Some live in mansions, some live in holes...
W.H Auden: Refugee Blues
Auden's poem, written 70 years ago, explores the hostility felt by refugees from Nazi Germany in the country of 'welcome'. Many inhabitants of Buenos Aires hail from elsewhere: new arrivals from Bolivia and Peru perch on the fringes of one of the bulging villas, shanty towns; almost everyone you meet has an English cousin or uncle or great-great something. Yesterday we visited Maggie, a friend from Cumbria now on her fifth six-month stay, in her flat on Avenida Nueve de Julio. Escaping the English winter, her summers here often seem beset by problems. Still, she keeps coming back. She takes us up to the 14th floor of her apartment block to look at the view. Cars on the complex intersection above San Juan zip along like crazy toys below us. The jumble of ugly apartment blocks and crumbling splendour spreads before us. On a clear day, Maggie says, you can see the river, boats appearing to glide over the rooftops, occasionally a big ship from somewhere far away. She seems to feel at home here, as we do.
The issue of Las Malvinas rumbles on, the protests in the Plaza de Majo a permanent fixture apparently. Even so, we rarely encounter any hostility towards the 'enemy', and any mention of Inglaterra is likely to elicit an enthusiastic Que linda! The exclamation serves for almost any situation: a fine day, a milonga, a piece of music, that last dance. Francesca is building a repertoire of lines to charm her partners between dances, a crowded dance floor como una lata de sardinas and the latest, an economical Mmm mmm with the stress on the second mmm. In Rino's class, Fernando wraps me in his huge embrace, rubs my arms and shoulders, and punctuates every small success with Muy bien, niña. Muy bien! Struggling for dances in the milonga, I see Rino striding the length of the floor towards me. Francesca, I think, or maybe Nancy. But no, he's coming for me. We dance to a lovely Donato set, including m favourite Sinsabor, the troubles of love. At the finish Rino says something I don't quite catch then translates laboriously: I - love - you. I love you too! I say. It's true.
You wouldn't expect to find love on the Subte, I suppose, though we meet some interesting people. Last Sunday a young man with an interesting haircut and an armful of tattoos stops us on the pavement and asks for directions. We clutch our bags warily in front of us, all those warnings echoing in our minds. Alejandro turns out to be a web designer-cum-surfer who travels the Americas in search of available work and the best waves. Come to Cornwall, Francesca suggests. It would be cold, he says. Although he lived here for six months a while back, he has forgotten all he knew about the underground system so he tags along with us. Suddenly we are experts. He invites us to visit him at his home in Bogotá. His lifestyle makes it hard for him to have a girlfriend. Pero viajo con dios, he says: I travel with god.
Travellers on the Subte can buy just about anything: tissues, pens and pencils, a screwdriver. The other day I encountered a man selling head torches. One morning a young girl - twelve, thirteen maybe - gets into our carriage. She has one arm round a baby. The baby, stiffly upright, gazes at the passengers. The girl moves down the aisle, stopping in front of each traveller and holding out her right hand as if for a handshake. If you offer your own hand, you receive that street greeting of a palm-to-palm slap followed by a gentle knuckle punch. Most do. Then she leaves a matchbox-sized pink card on your knee. Amor is printed in a heart on one side; on the other, a few lines where you can write a message. I return the card with a few coins. Her smile is faint. The baby looks away. I wonder where she lives.
The city has a variety of undersides. One afternoon we play at tourists and follow the guided tour of El Zanjon, a building which charts the course of San Telmo's history. Built almost 200 years ago as a single dwelling for one of the city's wealthy families, it later became a conventillo, housing over a hundred people in 23 bedrooms. It fell into disrepair and in the 1960s was condemned by the government. Twenty years later it was bought by the current owner, who wanted to turn it into a restaurant. The initial excavations uncovered first a huge cistern below ground, and then the remains of an earlier home with a lookout tower. The old tunnels where the stream-cum-sewer had been bricked over after the yellow fever epidemic were dredged, removing tonnes of debris. The owner abandoned the restaurant idea and began a thirty-year restoration project, turning the building and the tunnels beneath into a museum. The tour is fascinating, taking us from wealth to poverty and back: El Zanjon is now available for hire for corporate events. We ask how much. Think plenty, our guide says.
A few blocks from here, holes in the ground of a different kind. Francesca and I rediscover, eventually, the site of the old Club Atletico, under the flyover where Paseo Colon meets Cochabamba. In 2002 archaeologists discovered intact the basement torture centre where 1800 prisoners were 'disappeared' during the Dirty War of the 1970s. When we found the site in 2010, we watched as people with trowels walked down the short flight of brick steps and disappeared below ground. Parts of the excavation, now complete, had been landscaped and paved, and a memorial created; parts were still to be begun. Two years on, we think there has been some progress, though the whole thing has an abandoned air. A cycle lane now runs along the perimeter fence. The memorial park with its seats is firmly behind bars. And the mention of the site has disappeared from the guidebooks. I imagine the area being bulldozed to form the next carpark. Francesca disagrees. They couldn't get away with it, she says. There would be a public outcry. I'm not so sure. Whilst investigations continue and the trials of the perpetrators reach their conclusion, I have the sense that this memory has been packaged and preserved elsewhere, in the elaborate monument on the other side of the city perhaps, leaving reminders like this one buried like the polluted waters below El Zanjon.
Back in our mansion, we look at the holes in the glass at the top of the building, the damp on the walls. We hear talk of the rules of the building and government regulations which make restoration or resale difficult. There is much chatter about politics, corruption, the economy, the difficulty of buying dollars. Not everyone is of the same opinion. On the day after the latest mass demonstration which stitches up the traffic for hours, we listen to an Argentinian friend dismiss with scorn the pot-banging middle classes whose anti-government feelings are rooted in a desire to avoid taxation. The friend (who was in prison for three years during the 1970s military rule) reminds us of what the present government has done on behalf of those most in need. Still, there is no housing benefit. The latest 'land grab' sees around 6,000 squatters staking out a piece of land in the Parque Indoamericano, with protests from local residents torching tents and chanting racist slogans. Nothing is straightforward in this Through the Looking Glass world. We have only a few days left before we return to what we regard as normal. This morning the sun is tempered by a cooling breeze. 'I LOVE this city,' our friend says, 'in all its uglinesses.'
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