I went to my first asado this afternoon while visiting a former ranch just outside of the city. It's a feast of meat: chicken, pork and serious amounts of beef, all roasted over a charcoal fire for most of the afternoon. Most of it looks familiar. Some of it doesn't, though it's still tasty. And then there are things that — well, you're pretty sure they came from a cow, or at least some kind of animal, but you'd just as soon not know for sure.
Buenos Aires is kind of like that, although most Argentines would be horrified by the comparison. They like to point out the city's European flavor, and it's hard to miss: walking around the wide, busy avenues lined with buildings that look like small castles, it's easy to imagine yourself in a Europe that was never visited by war. The tower outside my head — a gift from the British government — wouldn't look out of place in London, and the city's National Museum of Fine Arts (one of many in an entire neighborhood dedicated to art and design) has an impressive collection of European masters, though its works by Argentine artists are often just as good, if not better.
This is a city with an ambivalent relationship toward its past. Porteños are proud of the gaucho spirit, and the city's exclusive shopping districts are filled with stores selling leather goods, designer ponchos and silver spurs. There is even an unusual number of paintings at the Fine Arts museum with cows as their subject. Gauchos are a popular draw at tourist programs like the one I attended this afternoon, which combined performances of riding, roping and bola-twirling with demonstrations of the tango. But the gauchos of the past were half-native outcasts who lived on the outskirts of society; like the outlaws of the American Old West, they're romanticized, but no one wants to have one in their family tree.
Having a name is important here, as I discovered while touring the Recoleta Cemetery yesterday. To call Recoleta a graveyard doesn't do it justice — it's wall to wall tombs, all of them elaborately carved, with angels, rearing horses and other monuments that cost several times what I make in a year. They're visited by legions of well-fed feral cats, by strolling porteños and by American tourists looking for the grave of Eva Peron, who still receives armloads of flowers every day — even though many of the powerful families whose dead surround her consider it a scandal that a former entertainer is buried at Recoleta.
I rarely get to talk to anyone other than public relations personnel on these trips, but even the one Argentine-American I met had little to say on the subject of the "Dirty War," the period from the late '60s to the early '80s when a military dictatorship seized power to combat student terrorism and created a reign of terror, "disappearing" anyone they suspected of subversive tendencies. In fact, the only evidence I saw of those times was yesterday's weekly gathering of the Mothers of the Disappeared, who march around the city's central Plaza de Mayo carrying signs and banners and demanding to know what happened to their children. It's hard to look at those wrinkled faces and stooped backs and think of them as revolutionaries, though they certainly seemed brave. It's strange, too, that their weekly vigil has become a kind of tourist attraction, drawing folks like me who — however impressed we might be — want another item to check off on our list of things to see.
And there's so much to see here, and to taste, and to hear. It's hard to categorize the music here: listen to a band like Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, and you'll hear rock and big band, ska and country and several other influences I couldn't identify. Porteños do a lot, and they do it with passion: one woman I talked to said she spent her free time playing field hockey and boxing, because nothing else was active enough for her. People here who are about my age go out on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, hitting the clubs at 2 a.m. and going to bed at four so they can get up again at six. They sleep by going to the movies on Friday. This is the only place I've ever heard the expression "seven o'clock in the afternoon."
And then there's the food. Almost everyone I've met is a recent immigrant, their families coming from Spain, Germany, Italy — and you can taste the combination of flavors everywhere you go. Even the food at the soccer games is unbelievably good, and when you go to a restaurant and order something unusual — juicy steak cooked inside a puff pastry with mushrooms and served with a glass of Mendoza wine — you might as well take the rest of the night off to spend rolling around on the floor going "so goooood" before fading off to sleep.
If there was ever time to sleep.
Still, after a day spent riding on horseback, watching burrowing owls peep out of the Pampas grass on my way to an asado under the limitless sky, I'm willing to give it my best shot.
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