Double Vision

"Most of the places I have gone to dance 
lead a double life"

Carlos Calvo 

Julie Taylor: Paper Tangos

From last year's apartment (Carlos Calvo 846: 1st floor) you could look out past the geraniums to a muddle of old and new.  This year we are in the same building on the second floor.  It feels a long way up.  We cling on to the narrow balcony railing and crane our necks for the same view but the angle is different, so we learn to see both at once: the street view from 2011 is overlaid with our new roofscape of concrete and tile, bits of rooftop garden and the odd line of washing.

San Telmo invites this kind of double vision. Past and present jostle for attention.  On Sunday we walked the few blocks to Puerto Madero, what might pass for the Canary Wharf of Buenos Aires.  The recently regenerated port area gleams with plate glass and polished steel.  We stop for coffee and watch the cyclists and joggers pass in the sunshine.  A young woman on roller blades glides to a halt at the lights.  The waterfront's history survives, though, in the red brick of the refurbished dock offices, the huge cranes, and the eyesore blocks of flats, dating back to the sixties perhaps, half derelict, awaiting demolition presumably .   Heading back, we stop to photograph a piece of graffiti that has appeared since our last visit.  Rather than the hastily-sprayed slogan (though there is plenty of that, voices of the otherwise voiceless, I guess) this is state-of-the-art art, huge, elaborate, often shocking or funny - like the eyes of the enormous cat on the side of a building on Peru which, since it was painted round wall-lamps, light up at night.  Street art is everywhere: along the length of a train on the Subte, across a house wall, once the home of one of San Telmo's burgeoning rich, now crumbling.  It pulls us up short, making us see the past through the filter of the present.

Yesterday we walked the length of Carlos Calvo and Estados Unidos, the sections between the multi-lane Avenida Nueve de Julio and Paseo Colon, which Francesca tells me used to be a river, with streams from San Telmo flowing into it.  We pick our way along the cobbles, slithery with persistent drizzle, and imagine the swampy land that hatched the first big yellow fever epidemic in the 1870s, claiming 10,000 lives and driving out the wealthy settlers, leaving the area to be reclaimed by the poor.  Their splendid homes became tenement buildings.   Now, poverty and wealth coexist here in a way that is never comfortable for the visitor.  On the way into the bank's  cash machines late at night, we step over a boy sleeping on the steps.  San Telmo seems poised on the middle of that seesaw between regeneration and decline.

Two encounters bring this home to us.  Pip books us into a wine tasting (http://www.vinotango.com.ar) as guests of his friend Juan, the proprietor and Juan's mum.  There are nine or ten of us, seated round a table in this beautiful shop.   In front of us, trays of cheese, a silver-coloured tub that I imagine is for the bits we don't want to swallow (in fact, we swallow everything that is put in front of us, Juan and mum included) and two gorgeous plain glass fat-bottomed decanters, into which Juan empties the most expensive reds.  We sample five wines, one white, increasing in price and body.  'We don't know that much about wines,' our hosts say modestly.  These varieties of grape are unusual for Argentina and we are to discover them together.  In between bottles, Juan sings tango.  Apparently, he studied music in New York. The penultimate wine, a Bonarda called El Enemigo, wows us all.

Around the corner although a world away, we stroll down Chile and find the fileatador at work. He looks at us without comment over his spectacles as we stumble in castellano through a request for a traditionally decorated sign for Francesca's house, then laboriously finds four chairs which he arranges at the trestle tables opposite his seat.  The tables are covered with tin cans of paint, brushes, bits of paper, blunt pencils. Almost two hours later (see Pip's blog fatguyinfabioshoes.blogspot.com for a blow-by-blow account of a similar meeting) we emerge dazed into the now dark street, having struggled in several languages through every topic from the derivation of the word hedgehog and the difference between frogs and toads to the potential benefits of nuclear power.  No website here: he hands us a carbon copy of the handwritten order.  
   
It's hard to tell whether San Telmo is on the up, the smart new bodegas and bars a sign that the patron saint of sailors will raise her to new heights, or whether it is sinking back into the swamp.  Visitors can only see the past, not the political and economic pressures which the capital and its barrios face now; so says the owner of El Zanjon, one of the oldest buildings in the area.  The blind leading the blind, Francesca says as we pass two men with white sticks navigating their way along a busy pavement.  Who knows?  Certainly this is an area that will not roll over and die quietly.  On Peru, we come upon a woman, middle-aged, respectable, lipsticking her opinion of the authorities responsible for the violent repression of academics in the 'Night of the Long Canes' (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos) onto a commemorative poster - 'hijos de puta' was her view.  In the Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers and Grandmothers still march every Thursday afternoon to commemorate those lost during the country's 'dirty war'.  As a woman with a megaphone speaks each name, the rest chorus 'Presente'; the disappeared reappear.


I'm sure there are treatments for seeing double but I think I prefer it this way.  Today we visited the Giacometti exhibition at the beautiful PROA gallery in La Boca. The artist began every day, the curator tells us, with the intention to see 'con ojos propios', with his own eyes, rather than let his perception be dulled with preconceptions.  Whilst San Telmo doesn't encourage belief in miracles* it does teach you to look up (there are wonders on every block) but to do so with care where you tread.

*(although our cleaner, Milagros, arrived yesterday)