a question of colour

Our last few days in San Telmo and the city explodes into colour.  On Avenida 9 de Julio rhe jacarandas are suddenly in flower, so the lanes of traffic speed or stall under a cerulean cloud.  The ceibo, the national tree of Argentina, has blossom which flames coral pink in the fierce spring sun.  It's so hot that we risk flip-flops, negotiating the slithery cobbles and cracked tiles and tram rails of Estados Unidos, where the young trees that line the pavements are covered in buttercup-yellow buds.  In the botanical gardens, we spot a humming-bird just feet away, a fizzing pebble of shimmering viridian suspended in mid-air and then instantly gone.  From the bus window we see a girl in shorts and huge electric-turquoise platform sandals.  I miss all those different faces, Joan says after she and Dennis move to a new area.  In Palermo, everyone is so white.

Fearing we are running out of time, we sign up for a tour with Buenos Aires Street Art.  Fast-walking, fast-talking Matt from Oxford takes us on a train to the outlying barrios of Villa Urquiza and Saavedra Park, where we spend three hours battling heat and mosquitoes (Matt rummages in his back-pack and produces a giant bottle of 'Off!' which we pass round like addicts) and marvelling at the work. The paintings are typically technicolour, intricate, elaborate, massive.  Often collaboratively done, they involve artists from various countries, most notably the Bologna artist Blu whose enormous world-within-a-baby (is it a baby?) covers the side of a building and features in his amazing animation (see his website blublu.org).  Closer to home, we watch artists at work on a new intervention round the corner on Tacuari.

The battered silver trains of the Subte have been transformed by the spray cans and rollers of the graffiti artists - some 400 out of some 550 units are painted, Matt tells us.  Although steamy, dirty and sometimes impossibly crowded, the underground system seems to work efficiently, although our friend Juan thinks differently.  At least it's cheap, I say: 2.50 pesos a journey seems like a bargain. Not for us, Juan says.  I have to rethink: five pesos a day, so 30 per week for someone working six days out of seven; about £4.  We push our way through the milling crowds on Callao.  In front of the brash storefronts, a clutch of children with a man I presume to be their dad are curled like kittens in the midday sun.  The city's rubbish collectors are on strike, so piles of stinking garbage spill into the streets.  The authorities spray the heaps with insecticide and declare a yellow alert on account of the heatwave.  If £4 a week is expensive for a successful businessman, what of the jugglers and the thieves?  Bob Dylan sings in my head: there must be some way out of here.

But of course we don't want to leave.  We buy our bottles of Malbec, dark as liquid garnet or slow-flowing blood.  We exchange contact details with new friends.  We have a final breakfast in Las Mazorcas on Peru.  How are you? I ask the lovely proprietor.  Oh fine, she says, just calorada, like everyone else in this heat.  We pay twenty pesos each for an ice cream from a different Dylan, also on Peru and surely the best ice cream in the world.  The raspberry flavour is a livid pink.  The taste, though? It transports me straight back to my great granda's garden, Francesca says.  On the way back to the apartment to collect our cases, I take a last photo of our gomero tree, and one of the empty house next door, painted by the Columbian artist Malegria to protest against homelessness.  Our driver Daniel berates us for our masses of luggage.  What's wrong with travelling light? he says.  Of course we won't all fit into his car.  When we accept his suggestion - that he take me and all the suitcases, and that the others pick up a taxi and meet us at the airport - his fury abates and he apologises for the lack of air conditioning.  As long as you have windows, I say.  Of course, he says, all the windows.  We are onto the motorway before I discover that the seat belt doesn't fasten; the windscreen is spectacularly cracked across its width.  We discuss countries of origin, surnames, tango, the heat.  When we rattle into the heavy goods lane at the first toll point and he abandons the car to help push another vehicle which has crashed into the barrier, I think of other things.  We zoom off again, features of the landscape (There's where they do the selections for the Argentine football team, Daniel says, rolling a cigarette) flashing past like rags and tatters of memory - the light blue of the national flag, the grey cat on Francesca's painted house sign (whatever happened to marmalade?), the shiny silver suit of the demo dancer the previous night at Porteño y Bailarin, that gorgeous first and last dance with Hugo.  It's all over now, Baby Blue, Dylan sings.


Not really, I suppose.  By some miracle we survive the next thirty minutes or so and the rest of the journey passes without incident.  On the way I read Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, about as far from life in Buenos Aires as you can get.  Soon we are back in Carlisle.  It's cold and very wet, and dark by half past four.  Everything works; everything seems pale by comparison.  Friends still in Buenos Aires email with news of a massive power cut which we have missed by a whisker and of the latest anti-government manifestacion in the capital the night before.  I look at the photos of the demo, think about the insecurities of life there, and the passion for change that seems to motivate many of the city's inhabitants.  Is this something we have lost in this country, or something
we have never had?  I remember the hot pink of Club Gricel's neon sign, the blaze of bougainvillea outside a pavement cafe, the kids playing football and taking drugs on the corner by the kiosk, where
the fat lady on the wall reminds us never to settle for simply existing.