ARGENTINA APRIL 6, 2017 TO APRIL 9, 2017

ARGENTINA:

BUENOS AIRES

April 6, 2017 to April 9, 2017

Bob Francescone

 

APRIL 5 AND 6, 2017 – TAMPA-MIAMI-MONTEVIDEO-BUENOS AIRES

For the third time in less than four months I cross the equator, five miles below, again in the dark.

When I was a kid my favorite expedition with my father on our weekend visits was to the airport. He loved to watch the planes take off and land. I’d map the places the planes had been, or were going to, imagination flying, my feet landlocked in Bellerose, Queens, New York. In the last four months, I have walked on five continents, North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and, now South America. My feet are catching up!

American Airlines 989 is perfunctory, unimaginative, snooze-worthy. There are no movies. Breakfast is à la Motel Five and Half. My seat mate, doppelganger for salsa star Ricky Martin, (and therefore none of the above) creates angular origami fauna and flora from the pages of the airline magazine, muggle-stuff become magic.

We catch a local bus in front of the Montevideo airport to Tres Cruces bus depot where we board the Seacat long distance bus for the 2-and-a-half-hour trip north west to Colonia, Uruguay. Buenos Aires is an hour and a half ferry ride across the brown Rio Plato, here ocean-wide. Midway, we are out of sight of land, Uruguay and Argentina below the horizon.

Argentina’s national sport may be 'futbol', but strikes are a close second.  Today there is no public transportation.  We walk the last mile and a half through the streets of Buenos Aires to our AirBnB digs. It is a smidge over 34 hours and a smidge over 5,000 miles since Roger and Greg picked us up in our driveway. Little Bobby F. has come a long way from Bellerose, Queens, New York. And my feet hurt.

APRIL 7, FRIDAY – BUENOS AIRES

'Do you eat meat?' It’s a question with only one possible reply in beef-enamored Argentina. Sebastian and Iris, our young guitaristo and drummera (?) AirBnB hosts, are eager to please, and very sweet. I squeak out a “yes" I hope carries enough bloodlust. It does.

A half hour later we are in their favorite local carnivortorium, the gently named 'La Poesia'. There isn't much poetry on the menu, though the Spanish words slide gently into our ears if not our comprehension.  The many pages of ways a cow and barnyard buddies can be dismembered and served up defeats us. Huge tankards of local beer are smooth, but unhelpful.  Dennis chickens out with hand-made, fresh, cheese and rugula sorrentinos (a size 24 and full-figured ravioli like my Sorrentina grandmother used to shovel onto my plate) in a version of basil pesto, fresh basil, walnuts, garlic chopped, not ground. (Note: you pick your pasta sauce and pay extra for it.)

The waiter (a Sorrentino version of the usually svelte, tight-jeaned, local gaucho types) speaks no English, but is bountifully helpful, and points to a long line of Spanish nouns attached to one of the higher prices on the menu: 'Especialidad de la casa'. Sure, why not? Eyebrows rise. 'Rojo?' 'Red?'  'Si'. He nods approval. A very sharp pointed knife joins our loaf of bread. I regret not paying more attention to my uncles, the butchers in the family store.

The 'Especialidad' arrives with a two-handed flourish. It is stupefying. The steak, a full.8 inches by 4 by almost 1 inch is sacrificed bovine perfection, 'rojo’, delicious, almost too tender for that knife. The special touch of the 'casa' is to make it the canvas for a whirling Jackson Pollock stack of everything the casa has to offer:  a field of perfectly fried circles of potatoes, an ocean of fresh peas, onions, red peppers, and a topping of fried egg. Curly strips of salty bacon add an ecumenical touch from another part of the barnyard. 'Especialidad' is heart-stoppingly good in too many senses. Poetry, indeed.

That was last night. Today we absorb the effects of the 34-hour trip, that tankard of hefty local beer, and all that beef. Sebastian makes us jerba mate, caffeine-dense local drink of choice and we all spin travel stories. Ours will get him to Ethiopia. His will get us to Bolivia.

Late afternoon hunger pangs get us back to La Poesia. We share a potato tortilla (think thick quiche, not thin pancakes) and a cheese and veggie omelet, semi-antidotes to yesterday’s carnivorous indiscretion. Our waitress, of a 'certain age' and rich in expressive flourishes, semaphores delight when she excavates from our 'Spanglish’ that we are from the USA. Then she adds a coda of wrinkled forehead, raised eyebrows, shrugged shoulders and two clear words in English: 'Trump'. 'Crazy'.

She gets a big tip.

APRIL 8, SATURDAY – Buenos Aires Day 3

There are homeless people sleeping in the streets.

Buenos Aires is one of the most sophisticated, cosmopolitan, beautiful of cities. It has been called 'the Paris of South America', as if every continent needed a Gallic clone. The architecture has the same roots in 19^th century elegance. But this city is more than gracious brick. I feel a luscious Latin warmth, energy and pizzazz, a hint of a tango about to take over the streets. Paris is logic. Buenos Aires is passion.

The look of the people is European. I don’t see the font of genes from the original peoples so obvious in Peru and Central America...not until I look carefully at the faces of the people living in cardboard, on piles of rubble, wrapped in jetsam. There I see the cheekbones and eyes and noses of the Americas.

In one of those magnificent buildings is a museum of the native peoples. There I found this quotation:

'It is a paradox of the Western world that it cannot know without possessing and it cannot possess without destroying.'

And, there are homeless people sleeping in the streets.

APRIL 9, SUNDAY– BUENOS AIRES

'My father worked on the building many years ago.'

It’s one more of the spectacular stone portraits of 19^th century elegance that make the streets of Buenos Aires. We mourn the graciousness of that era. But our old friend, Mario Lorenzo, is happy, resurrecting days walking these streets with his father, a 'dandy' with a feather in his fedora, and a love for his adopted city. We’ve known Mario for years, but only on the turf of his adopted country, ours. He was happy there. But here he is rooted, spinning stories decades in the making.

We walk for hours, pushed by his memories, pulled by the allure of the city.

Buenos Aires is famous for its doors. Next to one massively bronzed set is a small sign: La Prensa. My pixilated memory burps a sound bite of a teacher telling our class that Peron had just closed this newspaper. Way across a park a stylized profile of Evita herself stretches for a dozen stories across the facade of a skyscraper. 'That is new.' Shrug. 'The decline of Argentina started with Peron.' And he leads into more stories of his life here.

Lunch is fried calamari and then we gild the lily of a mound of flan with a side puddle of dulce de leche in Mario's favorite restaurant. Both are served by a bronzy waiter, shapely head wrapped in a samurai haircut. He thumbs up the photo of me as samurai in Madama Butterfly, an ally in fantasy, communicating via hairdo.

Now, we, too, have a story of Buenos Aires.