But my favorite shyster was the usher at Teatro Colón, who took one glance at our tickets and informed my girlfriend and me that we had purchased seats apart from each other. He kindly offered to pair us up—at a price—and by the time I’d paid for the pleasure of our special new spot I realized that the original seats had in fact been together all along. At intermission, he flashed me what looked like a victorious smirk.
The hipster hood of the moment is Palermo Viejo, a handsome swatch of cobblestone streets, bougainvillea-draped mansions, and up-to-the-minute enterprises. One half has been dubbed Palermo Hollywood, for the flood of production companies that have moved in; the other is commonly called Palermo Soho, for the flood of trendy stores. Neither of which should be confused with Palermo Chico, another barrio entirely. (Argentines love to distinguish themselves in any way possible. They refer to other South Americans as “Latinos”—just as Brits demarcate themselves from “Europeans”—and their Spanish exists in a world of its own, less a parting of ways with standard Castilian than a major detour of syntax and diction.)
By day, global fashion junkies cruise Palermo Viejo’s armedguarded boutiques, scouring for funky footwear, artisanal soaps, retro-mod linens, and girly lingerie. By night, the neighborhood is an explosion of Porteño party style. In the warmer months, from October to April, bars and restaurants spill boisterously onto the sidewalks, where there’s barely a trace of the noxious trash of Microcentro, a ten-minute ride away. Instead, there are a lot of smolderingly beautiful people talking up a storm.
The funny thing about this area, of course, is how so many stylish establishments have sprouted here—particularly in the past three years, since the peso plunged into free fall. The simple explanation points to the number of savvy Argentines who, even before the crisis, knew to keep their money out of the country or under the mattress—and always in dollars. Which is how they saw their fortunes treble almost overnight.
Not everybody has been so lucky. Despite the welcome emergence of Néstor Kirchner’s zero-tolerance presidency, a vital loan from the IMF (following the country’s default on a record $100 billion debt repayment), and the fact that Argentina’s is now among the fastest-growing economies in the Western Hemisphere, vast tracts of Buenos Aires remain manifestly ravaged by poverty. There’s none of that potbanging-outside-banks business anymore, but if, for example, you visit the bargain-outlet barrio of Once, you should expect to see street children hustling for change.
While many here find living more of a struggle than ever, there’s still a sense of collective energy crackling at the seams. All you need do is take a 15-minute cab ride to the Feria de Mataderos—where, at the very least, you’ll understand something of Argentina’s gaucho heritage. “This fair is how we keep our country traditions alive in the city,” says Mariano Gómez, whom I meet in the plaza as he takes a break from a chamamé dance—a lopsided-looking cousin to the tango from Corrientes province.
Clad in a white dress shirt, suede waistcoat, and pleated white jodhpurs, Gómez shows me his ten-inch knife and returns to the dance. And so I wander off, through canyons of streetside stalls selling engraved wooden mate pots (for sipping the nation’s ubiquitous herbal drink) and parrillas peddling choripán (grilled-chorizo rolls—don’t call them hot dogs). Porteños are renowned sales wizards, and thus the level of customermerchant interaction barely lets up as I walk through the fair. The one thing I don’t see (or hear) are non-Argentines.
The surge of foreign visitors to Buenos Aires has of course done wonders for places in the central tourist zone—places like San Telmo, an evocative pocket of cobbled streets concentrated around the Plaza Dorrego. Its fabled Sunday flea market is awash with tango couples hamming it up for street punters and vendors hawking all manner of antiques.
This area is often dubbed the home of tango, though in truth the dance probably evolved in the brothels of La Boca, where in the 1880s the city’s immigrant workers would dance with one another to while away the loneliness of being without the women they’d left behind. Nowadays, the tango is in full force throughout the city, boosted by both a burgeoning international interest and a growing enthusiasm among young Porteños, who for years saw the dance as passé.
“Five years ago, you’d rarely see someone my age here,” says Diego Malvicino, a 31-year-old musician I meet at Porteño y Bailarín, a favored Tuesday night milonga in the San Nicolás neighborhood. “It was mostly couples who’d been dancing with each other for the past fifty years. But now everything’s changed. And it’s not just the younger crowd. You might walk into a dance hall and see thirty Japanese people.”
Tonight, the salon is stuffed with a homegrown crowd who do little to decimate the myth that all Porteños are in love with themselves. The women dance with their eyes closed, eyebrows perched high, skirts slit close to the hip; the men wear their shirt collars over the lapels, pimp-style. Comb-overs, false breasts, and perma-tans are in plentiful supply, and most everyone is wearing black. Nobody seems particularly interested in talking to me between songs—and when they do, they are constantly looking past me to size up their next partner.
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