Thoughts Occasioned by My Father-in-law, Garlic, and Montevideo's Mercado Modelo

For 20 years, since the man he shared a fruit stand with stiffed him, my father-in-law has worked as a simple middleman carting vegetables, mainly garlic, from Montevideo's giant central market to faraway cities and forgotten towns. He likes the easy pace of it, the chats with old friends at the market stalls, the quiet, jostling hours on the bus, the quick conversations with the terminal staff who watch his extra bags as he carries one slung over his shoulder to front-yard kiosks and corner bars, to steady customers who smile when they see him and offer him drinks and pay him when they can. He likes the card games and drinks at late hours in bars with fleeting friends his age and temperament who remember fatter times, and greener.

We left early in the early morning, dressed in flannel and jeans, walked to the bus stop near his apartment: concrete slabs in patchy grass and rusting metal tubes holding up a corrugated fiberglass roof. Light from the streetlamps overpowered the stars, or the clouds did, and crickets sang, or frogs, and a cat crossed our path and turned, paused, looked back menacingly, then continued on to the overflowing trash bins where it foraged for food, or slept. We waited in silence and yawns as other weary travelers arrived dressed in ties and slacks and dresses and yawning and silent and drab in the feeble light blocking stars and casting the world in dreary gray, and languor.

We hardly spoke, but I observed him, white with years and worn and wizened, his skin leather, his hands strong and curled from years of hauling his 50-pound bags of garlic—I, unaccustomed and soft with tender hands and worsening eyesight from reading books and people.

* * *

The plot today is we are going to Mercado Modelo, Montevideo's central fruit and vegetable market, where he will buy garlic to sell and I will observe and accompany and sit lethargically on boxes of apples eating dried sausage on crackers and fry bread as the sun slashes through the spaces between easterly buildings.

* * *

He is like so many other Uruguayan men, dressed in a plaid shirt and faded pants and comfortable alpargatas, canvas shoes with coiled-rope soles, with a white moustache and missing teeth. He is five-foot-eight but hunches over, he is overweight, he walks slowly and deliberately, sings ever so slightly when he talks, calls me "mi hijo," my son, and watches the world with piercing steel-blue eyes.

* * *

On the bus, the people scattered to empty benches to sit alone, but my father-in-law and I sat with each other, his shoulder jabbing my biceps, in silence. After a short ride, we arrived at the market, in the warehouse district in the middle of the city, north of the tall buildings, along Avenida José Batlle y Ordoñez, named after Uruguay's great social reformer president, who served twice in office from 1906 to 1910 and from 1916 to 1920. But the street name is ceremonial, perfunctory, and everyone calls the avenue by its old name, Propios, which means "ours" or "those who belong," because it once divided Us from Them. The market is on the Ajenos side.

I was struck immediately by the immensity of the conglomeration of merchants, the hustle of runners with hand trucks dashing through amoebic crowds, the sweet and pungent smells of fruits in all stages of ripeness and decay, stacked neatly in piles and boxes or trampled underfoot. I saw colors and blurs of movement in the darkness turned back by vapor lights strung high from vaulted ceilings. I heard echoes of a more glorious past grown too big and past its limits in the stalls and stands sprawled outside the original fading central building into smaller buildings and spilled over into alleyways and walkways, among the trucks and tarps and stacks and stacks of crates and boxes, everywhere.

* * *

I thought of the impossible complexity of interrelations. I grew up near New York City, 45 minutes west in suburban...