My dearest Buenos Aires (1)

That’s the thing about this city: either you love it or you hate it. Or well, you are like me, together with ninety percent of its inhabitants and you are somewhere in between. I live in the city of tango, the city of the Obelisk, the city of big theatres and European ambitions with a mixture of ethnicities, origins, and aspirations. The city of big gaps: River or Boca (our big soccer teams), mate or coffee, Peronists or Antiperonists, pizza or barbecue (“asado”), national street rock or reggaeton… In Buenos Aires, you always have to pick your side. And haters gonna hate anyway.

What is it about this city? First of all, it looks so different than the rest of the country. And this is neither good nor bad. It’s just that Buenos Aires seems more modern, with those skyscrapers, and fancy new buildings, which so few people can afford. But it loses in familiarity, friendliness, and the warmth you find in other Argentinean regions. People in Buenos Aires are adventurous, well-traveled, open-minded, but they can also be cold, ambitious, snob, and condescending. You’ll hardly find somewhere else in Argentina the contrasts you find in this city: families searching in the garbage for leftovers from fancy restaurants, homeless men sleeping on the bench of the park, a couple of meters away from the kids’ playground; apartments for rent which are unreasonable expensive and thus, remain empty for years and years. And let’s not forget about its crowded streets full of angry taxi drivers, angry pedestrians, angry horns, and a general angriness that you can breathe as a puff of smoke coming from the nearest bus that passes a red light.

Yet, Buenos Aires also hides some beautiful spots: huge parks with artificial lakes in which ducks and geese live and let children take a glimpse of nature; tall trees growing on most sidewalks, providing the pedestrians a natural shade; lots of underground artistic movements (music, theater, painting, performances), distributed in plenty of museums you can visit for free; the amazing Plaza de Mayo and Plaza Congreso, sceneries both of past and present history. Let’s not forget that Buenos Aires, like other cities in Argentina, offers free education: schools, kindergartens, even one of the best universities in Latin America; and free health: the attention may be slow, and hospitals are crowded too, but no one is left without a heart surgery if they need one, no matter if they can’t afford it. 

I used to think I straight hated Buenos Aires: I wasn’t born here and I never considered I belong here, although I have lived in this city for most of my life, ever since my mom dragged me here. It happened when I was about to finish the 6th grade, so I had to change schools, and kids in my new neighborhood weren’t too nice to me. I was a provincial 11-year-old who had never kissed a boy and who would still play with her Barbie dolls. As for my new cosmopolitan classmates, they were teens already, or acted like them, doing parties and playing “Spin the bottle” or “Seven minutes in Heaven”. I had a fringe and ponytails, I’d dressed t-shirts with “Hello Kitty” on them and cute skirts; they’d wear pixie haircuts, fancy designer dresses, make-up, French perfume, and high heels. As soon as they knew me, they rejected me, and I felt the entire city was casting me off as well.

My father was living 10,000 kilometers away, an ocean in between us, and he wasn’t looking forward to coming back. My mom had remarried, and my sister, by that time my opposite, was enjoying her new group of friends. Maybe she was made for the city life, the same way I considered myself suburb material. I spent my adolescence trying to figure a way out of here. And then I finally made some friends, and by the time I was seventeen, I fell in love for the first time. I finally got some sense of belonging. Still, I kept dreaming someday I’d find my true place in the world. Buenos Aires couldn’t be it!

Already going into my twenties I discovered the pleasures of traveling through the country, which is big and full of all kinds of landscapes: from tropical waterfalls to snowy mountains; from high salt pans to amazing hills with streams, birds, and flowers; and everywhere, amazing people, of all kinds. Every summer I would take a trip to a different region. Sometimes I traveled by myself, other times I took trips with my friends from college, and later I met the love of my life, and traveling together became one of our relationship’s main goals.

Every time I returned home to Buenos Aires, I felt as I was missing something. Instead of coming back home, I felt as I had already been there, and here I was again, a castaway in a sea of asphalt and cement in which I was doomed to drown, eventually. As I said before, it is a place of contrasts: the best professional opportunities along with the most alienating jobs, no time for spiritual development, no time to rest, no sleeping, always the sound of a siren nearby keeping us up all night, looking at the ceiling of our small apartment which we can hardly afford, surrounded by neighbors whose names we don’t know, wondering if anyone in this freaking city would be sad if we were suddenly gone for good…

And yet, so many poets and writers have honored this city with astounding words… so many novels have been written, so many songs have been sung. Artists have given birth to a whole new different Buenos Aires through their creations, their many films… So many astonishing works of art were born from this landscape… Is the Buenos Aires I read about the same city I walk every day? 

I have to give it some credit: Buenos Aires made me who I am. It’s not the place where I was born, or where I lived the happiest years of my childhood, but it is the place where I studied my career, where I developed professionally, where I met most of my friends, where I got married and built a home for two, and later, the city in which both of my children were born. I can no longer hate it, although I still consider myself living here as an eventuality. I am still trying to find my place in the world: I don’t know which place is it, but Buenos Aires is what happens to me while I’m busy making other plans, so I guess this city is my life, whether I like it or not. At least, that’s what Lennon would say, right?

(1) This is a translation of the first line from a famous tango by Alfredo Lepera and Carlos Gardel, “Mi Buenos Aires querido”.