Finding the heart and soul of Buenos Aires

By Olivia Frey Jan 17, 2012, 3:06 GMT

Buenos Aires - Through a loudspeaker, a violin is making a weeping sound, and two bodies are elegantly moving to the music over the Plaza Dorrego in Buenos Aires.

The air is heavy with the late summer. The asphalt is giving off heat, which is rising into the cloudless evening sky. A light breeze is whistling through a side street.

Here, in the middle of San Telmo, the oldest district of the city, is a meeting place for everyone - couples, the homeless, street artists, tourists. The charm of the plaza attracts all kinds of people. A self-declared military dictator is going through the area, gesticulating wildly with a stick and shouting orders to the motorists.

Sitting on one of the roughly one hundred folding chairs on the plaza, one can simply enjoy the here and now.

Juan has grown up in the Paris of South America, as Buenos Aires is dubbed, and he has experienced the abysses of the city in his own experience. His poems, which he recites on the Plaza Dorrego, are about love, madness, and passion. He groans in delivering the heavy words, hops with the easy ones, and at the end bows deeply to the applause of the audience.

'We have experienced how fickle life can be here,' Juan says. 'We have survived dictatorship and a good twenty years later got through the economic crisis. But we don't know when the next lightning bolt out of the clear blue sky will strike us. My generation is living a life in which uncertainty is the only certain thing.'

Wrinkles crease his forehead. 'Do you see those two dancers?' he asks. 'The way they draw each other to themselves as if they will never let go, and then in the next moment push away from one another as if it is the final farewell. That's the way we are. We live with extremes because we don't know when it will be the last time.'

The journey into the heart of Argentina leads further into the surrounding countryside, to the tribune overlooking the turf of the Avellaneda football stadium. Those who pass through the gates merge into a community. Status symbols vanish beneath the fans' blue-and-white jerseys.

There is no VIP section. Football makes everybody equal here. There are few other cities in the world where the spectrum of cultural roots is so comparably broad as in Buenos Aires.

'We have only the best of everything in us - or the worst, depending on how you look at it,' says Sergio, laughing. His Italian grandfather came to Buenos Aires in the first half of the 20th century and his grandmother is from Spain.

The masses are cheering, chanting, shouting. The stomping of the dancing feet is synchronised, the rhythm is fast, the music deafeningly loud. People are singing of love, of madness, of passion.

'Only those who share this passion can also understand the madness - Racing Campeon!' are the words of the football club's fight song. Here in Avellaneda, at the very latest, far away from the bustle of the metropolis, here among the sweating masses of the football club Racing, the last similarity with tame, sheltered central Europe evaporates.

'This,' Sergio shouts, 'is the real Argentina.'