October 23rd, 2005 | The lowdown by Liz Fouksman

The Old World and the New: a Preface to Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is like a Victorian bride from an old family who awakes on the morning of her wedding to discover her entire fortune vanished, collapsed into the void of an economic crash.

There is not even enough to now pay for the carriage to the church, but undaunted, she walks instead. She trails the lace of her imported wedding gown through the mud, steps in dog shit, tears her sleeve on a rusty nail, and arrives at the church flustered and disheveled but glowing, her charms unobscured by the rips and dirt.

Every description of BA inevitably starts with a comparison to a European city – "The Paris of the South" is perhaps the most common epitaph employed by travel writers. But just comparing BA to the beauty of Europe is like commenting on the Parisian lines of the bride’s wedding dress and ignoring the color in her cheeks, the contrast between the white of the gown and the gray-brown of the dirty hem, and the very impertinence of walking to one’s own wedding through the muddy streets.

Make no mistake - Buenos Aires is the most European of the South American capitals. Its northern neighborhoods of Retiro, Recoleta and Palermo have the wide tree-lined avenues and great ornamented 19th century apartments of Haussmann’s Paris, and are filled with "Palacios" and plush hotels, botanical gardens and professional dog walkers. And in the south are the even older barrios of Montserrat and San Telmo, small and picturesque in a fashion that is most reminiscent of northern Italy, with cobbled one-way streets where passing buses seem to brush the wrought iron balconies of the crumbling narrow houses, threatening to knock over with their breadth and modernity the dusty curlicues that frame doors and shuttered windows.

And yet, despite the lines mooring Buenos Aires to the Old World, BA is much more then a younger copy of a European city. There is a chaotic randomness that permeates the streets of the south and center, and creeps even into the genteel districts of the north, a chaos that is all Latin American.

One can see it in the political graffiti that covers the Romantic excesses of the Plaza del Congreso, contrasting strangely with the half naked bronze women, rearing horses and petrified unfurling banners. The graffiti proclaims anarchy or ousts G. W. Bush or imperatively calls for the end of war and violence. T

he signs of an infrastructure full of holes are clearly visible in the beautiful old buildings crumbling into a gray obscurity, the loose and missing tiles in the sidewalk and the stray dogs that leave their mark on every few street corners. But with this chaos comes a vitality, a jauntiness even, that is felt in the city, in the bustle of the crowds, in the corner cafes and fruit stalls, in the demonstrations in Plaza de Mayo, in the crowed smoky Parrillas on calle Defensa, in the clubs and even the Opera – in short, in the Portenos themselves.

Buenos Aires has achieved a strange marriage of opposites. It ties together the old and the new, the rich and the poor, Europe and Latin America. It contains ruins and copies of French palaces, not to mention the sight of shanty-town families sorting through garbage while ladies in mink and diamonds walk past them to opening nights. Altogether this forms Buenos Aires, the city in which, as Borges wrote, "actuality, ceaseless, ruddy, and beyond doubt, celebrates in the street’s traffic its unassailable abundance of present apotheosis."