European heart, Latin soul

South America or southern Europe? Buenos Aires is both

July 1997

In the Argentine capital city, you have to remind yourself that you’re in South America. The buildings have the look of Paris and the streets the pace of Rome. Men and women with Italian surnames stroll the boulevards in the latest French fashions. Home to some of the most skilled soccer teams — and most rabid soccer fanaticos — on the planet.

For all its hustle and traffic, Buenos Aires is a pastoral place, despite being a city of 6 million. From a balcony at the Etoile Hotel, you can watch strollers exercising their dogs. Or hang inside the lobby breakfast bar at the Hotel Etoile and eavesdrop on U.S. military attaches hobnobbing with Argentine army colonels.

Dogs, by the way, rule in this city, virtually to the extent that they do in Paris. All breeds and all sizes, but the bigger and more chic, it seems, the better.

On any given morning or afternoon in toney neighborhoods like the Recoleta, they can be seen walking their owners or professional dogwalkers; they have the good sense to allow the humans to think that they are the ones in control.

They also spend a fair amount of time terrorizing the city’s badly outnumbered cats, some of whom display a vertical leap that Michael Jordan would have envied whenever a dog is close enough to bark and growl at them.

If you love beef, seafood, Italian food and great red wines, you’ll think you died and went to Heaven here. For tee–totalers and vegans, BA is a hard hustle.

Extremes

So many things here seem to be magnified, exaggerated. The city itself is one of the largest and most populous in the world. The River Plate which separates Argentina from neighboring Uruguay to the north, is 136 miles wide, the widest on the planet.

Its principal thoroughfare, Bulevard 9 de Julio, is the widest street on Earth, all 12 lanes of it, with a broad median down the middle. Crossing it is for neither the faint of heart nor those with short attention spans. Big and broad enough to be seen from space…easily.

It also is the birthplace of the tango, which is about as close as you can get to vertical lovemaking in public without being arrested. But when you watch this dance, you soon realize that there’s a lot more going on than a thinly veiled sexuality.

It’s a much more all–encompassing expression about the relationship between a man and a woman — pleasure, passion, respect, cooperation, communication, and above all, trust.

It’s all there, if you look.

Being well below the Equator, seasons are reversed here. Our summer is their winter, our fall their spring, and vice versa.

As in much of Latin America, the social classes tend to be very well–defined in the BA. The rich are very rich, and the poor, of whom there is a sizable number in this gigantic city, are just as extreme in their poverty. Unlike American cities, however, it’s the poor who fill the suburbs and the outskirts of town.

Where the rich are dying to get in

The city center is the preserve of the well–heeled, even in death.

Provided, of course, that they have the posthumous “juice” to get themselves buried in Recoleta Cemetery — a calm oasis in the bustling upscale heart of Buenos Aires, equal parts burial ground, sculpture park and last stop for Argentina’s class–conscious.

Few of the dead, with one very notable exception, are buried in the ground here. If you can’t afford your own extremely ostentatious granite or marble crypt, you don’t qualify for this neighborhood.

Argentina’s rich and famous are literally dying to get in here.

That’s right, folks — the Recoleta Cemetery has an A–list. If you’re not a general, a politician or a millionaire — or kin to one — you stand a better chance of getting into Heaven than taking up residence on one of these wealthy “streets of the dead.”

Whole families lay together, their doily–draped coffins lying beside each other or stacked in racks atop each other,  all in plain view through glass windows and doors.

Eva Peron — “Evita” — is here. Her life was anything but ordinary, and so is her final resting place. Unlike her eternally slumbering neighbors, her coffin is out of view, resting under a 6–foot slab of concrete. The fear is that either Evita’s devotees or her detractors — and there are still plenty of both here — might try to ransack the Duarte family crypt and steal her remains.