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Buenos Aires (June, 1987)

Solicitous friends suggested that I ought to take a bulletproof vest, because Argentina is "a military state"; but once I got there, I didn't see any military, other than cadets at the parade grounds on Saturday morning. (My first thought was that they must be boy scouts; a colleague told me otherwise.) On this level, the Alfonsin regime has certainly succeeded. Indeed, there were remarkably few uniformed police for a city its size. In front of the synagogue that once housed Rabbi Marshall Meyer, to whom Jacobo Timmerman dedicated his best-seller, there was on Sabbath morning one unarmed guard in a doorman's uniform; and when we asked to see a particular official whose name he did not know, I got the impression that the synagogue wasn't this guard's regular beat. (In West Berlin, by contrast, the armed policeman outside the synagogue inspects your bags before you enter, even if you're wearing a skullcap. In Israel, there might be two burly boys with machine guns.)

Buenos Aires is a real city, with people, people, people, all over the place; and merely watching them, the variety and purpose of them, is a pleasure, as it is in any true city. There are many little shops, most of them with customers, though I'm told that fewer are buying than before, because just now the economy is not as good as it used to be. The air stinks of exhaust fumes, perhaps because there are lower emission standards for cars; there are also fewer trees than in most cities I know. Many downtown one-way streets are several lanes wide. In its scale--the height of its houses, the width of its avenues--the cities resembles Queens, say, more than other New York City boroughs.

Many people are on foot, no Los Angeles is this, as there seems to be no fear of walking the streets in Buenos Aires--people of all ages appear to do it, at all times of the day, even into the middle of the night. In the heart of town is a pedestrian street named Florida. On Saturday night, around two in the morning in mid-June, which is, remember, the middle of winter down there, I saw thousands of people milling about. Most were young, to be sure, but some were middle-aged and a few were certified pensioners. Shops were open, there were people waiting on line inside the fast-food restaurants, and there was a thick line, with people four abreast. I asked where all those people were going? "To the movies" was the reply. My hunch is that these pedestrian streets would be as populous at 4:00 am. as now.

There is a subway system whose fares are cheap, and a plethora of city buses that are, compared to those in other cities, undersized, colorfully painted, and rickety-looking. There is a visible abundance of tiny taxis painted yellow and black, even in the outlying areas, and fares are computed from the meter, with adjustments explained on a card visible in every cab. For tips you are advised to round off to the nearest convenient unit (thus for 14 australes, pay 15), and I didn't find any drivers ungrateful for such a small supplement. My own problem with these taxis, which are manufactured (or at least assembled) in Argentina, is back seats so small my feet felt painfully big.

Though Argentina is geographically a big country, half of its twenty-five million people live in Buenos Aires. It is said that "God is everywhere, but he does business only in Buenos Aires." I did see anti-Semitic graffiti; but when I asked Jews about them, no one seemed to protest, or worry, One former Berliner told me, "As long as anti-Semitism doesn't become the policy of the state, I can live with it."

I didn't see any beggars or any homeless, even though everyone believes that economy is worse than it used to be. (I also didn't see any people I would racially classify as Negro. In this last respect, Buenos Aires differs even from every other big city known to me; even Moscow or Warsaw has a sprinkling of Africans.) The few parks had remarkably few benches (perhaps to discourage the homeless). One roughly the size of New York's Washington Square had a seating capacity for one hundred or so; but even in the daytime, its seats were hardly filled, the locals apparently preferring to sit in cafés.

Of all the major countries I've ever visited, this has the least contact with the U.S. The only American newspapers visible on the stands were a few days old, and the Miami Herald was more visible than the International Herald Tribune. (At the newsstand at the municipal airport was a Sunday Herald a full two weeks old.) Remarkably few people spoke English, which was a surprise, since I understood that most studied it for at least a few years in school. I stayed in a small hotel with a British name, "Wilton Palace," but the front desk clerk spoke only enough English to explain the bill, while the only English familiar to the telephone switchboard operator were the words for low numbers. (No matter how hard or various I tried to explain the concept of a collect call, she could never grasp it.) Friends explained that this ignorance of English could be traced to the contretemps over the Malvinas Islands, in a country that inherited the custom of high tea; but I made it clear that I was not British but American. I didn't hear English on the streets, and saw fewer tourists from English-speaking countries than I've encountered in Warsaw or Moscow. There was no English on the radio or the television, and the one American program that I saw on the television--a basketball playoff game one week later--was completed dubbed over. I began to think of Buenos Aires as the last frontier of resistance to the imperial language.

There is an abundance of cultural activities, as befits a great city; and many of them are free. Indeed, on the back page of a certain newspaper is a complete list of everything gratis. I met a bank president who told me that his greatest achievement was sponsoring a chamber orchestra; and sure enough, when I mentioned his name to a women whose husband worked elsewhere in banking, she said that this man's bank was best known for its orchestra.

My next step was Montevideo, a city on the other side of the Plata river; and it seemed a different world, with fewer people and far fewer cars, cleaner air, a more civilized tone. To a New Yorker who had fallen in love in Buenos Aires, Montevideo reminded me of Boston.