Sunday Afternoon in Plaza Mafalda

The humid summer air sits heavily on Plaza Mafalda. The mid-day sun, high in the crystal blue sky washes the little urban square in a white heat.

Under the spreading plane trees, young couples barely clad, have spread white sheets on the beaten grass, playfully photographing each other with cell phones and sharing cups of hierba mata. Young parents clack by in flip-flops, pushing a carriage with a black-haired baby that could be cartoon Mafalda herself.

In the far corner of the park, a group of young men, stripped to the waist and drenched in sweat, have just finished a friendly game of futbol and are jostling loudly over attentive girlfriends and sweating bottles of chilled cola.

Nearby, an older, white-haired couple sits primly on a hard wooden bench, gently gesturing in conversation. Two attractive middle aged men walking fancy dogs exchange cheek kisses, revealing nothing.

The thick air is both quiet, and filled with a distant soundtrack that mingles the screams of excited children in a nearby community pool with the ceaseless barking of confined, frantic dogs.

This is not one of Buenos Aires’ show-piece plazas. It’s not pretty. A few trees have died, the grass has been beaten to dirt in places. Freshly poured concrete walkways lead to a construction fence where the central plaza is torn up. The barely stirring breeze carries pungent waves of dogshit.

No, it is a middle class park, a back yard for the hard-working Portenos who live in the airless towers around; those who can’t join their wealthier compatriots on a summer exodus to the beach. It is here that they come as the air cools at the end of a hot Sunday afternoon to walk their dogs and see their neighbours.

I spend the afternoon sitting in this worn little park below my apartment window, listening to the italian musicality of the Argentinian accent, starting to pick up more than a few isolated phrases. For a moment, I try hard to believe that I’m not a tourist anymore, but a resident; a still-isolated new-comer unable to strike up a conversation with the sweating neighbourhood around me.

My stomping ground

View from my bedroom window (left); My building (centre); My room (right) .

AMAUTA - my school (left); My favourite lunchspot (centre); My gym (right).

Best Parrilla (grill house) yet - El Establo, corner of Paraguay and San Martin.

Las casas de Belgrano / The Houses of Belgrano

From its oldest neighbourhood - the still sketchy San Telmo - Buenos Aires grew northwards along the shore of the Rio de la Plata (River of Silver).

When yellow fever hit the young city, the wealthy fled, leapfrogging the train station district in Retiro and carved the fancy neighbourhood of Recoleta out of the countryside.

Its neighbour to the north is Palermo, subdivided into trendy zones called Palermo Soho, Palermo Hollywood and Palermo Viejo. Today the once-bohemian hangouts around Plaza Serreno are avant-guard clothing shops selling expensive t-shirts and ‘bermudas’, overflowing restaurants serving big slabs of meat, and ‘too cool’ bars where locals and tourists vie for spots at the sidewalk tables.

Just beyond Palermo is my neighbourhood – the elegant, residential Belgrano. It is a huge grid of leafy residential streets that once boasted the elegant, architect-designed home of the upper middle class. “Revival styles” appear to have been popular – Beaux Arts, Classic, Gothic, Romanesque, even Tudor.

Today, elegant renovations of these compact mansions sit shoulder-to-shoulder with tall, narrow mid-century apartment towers, built on the footprints of demolished homes.

Here are a collection of some of the lovely old homes I walk by every day…

Todo contra la sobriedad

I wrote a poem for class this morning - with apologies to Gloria Fuertes and her poem "Todos contra la contaminacion". The exercise was to practice the subjuntive tense, but I was still a little buzzed by last night's bottle of white wine (with a slab of meat on a roof top terrace in Belgrano, of course). Apologies for the lack of accents, but my little netbook doesn't seem to have that function.

Todos contra la sobriedad

Que no sepas nunca la joya de descansarse
Que no tengas nunca la oportunidad de encontrar alguin diferente, alguien que nunca encontraria en su vida normal
Que no reis nunca sin razon, sin parar, hasta que te duela tu estomago, sin razon ...
Que te acuestas todos las mananas con memorias intactas, sin la selectividad dulce de cosas olvidadas.

The Cell

At the bottom of a deep pit, in a small, airless chamber, a lonely man lies, limp, on a tiny bed. The stifling air weighs heavily on him; his thin pillow and threadbare sheets are damp with sweat.

He can hear the voices of others, filtering down through the pit, but his only company in this crude cell are the mosquitos who have found him through the cracked glass door, left ajar in the hope of some movement in the air. Black smudges of their unlucky ancestors are smeared on the sticky yellowed walls.

Scattered around the chamber, his few sparse belongs lie in disarray, abandoned in despair.

As he struggles to breath, the sodden air develops a sickening, smoky texture. He shifts, rolling onto one side, trying not to imagine the horrors that lie ahead.

Hope is an effort.

His guardian, a skeletal witch with clacking dentures, has laid out his evening meal – a scrap of blackened meat and parts of a potato. She barks abuse at him, knowing he won’t understand, perhaps trying to unburden her own blackened soul.

He spends a sleepless night, trying hard to imagine the sparkling sea, vast prairies and soaring mountains beyond the walls that enclose him. He forces himself to construct a film in his mind; he is riding a horse through a verdant mountain pass, following a sparkling mountain stream to a place with crisp, cool air. But the image is fleeting, leaving him, dropping him down once more onto the tiny, damp bed.

At first light, he dresses quickly, collecting his belongings and escapes the cell, wandering burdened through the wakening city.

And then hope arrives. At Spanish school yesterday, the lonely, desperate man had unburdened himself to a sympathetic school administrator. Today, she tells him, you’ll move to a new “family”. With some trepidation, and a constant supply of Mate* he forces himself to concentrate through his classes, and then follows the administrator’s directions to his new home.

The door opens to a 6th floor aerie of polished wooden floors and crisp white walls. An older women, smiles warmly, her black and silver hair gathered elegantly into a loose bun. She leads him to his room – a gentle space decorated for a son who was once a teen; colourful sheets, crisp and clean, a broad white desk, shelves of books – Latin American authors and politics. A wall-to-wall window is flung open to the cooling breeze and a broad view of the city’s skyline.

Exhausted, he falls into the bed, and sleeps, soundly, awaking an hour later to see a vivid rainbow glowing over the city.




(* Mate ('mat-eh')- an herbal infusion consumed continually by Argentines, often passing a single 'bomba' around a group. "Mateine" seems to have an effect similar to "cafeine")

Photos from a weekend in Buenos Aires

Avenida Cabildo near the school. A Palermo townhouse. The San Telmo market.

Plaza de Mayo (the Cabildo). Street corner in the MicroCentro.

Trying to understand our Spanish. MicroCentro rooftops

Arriving in Buenos Aires

I left on the second leg of my grand adventure yesterday, flying out of a snow-dusted, sub-zero Toronto on a midnight flight to summer in Buenos Aires.

My new home in the north end of the sprawling city sits on the fine line between genteel decay and well-guarded opulence. I may have landed on the wrong side of the line. It's a 2nd floor apartment along the busy Avenida Cabildo in Belgrano. I've been given a dark, airless room off the kitchen - likely the 'maid's room' - with a door that opens onto a little terrace at the bottom of a 15-storey light well. Every noise from the 30 or so apartments above filters down into my room.

My "host family" is actually a single pensionner, small and wiry, with the youthful appearance of a woman used to honest physical work. Her home 'knows no hunger' she tells me, but the cold rice and tuna mash for my first meal may lead me to seek the fabled Argentinian food elsewhere.

In contrast, the leafy side streets behind our building are lined with magnificant confections; pristine Beaux Arts homes, two-stories of decorative opulence sitting shoulder-to-shoulder behind imposing gates. It feels like the mansions of New York's 5th Avenue/Central Park East on a more compact scale.

On my first morning, I bought a new cell phone from a "Claro" store, making good use of what is likely to be my favourite Spanish phrase - "despacio por favor", slower please. I think I've absorbed all of the instructions and special deals the vendor raced through, but we will see later today when the new device is charged.

It's mid summer here, and most business shuts down on Saturday afternoon. They've all gone to the country, my host tells me. So I have spent the early afternoon wandering along the broad, modern avenues and through the huge green parks of Belgrano.

This is only the first day. Let's see how it all unfolds.