Almost a week here, and it didn’t take long to feel like home. Mrs Mariel, a retired teacher, is the dueña of the apartment I’m renting. She spends her days cultivating her orchids and taking care of her guests. The living room of the early 20th century apartment is a small library-tropical garden. Every evening someone plays the piano in the apartment next doors, and we talk, or read Cortázar and drink cheap Malbec wine. Mrs Mariel’s bookcase is a small treasure trove with Latin American authors and gardening encyclopedias resting among arcticrafts and miniature icons of Virgin Mary and San Antonio. Images remind a lot of what we see in Argentinian films, but Buenos Aires is like this anyway; an Aleph (Borges) between fiction and reality, modernity and retro, the future and the past. Books are everywhere. Culture is everywhere too. Life is no easy here for the people. There is almost 100% of inflation and the country has been in recession for 20 years now. There’s anger and disappointment and one can see it everywhere; on the graffitis, the newspapers, the protests on the streets that seem like a routine to the people. But there’s also kindness and quality and one can see this too in the people’s manners, habits and everyday ritual when both in public and private life. Buenos Aires is a city that makes one emotional with its honesty and humility. If it were a human, it would be a citizen of the world; an old aristocrat with impeccable manners and nostalgia about their old perished glories. Buenos Aires is the tango and the parks, the hectic metropolis and the colonial buildings, the intellect and the charm, the future and the nostalgic past.
Travellogbook 
Leave a comment