My (now ex) husband, Gustavo grew up in Villa Martelli, a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The area is a warren of low, rough, cement buildings and rusting signposts. It looks the way you might imagine Mexico to look – an odd mixture of crumbling houses with iron grills. Brightly painted buses rumble noisily past groups of listless young boys on street corners. The main street is Laprida with side streets Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay that intersect with no stop signs. Here you stop briefly- but only briefly – at red lights particularly at night when this area is too dangerous to stop at all. The houses are small with low roofs of corrugated iron and tiled front gardens. Most curtains are drawn behind their gated windows and shops are shuttered after seven and during the long lunchtime break.
Argentinians live on a time schedule punctuated by mid-morning and mid afternoon ‘Mate’ breaks. Bitter tea sipped through an elaborate strainer-straw is passed from person to person in a leather pouch like a peace-pipe shared among friends. It is usually accompanied by dry crackers spread with sticky sweet caramel spread (Dulce de leche) or Medialunas, dry croissants that sometimes glisten with sugar crystals. In the morning there is strong, dark coffee and ‘facturas’ – little pastries you pick off the shelf with metal tongs and place in a basket to take to the counter where they are lovingly wrapped in white tissue paper that crackles expectantly around the sugary, glazed pastries.
People seem to drift into work just in time for Mate then at one o’clock sharp everything shuts down and people go home to share midday meal with their families. At my mother-in-law’s house we sit at a long, dark wooden table with a white lace runner and eat homemade moon-shaped pies called ‘Empanadas’. They have coded markings punched into their browned folded edges indicating fillings. One hole- spicy meat, crescent hole – chicken, etc. They are hot with melted cheese dripping from their edges. When my father-in-law was alive he would try to add to the confusion of claiming what each person had ordered by claiming every variety of Empanada for himself. He loved food.
Vegetarians in Buenos Aires eat mostly bread and cheese but sometimes there are bowls of salads – grated beet and carrot and chopped potato with egg. After lunch there is ‘Siesta’. Silence falls on cold stone floors as the sun shines through frilly net curtains. Men lie across beds with embroidered spreads; one arm across tired eyes as the women do dishes and hang up laundry in the hot sun. After lunch keys are collected from wooden sideboards and the metal gates of the shops slide reluctantly open. Old men play checkers in the park or lean on shop counters drinking Mate and listening to Gardel on the radio. He sings about the city of Buenos Aires and the fear that death will call him and he will never see her again. ‘Mi Buenos Aires querida,’ he sounds as if his heart will break. When Carlos Gardel died in 1935 three women committed suicide (one in Rio, NY and one in Buenos Aires). The city mourned its favorite son with a state funeral. It is said that if you place a smoldering cigarette between the cold bronze fingers of the life-sized statue on Carlos Gardel’s grave grave in the Cimeterio de Chacaritas, your wish will be granted. We’ll see.
Criss-crossed by wide avenues with heavy traffic, the city is less than beautiful but the heart and soul of Buenos Aires is in the details. There is incredibly beautiful typography (from the 20’s and 30’s) everywhere, and long, skinny French-style shutters on elaborate stone buildings.
Trendy little areas pop up in little neighbourhoods around the city where you can eat powdered sugar alfahores or sip Quilmes in sidewalk cafes. There is fabulous modern design in chic little sidewalk shops – cow skin hammock chairs and beautiful knitted rainbow dresses for little girls. I bought a 5’ ladybug with bulbous antennae and fiendish looking eyes. Later a taxi driver watches with astonishment as I attempt to wrestle it into a taxi. There are so many cute things for kids. Drunken looking sheepskin rabbits with floppy ears and big bottoms and giant pink heart-shaped fuzzy rugs with shiny red edges. The modern furniture is great too – animal hide everything and white plastic modern – great ideas and shapes. Districts like Avenida Santa Fe and Belgrano are crammed with shops full of white plastic mannequins in bias cut 80’s styles in cyan, white and yellow.
I love shopping for ordinary things in a new place – supermarkets and hardware stores and ‘mom and pop’ shops. The bra shop is one of the latter. Six metres by four, the walls are covered from floor to ceiling with small boxes with handwritten magic marker labels. A thin grey man in a clean brown work coat, sells thread and buttons, stamps and envelopes, jewelry and hair brushes in the front while at the back his wife presides over the cramped bra counter. She is an enormous woman in a flowered housedress. She hands me a stack of bras without asking my size and indicates a green felt curtain in a tiny storeroom. Bras in my size tend to be industrial affairs with flying buttresses and reinforced gables. These are delicate and I am immediately skeptical. Sure enough they are not right. Don’t ask me why but it seems that bras in my size (34E) are always bizarre. They always make one look like some sort of Soviet missile launcher with Torpedo breasts jutting out from under each arm, or they have a strange flattening effect that makes my chest look like a strange, lumpy extension of my stomach. For me shopping for bras is an eternal struggle and I have things to do, property to purchase… “I give up,” I say, looking dismayed but she is not to be deterred. “One more try” she says forming her thick fingers into the number one before climbing the rickety ladder to pull boxes from a top shelf. She hands me something beautiful and lacy. ‘Oh sure’ I say to myself. Behind the felt curtain I slip the lacy straps over my arms, adjust and stand back amazed. It is perfect. She smiles at me knowingly as I emerge. “I have been doing this for thirty years” she says in a slightly ‘I told you so’ tone of voice, “I just needed a little time….”
In 2004 a family friend of my Argentinian (now ex)husband had inherited an apartment in Buenos Aires from a cousin who committed suicide. Knowing that we were interested in purchasing something in Buenos Aires for our daughter he offered us the option of purchasing it. As our daughter was still small it was decided that I would fly to Buenos Aires on my own to check out the apartment. I speak Spanish the way Tarzan speaks English and so I was apprehensive but quite excited as I boarded the flight. I was met at the other end by my in-laws who deposited me at the door of the flat and departed. As I entered the apartment it occurred to me – rather surprisingly for the first time – that I would be spending the night alone in the deserted apartment of a woman who had shot herself there only a week before. I have long had a fascination for the feeling of empty rooms – the power that resonates in them long after the occupants have left. The three-room apartment, newly cleaned and painted, was empty except for a blow-up mattress and a stack of industrial candles (no electricity). Although I did not like the apartment, I felt a strange deep calm there; a peaceful quiet that invaded my dreams and held me quietly in its gentle arms.
Having decided that this apartment was not right and seeing as how I had three days till my departing flight I decided to look instead for the kind of apartment I would have liked. I head to San Telmo, the old cobbled tango district which has always been my favorite. Here I install myself in a dimly lit café to consider. I love waiters in Buenos Aires. Old men in short black jackets and long white aprons who move quickly around the café dealing with customers as if they were tolerated interlopers in a sacred crypt. Only long-term patrons earn their respect. I order quickly and decisively having practiced my order first in my head several times and he nods approvingly. I imagine that I have set myself apart from the tourist riff-raff but I am faced with a dilemma as I want to look at my map…. He returns in a minute with watery hot chocolate in a glass cup and a plate piled high with small golden medialunas. The bar is dark with simple wooden chairs and elaborately tiled floors. Tall French windows look out on the Plaza Dorrego where tourists watch tango demonstrations on Sunday mornings. I ask the waiter where the nearest estate agent is and he gestures without looking at me.
It is hard to understand the social codes in a foreign city but B.A. seems to run on ancient lay-lines of social acquaintance the way Paris does. A brief introduction to the local butcher from someone known will alter the quality of the goods you buy regardless of price. And so my cold –calling into Real Estate offices is not well received. The well-groomed real estate ladies in black pumps shake their heads at me when I finish describing the apartment I am looking for. “Impossible” they would say if they were French, here they just shake hair sprayed heads as if slowly dissuading a fly. I insist, pointing to likely properties posted in display cases and the temperature drops even further. “Not possible to see today”, “not in the style/area/ price range you are looking for”. They tell me it will take six months to find an apartment. But I am relentless, inspired by both my own pig-headedness and theirs. It is, of course possible to see the apartment today… but this is the charm of B.A., the oldest things are the best including the mis-trust of foreign money and a discrimination against a woman operating on her own.
Nonetheless, a few hours later I am seated at my café table once again, this time with my new friend Americo de Pinera. He is approx 70 with slicked-back white hair and he walks as if he is wearing slippers. He has lived in San Telmo all his life. This morning as we walk from apartment to apartment he points out the places he was born and lived, and now as he sips his ‘Cortado’ he tells me about the people passing by the window. “Spanish lady” he says indicating a dramatic woman with pale skin and a dark bob. “owns a dance school in Madrid” the woman swings an enormous black shawl around her angular shoulders as she steps into the street. “- Rents the whole floor of that building, $8000 a month” he smiles and nods as she whips expertly around the next corner.
The first apartment he shows me is a rabbit warren of small rooms lived in by dying or derelict relatives of the owner. There are animal smells and dusty pigeon feathers on every surface. A thin woman with frayed, dyed black hair proudly shows us the work her husband has put into the apartment – varnished pine boards hammered over windows and a medieval castle-like construction of cement bricks in the bathroom. I don’t know what to say and I don’t want to touch anything. I move slowly around the apartment as if politely circumnavigating a sick bed. Finally it’s over, I glance at Americo on the way down the stairs and he points to himself and shakes his head as if to say ‘for me, no!’ I am starting to like him.
Next he takes me to 1050 Balcarce, a low, French-style building one block from the Plaza Dorrego. Across the street a wide doorway opens onto a flowered courtyard with framed pictures of Gardel. An old man in the street argues with Americo about the original usage of the building. “Don’t try to tell me about San Telmo!” Americo is indignant as he shuffles across the cobbled street. We enter a carved wooden door into a corridor than opens to the sky. Up three steps Americo opens a door on the left and we enter a one-story house with high ceilings and glass French doors. Inside its cool I can feel the damp air rising off the terrazzo tiles. Many people would enter this house and see dirt on every surface, piles of garbage, peeling paint, ancient plumbing and stained mattresses. Evidence of neglect and old age. But I can see instantly how it will look. I can feel it. Original herringbone wooden floors polished and lovingly waxed, white plastered ceilings and Robin’s egg blue walls. Skinny green metal shutters creaking closed behind white glass paneled French doors in every room. One bedroom has a shuttered window on to the kitchen and I can see myself handing snacks to my daughter through it. Narrow stone steps twist up to a roof terrace with a white marble table and a view of the rooves and spires of nearby churches. I am in love.
Later I sit with my mother in law beneath a string of coloured lights on a square in Palermo Hollywood. As we sip cool Quilmes beers in the warm blue evening she lists off the places and things that are forbidden to her now that she is a single woman. She went from her mother’s house to her husbands and now doesn’t know how to de scramble the social code that binds her. She can’t invite married male friends to dine with her, but most of her friends were his friends and therefore fit into this category. And she can’t go out alone. She jumps at the chance for even this small adventure. We order more beers and I try to inspire her to live her life.
Some twenty-five years ago her baby-daughter was terribly ill and rushed to hospital in the middle of the night. In the ward chapel that night she made a solemn promise to the sister and to herself that if her daughter lived, she would volunteer in the hospital. After all these years this is the simple dream that lights up her face with the glow of possibility. We discuss the steps to be taken for a proper introduction and she swears to me that she will call on Monday morning. I give her advice from the privileged perspective of the educated, free life I have been lucky to live. I know how to put a house on the market, and a plan in motion and I quickly outline the steps as though the path will be easy. I know this is not the case but tonight everything is possible. Nonetheless my head is reeling with the beer buzz and the contagious potential of a new life as we leave the bar we link arms and stumble laughing into the warm spring night. The shops are still open and we stroll through the busy streets, sometimes separately, sometimes together. On the long taxi ride back to Villa Martelli she chats and even flirts a little with the driver. She is alive and sparkly and I am proud of her even just for this moment of possibility.
Across town in the smoky dance hall of ‘El Nuevo Salon de Tango Argentino’ powdered old ladies with black-lace stockings sit quietly waiting in groups to be asked to dance by ‘Tangueros’ with slicked-back black hair and permapress trousers.
