September 22, 2024

Dateline – Buenos Aires –

Last night it was my neighborhood. While I was sound asleep here in Buenos Aires, someone turned a semiautomatic weapon on a crowd in Birmingham outside a club in the 5 Points South neighborhood and fired more than one hundred shots in just a few seconds killing four and injuring eighteen others. I don’t do a lot of clubbing these days but I am well aware of the location. It’s less than three blocks from my academic office. A block or so from some on my favorite restaurants. Close to the office of my travel agent. Less than a mile from my condo. There’s scarcely a day that goes by when I’m not either driving through or patronizing some establishment in the area. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about this. To my knowledge, no friends or acquaintances were among the victims but I have seen the names of friends of friends on social media as survivors. I think I need to do a deep dive into politics spurred by this and other events but I’m going to wait until after I get back to the US. I really don’t want to have to turn on that part of my brain while on vacation.

Today was a fairly low key day. The temperature dropped some and it clouded over, threatening another cloudburst which never appeared. As tomorrow is another travel day with an international flight, I’m not sad that there wasn’t all that much on the agenda for the last full day in Argentina. After breakfast (back in its usual location now that the society wedding has decamped and the guests gone back to their elegant apartments in the better districts), we headed over to the Recoleta cemetery which is only a few blocks from the hotel. I had wandered by the outside a few days ago but did not go in as I knew we had a tour visit today. I love old important cemeteries, the kind where lots of money and familial obligation leads to a sort of keeping up with the Jones’ in terms of mausoleum building and funerary sculpture. My favorite is Pere Lachaise in Paris where anyone who was anyone and died in the environs of Paris ended up from Peter Abelard to Oscar Wilde to Jim Morrison. Like New Orleans, Buenos Aires is built on the riverbank of a major river as it turns into an estuary and sea. This means high chance of flooding. (No longer a major issue but when the cemetery was plotted a couple hundred years ago it was very definitely a problem). And so, like the cemeteries of New Orleans, the graves were originally established above ground in family mausoleums. Due to space constraints, the mausoleums all sit cheek by jowl in blocks giving the place the feel of a miniature city of the dead. The mausolea run the gambit from simple plastered brick to huge gothic fantasies. The inhabitants are mainly from prominent Argentine families and not people with whom most North Americans would be familiar.

The exception is, of course Eva Duarte Peron. She does not have her own mausoleum, politics having seen to that. Nor is she buried with Juan Peron (Juan’s later wife, Isabel who is still alive at 91 saw to that). Instead, she is buried with her mother and siblings in the Duarte family crypt. Despite being deceased for over seventy years, she is sill getting offerings of fresh flowers from her people. Eva was a complicated person (and much of the complication was excised from the musical Evita – there is a non-musical film with Faye Dunaway which actually gets somewhat closer to the actual truth). The family tomb is a severe black granite with bronze memorial plaques attached. Would Eva be satisfied with this? Probably not. Her tastes were a bit more grandiose. I thought about going to the Evita museum but I just didn’t feel like it. Later in the afternoon when I could have. And it gives me an excuse to come back.

The next stop was the famous Teatro Colon opera house. They’re in the middle of tech for an opera that opens next week which is why there were no performances of note on the nights I could have gone. We did get a tour of the building with all of its spectacular marble foyers and the 3000 seat house with its boxes and frescoes and enormous chandelier suspended over it all. (Cue Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D major on the organ). Like most 19th century opera houses (although this one is technically 20th century having been dedicated in 1908), it has great acoustics and a huge system of boxes best suited to displaying the occupants to each other rather than giving them appropriate sight lines to the stage. Opera audiences of that day were familiar with the plots and music from repeated viewings and hearings so they need not keep full attention on the stage. They knew what was coming next.

With that, our official tours ceased. I returned to the hotel, fortified myself with some ice cream (when in Italian or Spanish influenced cities, ice cream is a must), and then took a walk through some of the parks over to the museum quarter. First stop was the national museum. Not as large as the great museums of Europe and with a mission to give prominence to Argentine artists, it never the less was a pleasant hour or two basking in the reflected light of creativity. The Argentine artists weren’t particularly inspired as, until about World War II, they seemed to spend most of their time copying European styles and schools so there was kind of a Monet and kind of a Corot etc. The last half of the 20th century Argentine works were more separated from progenitors. There were a few inspired by the terrible period of dictatorship in the 70s and early 80s and I expect there’s a lot more that can be mined from that experience I expected a lot more than there was. The works by artists you have heard of are mainly inferior work although there are some rather good Goya’s from his black period, and a couple of very nice Picassos. Then a little further down the road to the museum of Latin American art. I did not spend as much time as I should have as i didn’t want to be caught in the rain walking back. A lot of pieces by artists of whom I had never heard, many of them with good reason. I did make it back to the hotel without getting wet and with many steps on my pedometer.

I stayed in for the evening and worked a bit on a couple of essays for the new book but kept falling asleep so that’s a task that will have to wait until later. Going to just relax the rest of the night as there’s an early luggage pull in the morning and we have been told that the bus leaves at 8 am sharp with or without us and if we are not on the bus, we’re expected to take a taxi to the airport and catch up with the group. (apparently there’s been issues with missed connections at this juncture in the past). One way or the other, we’re due to arrive in Santiago, Chile mid afternoon tomorrow where we’ll be for a couple of days before returning home.