Rio de la Plata, Argentina, photo Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC
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“We are not united by love but by fear;
that’s why I love her so much.”
Jorge Luis Borges
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by Luis Benítez
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Dirty. Expensive. Dangerous. Two hundred and two square kilometers where just over three million people live the hazards and paradoxes of the 21st century, between stupor and habit. Our city borders the Río de la Plata to the east, the widest river in the world: two hundred kilometers of polluted water separate our shores from those of Montevideo, in Uruguay. To the north, west, and south, the city is surrounded by the Province of Buenos Aires, the largest in the country, with an area equivalent to Italy.
Buenos Aires was founded twice in the 16th century. Its first founder was the Spanish admiral and conqueror Pedro de Mendoza y Luján (1499-1537), who financed the venture with the loot he received from the sack of Rome in 1527. His monarch, Emperor Charles I of Spain, did not contribute a cent. However, the then powerful Spanish Empire had urgent reasons to establish a military presence in the region: the Portuguese Empire also coveted control.
In exchange for carrying out the adventure, De Mendoza obtained extensive powers: he could build forts and fortresses and, in particular, keep half of the supposed gold he would take from the natives, and 90% of the ransoms demanded for the freedom of the prisoners.
The hope of finding precious metals fueled the ambition of the conquerors, still in search of the fabulous city of El Dorado, a legend that spoke of a city made entirely of gold. Of course, the Crown had no idea about the true dimensions of South America. Pedro de Mendoza was commissioned to build a canal linking the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean! One thousand five hundred kilometers separate Buenos Aires from the coasts of the Pacific Ocean, not counting the obstacle of the Andes Mountains, whose average height is three thousand five hundred meters.
One can also live on illusions, but they live for a short time. De Mendoza barely managed to erect a miserable hamlet on the banks of the Río de la Plata, on February 3, 1536, defended by a flimsy wooden palisade.
It is often said that poets best define the conditions and spirit of an era. Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), who wrote so much about our city, left us these verses in his poem “The Mythical Foundation of Buenos Aires”:
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And was it through this river of dreams and mud
that the prows came to found my homeland?
The little painted boats would tumble among
the water hyacinths of the brown current.
Thinking about it carefully, we’ll suppose that the river
was blue then, as if it came from the sky
(…)
The truth is that a thousand men, and then another thousand,
arrived across a sea five moons wide,
still populated by mermaids and monsters
and magnetic stones that drive the compass mad.
They erected shaky huts on the shore,
they slept in confusion…
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Perhaps this version of events is idyllic, but it conveys in some ways the bewilderment and stupor that those first settlers must have felt, coming from little Spain to these vast Latin American lands.
Contact with the tribes inhabiting the area was far from ideal. Relations with the natives, initially friendly, turned hostile due to the brutal abuses inflicted on them by the Spanish troops. Finally, the natives rebelled and besieged the wretched fort. Tormented by hunger, disease, and despair, the Spanish soldiers were powerless to prevent disaster. Twenty-three thousand Indian warriors occupied the original Buenos Aires and burned it to the ground, killing every settler in their path, in December of that same year.
Barely eleven months after its founding, Buenos Aires was a heap of ashes and corpses. Only De Mendoza and a few officers and soldiers were able to escape the ferocious slaughter, embarking for Spain.
Devastated by syphilis contracted in Rome, the ruined conqueror died on his deathbed before even reaching the Canary Islands. His body was thrown into the sea, according to the custom of the time, along with all his illusions of grandeur.
Almost half a century passed until another conqueror, Juan de Garay (1528-1583), founded Buenos Aires for the second time, in the mid-1580s. Thus began, formally, the colonial period of our city. Its inhabitants had to surrender when it became clear that there was no gold or anything like it here.
As the only port of entry to the vast southern territory of Spanish rule, Buenos Aires enjoyed a privileged location: everything had to enter and leave its shores. Over time, the most lucrative business these shores offered flourished: smuggling.
To us, its inhabitants, Buenos Aires seems ancient; to Europeans, it certainly doesn’t. Perhaps because Buenos Aires constantly forgets
Bypassing the commercial monopoly imposed by the Spanish Crown, Buenos Aires shopkeepers made their fortunes thanks to British and French ships that, anchored outside the port, supplied all kinds of merchandise in the middle of the night at a much lower price than that established by Spain. For example, a shirt made in Manchester cost ten times less than the same garment from the looms in Madrid. Shopkeepers in Buenos Aires would sell that shirt the next morning for five or six times as much and pocket the difference.
How was the trade carried out? Shopkeepers exchanged cowhides, the region’s greatest treasure, for merchandise from the Old World. In colonial times, even the knives and ponchos used by rural laborers, the gauchos, were made in Manchester, according to the favorite designs of their distant buyers.
The smuggling business was so brazen that Hernando Arias de Saavedra (1561–1634), the first governor of the region born in these lands, obfuscatingly declared that “Buenos Aires is the most perfidious jewel of the Spanish Crown”.
To us, its inhabitants, Buenos Aires seems ancient; to Europeans, it certainly doesn’t. Perhaps because Buenos Aires constantly forgets—many crimes, injustices, atrocities, and human rights violations were committed on its streets, as in any other city on the planet—it barely retains a single wall from its architectural past. It still stands in the south of the city, dating from the 17th century and forming part of a parking lot.
The network of tunnels that connected the old mansions in the south of the city to the waters of the Río de la Plata has also been preserved. Through these tunnels, wealthy shopkeepers would venture out to the river at night, alert to the business that awaited them further out, in discreet boats loaded with cowhides and rowed by their slaves. These tunnels are currently a tourist attraction, heavily exploited by the metropolitan government, but the explanation provided to visitors omits any reference to their original use.
After the May Revolution of 1810 and the declaration of independence six years later, interest in smuggling continued unabated. In fact, one of the members of the first patriotic government, Juan Larrea, was the largest smuggler in the Río de la Plata, holding 30% of the business. Today, a street in Buenos Aires honours his memory.
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Buenos Aires, one and multiple
Our attention is not attracted by the uniqueness of the buildings of Buenos Aires, but it does attract a lot of attention from those who visit our city.
The architectural uniqueness of our city lies in the heterogeneity of styles that crowd together not only on each of its streets, but even in each individual building.
Thus, at every turn, we can find a building with a modern commercial premises as a facade at street level and upper floors where the most diverse styles alternate: French, Italian, Brutalism, International, Neoclassical, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Rationalism, etc.
However, what is most common is that we find combinations of two or more styles, with Italianate details mixed with characteristics typical of any other variety. Our poet María del Carmen Colombo (1) paints a fine picture of this:
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A disjointed landscape of the neighborhood’s houses. Above all,
the dislocated flow of the roofs betrays the disharmony
of its inhabitants. Addicted to the ethylic brush,
with a thick inked brush, it was painted one day, surely
by dissident calligraphers of the empire, visceral masters
stricken by fury.
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This building chaos is fostered by the indiscriminate granting of construction permits by the metropolitan government makes it possible to erect towers of twenty or more floors in neighborhoods that were formerly low houses, occupied by a single family.
This latter type of building is currently disappearing. The gentrification process does not stop, destroying the old family homes, which in the previously popular neighborhoods offered a garden in front, falsely colonial bars, and consisted of a single floor or at most two. The reason for such municipal profligacy is quite simple: more taxes are collected from a twenty-story building than from a home inhabited by only four or five people.
The residents’ protests are never heard, even though they know full well that, once the monstrous building is inaugurated, it will reduce the flow of electricity, gas, and water throughout the neighborhood.
Our city’s public services distribution system is outdated, inadequate, and unable to provide water, electricity, and gas when consumption increases.
In the 21st century, during the summer, when heat can reach over 40°C, power outages occur, leaving thousands of people in the dark, without air conditioning, and without water within a few hours, since the pumps that supply the homes’ water tanks run on electricity.
But Buenos Aires—the city without memory—does not stop and does not hesitate to tear down the old to build the new. The poet Eugenia Cabral (2) portrays this very well in her poem “Nobody”:
Money. Love. Art. Death. Each of them occupies a corner of the great building, and each tower is guarded. In dark sunsets, we can see the smoke of the sacrifices rise and the gray smoke blend with the almost black clouds. Infamy in the sky. Infamy on earth. And among the dust, the candid, the desolate, wander outside the fortress, knowing that his eyes will never penetrate the interior of the golden halls. From their hands rises (on the verge of becoming an angel) the day of oblivion. He senses that when the dwelling is destroyed, he will feel the desire to blow on the ashes until the strange sculpture with the bones of the hecatomb—after the offering—is left bare. But now he wanders among the ruins.
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A city always attentive to marking the differences
Despite the aforementioned building heterogeneity, Buenos Aires is very careful to establish the differences between those who have money and those who don’t.
Divided into forty-eight neighborhoods, its northern and northeastern portions are roughly occupied by the wealthier classes, while the southern border, marked by the Riachuelo, a waterway much more polluted than the Río de la Plata, is inhabited by the poorest people. The dwindling middle class resides in the rest of the city, depending on their means.
The Riachuelo is the destination for all the waste from the factories and industrial establishments it runs through, plus sewage and anything else anyone throws into it, without any kind of control.
The result: the black, fetid waters exude an unbreathable stench, thoroughly polluted for decades. A degraded landscape, where the poorest have also established precarious settlements, is also characterized by the presence of abandoned shipwrecks and scrap metal of all kinds in its oily, dark waters.
It is precisely this sordid scenery that the Argentine poet Alberto Boco (3) chose to use as a metaphor in one of his books of poems:
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…we waited
and saw the plastic bottles and drums resting on the layer of oil.
They didn’t look like ships to us, nor did we begin to think about chaos and
/ order.
(…)
The trees sway in the same breeze as the fine mist
with the smell of rotten petroleum
of degraded metal and sulfides soaked into the water.
The same wind for The Eumenides in the
African Oresteia and the silent
evening breeze of the bottles.
The sail moves without blemish or harbor on the grimy back.
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For tourists Buenos Aires offers other faces, of course, the most visible in the abundant brochures intended for visitors from abroad or from within Argentina, eager to discover the promised beauties of the country’s capital. That “other Buenos Aires” also exists, its shining aspects scattered throughout what we explored in the previous paragraphs. A cosmopolitan city and a major tourist destination. A city that prides itself on being very active in terms of commerce, finance, fashion, art, gastronomy, education, entertainment, and culture. A city that once did not hesitate to call itself, without blushing, “the American Paris” and even “the Athens of the Río de la Plata”.
But I live in Buenos Aires.
NOTES
(1)María del Carmen Colombo (Buenos Aires, 1950) has published six books of poetry and received, among others, the First Grand Prize for Poetry, V Centenario (1992) and Special Mention, National Poetry Prize, 1996-1999 (2005). She is included in anthologies of Argentine poets published both domestically and abroad. The excerpt included is from her book La familia china (1999).
(2)Eugenia Cabral was born in the Argentine province of Córdoba (1954) and has lived in Buenos Aires for several decades. She is the author of two plays and seven collections of poems, as well as four literary essays, including Vigilia de un sueño. Apuntes sobre Juan Larrea en Córdoba, Argentina (1956-1980), Eduvim Press, 2017, which won Second Prize in the Biennial Literature Competition of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, 2016/2017. The quoted fragment is from her book of poems La ciudad de amapolas (2022).
(3) Alberto Boco (Buenos Aires, 1949) has published a dozen collections of poems and has received various awards, including First Prize in the First National Poetry Contest “César Domingo Sioli” in Argentina. The cited fragments belong to his book of poems Riachuelo (2008).
Luis Benítez was born in Buenos Aires (1956) and has received several national and international awards for his literary work. His 45 titles of poetry, essays and narrative have been published in Argentina, Chile, France, Italy, Mexico, Romania, Spain, Sweden, USA, UK, Venezuela and Uruguay.
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