Winter Wishing

Seeking evidence of phantom winter, I went to my first Rangers game for the season tonight. The walk to the subway was cold, promising. The crowd was New York right too, booing the 12 year old boy introduced as the game's honorary member of the crew that cleans the ice during commercial timeouts; naturally screaming "No" when the scoreboard message from Benny asked Gail to marry him (in the third period we saw the happy couple as the Jumbotron informed us "she said yes") and cheering the bald guy in the 400 seats who dances after a fashion to a sound bite of rock at every game during the third period. We also applauded Cyndi Lauper, in attendance and still having fun as her signature song played. I always thought she should have been the one instead of Madonna, but she wasn't. So it was a fine facsimile of winter, and with snow predicted for tomorrow night maybe the real deal to follow, except for the Rangers who spent the evening firing shots straight at Andrew Raycroft's midsection, never followed a rebound and lost to Toronto 2-1. What I've learned between this season and last -- the fastest route out to the subway in the endless corridors of Penn Station.

More Boca, No More Ford Falcons

On to Caminito, one of the major tourist fly traps of the city, where the houses are brightly painted and over the last twenty years the quality of the street art has gotten much worse, and the subject matter of the work has narrowed to two words -- tango crap. You can pose with tango dancers or stick your head through one of the tango or beer belly cardboard cutouts. But there are still deserted tables under Quilmes umbrellas where eventually a mozo shows up and you order a beer and an empanada and watch the young couple in the cement playground across the way dancing tango (it´s not of course the dance that merits the "crap" epithet, it´s the crass industry around it) to recorded music, under the wall photo of this year´s Boca squad, and look forward and back. Here in Boca, in San Telmo, and in Palermo around the corner from our rental, there were four far more eloquent reminders of the military reign of state terrorism than spray painted slogans or even, by this time, grandmothers´ head scarves. Simple plaques in the sidewalk or -- in San Telmo´s case -- Dorrego Plaza reading, "Aqui vivio (name), victima del terrorismo del estado, desaparecido el (date the person was taken away)" At another site in Boca there is a list of union members who disappeared, in one case on the same day, a 39 year old mother and her 17 year old son. There was simply no excuse on earth for it. Argentina now, for all its faults, no longer carries the threat of the cruising Ford Falcons late at night. I walked around the handicraft fair in the Palermo Viejo plaza, seeing some very alternative people and thought that thirty years ago some of them would not have been let alive to sell their trade. Tom Paine -- profiled in a New Yorker review of books about him -- would have had some thoughts about all that. There weren´t -isms in Tom´s days, but it´s a fair bet he would have thought as little of them as he did of religion. To an old woman who came "from Almighty God to tell you that if you do not repent of your sins...you will be damned," Paine replied, "God would not send such a foolish ugly woman as you."

City Tour

One day we took a city tour for an afternoon. First stop was the Plaza de Mayo, rundown, defaced, and to my eyes at least, bereft of much to inspire national pride. It´s one thing to have causes; it´s hard to see how spray painted slogans on national monuments -- the Cabildo, the National Cathedral, and the National Bank, fine old, if not well-maintained buildings all -- advance those causes. (To be fair, a few days later we wound up again in the Plaza and the Cathedral at least had been cleaned up.) On the other hand, the Casa Rosada is surrounded by barricades and scaffolding, getting a facelift and a careful, total new paint job that Dana Dee says she read is driven by historical documents on the exact color. To judge by what has been painted so fair, it should perhaps be re named Casa Salmon. We moved on to La Bombonera, stadium of Boca Juniors, capacity 58000 and so nicknamed because to some, seen from above, it looks like an open box of chocolates. Inside the Boca museum store, among other useful items, one can purchase a computer keyboard in Boca colors of blue and gold, as well as a model Bombonera music box that presumably plays the Boca anthem. There is also a lifesize monument to Maradona, the young, athletic Maradona, not the fat, drug-addled Maradona. He is in gold fiberglass, standing with his hand over his heart as the Himno Nacional is presumably being played. Call it Monument to a Cheat since the "Hand of God" goal that gave Argentina its Copa Mundial in 1986 has long since been revealed to be the "Hand of Maradona." In the US we pursue an African-American who may be a cheat and who doesn´t treat the press nicely by empaneling a grand jury and when it expires without enough evidence to indict, empaneling another grand jury. In Argentina a sporting cheat is a national hero.

One of BA´s great charms, like New York´s, is that it is a splendid city to get lost in and, among all the crowds, to hide out it. The beauty of both places is that you don´t need an absence of people or a swath of empty planet to do either. All you need is a few square feet and the indifference of the surrounding energy.

Calor Sofocante

There have been several days of what the BA newpapers are fond of calling "un calor sofocante." As with the rest of the world, temperature doesn't count anymore; it's the "sensacion termica," which reached 106 F on New Year's Day, the hottest New Year's in a decade. On one of the earlier days like that, we went to the long-standing Embassy steakhouse hangout, the Rio Alba. With each bite of chorizo steak there I sweated more despite the air conditioning. Then that night I jogged around nine, still with the temp almost surely 90 degrees. Dana Dee and I went out later for something to eat and when we stopped at Filippos near our house -- great ice cream and the irresistible pastiche outside its entrance of Carlos Gardel in his standard stud of tango pose with a Filippo cone in his hand -- the rain finally began. It lasted all night -- as it has on two other occasions since we've been here -- and, after spectacular lightning and sleep-shaking thunder, finally ended when we got up around 10. These storms at night are a wonderful part of Buenos Aires and on that particular Sunday morning only after noon did Palermo begin to stir. The NYT Travel feature section quarterly said "Porteños would only venture to this original part of the city to visit the old folks or when the Peugeot needed fixing." Or, as our experience with our Peugeot in the 80's was, when something was wrong that the garage could fix while also nicking something else that would assure I'd be bringing it back in another couple weeks for the same cycle to begin again.