I came to Buenos Aires for the first time in 2003. for the second time, a week ago, early on a friday, very soon after waking up.
And 2003 I was in the city for a month, I arrived to travel through Argentina, to get lost in the endless pampas of the Pampa, through the glacial ice of Patagonia, for the empanadas of Tucumán and, however, I couldn't leave the federal capital. Their endless roasts entangled me, the streets with stairs, roundabouts surrounded by cars at any time of the day, and the energies of the night that lift edges and glasses of malbec from one block to another without any mercy. The gastronomic tentacles caught me, daring and social, the museums of sad ships and the afternoons with Quilmes and José, in which we walked powerfully to nowhere through the squares and sidewalks of the southern autumn.
The gastronomic tentacles caught me, daring and social, the museums of sad ships and the afternoons with Quilmes and José
I write and remember all this while I'm leaving. The navebus sets sail and the skyline of Puerto Madero remains bright on the other side of the afternoon sun clouded by the haze of the boat's windows., away, increasingly further away, without the poetic nostalgia of Rayuela, sin la pena tanguera gardeliana, It is far away and one thinks about returning to Montevideo and even feels a secret pleasure in abandoning the frenetic modern rhythm and the slow surrender to Uruguayan laxity.. Extremes of life separated by a sea.
From the classics: bookstores and cafes
Buenos Aires has changed but not that much. I remembered her as more melancholic than hipster., something older than innovative, and I am surprised by the prevailing universalization, in the metric limits that modernity allows, and the even hackneyed homogenization of the bracelets they sell in a secondary market. I remembered her as disruptive and overshadowed by an excess of feeling and, however, I find her happy, sunny, with very fashionable people milling about and an air of progress and alternative and premeditated culture that launches me into European territories, mexicans, gringos, in deep contrast with neighboring Uruguay, who could well be a reference for sentimental sailors and parish priests of good faith.
In Buenos Aires there are absolutely wonderful cafes, filled with a mix of charming goofball and photogenic literature that can even be insolently blue, pink or yellow, have semi-gratifying heating or air currents and host a whole cast of characters that oscillate, eg, between the talkative and sensitive screenwriter and the manufactured civil servant or the elderly. My friend Paula, who is a mother, multifaceted and cheerful, she took me to Café Coco, what is turquoise blue, It has wooden tables, magazines of various themes and some yogurts with fruits and cereals whose plate exceeds any possible visualization.
There are also graffiti. Graffiti that slaps you like epiphanies in many streets of Buenos Aires.
Before Café Coco we had been in Palermo in a pure bookstore with stairs and a cafeteria, and in another that is confused with a patchwork store and where they cohabit, in apparent harmony, Cristina Kirchner's biographies with the Pope's speeches, and children's stories with the encounter of oneself, the classic eggs benedict and the types of tea.
The truths in the streets
There are also graffiti. Graffiti that slaps you like epiphanies in many streets of Buenos Aires. In elegant neighborhoods and in neighborhoods that are not so elegant, in mixed corners and in abandoned walls. There are phrases that hit you in the middle of a walk, releasing a verse that sticks to you like a mole.. It could be a phrase from a tango, a poisoned sting, a “erase the sadness”, calm the bitterness” o, simply, “wind and shadow” no more.
Finally I think it hasn't changed that much.. Or yes, but the words keep falling out, that smells of the past although with a fresh coat of paint and that, yes, that vibrates and advances and mutates and changes, and that is more than enough for a city to carry the word “grow” on its back..
