Socorro Acioli says she went looking for an anthropological subject during her honeymoon in Montevideo. The Brazilian columnist visited the Tristán Narvaja market, which she had heard offered a vivid glimpse of local life and customs.
The market had no clear sections, she writes. Its stalls ranged from fruit, vegetables and fresh herbs to olive-wood kitchenware and incense. A mother and son sold homemade cakes and cookies, and Acioli bought one of each. She also passed stalls of used books, including Spanish editions of Paulo Coelho and Isabel Allende, before finding Juan Carlos Onetti’s out-of-print novel “Juntacadáveres.”
Vendors at the record stalls, she observed, were mostly older adults wearing shirts featuring their musical idols. Nearby, a woman with blue hair read tarot for passersby. A double stall devoted entirely to gnomes caught Acioli’s attention, as did the antiques she came across: tiles, old photographs, and silver salad servers.
As the walk went on, the column shifts from market observations to playful uncertainty. Acioli wonders about the gnomes and duendes, the thermoses and gourds people carried, and the words of songs seeming to appear before her like subtitles. She says her first day in Uruguay was intriguing and promises to write more the following week.
Sources: Folha Ilustrada.