Folks who worry about hyperinflation-induced food riots and general mayhem in Argentina needn’t. As long as you’re reasonably prudent (don’t wear grabbable jewelry and watches when you join the crowds, park your passport, currency, and credit cards in the hotel safe), Buenos Aires is like Atlantic City with gauchos.
I passed half of my five-day sojourn with the tours my group visit entitled me to; half following my nose. And I only got nicked once by a cabbie.
The trip to the Recoleta cemetery was exceedingly interesting, not only for the widely diverse architectural styles of the individual mausoleums, but for the glimpses of Argentine history you pick up if you listen between the lines of the tour guide’s spiel.
She took us, for example, to the grave of the heavyweight boxing champion Luis Firpo, the legendary “Bull of the Pampas”; and though even this largely geriatric crowd had to think hard to remember who he was, Argentina’s once having been Number One at something was clearly important to this temporary basket case of a country.
The same rueful recollection of grandeur bygone spiced up her comments on the soccer stadium where Argentina had not so many decades ago surprised everybody by garnering the World Cup. The same theme emerged from her wry commentary on the humongous public sculptures that the grateful immigrant communities (Spanish, then German, then Italian) donated to their adopted country during the Centennial celebrations in 1910.
Strangely, in a city where there seems to be a bronze general on horseback on every other street corner, there is no monument to Juan Peron. Right now, he’s still the man to hate among the upper classes, the ones who commission big bronzes. At Cinacina ranch 75 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, owner Raul Ramirez paused from supervising the mouth-watering open pit barbecue we were benignly fated to tangle with to give me his gloss on Argentine politics: “We hated them for 20 years; then we give them a monument.”
I noticed such a portent on all the President Menem election graffiti painted on the concrete stanchions of the expressways out to the ranch. They bore the initials, P.V., which Mr. Ramirez explained stood for “Peron will conquer” in Spanish.
“We were the third strongest currency in the world in 1940,” he noted gloomily. “And look at us now.” He raises jumping horses on the ranch when he’s not feeding tourists—2,000 a month during the peak of the season, at $20 a gorge.
We were offered an extraordinary Gaucho Serenade for a second dessert. The “help” took off their aprons and danced, sang and played folk music of beguiling energy and grace. For me it was the high point of the trip.
There was a souvenir shop that had some authentic goodies—a pure wool shawl for $20 will give you the idea. But I set my heart on one of the wine pitchers, decorated with a folk spray of flowers in rose, the cracked craziness of its glazes adding all the more to its power. I guess it was the first time a gringo had tried to buy some of the furniture. Mr. Ramirez held a hurried consultation with his wife and agreed to let me take it away for 400 Australs ($8). It’s a honey.
There is a small but absolutely delicious museum next to the farm. I feel about working tools the way Will Rogers claimed he felt about people, “I’ve never met a tool I didn’t like to look at.” There are spurs and stirrups and bridles galore, remnants of the era when Argentine beef was a world standard.
And the fewer blemishes on the leather, the better the price in Europe. So the inventive gauchos picked up on an Indian invention, two balls of stone connected by leather thongs which whomped the cattle to death without the mess that swords or shot would entail. A wall full of them constituted one of the nicest site sculptures I’ve relished in many a moon.
Little Palermo Park is another must look at. I lucked out there on the political side as well, striking up a conversation with a resting jogger at the teahouse, who consults with the big firms to cool down the workers with bad confrontational habits from the Peronists era. Amazingly, he voted Peronista in the recent presidential election. “We’ve had to change along with everybody else,” he explained.
Imagine my joy when I opened the English daily Herald to discover that the Sixteenth Annual International Book Fair was opening the next day at the Municipal Exposition grounds, kitty korner to the Museum of Fine Arts. “Japanese Treasures” were on display, but minor-league stuff compared with what I have practically O.D.ed on. But the Argentine 19th- and 20th-Century stuff was fresh to me and well worth a long dawdle.
I schmoozed with the PR people, where I learned I was a month too early for one of my favorite architects, Alvar Aalto. So they appear to be plugged into the international art scene fairly securely—surprisingly more so than Brazil, as I was to find on my next pit stop in Latin America.
The Book Fair was a kick. For a retired English professor, any such collection of books is hog heaven, even when the language is Spanish, in which I read haltingly and speak not at all. But as I cruised the floor, there were two epiphanies, one small—a handsomely designed black sweatshirt inscribed with signatures of all the literary biggies of Argentina—and one very, very big, an interview with Jorge Luis Borges’ widow.
XXXXXXXXXXXXX that Borges married her five days before his death to insure that she inherited his goods. The writer’s family, who hadn’t been too solicitous of his condition in life, freaked out at this deathbed union, but the courts came down on her side. While I was talking with her, a contingent of teenagers from a private high school converged on her like she was Madonna—the pop star not the virgin. Their ebullient joy in her presence was remarkable.
There’s yet one more must visit in B.A., the so-called La Bocca (“mouth”) district where a river flows into the wide, wide estuary of the Rio Plata. The Italian immigrants who first settled it built their shacks out of the leftover odds and ends of the construction jobs they took up. And they painted their flimsy digs with leftover paint, of the wildest hues. Now the district has been retrieved as a hippie artist colony with an eye on visiting tour groups like ours.
One final new treat for visitors, the new Museum of Modern Art, had a show of works chosen by a jury of the best-known artists in the city. The exhibition was interesting enough—especially a 70-year-old sculptor’s randy parody of the Ubiquitous General on Horseback sculptures. But the enduring treat is the architecture, a recycling of an old cigarette factory by the city’s preeminent architect, Santiago Sanchez Elias.
There were other minor delights: walking through the train station, with the train shed patterned on London’s Victoria Station; a new bus terminal full of lively travelers and attentive peddlers; a pedestrian shopping district, Avenida Florida. B.A. is OK.
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, August 7, 1991
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