The Madness Begins at Midnight

The Evening started at midnight--early by Buenos Aires standards. It was now three A.M. The nightclub is called Black and it was packed. It's sleek, with a long shiny bar and a small parquet dance floor set in front of a huge mirror. The clientele consists of well-dressed foreign businessmen and drop-dead fashionably dressed young women.

There were gorgeous women of all persuasions: porteñas (as people from Buenos Aires are called), Asians, Brazilians, beauties of every imaginable sort. On the dance floor, some were alone, dreamily swaying to the music, narcissistically watching themselves in the mirror. Hard to blame them. Others were curled up on couches next to various well-heeled businessmen, drinking and laughing. Still others were discreetly cruising, looking for someone to cuddle up with.

Yes, they are all working girls, but they are as sleek and elegant as the nightclub itself. Drinks are $20 a pop. The bar makes its profits from the drinks. The women are freelancers who get between $300 and $500 per night. Nearly half are college students, working their way through school.

Seeing that I was unattached, one woman sat down on a couch next to me and introduced herself as Maria. She was a lovely longhaired porteña, wearing a see-through beige knit dress. My Spanish is terrible, but with scribbling gestures I explained I was there just as a journalist. Her eyes said right, but she sat and talked for a few minutes anyway. She was in college. She said she was una estudiante de relaciones internacionales--so she seemed to be in the right place.

Reluctantly I got up and said so long. I was due to meet my old buddy Eddie at 3:30. He had tended bar in a Chicago saloon I once frequented. A few years ago, he moved down here on a whim to what he calls "the antipodes." Eddie loves the city and has it wired. When I saw him he was working as a bartender at another club, called Open City. It is several cuts below Black, with imitation English pub decor and strippers humping a pole on the dance floor. Happily, Eddie was getting off work, and we went somewhere more savory, if fairly weird, called the Open Plaza, at Libertador and Tagle. It's a 24-hour warehouse-size place on three levels, the first of which is a (continued on page 106) Buenos Aires (continued from page 96) one-room mall. The Open Plaza has the industrial-strength look much in vogue here. In this huge airplane-hangar space--with no particular logic and with no separating walls--there is a bar, restaurant, CD and video store, curio shop, fruit and flower market, pizza place and jewelry store. Upstairs there are more restaurants, a fruit juice bar, an art gallery and a disco called Live-In that's furnished with sofas and easy chairs. It's an all-purpose joint.

I get back to my hotel room and collapse about nine A.M.

•

Buenos Aires goes all night. God knows when people sleep. There are gourmet restaurants open at midnight. Discos are open until dawn and beyond--some of them hold a couple thousand people. On weekends some of the movie theaters start their last features at two A.M. For studious insomniacs, Avenida Corrientes has a strip featuring all-night bookstores, new and used, plus 24-hour cafés to read in. There's never an excuse for getting bored in Buenos Aires.

Despite its slightly comic obsession with Eva Perón (Iviva Evitai is a common graffito, the Argentine equivalent of Elvis Lives!), Buenos Aires is a sophisticated city. The people here did, after all, invent the tango, a dance so sexy it was once condemned by the Pope. Practically everybody is a fashion plate, or is doing their best on whatever money they have. You can see it in their shoes, mostly designer leather. There are shoeshine stands all over to keep those shoes looking spiffy. I saw lips curl when people looked down and noticed my low-rent New Balances.

The city is often called the Paris of Latin America, but that overstates the case. It's more like someone's fading memory of Paris. The road in from the airport, with mile after mile of drab high-rises, is reminiscent more of Beijing. But the microcentro--which is what downtown is called--and the upscale Recoleta section to its north are the most European-looking areas in any South American city. Many of the buildings there were built late in the 19th century on European models.

One thing Buenos Aires shares with its European counterparts is that it's a great walker's city. Most of the city's tourist sites are within walking distance from hotels in the microcentro, which is where most of the action is and where it's best to stay.

When I finally woke up the afternoon following my all-night club hop, I decided to take a walk. I started on Calle Florida.

In the microcentro, around the corner from the Hotel Libertador Kempinski, where I was staying, Florida is Buenos Aires' famous pedestrian shopping street. It has nearly one mile of shops of every variety, with green kiosks and, along the center, benches under trees.

Practically every other shop sells leather goods--at prices considerably lower than in the States. They're the best things to bring back from Buenos Aires. Thanks to all those cattle out on the pampas, Argentine leather is of the highest quality. There are shoe stores beyond counting, upscale leather jackets, leather coats, handbags, wallets, briefcases, luggage--if it can be made out of leather, you can find it on Calle Florida.

The street ends to the north at the Plaza San Martín. José de San Martín was the Bolívar of this part of South America, and the plaza is dominated by the requisite heroic statue of the liberator on horseback. There's also a memorial to the soldiers who died in the Malvinas war, as the Argentines call the 1982 conflict with Britain over the Falkland Islands.

Not far beyond Plaza San Martín is the Park Hyatt. Rooms on its upper floors offer a view of the Río de la Plata, a murky brown river about 30 miles wide at this point, with Uruguay on the other side. The Park Hyatt is the best hotel in town, but you'd hardly know it from its exterior. The French-style mansion grafted onto its side looks fancier, and is. Built in 1916, it's part of the hotel and is where the biggest stars stay when they're in town--Madonna while filming Evita, Michael Jackson, et al.--at a cost of up to $3600 per night.

Many embassies are located in this area. The vacant lot I passed on Arroyo used to be the Israeli Embassy, which was bombed to rubble in 1992. Seeing it, I couldn't help thinking about the thread of anti-Semitism running through Argentina's history--in particular its pro-Axis neutrality during most of World War Two, and the various old Nazis who still turn up here on occasion. Somehow Argentina seemed like a good place for them to land when the Third Reich went up in flames. This in a country that has the largest Jewish population in Latin America. Why the Israeli Embassy hasn't been rebuilt, I don't know. Maybe the Israelis decided to leave it as a reminder.

Just past the Hyatt you come into the beginning of Recoleta, an exclusive neighborhood of century-old stone mansions on charming narrow streets lined with trees. In this part of the city, you really could be in Paris.

On Avenida Alvear, near where it ends at a plaza, is the Alvear Palace Hotel, which drips with opulence. Built in 1932, it is the grand dame of Buenos Aires hotels. I love the lobby--its marble floors, 25-foot-high ceiling supported by marble pillars, staircase sweeping up to the second floor, crystal chandeliers and gilt-framed paintings all speak of another, more splendid time, one long gone except for guests of the hotel.

I stopped at Café de la Paix, which faces the Plaza Alvear, for a coffee and some excellent people watching. A simple coffee costs $3.50 but is well worth it for the passing vanity fair. It was a golden sunny afternoon and everybody was out. I was again struck by how suave and well-groomed everyone looked. And beautiful, in the case of the women. Most porteñas are descended from Spanish and Italian immigrants who arrived here a hundred years or so ago, and the resulting mix is enough to make your neck hurt from spinning.

Since I was so close, I figured I might as well visit Evita's tomb in the Recoleta Cemetery, next to an old church. The cemetery is actually a necropolis, a small city of mausoleums aligned along a network of walkways. Evita's body is in the Duarte (her maiden name) family mausoleum, of striking black-green marble. The tomb is protected by a tall wrought-iron gate of floral design that is embellished daily by admirers of Evita, who weave cut flowers into it. On the anniversary of her death, July 26, hundreds of people come to the cemetery, and the entire length of her corridor spills over with flowers.

•

That night I took in the tango club El Querandí with Eddie.

"You ever see the tango done right?" he asked.

I said that I had never even seen it done wrong.

"Seriously sexy. A lot better than the bump-and-grind at the joint where I work. More sophisticated. But anything would be, I guess. El Querandí has the best dancers in town. It's named after the Indian tribe that sent (continued on page 199) Buenos Aires (continued from page 106) the first Spanish settlers fleeing in the 1530s. They were tough mothers. It's a cool place, restored to the way it was when it opened in 1920 as a restaurant and bar. Early art deco, all black and white. The bar looks as if Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet ought to be plotting at one end while Bogart broods at the other. Also, the food's great. Querandí gets mostly locals, not tourists. You'll dig it."

Eddie tends to speed-rap but he was certainly right.

The show hadn't started yet. We got one of the last tables and I started looking through the fat menu, which was in Spanish, French and German--but not English. A good sign. Most of it looked tempting, but Eddie said, "When in Argentina, eat beef." Right again. When our steaks came, they proved to be enormous and tasted both better and different from any steak back home. Must be that good pampas grass again.

While we ate, Eddie gave me a short history of the tango: "It started in cantinas down in La Boca, the old waterfront. Sailors cooked it up and started dancing it together. Women didn't because it was considered disreputable. So at first it was hello sailor, I guess. But that didn't last too long--at least among the working class. The society types wouldn't be caught dead dancing it until around 1910, when it became a fad in Paris with the upper class. That made it acceptable for decent women. It was created here, but it had to get the Parisian stamp of approval to be OK. Typical."

I liked the show a lot more than I had expected I would. The music sounds like Buenos Aires itself: an odd but interesting coupling of romantic 19th century chamber music and Gypsy music, with a Latin American beat. And the dancing is seriously sexy, full of flashing thighs and dramatic twisting dips, the couples fluidly entwining and separating with great drama as they act out the love stories of the songs.

Afterward, out on the street, Eddie said, "Let's go walk off the steak on Corrientes." He raised an arm to hail a cab and one stopped in front of us in two seconds. Buenos Aires taxis look like metallic killer bees, with black bodies and yellow tops, and they are everywhere. More than 35,000 of them, more than in New York City. And the drivers make their New York counterparts seem absolutely sane and timid.

As advertised, Corrientes was going strong into the night, with new and used bookstores still open among the cafés and pizzerias. On my first visit to Buenos Aires some years back, I had been surprised at the number of pizzerias. But this fondness for pizza isn't just a quirk. Italians were the largest group of immigrants during Argentina's great wave of immigration during the second half of the 19th century.

This part of Corrientes is also the theater district, Buenos Aires' version of Broadway, with half a dozen or so theaters concentrated in a few blocks.

We got to an open-air mall, Paseo la Plaza, which Eddie wanted me to see. "I'm no mall rat," he said, "but this one is different." It was. It occupies three levels, with cobblestone walkways, little fountains here and there, and trees and flowering bushes planted in front of the shops and restaurants and movie theaters. The theaters are named for writers and artists, Cine Pablo Neruda and Cine Picasso among them, and one café is called Miró.

We stopped there for some excellent coffee and a second dessert for a night-cap. I had the soufflé de caramelo con salsa sabayon, a delicious caramel souffle with an egg-and-wine sauce, while Eddie went light and basic with the helado de limón al champagne, lemon sorbet with champagne sauce. They're very good at dessert in Buenos Aires.

•

I'd saved two of the main stations of the tourist cross for last: the Teatro Colón and the Plaza de Mayo.

So the next morning I walked the few blocks from the hotel to the Colón and signed up for the one-hour guided tour--which costs five pesos, or $5. The exchange rate is exactly one peso to the dollar, making it easy for those of us who are mathematically challenged.

The Colón, which opened in 1908, is rightly considered to be one of the most magnificent and acoustically perfect opera houses in the world. Placido Domingo would be singing there in two weeks. Seven stories high, taking up a whole block, it took 18 years to construct. The ornate lobby is done in four kinds of marble, with a stained glass cupola high above. The swooping marble staircase is made of an unusual amber-colored marble, with banisters boasting intricately carved dragon heads and art nouveau squiggles, along with the muses of the arts. The second floor of the lobby has at least a 60-foot ceiling with more stained glass above depicting scenes from Greek mythology.

The theater itself is also a trip. Above the main floor there are six wraparound balconies and extremely ornate boxes. "Widow boxes," shielded by black grates, were once used by widows who weren't to be seen at social events because they were in mourning. The presidential box has its own bathroom and a secret exit--not a bad idea given the Argentine proclivity for coups d'état.

From the Colón it's about a ten-block walk to the Plaza de Mayo, the city's most historic spot. It's where Spanish settlers set up shop in 1580.

Today it is a large, pleasant square with well-kept flower beds and tall palm trees along its sides. Also about eight zillion pigeons. The plaza is dominated at one end by the Casa Rosada, which is the Argentine equivalent of our White House. Juan and Eva Perón, among other dictators and generals, regularly used the balconies of the Casa Rosada to placate or stir up the masses below. Not too long ago, Madonna was up there doing it--except the masses were all paid extras.

I walked south from the plaza to an area called San Telmo. It's one of the oldest sections of the city, with charming colonial buildings and narrow cobblestone streets. Today its little main drag is lined with antique stores. I stopped for a quiet lunch at Antigua Tasca de Cuchilleros--the Old Cutlers Tavern. The building, low white stucco with a red tile roof, is almost exactly as it was two centuries ago.

I had the all-cholesterol mixed grill and a couple of glasses of fine Argentine red wine. By meal's end, I was ready for my nap--especially since Eddie and I were scheduled for another round of all-night nightlife.

On the sidewalk, no sooner had I raised my arm than a taxi screeched to a halt in front of me. The driver had the characteristic manic gleam in his eye, but I closed mine during the ride to the hotel, so I didn't have to watch.

After a few hours' sleep, I was ready to take on the city that doesn't sleep, one more time.

The biggest stars--Madonna while filming "Evita," Michael Jackson--stay there for $3600 per night.