martes

The Best Meal So Far

Soberbia 22
Four courses (incl. wine) plus tip for US$10.

















Flan for dessert? Now that's what I call the Sense of an Ending!

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In search of more Endings, I visit the barrio of Recoleta, with its famous cemetery. Eva Perón is buried here (those are flowers on her family's mausoleum, to the right), amidst the elaborate memorials and stained-glass windows that snatch the light of the setting sun and arc it in toward the sepulchers rather than out toward the world. The graveyard is packed with tombs as big as studio apartments--evidently it's quite a swanky address to have when you're dead, like Père Lachaise. The living are packed in, too: there's a much higher population density here than in Palermo Soho, and all the buildings are high rises with hair salons, pharmacies, and other retail on the ground floor, with more traffic along the one-way streets. I meet plenty of children walking home from school, in blue uniforms and long, white coats. Recoleta is also the home to the National Library, where unfortunately they don't maintain any exhibits of the treasures in their collection. I had planned to step over from the cemetery to visit the Basílica Nuestra Señora del Pilar, the city's second-oldest church, but a pro-life event dissuades me from going inside.

La Recoleta

By Jorge Luis Borges

Convencidos de caducidad
por tantas nobles certidumbres del polvo,
nos demoramos y bajamos la voz
entre las lentas filas de los panteones,
cuya retórica de sombra y de mármol
promete o prefigura la deseable
dignidad de haber muerto.
Bellos son los sepulcros,
el desnudo latín y las trabadas fechas fatales,
la conjunción del mármol y de la flor
y las plazuelas con frescura de patio
y los muchos ayeres de la historia
hoy detenida y única.
Equivocamos esa paz con la muerte
y creemos anhelar nuestro fin
y anhelamos el sueño y la indiferencia.
Vibrante en las espadas y en la pasión
y dormida en la hiedra,
sólo la vida existe.
El espacio y el tiempo son formas suyas,
son instrumentos mágicos del alma,
y cuando ésta se apague,
se apagarán con ella el espacio, el tiempo y la muerte,
como al cesar la luz
caduca el simulacro de los espejos
que ya la tarde fue apagando.
Sombra benigna de los árboles,
viento con pájaros que sobre las ramas ondea,
alma que se dispersa en otras almas,
fuera un milagro que alguna vez dejaran de ser,
milagro incomprensible,
aunque su imaginaria repetición
infame con horror nuestros días.
Estas cosas pensé en la Recoleta,
en el lugar de mi ceniza.

















* * *
Anyone sitting outdoors in BA’s touristed areas will be approached by people selling knickknacks or offering to give a tarot reading. The vendors are ubiquitous but unobtrusive. On the subte, they deposit notebooks or sticker sheets or small photo albums featuring superheroes, princesses, and Simpsons characters in people's laps, make their way to the end of the car, and return to either pick up unwanted merchandise or close the deal. The forwardness of this gesture exceeds my usual experience, and I immediately put the object on the empty seat next to me, but my fellow subte riders are actually interested in what's on offer, examine it and often buy it. One guy made four sales in my car alone, and the girl selling stickers did even better. At Bar Federal, a teenager who approaches is easily dismissed with a "no, no gracias." But her younger sister, who tries next, works the pity angle. When she lingers near a man who could be a character in Metrosexual: The Musical, with his striped buttondown, round glasses, receding hairline, and spiked-up aging intellectual style, he shoos her away as if she were a fly on his chorizo. And when she doesn't budge, but stands there performing a half-hearted and perfunctory pout, he reaches out and shoves her hard, so hard she falls back over the curb.

The worst personal violence I’ve ever witnessed was an attack on a beggar by two policemen in Costa Rica. At a rural bus station, in the early morning, she too had been shooed away by the putative keepers of order, and she too reapproached us, abject and mendicant. She was frail and dirty, her hair matted, her skin contracted into wizened folds. Where there should have been muscle, there was only bone, and her torn clothing and slow, shuffling step spoke to her utter wretchedness. When the attack came, it was swift, unsignalled, and unmerciful. They hit her with a club, wrenched one arm behind her back so that she howled, and then hoisted her by that arm and carried her off, continuing to beat her. Her crime, like that of the little girl in San Telmo, was not poverty per se, nor was it appealing to people whose skin was lighter than hers. Her crime was her refusal to stay put, to maintain a certain distance, her insistence on occupying a public space, on not disappearing. She had offended a location and someone’s sense of location as much as anything else, and her disregard of authority ignited rage.


It is quite shocking to see someone touched without her implicit permission. The little girl in San Telmo is more emotionally than physically wounded, and she hasn’t yet achieved her sister’s bored internal distance, no doubt developed in response to situations just like this one. Outraged, she appeals for comfort but gets none. Indignant, she curses the man, but quietly and from a position of safety, beyond his reach. It’s time to move along, and the girls walk away, sullen, as if it’s not even worth talking about.