BUENOS AIRES LETTER:There is plenty to see when wandering through South America's greatest walking metropolis
BUEN DÍA Buenos Aires!
The morning news shows are promising that the rain will soon ease off with the late summer sunshine to make an appearance by lunchtime, some comfort for the morning commuters facing into traffic chaos.
The subway workers are on strike – the latest chapter in the long-running battle between the federal government and the city’s administration.
As ever, innocent victims are paying the price for this political trench warfare, with bus queues stretching around corners. An already chaotic situation is exacerbated by the mounted grenadiers of the San Martín regiment slowly making their way down Avenida 9 de Julio, the city’s main thoroughfare.
They are splendid even with their dress uniforms hidden under waterproof ponchos, and their trumpeters blow mournfully, watched by pedestrians forced to miss their signal to cross the avenue’s 14 lanes.
The televisions in the cafes are showing the hat-trick Lionel Messi scored against the Swiss the previous night. Finally, the strapline says, Messi is Messi playing for the national team. Those who have stopped off on their way to work for coffee and small, doughy croissant-shaped medialunas mumble approvingly at the beauty of the Barcelona ace’s dink for the second goal.
The rain stops and the sun starts to break through, but the traffic only worsens. The San Martín regiment have vacated the avenue but have been replaced by columns of Peronist supporters arriving in the centre from the outlying rustbelt. Led by deafening batteries of drummers, they are on their way to the Plaza del Congreso to show their support for La presidenta, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, as she opens a new legislative year.
An affable organiser named Jorge says his neighbourhood’s group have come into the centre hoping Kirchner will announce the renationalisation of YPF, Argentina’s old state oil company, which is now controlled by Spain’s Repsol. As he says the company’s initials, a group of women in Kirchner T-shirts joyfully start chanting in unison: “The oil is ours!”
Up Avenida Corrientes – the city’s Broadway, aka the street that never sleeps – the late-night bookshops are already open and the Steve Jobs biography is clearly winning the battle of the window displays.
At the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación, Cristina Banegas is starring in a one-woman show as Molly Bloom. James Joyce is a hero for many in this psychoanalytically obsessed city. Up the street from the cultural centre, standing outside one of the video stores stacked floor to ceiling with DVDs of art-house films, is a man handing out fliers for “emergency psychoanalysis” for those suffering from “moments of panic or traumatic situations”, with consultation also available by email.
A poster on a traffic pole advertises a free seminar on the writings of Rodolfo Walsh, the urban guerrilla ideologue of Irish descent whose 1957 non-fiction novel Operation Massacre anticipated Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood by nine years.
The televisions have switched to Kirchner, since escorted by the San Martín’s troopers from the Casa Rosada to Congreso. It will take her more than three hours to deliver an epic speech of more than 23,000 words. YPF is not to be nationalised (yet). Maybe the phone call from King Juan Carlos of Spain has had more of an impact than initially thought. Rather than beat up on Spain, she lays into the city’s mayor again.
With the clouds all gone, it gets hotter as the afternoon continues, even as the shadows lengthen. Walking on the narrow pavements of the Microcentro, you have to watch for the damp patches which signal dripping air-conditioners whirring away above.
In front of the Casa Rosada there is an open-air exhibition of photographs by Victor Hugo Bugge, Argentina’s presidential photographer since 1978. Despite the fact that he has witnessed historic celebrations of two World Cup triumphs, the short-lived 1982 conquest of the Falkland Islands and the return of democracy, all of the dozens of photographs on display are from the Kirchner era. Maybe he only became any good in 2003.
Now the evening commute is emptying downtown. A few blocks from the presidential palace, a man in an Argentina top beds down for the night in a doorway not far from the statue of Almirante Guillermo Brown of Foxford, Co Mayo, who has got his sabre back having previously lost it to vandals.
By nightfall the restaurants fill up slowly in a city that likes to eat late. Maybe it’s time for a drink before getting something to eat. Or maybe there’s time to walk a few blocks more in what is South America’s greatest walking metropolis – Mi Buenos Aires Querida! (My beloved Buenos Aires!)
