sábado

Theme of the day: pingüinos.

I’m itching for someplace local, not trendy, and I decide that that El Pingüino de Palermo is it. A neighborhood café, where large families push two tables together and a bearded man nods over his newpaper and vino tinto. The servers are elegant in their green checked vests and accommodating of my limited Castellano. They joke with the children and touch them affectionately. I order a milanesa—a breaded cutlet—and sparkling mineral water, which people here drink like Americans drink Coke: at every meal. The usual basket of bread arrives, and with it an unusual bowl of marinated lima beans. They’re tender and tangy, and when the lemon is squeezed dry, I spoon the vinegar and onion over the milanesa. Over cafe con leche I admire the pingüino who appears everywhere the word pingüino should be printed: on the door, on the menus, on the embroidered napkins. Across the street, no pingüino, but an outfit amusingly called CyberBorges.

In the afternoon I meet C. for coffee and medialunas, sweet, dense croissants that go down in just a few bites. We grab an outside table at Bar Taller, one of the oldest cafes in BA, amidst the teeming and streaming Saturday throngs. C. is a poet and translator, and we talk about her work and about her 13-month-old, Félix. I’ve been charged by my friend a!, who lived in BA all last year, with a special mission to deliver some books to her: David Foster Wallace, Aimee Bender, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and a children’s book about a lonely pingüino. She is brilliant and radical, a reader of Naomi Klein. C.’s Marxist take on infancy is that breast-feeding babies are completely outside the circuits of the marketplace, but we are obviously not, and we make a tour of the shops. We agree that we believe in fashion, but we believe even more in sales. C. is looking for things for her new house, which is undergoing renovations, and I am looking to avoid buying anything until my last few days here. The very first store we set foot in shows how much of a challenge that will be: there are soft leather bags and placemats, in earthy reds and browns, fabulous cowhide rugs, handmade wooden toys, and wine jugs in the shape of, what else, pingüinos.