In today's Travel section, a photograph of the San Telmo neighborhood in Buenos Aires is misidentified as La Boca.
The Sun regrets the error.
In a map on Page 4 of today's Travel section, labels for the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were inadvertently transposed.
The Sun regrets the error.
There are few sensations so emptying as going back to a place that's no longer there, a house you lived in, a favored neighborhood, or even a city or country that has become utterly different, and you find that the nest that warmed your memories is gone. But it is not always that way.
My first sight of Buenos Aires came in November 1964. It was from the deck of a rusty freighter named the Rio Araza, a 20-year-old U.S. Victory Ship bought and operated by the Argentine merchant fleet.
It had taken three weeks to travel from Brooklyn to Buenos Aires. It was a long, hot voyage. The only object of wood on that ship, which is to say the only thing that didn't conduct heat, was the butcher's block in the galley. To make matters worse, we ran low on water off the coast of Brazil and had to ration. I walked down the gangplank with only $500, a good tan, few prospects as a free-lance journalist, but lots of energy. It's true: The sea is restful.
Buenos Aires is best seen this way, the way I saw it, coming in over the flat undisturbed surface of the River Plate. It is all verticals, the way New York's skyline is, but without that heroic modern architecture that so characterizes Manhattan. But in its center Buenos Aires unfolds in a strangely European setting, a collection of green copper domes, towers and cupolas, carved stone entryways, and vaulted galleries full of shops and coffee stands.
I had come from Washington. I remember the contrast of the white, neo-classicism of the brisk American capital with this gray baroque congestion, full of shadows and secrets, and oblique, cautious conversations. Recently I retrieved the two paragraphs put in my journal the day I arrived. They were an attempt to crystallize my sense of removal, my response to this new country.
"I would live in a city, or deep in the country. Keep me from suburbs everywhere. I prefer older cities as I prefer older houses, where people have lived, created their stories, and where the residue of their experiences down through the generations has accumulated and is at times detectable by some sense within us that is not always at our disposal, some way of understanding independent of our rationality.
"These houses of which I speak stand before compressed streets uncongenial to automobiles, where a million transactions money and goods have been made, declarations of love and hatred offered, and many pledges, where trust has been fortified or betrayed, probably an equal number of times."
Buenos Aires was such a place. Three years I lived there. From the first day I was at home. Earlier this year I returned and learned to my surprise that Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again. I also wonder at how little my attitudes have changed about the way people arrange their lives.
Yes, things were intact, and even improved. My memories of Buenos Aires were largely sown during my residence and on frequent visits throughout the long cycle of militarism (1930-1983) and the muscular anti- democratic politics of Peronism. My returns were nearly always made during periods of crisis and general political despondency. But Argentines have now lived nearly 15 years under an active democracy. And it shows.
Before, Buenos Aires was characterized by a seductive melancholy, a taste among its people for the sad pleasures of nostalgia. The prevailing attitude was captured by a friend there who said, "Our point of view? We simply believe things are never as good as they were."
Buenos Aires was a place out of time, a center of turbulent human emotion out on the periphery of Western civilization, removed from the usual currents of culture that flow back and forth between Europe and the United States. It was, if you can imagine, a glittering backwater. It had its own history and national experience, fought bloody wars few people here have ever heard of. It played no active part in the two major world wars in this century that have so shaped the thinking of Europeans and North Americans. It is, simply, a different place. It's literature was tragic, it's art violent and bizarre. It's music? Well, there is the tango.
Today there is a new beat to Buenos Aires. It is livelier, more expectant, integrated into the global economic currents.
Argentina always sent its beef and grain off into the world; now it sends its troops off to serve as United Nations' peace keepers in the Middle East and elsewhere, thereby broadening the scope of the country's perspective. What was once a slow-moving command economy has been turned into a comet of private enterprise, with all the usual results and consequences. More money is coming in than is leaving. Some Argentines grow rich as Croesus; others, bewildered, fall into poverty.
Under the stimulation of a new mayor, Fernando de la Rua, the first one ever elected (in 1996) to run this federal city, Buenos Aires has been spruced up. A new preservationist ethic is evident. Many of the lovely old buildings that line Calle Corrientes and the Avenida de Mayo, those domed and balconied piles so reminiscent of turn-of-the-century Europe, have been plastered-up, repaired, painted.
These graceful buildings in the Parisian style are emblematic of Buenos Aires. The two cities are similar, owing to the resort by the fathers of the Argentine capital to the plans and designs of Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann, the man who renewed the urban center of Paris for Napoleon III. There are the boulevards, Nueve de Julio (the largest in the hemisphere), and there are the cafes, places like La Biela, near the Recoleta Cemetery (maybe the world's most sumptuous necropolis), and El Tortoni, a few blocks down from the pink presidential palace on the Avenida de Mayo.
These days the chat is free and open in such places. Conspirators still gather inside and outside, drinking coffee, wine and vermouth with spritzers. But now they complain about how expensive things are, plot new tango shows; they make book deals, commission articles, sell real estate, and watch the girls go by.
Many visitors
There are many tourists in Buenos Aires these days. The currency is sound, and the peso trades one to the dollar. The best deals are on leather goods, in shops found on Calle Florida and Avenida Santa Fe, and actually throughout the warren of small streets called the micro-center. You get a discount if you pay in cash, pesos or dollars.
If you are a tourist in Buenos Aires, there are a number of things you must do and see. Go to the weekend fair in Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo. This is the oldest part of the city, near where it was founded. It is surrounded by rundown, balconied houses, arcades in deep shadow, full of antiques shops and cafes with Serrano hams hanging from their ceilings.
(Buenos Aires is one of the few capitals in the world that was founded twice, first by Pedro de Mendoza in 1536. His colony was driven out by inhospitable Indians. Later, Juan de Garay came down the Parana river after founding the city of Santa Fe, and reintroduced the Spanish presence on the banks of the River Plate in 1580. This time it took.)
You can buy art in San Telmo, of many periods, and old phonographs, pieces of the past. Once I bought a pair of antique aviator's goggles. The vendor swore they used to belong to the French author and flier, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who wrote of the daring pilots in the early years of aviation who brought the Europe-bound mail to Buenos Aires in perilous flights across the high Andes from Chile, and up from Tierra del Fuego through the windy furnace of Patagonia.
La Boca is nearby, down on the old working port. It is more a carnival than a neighborhood, with as many trattorie as houses, all painted up in bright pastels beneath the shadows cast by rusty ships' cranes. It is a place where you go to eat pasta, drink wine, dance and generally shake off all inhibitions.
There is a little walkway in La Boca, a street called La Caminita, named for a famous tango, about which more later.
The 13 million people of metro Buenos Aires are called portenos: Theirs is a port city; they look out over the River Plate, toward the sea. Because it is an export-driven economy, this gateway of theirs, this port, is always much on their minds. They gravitate to it.
A new area has been redeveloped on the once-decaying docks of Puerto Madero some blocks farther north on the river bank from La Boca. It is full of shops and restaurants and new tango clubs. Puerto Madero was like Baltimore's Inner Harbor before James Rouse got his hands on it. Nobody thought it had much of a future, and everybody was wrong.
The land of tango
One cannot think of Argentina these days without thinking of tango. Over the past 10 years or so it has become popular outside this country of 35 million. Tango shows are performed on stages in New York, London, even Tokyo. (The Japanese were tango-mad before the tango was chic.) Yo Yo Ma records the songs of the late Astor Piazzolla. He plays them as poignantly on the cello as their creator did on his bandoneon.
It is a strange thing, tango. The use of the word without the article suggests that tango is more than a dance, but a small artistic micro-culture that flowered many years ago in this nocturnal city at the bottom of the world. Tango has a dual expression. It began as a dance; it evolved later into a song. In the dance the man controls the woman (the mina), her every move. He signals by this to all other men in the room that the woman is his, and his alone. But in the song, the interpretation goes the other way. The woman has destroyed the man by leaving him, or betraying him. The tanguero sings of his loss. There is no such thing as a sunny tango, and they are not always about lost love, but poverty and life's myriad cruelties as well. And it is appropriate that that is so, for the Argentines, especially the portenos, cultivate the melancholy in their art, their music and their world view. Tango is the music of the people of this city.
These days tango is so popular you can see it just about anywhere, up in the opulent Barrio Norte, in Palermo, all around the town. Places like El Viejo Almacen (Old Grocery Store) in San Telmo and La Cumparsita. There is even a National Academy of the Tango, where this peculiar little culture is studied, and the lives of all its late great masters - Carlos Gardel, Julio Sosa, Piazzolla and others - are explored and written about in scholarly treatises.
There is no country in the world outside of Europe that is so European as Argentina, no city so continental as Buenos Aires.
The composite is as follows, in order of dominance: Spanish, Italian, English and German. Argentines pretend theirs is a white nation, and it is to a great degree, but the indigenous people are also evident, the darker Indian people of the north and far west.
Argentina is not long out of the darkest period of its national history. The military is no longer a disruptive factor in politics, though there is residual anger and strong demands for further punishment for those who waged the Dirty War between 1976 and 1982, during which about 10,000 people disappeared or were murdered.
The current president, Carlos Saul Menem, is a Peronist. His opponents spring largely from the Radical Party. It is the oldest political party in Argentina and might just claim the presidency in a year hence, when Menem must leave the presidential mansion in the suburb of Olivos, according to the constitution.
The newspapers are lively and many report the actuality of modern Argentina. This is one of the ways Argentina has changed and improved dramatically from the way it was during my earlier years there. It is full of public truth. What better thing could one say about a country than that?
An Ideal Day
9 a.m.: Mornings in Buenos Aires can be fresh, with the breeze flowing in off the River Plate, so go out, pick up the English-language newspaper, the Buenos Aires Herald, and find a "confiteria" where they sell delicate pastries the Argentines call "media lunas" and which the French call croissants.
10:30 a.m.: Walk over to the Recoleta, the walled cemetery for the elite dead of the country. Eva Peron is buried there, in her own little house, as is Admiral Brown, the Irishman who founded the Argentine Navy.
1 p.m.: Have lunch at the nearby La Biela, a restaurant right across from the Recoleta.
3 p.m.: Corrientes Avenue, featured in the film "Tango Lesson." They give tango lessons here, starting about noon, above the restaurant, but about 3 p.m. the live band comes on.
5 p.m.: Rest up for dinner. Argentines eat late.
9 p.m.: If your taste goes to pasta - you will have plenty of opportunity for the beef - take a taxi to La Boca, the old Italian neighborhood down by the docks, Buenos Aires' version of Little Italy.
Midnight: If you have some energy left about this time, take another taxi up the hill into San Telmo. Find a tango show. Clubs are everywhere, and you can never have too much tango.
When Your Go
Getting there: The national airline of Argentina, Aereolinas Argentinas, flies out of New York's JFK, and several American airlines go to Buenos Aires direct. American Airlines has round-trip service to Buenos Aires from JFK airport starting from $866; United flies from BWI to JFK to Buenos Aires starting from $1,082.
Accommodations: Hotels in Buenos Aires, like most other cities, range from cheap to dear. The Sheraton in downtown Buenos Aires is located on San Martin, 011-541-318-9000, and offers prices comparable to those its hotels charge in the United States. The Continental Hotel, Avenue Pte. R. Saenz Pena, 011-541-326-1700, is a less expensive hotel located in the heart of the city.
Food: Argentina is famous for its beef. It is tasty and somewhat tougher than beef in the United States for two reasons: It is entirely range-fed, and it is fresher when it is served. Aged beef is not prized here, and the cuts are entirely different, so ask for instruction from your waiter; look around, ask what others are eating. Among the preferred places to eat beef are La Cabana and La Estancia; the latter is on LaValle, in the heart of the city.
What to see
* Visit the Colon Opera House, on the wide Nueve de Julio Avenue.
* Take a tour of the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in the Plaza de Mayo.
* Take tea in one of the many restaurants on Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires' new "Harborplace."
* Visit the fair in San Telmo on Sunday: antiques, books, interesting street entertainment and - what else? - tango in the street.
Tip: Because the dollar and the peso are maintained at a one-for-one basis in Argentina, you can spend dollars as freely as pesos and they are accepted nearly everywhere. Frequently it is best to pay cash, because some shops charge a fee for use of a credit card.
Best buys: Leather goods, in shops on Florida and Ave. Santa Fe.
Best time to visit: Buenos Aires has a temperate climate, more or less like Baltimore. Because it is in the southern hemisphere, the best times to visit are the spring (October-November) and fall (April-June).
Information: Argentina National Tourist Office, 5055 Wilshire Blvd., No. 210, Los Angeles, Calif. 90036; (213) 930-0681.
Pub Date: 8/09/98