Buenos Aires: Where the streets have no name. Seriously.
Buenos Aires is a nervous city. It’s the opposite of the palm-tree paradise people imagine when they think of anyplace Latin.
There are some palms, yes, and it’s hot. But that’s it. The rest is like blood pulsing through the veins of a hyperventilating aerobics student.
At the airport, waiting for my grandmother to bring the car from the parking lot, the first thing that struck me was the warm, sweet air. See, coming from Minnesota in December, any air above 20 degrees is warm and sweet.
My grandma appeared, riding high in a huge, rickety, diesel-fueled van. As I climbed inside, the hot upholstery felt both pleasant and unpleasant against my skin.
I was in the front. My girlfriend was way in the back, in the bench seat,
She was smiling, I remember; ducking her head down and looking around. I was smiling, too, in that oh-please-don’t-freak-out kind of way. That was because I could see that my grandmother’s feet reached the pedals the same way a five-year-old’s hands reach the kitchen faucet.
Every time she had to shift the van’s stubborn gears, her whole body would slide down the seat a little. And this was before we’d even made the highway.
Somehow, though, my girlfriend failed to notice this, and looked content.
I kept asking Baba (that’s what we call my grandma) things about Argentina, and then trying to relay the answers to the back seat. But with the windows open and the sound of 50 other cars idling around us (we were caught in a jam at a toll), communication was impossible.
When we got on the highway, my girlfriend’s contented smile turned into a concerned smile. It was as if she was watching little kid carry a huge glass pitcher, thinking, Ok honey, just don’t drop it.
The highways in Argentina are like rivers. There is some semblance of order;
there are traffic signs, speed limits, and everyone on the right side of the median is driving in the same direction.
But beyond that, there is a feeling of chaotic fluidity. Currents. Swirling eddies.
Lanes are not respected. It’s common to see cars driving steadily with their wheels straddling the dashed white line.
Signals – I mean those that use the car’s blinkers – are rare. More common are hand signals, quick glances, or just unannounced changes of direction. Perhaps this is just a sign of a more trusting society, but I doubt it.
Also, there is a lot of random slowing down, which was problematic. Cars in front of you will drop speed like kids in front of a lifeguard at the pool, as if to fool you – Oh no, I wasn’t going fast, I was always going this slow.
Fooled or not, you have to hit the brakes. And, as I explained before, sudden pedal changes, for Baba, are little feats of acrobatics.
Now, Buenos Aires is an immensely beautiful city. It is known, rightly, I think, as the Paris of South America. Some parts of the city are as impressive as any place I’ve ever been, the real Paris included.
But the highway is not one of those. The highway is ugly. The buildings surrounding it look like they were built from materials left over from the construction of the concrete lizard down below.
Before you reach these laundry-speckled slabs, further out from the city, there are some green patches to either side. That’s where, believe or not (I couldn’t until I saw it), people have picnics on the weekends. Right there, next to four throbbing lanes of erratic traffic.
My grandmother, who is HOW OLD, is impervious to all this. She went calmly along with her arm resting out the window, like she was driving a golf-cart down the middle of a fairway.
When we got to my grandparents’ house, we were wobbly. We stepped into the cool shade indoors and fell almost instantly asleep on the fold-out bed in the living room. There, it was quiet, peaceful and cool. Just what we needed.
Little did we know that in the evening another adventure awaited. My grandpa wanted to take us sightseeing in the maze of downtown city streets, where intersections are like gang-fights and parking is like the last level of Tetris.
If we thought the afternoon’s ride had been rocky, we had a rude awakening coming: the streets in the city are made of cobblestone.