Archive for August, 2007
The dance floor is packed at the tango hall Confitería Ideal for one of Buenos Aires’s all-night milongas. In the harsh light of grimy Victorian chandeliers, gray-haired gentlemen work the floor, steering women wearing the kind of T-strap shoes seen on 1930’s Hollywood chorines. Everyone is pressed hip to hip, cheek to cheek, breast to chest—matter-of-fact pairings that speak of decades of waking up in the same bed and quick kisses at the door. Couples at rickety tables puff cigarettes and chat; only a few are dressed up, one of these a matron with a bleached-blond bouffant who keeps adjusting her black net gloves. Except for the whine of the bandonion, which looks like a pint-sized accordion with buttons instead of keys, it could be a Masonic lodge in the American Midwest. The same story is played out all over town: Saturday night, slow tango dancing, nobody heading home until dawn.
But as I stand in a corner, nursing a bottle of Quilmes beer, I start to notice younger faces flitting through the crowd. A trio of beaming girls barely out of their teens go through the tango motions, one after the next, with a courtly instructor old enough to be their grandfather. One cool couple is hotdogging like Ideal is their ticket to Broadway—she’s an Uma Thurman blonde with elegant footwork and a beauty-queen smile; he’s surfer-dude handsome. And in the band behind them all, amid the lineup of rumpled veteran musicians, the bandonion player has the clean-cut good looks and bespoke suit of a newly minted investment banker. Actually, he was one. I later learn that a year ago he shocked his coworkers at Goldman Sachs by resigning and announcing that he was heading back to his hometown to learn to play his grandparents’ music. In New York, he advised investors; in Buenos Aires, the long-troubled capital of an equally troubled country, he found something else to invest in—his own culture, his own identity.
No matter where I go in the city, from the traditional dance halls to the recently opened nightclubs, I keep recalling the question that the angry young narrator Che asked in the Lloyd Webber and Rice musical Evita: “What’s new, Buenos Aires?” Judging by the looks of things now, the answer is simple: what’s new is youth, vigor, and a fresh sense of self-awareness that has nothing to do with the Europe-yearning of past generations and everything to do with a recently discovered national pride. At Mark’s, a popular Palermo Soho sandwich bar, all raw brick and sheets of glass, I sip café con leche and listen as Ramiro López Serrot, who co-owns a fashion boutique just up the street with his wife, marvels at how much he and his fellow thirtysomethings have evolved in just a few years. While rising to meet the drastic economic challenges of a seemingly endless recession, the current generation has come to a realization that they are further away from their European roots than their parents ever were. “My father’s family is Spanish, my mother’s family is French Basque, and everybody in that era looked to Europe for guidance on everything,” says López Serrot. “For the first time in my life, I feel like an Argentinean.”