imposing a uniformity that is designed and defined by Buenos Aires. It is a uniform that most of Argentina finds alien. It is this that inspires my pensive poet friend. 

With the early morning sun the terminal was basked in a squeaky new light, and we watched as everything around us changed. The floor took on a shiny glow; reflecting a smoky haze up into the station. Sounds became louder and higher pitched, people moved more determinedly and expressions grew subtle and vague. At 7.30 my friend got on his bus and I was left alone again, with a signed copy of a few of his poems.