by Pico Iyer
Meanwhile, every day, the economy was sputtering further towards collapse. Some of the money I received was printed only on one side; some had the denomination inscribed in ballpoint pen. Some was “provincial money,” which was worthless as soon as you entered the next province. Interest rates had recently hit 600 percent a month; the new government had exhausted five economic programs in its first eight months; people were lining up all night outside the Spanish and Italian consulates. Argentina, the immigrant’s dream, was becoming a land of would-be emigrants.
What was going on here? A roulette-wheel economy that had the quality of opéra bouffe; a dolce vita gaudier than anything I had ever seen before: I could not put the two together. One hint, perhaps, came from the observation of a British journalist, who, visiting Argentina eighty years ago, concluded that “Appearances count for everything.” Another came from the description in the very English, and very sardonic, Buenos Aires Herald of the scene at the block-long Teatro Colón on Oscar night—akin, it said, to “a fancy dress ball on board the Titanic.” Most ladies, remarked the paper tartly, “came dressed as wedding-cakes.”
I got my best sense of Argentina’s ruling paradoxes, though, when I left the well-coiffed streets of the Barrio Norte. For there is a Left Bank culture here, as well as a Right, and a world that falls beneath the scrutiny of either: the large red sign immediately above the Pierre Cardin store on Avenida Callao announces the COMMUNIST PARTY. And I felt I could better understand the constituency of Menem and Perón when I went into the rough, working-class district of La Boca. For it was here, in this broken-down, Neapolitan dockland area, that the blood-red graffiti on the walls read MENEM IS THE WORD FOR HOPE and EVITA GUIDES US, SAUL LEADS US, and it was here, in a blighted West Side Story neighborhood of broken-toothed laborers and secondhand guitars, that people looked to Diego Maradona or the Madonna for salvation (those streets not lined with ads for football schools were decorated with the sayings of Jesus). On one wall, outside a school, someone had scrawled, plaintively, “Today is not my day, but I live.”
The most famous street in La Boca—and the tourist’s reason for going there—is Caminito, a short alleyway of corrugated-iron houses painted as brilliantly as M&M’s, yellow, orange, and green, and surrounded by an artists’ showcase of murals, sculptures, and plaques. Walk around the back of the cheerful, party-colored houses, however, and you can see that the rainbow hues cover bleak and semibroken homes.
I got an even stronger sense of dispossession when I went one day to a soccer game just ten minutes away from the perfumed streets where professional dog walkers were doing their job. For as soon as I arrived at the game, I was surrounded by the other faces of the capital. Groups of young boys in torn shirts, with tangled shoulder-length hair, sat sullenly on stoops. An old woman with overbright yellow hair sold crosses. Six policemen on horseback paced up and down, and twenty-five riot police wielding staves stared back at their gun-toting leader. Every vendor who entered the place was thrown against a wall and frisked. And within the stadium compound itself—it seemed only apt—was a Justicialist Party office commemorated to Perón. Here, I thought, listening to the kids shouting ché, or buddy, to each other, were, quite literally, Evita’s descamisados, or shirtless ones. In the stands, twelve-year-old urchins huddled around a joint; one of them wore a cap that said THE MILLIONAIRES.
Yet what was most remarkable to me at the game was not how rough it was but, rather, how sedate. As the fiercely partisan tattooed boys took their places in the stands, and the riot policemen took up their positions, and the boys began pogoing up and down, letting off cheap fireworks and scattering scraps of paper like confetti, I braced myself for an eruption of the rage and violence so common in Europe. But in this game at least, the supporters simply stayed where they were, jumping in place, calm in their way, and strangely well-behaved. Tidy matrons sat demurely in a section reserved for women, and senior citizens took up another section. Vendors sold cashews at grilles modeled on toy trains. Even the (English-language) team names here suggested a curiously antiquated, clubby kind of British world: Newell’s Old Boys, Chaco For Ever, Racing Club.
This sense of self-possession was everywhere in Argentina: the sense of a people standing, very erectly, on imported ceremony. There were few beggars in the streets, or prostitutes, and almost everyone I met was honest (with the glaring exception of the taxi drivers in the capital, who seem bent on redressing the country’s $60 billion foreign debt single-handedly). Twice in four days, people actually refused tips from me. And for all the bons vivants’ round-the-clock haunting of cafés, the only unsteady things I saw in Argentina were the palos borrachos, or drunkard trees, that line Avenida 9 de Julio. This was a country where even the man banging an Andean drum in a folkloric show was a silver-haired CEO type in blue blazer, gray chinos, and tie.
Yet still, I felt, there was something buttoned up about the Argentine chic, and oddly homogeneous. And though everyone, especially in the capital, was beautifully and expensively dressed—the men like investment bankers, the women like Italian actresses—theirs was a strangely conservative, Brooks Brothers kind of elegance, the style, I thought, of a people not quite sure enough of themselves to take any chances. Here, in a sense, was high fashion by the book—even, perhaps, by the copybook. When I mentioned this to an Argentine friend, I was taken aback to find he agreed. “We are too much taken with British ways,” this most beautifully mannered of hosts said to me. “With that whole notion of being a gentleman. We don’t cultivate our own styles. That is why we are in danger of being colonial.”
More generally, “the Argentine people of every class,” as the nineteenth-century president D. F. Sarmiento observed, “have a high opinion of their national importance.” And in a land distinguished mostly by its size, they seem determined to assert that bigger must be better. The Argentines boast that they have the widest boulevard in the world, in Avenida 9 de Julio, and the longest street in the world (if “street” is defined in certain ways), and, in the mud-brown Río de la Plata, the widest river in the world (though the Amazon, they concede, is wider in parts). Many of the hotels in Buenos Aires—and not even the four-star ones—call themselves “Grand.” It is that somewhat peacocky kind of swagger that makes other Latin Americans as keen to dissociate themselves from Argentines as vice versa. “The Argentines consider themselves too good even for Europe,” sniffed an American woman who lives in Rio. García Márquez put it even more succinctly: “The human ego is the little Argentine inside us all.”
Argentina sets its aspirations so nakedly on display that it is never hard to find signs of pretension and absurdity. In the National Museum of Fine Arts, the first floor is all Rodin, Monet, and Degas; the second floor, astonishingly, features some accomplished, but utterly uninflected, Argentine copies of Monet and Degas, right down to pictures of twilight haystacks in Provence. The Alvear Palace Hotel in Recoleta boasts the almost smothering glass-and-gilt opulence of a mock Versailles; yet Paul McCartney Muzak is piping through its corridors. Even the zoo here is rich with replicas of the Venus de Milo and with animal houses that are done up like pagodas, columned Egyptian pavilions, and Russian Orthodox churches; but its tattered empty cages are taken over now by stray cats. It is this kind of grandiloquence that moved V. S. Naipaul, for one, to rage against the assumed sophistications of the place—and, even more, its belief that money can buy sophistication. Its air of civility, he wrote, in his devastating, if entirely unfeeling, essay “The Return of Eva Perón,” was merely a cover for barbarism; Argentina was “a simple colonial society created in the most rapacious and decadent phase of imperialism.”
Certainly, for my part, the longer I stayed in the capital, the more I began to feel that it was less like Europe than like some New Yorker’s idea of Europe, a selective, sentimentalized, exile’s version of a world that had faded long ago—Europe as it could be seen only at a distance of seven thousand miles. Much of Argentine life reminded me of the way that certain Indians spe
ak English, preserving, in their Wodehousian cadences of “jolly good, old chap,” an almost caricatured version of an England that exists nowhere but in the mind: homesick for a place that they have never seen. Argentina seemed, in some respects, more Old World than the Old; less haute couture than hauteur couture. It was almost a relief to see a girl in a T-shirt that said LIFESTYLES OF THE BROKE AND OBSCURE.
Much of this, of course, is part now of the standard image of Argentina, as a land of stylish melancholics sharing yesterdays. When Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow bumps into a crew of token Argentines, he quickly sees that for them “nostalgia is like seasickness: only the hope of dying from it is keeping them alive.” Paul Theroux, too, sensed that the country’s household gods were ghosts: “gloom was part of the Argentine temper … the hangdog melancholy immigrants feel on rainy afternoons far from home.” Even the tango, the country’s most salable commodity, plays off this air of brilliantined nostalgia: though it originated with poor men dancing together in whorehouses, it is now a repository of the country’s glamorous image of itself, of saturnine rakes and black-dressed beauties. The ritual celebration of nostalgia is now itself part of the country’s nostalgia for its vanished glories. (And even the tango has not gone untouched by the ironies of the class struggle—a few years back, after it became fashionable abroad, all the society ladies of the capital started taking tango lessons, eager to show off their expertise in this peasants’ kind of sensualism.)
Yet the perennial sense of expectations unrealized is also what gives the country a haunting sense of poignancy. So much in Buenos Aires was built on a bombastic scale, fit for a city of kings; so much was erected to be worthy of a country named after a precious metal, its capital of Good Airs built on the River of Silver. The buildings that remain now are an admonition almost, a reminder of splendors that never quite materialized. The downtown tearooms, like the Richmond or the Ideal, were built on a heroic scale, rich with mirrors, fleurs-de-lis, and thick leather chairs; gray-haired old waiters still stand on a vanished dignity as they dish out boiled potatoes and pots of strong tea. But there is something increasingly dusty about these places now, and frayed—the architectural equivalents of those lonely, charming con men in Graham Greene who go around abroad in Old Etonian ties. The pathos grows more piquant when Argentines, translating their terms into English, speak never of “decay” but, always, “decadence.”
This air of faded grandeur was strongest of all to me along the Tigre Delta, amidst the cluster of islands, just twenty miles south of the capital, where the middle classes have traditionally kept their weekend homes. On the way to the resort, one passes gleaming stores thick with Maseratis, and sailing club after sailing club—160 of them in all. But on the day I visited, it was raining, and the area had a deserted hill-station poignancy. All resorts are sad out of season, of course, but this one had the lingering sadness of a world that was not sure its season would ever come again. I peered through the drizzle at the bright cottages and gabled summer homes, with their croquet lawns and tidy hedges. All of them looked empty now, and shuttered, their deck chairs pelted by the rain, their lawns overgrown with trees. Two children canoed with perfect form through the darkening afternoon. For Sale signs stood on landing docks, and a hand-painted wooden board, hard to read in the drizzle, asked QUIEN SABE? The determined cheerfulness of the names was almost heartbreaking—Tres Amigos, Capricho, Never Say Never—and the uninhabited cottages in the rain had all the mildewed pathos of an abandoned British suburb that had found itself, somehow, on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
“We Argentines are living a dream,” an uncommonly thoughtful porteño, scion of one of the country’s richest families, told me. “And a dream of an age that lasted only a second. A dream of an age that perhaps never existed at all. For a few years, between the wars, Argentines were the wealthiest people around—like the Japanese today, or the Arabs of fifteen years ago. They imported ice by ship. They took their cows on shopping trips to Paris. They bought anything they wanted. But this was only a very few Argentines. And later everyone wanted to share in that dream. At the end of the war, when Perón took over, there was sixty billion dollars in gold in the treasury.” Perón, of course, deployed that money to create an enormous middle class and a standard of living that put Argentina closer than ever to Europe. With it, however, he created certain expectations of ease and comfort that have not always been realized, leaving a large middle class unable to live in the style to which it was accustomed, yet unwilling to relinquish its hopes.
And unwilling too—this estancia-owner continued—to work to make up the difference. “Argentines were used to making money very quickly. A railroad was laid down through an estancia, and overnight the owners of the estancia became millionaires. So people never had the idea of working for their money, as they do in the U.S. We’re used to an easy life, and everything coming easily, and now we can’t understand why things are different.” In some sense, it seems, Argentina cannot forgive the rest of the world for surging ahead of it. And the desperate gaiety with which it keeps up the high life seems almost a sign of idle bravado. The economy is collapsing, yet most people I met seemed more interested in speculating than in earning money.
Speculations, though, come in many forms, and one of the distinct pleasures of Argentina for the visitor is that so many of its people can speak so eloquently and thoughtfully about their own predicament; everyone, in this most self-conscious of places, is an analyst—and, therefore, an elegist—of his motherland. That may help to explain why the country has always attracted as many travel writers as tourists—it is such a fascinating case study (and the one place I can think of on which Naipaul, Theroux, Chatwin, and Jan Morris have all written extensively). What makes the country so intriguing to the visitor, in fact, is precisely what can make it so agonizing to the resident: it has the urbanity to reflect on its steady loss of all that urbanity entails.
“This crisis is the best possible thing that could happen to Argentina,” says an Anglo-Argentine, with a subversive gleam, as his friend, a novelist, buries his head in his hands. “It may at last bring Argentines down to earth. We’ve been living too long on dreams and expectations. And that’s all they are—dreams and expectations!” Above us, the murals and frescoes of a cavernous hundred-year-old restaurant gather dust. The novelist, gloomily announcing that even democracy has been exhausted now, quotes Clemenceau’s remark, on visiting Argentina, that this was a country with a wonderful future—and always would be.
Indeed, if conversation is one of the most stylish arts in Argentina, politics is one of the greatest sights; for the central issues of the day are played out in every street and café, in a land that seems almost to feed off soap-operatic calamity. The first time I went to the Plaza de Mayo, a group of old-age pensioners was holding up masks and waving banners outside the presidential Casa Rosada (now, all too fittingly, swathed in scaffolding). Nearby was a clamor of student nurses chanting, “We want teachers!” while under a nearby arcade, a line of haggard peronistas was staging some kind of hunger strike. The next day, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo conducted their weekly march, followed by a motley crew of complainants that included Trotskyites, Communists, and gays.
But the political pageant is hardly confined to the central square. The clangor of opinions is everywhere, as omnipresent as the mimes and clowns and illusionists who perform around the shopping streets. The Communist Youth are organizing a rally that somehow combines the fashionable issue of privatization with the fail-safe cry “The Malvinas [Falklands] belong to Argentina!” Outside the Greco-Roman Congress, under a lamppost consecrated to Thomas Edison, a Muslim is displaying pamphlets that predict the advent of the Khomeiniite revolution. On Calle Florida, the main pedestrian shopping street, gaggles of old men conduct ritual debates (“This is an economic problem!” “No, it is political!”) in front of a wall plastered with posters: one celebrating Menem; one outlining the rules for buying and selling dollars; one showing a turban
ed guru; and the last pointing out that extraterrestrials are dispensing wisdom directly to one Señora Valentina de Andrade.
Indeed, the fascination with flying saucers that so obsessed the Argentine priest in Greene’s Travels with My Aunt seems almost a national trait. Wealthy denim matrons pore over ads for parapsychology and devour the cover story of the Spanish magazine Muy Interesante, with its “Manual for Living in Outer Space” (another of its stories deals with “Transparent Bodies”). In remote Jujuy—the capital of the province of Jujuy—a Gnostic group is offering a series of weekly lectures; in Mendoza, the bookstores are heavy with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. And when I went to the annual book fair, an almost three-week-long event that draws more than a million people, the flashiest sign of all, advertised by a dazzling pink neon sign, belonged to the Hare Krishnas (the stall next door was that of the University of Moron). Menem himself took office on a day deemed astrologically propitious.
The other great rage in Argentina—which may respond to the same kind of needs—is psychology. Freud and Lacan dominate the bookshop windows, and, as everyone always mentions, there are three times more therapists and psychiatrists per capita in Buenos Aires than in New York State. Streetside kiosks sell magazines called “Real Problems in Psychoanalysis” and others whose covers say, simply, “Anguish”; the hot issue among the jet-setters is antidepressant drugs. What impressed me most about Argentina was not just that shrinks are as common as occultists but that both, like health clubs, are the kind of leisure-class accessory one usually associates with affluence. And as affluence grows more precarious, the need for miracles grows more intense. “We want even our politicians to be like magicians,” an Argentine told me, “just to wave a wand and make our problems disappear.”