The Ruin

With my friend and fellow boarder Rafaël already enroute to Misiones and the majestic Iguazú Falls, I set off on my own for the more modest destination of La Boca, in search of the famous Riachuelo and its bohemian neighborhood of brightly painted shoreside houses and tango culture. It was 2005, the first Tuesday in July, my last week of three in the Argentine Republic. After some short business in Palermo where I was staying, I hopped the colectivo #24 and headed for Parque Lezama, most identifiable site on Álvaro Abós's literary map of La Boca, from which I hoped to orient myself.

I got off the bus at Bolívar and Brasil, a block from the park which I then entered at Brasil and Defensa. In front of me stood, on its marble pedestal, a bronze statue of Don Pedro de Mendoza, who was said to have founded the city for the first time (in 1536) at roughly this spot, when it was (as Abós writes) “an infinite and scarcely rolling prairie, and the river of crystalline water licked its steep shore.” Rising behind him, arms outstretched and head cast upward as if in supplication, is the truly imposing image – carved in marble – of an Indian, towering above the conqueror who would in fact not be successful on that first attempt; the definitive settlement would be made in 1580 by Juan de Garay. Whatever the artistic intent, the towering Indian strikes me as oddly ironic, as if the monument were really to the indigenous spirit of resistance that brought Mendoza's Buenos Aires to ashes and sent its survivors on their way; or to that massive expanse of prairie that the Indian inhabited. Mendoza himself seemed dwarfed by comparison, as undoubtedly he should be. Still, the engraving was dedicated to him, in 1936, to mark the fourth centennial of his premature founding of what was to become this immense city.

I stopped to eat at the Restaurante Lezama across Brasil from the monument. I was delighted to find on the menu an old favorite, lengua a la vinagreta, beef tongue served cold – with red and green garnishes – in a vinegar sauce. It was as good as I remembered it from El Juanjo, the corner bar in Funes where my first Mormon missionary companions and I took our noonday meal more than a quarter century earlier. After that appetizer I enjoyed a main course of Galician-style white salmon and went happily on my way. Consulting my map, I thought I might best access the riverfront by simply following Brasil downhill for a few blocks to the Darsena Sur, the inner harbor or dock where the Riachuelo meets the Río de la Plata, and then turn right, walking until I saw my painted Bohemia. As it was, the snarl of overpasses and on-and-off ramps of the Autopista Dardo Rocha, which connected Buenos Aires with the resort-city La Plata, sent me scurrying back to the bottom of Parque Lezama where I turned left and followed Avenida Martín García to Defensa, which in its course to the river became Avenida Regimiento de Patricios. Had I remembered the name of the place I was looking for (undoubtedly I had both heard and read it before), I could have saved some steps, cutting a fairly straight course from Lezama past the soccer stadium to the famous Caminito, or “Little Road,” which, now that I know it, is easy enough to locate on the map.

In any case, the walk was an education to me. Not that I was particularly apprehensive. La Boca does have a certain unsavory reputation, but I still had daylight. So I walked along, my wooden cane marking the path at a fairly brisk pace, pausing now and then over ragged sidewalks and the occasional precipitous drop – negotiating sharp concrete stairs that scarcely accommodated a whole foot – at the entrance to a garage or a loading ramp for trucks. There was a promising sight: a shop or tango bar with its exterior painted in bright reds and yellows, with perfect blue borders, boasting exquisite murals and a familiar atmosphere that seduced me into thinking I was on the right trail. A couple of blocks further along and I seemed to be in some working-class urbanscape in Hammond or Gary, Indiana, in that concrete sprawl where my wife Anita was born, within the shadow of Carl Sandburg's Chicago. But no, while the factory with its broken-out windows had much in common with that North American setting, its dreary gray cobblestone street made me think more of Dickensian England as I imagined it. Alongside the building there were a couple of men beside a rickety wooden wagon, the one man having been pulling it along on two wheels, setting it down now for the two of them to pick up the bags of trash that were lying there at curbside, waiting to be hauled away. Later – I refrained from photographing this scene, shy of the workingmen's disdainful stares – there was the perfect image of a white-and-brown dog lying in the shade, beside a truck that the men were either loading or unloading, beneath a sky that at the moment was overcast and gray, morose-looking dog lying still on what seemed equally grayish cobblestones where the men were working.

As I write these words a couple of months later I realize that the image must have taken me back, unconsciously, to one of my elementary-school reading experiences, a grayish paperback novel from Scholastic Book Services called The Greyhound, by Helen Griffiths. I still have it in my library, having always remembered it with a certain fondness. It is the story of a boy caught between his love of a dog and the Fagin-like boy criminal who loaned him the money to save it. Its overall mood, as I remember it, is captured in this image of a dog sleeping on a cobblestone street in La Boca.

My own mood – morose; tinged, though, by a sense of nervous expectation – unconsciously reflected so much grayness as I continued my walk along Regimiento de Patricios, toward Pedro de Mendoza where I would come to within range of the stinking Riachuelo. Before that, perhaps before the dog, on the wall of a factory that looked no different than that other (perhaps it was the same), there was a workingman's mural, metallic eyes and men with muscled arms and heavy equipment, the slogan: NO IMAGINES QUE ESTAS SOLO (Don't imagine that you're alone). As I reached the river, I had to climb to the top of the imposing concrete levee that overlooked it. As I reached that level, the stench of the Riachuelo nearly knocked me over. In both directions I could see the evidence of industry unchecked; the river itself was black, thick with oil and countless other chemicals. A lighted match dropped purposefully or inadvertently on that sludgy River of Putrefaction and Nausea would perhaps be enough to set it all on fire. I had heard that it was badly polluted, but the reality of it was far worse than anything I could have imagined. My God! This was an ecological disaster of enormous proportions! As I surveyed the scene, I held my breath and marveled at the extent of the damage that Man can wreak in the venerable name of Progress.

I got down off of that levee, towering shield against the stench of the water, and headed right (from my approach on Regimiento de los Patricios) on Pedro de Mendoza. By now there was no escaping the smell. As I walked, a man rode past me on a bicycle, resignation written all over his face, brown paper bag in hand, presumedly the meal that he would eat at the factory.

I turned right again and walked aimlessly (and a bit nervously, now) in the other direction. Finally I came to a corner bar-café. In front of it were parked two or three taxis. One of the drivers was standing by his car; I asked him for a ride. He was off duty, but his buddy was about to go back out. He ran across the street to get his car and soon I was inside of it. Could he take me to that picturesque riverside section? You know, the one with all the brightly painted houses and such? “Oh,” the driver says, “you mean the Caminito. ¿Cómo no?” (Of course; why not?)

He was a friendly guy, talkative and solidly built like a hard-laboring Irish or Galician or Italian immigrant in New York or Boston or Chicago as well as in Buenos Aires. I have been told that I take my life (or at least my wallet) in my hands by soliciting a taxi on the street, that I should call it in to a reputable service instead, but so far I have had good luck. This fellow deposited me promptly at my destination with only a modest charge. I tipped him generously and got out, wowed by the contrast between the Boca that I had just seen and this touristy echo of a former heyday that was spreading out right now before me. It was already past four.

My students back home in southern Indiana, having seen pictures of the bright district, demanded that I take it in with my own camera. I am not sorry that I did, though the place had Tourist Trap written all over it. It was probably to my advantage that I only had a modest amount of cash in my wallet, and that the shop owners were no longer taking credit cards, since that spared me the temptation of spending more money on taudry souvenirs for my family than I would later spend on the more tasteful and folksy items that I would find closer at hand in Palermo.

I looked, anyway, at a set of drink coasters, over-priced despite their brightly painted scenes and verses; I had a pleasant enough chat with the street vendor who described to me their virtues, and who also expressed a friendly curiosity at my fluid but foreign-accented Spanish. Dismissing myself from her with the vague suggestion that I might stop back, I climbed the narrow steps, lined with colorful paintings, to an upstairs shop with all variety of items including, at the top of the stairs, a decidedly erotic version of another painting (in this case the figures were starkly nude) of a man and woman dancing by moonlight; and a boxed puzzle with some picturesque scene which, had it not cost more money than I had on me, I might have bought for my daughter Nadina who so loves jigsaw puzzles and the increasingly intricate art of “scrap-booking.” In the end, after being pursued mercilessly by the female staff, who seemed insulted by my feigned disinterest (I suppose they were working on commission), I paid for a couple of post cards: one of the traditional dancers on the Caminito itself; the other an idealized portrait of the tango legend Carlos Gardel.

Outside, supposing that it must also cost money, I declined the pretty tango dancer's invitation to have my picture taken with her (by her dashing partner; with my own camera). It would have been the most vulgar of vanity shots: her leg crossed in front of me, bare to the hip, while I (sporting her partner's rakish hat; or perhaps my own, since it was of the same variety) was molded into the expert masculine pose – as if it were my second nature. I confess that the proposition was tempting. But I declined.

I strolled around the other side of the corner building, glanced at the various paintings on display on easels, strolled down the single block of the second little street that converged there and then over toward the riverfront itself. Climbing again to a more advantageous height, I was again faced with the putrid river, wondering at the boats and at the little booth (at that hour closed) which advertised rides. I couldn't imagine that anyone would take them up on the offer. I hated to think what the Caminito itself must smell like at the height of an intensely muggy, pampean summer.

I strolled back toward the central point, where those dancers were in the midst of a performance. Shy of photographing them while having refused their own offer, I hesitated a moment too long, and then they were finished, posing in turn with other tourists (male and female) who were more than happy to indulge the ridiculous fantasy. Of course, who am I to talk! Wasn't it I, last night, who found myself posing beside the monstrous vulgarity of waxed-over death at Café Tortoni – of literary stylist Jorge Luis Borges, the tango singer Gardel, and poet Alfonsina Storni, all three regulars there during the establishment’s artistic heyday in the 1930s?

I walked back along the street from which I had come. I looked up at the life-sized caricatures in ceramic models of a defunct era's more common men and women, suggestive and bawdy, leaning off of balconies and looking out jovially at passers-by. I turned right into the historical Conventillo or “Little Convent,” which in reality had been nothing of the sort but a den of whores and gangsters, and which was now made into a museum, a little cove of apartments and balconies – laundry hanging over them – off of the bustle of the street itself.

I didn't linger. I was anxious to get back to Parque Lezama before night fell. I walked a few blocks, toward a plaza which had been the scene of a kind of farmer's market that was by then packing up. Along the way I saw other evidences of the neighborhood's decline, vague hints of color on houses and apartments which had not seen a coat of paint in many years. I caught a glimpse, along a side street and past some railroad tracks, of the famous Boca soccer stadium. There was also, though, short blocks from the tawdry spectacle of brilliant revelry and false color amidst urban decay and ecological ruin, a single glimpse of true beauty: a wall outside of someone's house, painted with the lovely scene of an interior patio and graced with a snatch of one of Borges's most evocative poems (with which I was already familiar): “Patio, cielo encauzado. / El patio es el declive / por el cual se derrama el cielo / en la casa” (Patio, heaven channeled. / The patio is the slope / through which heaven is poured / into the house).

I took another taxi and got off at the intersection of Martín García and Defensa, from where I cut through the park and came out pretty much where I had started, on Brasil beneath the trees to one side of the statue to the city's founder, pausing atop the multi-colored stone bleachers that I had first seen as I walked downhill toward the Dardo Rocha. To my right, now, at the southern extreme of that half-oval of a false stadium, were still gathered a group of men about whose activities I had previously wondered. Perhaps they were not the same men; the two at center, whom the others were watching, I now realized were playing a game of chess, or perhaps of dominoes. Across from me, on the other side of Brasil, were the golden spires of a Greek Orthodox cathedral, which I had only first noticed from a distance after I had passed it. I crossed the street now and looked closely at the engraved Spanish and Cyrillic script on the bronze plaque at its front, behind the familiarly black metal fence. Had I been there on a Sunday it would have been worth attending.

Part II will appear in future issue.

Brett Alan Sanders Biography

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