Winter in the City
by Dominic Hilton
August 2022
At wintertime, Dominic Hilton finds himself at a loss in Buenos Aires.
“What you like about Buenos Aires is that most of life here is lived outdoors,” my friend David said to me on a recent visit to the city. We were strolling home from dinner on the Avenida Callao, and his simple observation rang so profoundly true that I stopped in mid-stride.
“And because life is lived outdoors,” David continued, “you get to see it. That’s why you live in Argentina and not in the UK, where most of life goes on behind closed doors, on account of the weather.”
A legless tramp was collapsed nearby in the doorway of a bank. His fouled rags were held in place by a tatty length of blue rope, and it was impossible to tell whether or not he was alive. Fishing a 100 peso note out of my trouser pocket, I dropped the money into the man’s outstretched hand, which was monstrously misshapen and crusted in an unidentifiable green scum.
One of David’s eyebrows arched. “See what I mean?”
When I got home, I stared out a window across the city’s fractured rooftops, pondering the incalculable hours I’ve spent outside scenic corner cafés and bars, eavesdropping, watching all that’s happening on the sidewalks and in the plazas of this dreamy, unsettled metropolis.
“Ah, I get it,” a smart young woman said to me a few days later outside one of my favorite cafés, “you’re one of those flaneurs.”
“Excuse me?”
She took an amused sip of her coffee. “How terribly romantic.”
Winter was in the air that morning, and soon it arrived for real. The unscented, melancholy season never fails to throw Buenos Aires—a city built for heady, al fresco living—off-balance. There’s no Christmas in July, obviously, and Argentina doesn’t do “cozy”.
Overall, the atmosphere is one of puzzlement, akin to a collective “What… happened? Didn’t we used to…?”
At wintertime, I find myself at a loss here, unsure what the place wants from me. Instead of sitting at rickety tables on cobbled pavements outside picturesque bars, sampling plummy wine, I float ghostlike around misty, smoke-filled streets. Sometimes, I shelter in sparse museums, watching shadows shuffle past murky windows with their heads bowed to the wind and rain: all wrong for a famously proud and cocksure people.
Ice cream stores stay open, but they are vacant and sad. Overall, the atmosphere is one of puzzlement, akin to a collective “What… happened? Didn’t we used to…?”
For some reason, everyone I talk to in Europe and the United States believes Argentina is comparable to Cuba. I don’t mean economically, which wouldn’t be an unfair assumption, but rather in terms of climate. Ask them to paint a mental picture of Argentina, and they imagine gaggles of scrawny children in vests and flip-flops swarming around rich tourists, begging for change while admiring their hairdos. What they don’t see are seasons.
I recall entertaining the same wrong impression about America’s weather when I was growing up in the UK. Schooled on dumb movies set in southern California, I supposed the United States of America was one big desert, filled with perspiring cowboys, teens on skateboards, and year-round blazing sunshine. Family vacations to Florida added violent thunderstorms and gator-packed wetlands to the mix, but the debilitating summer heat was exactly as I’d expected (and hoped for). Then, when I turned thirty, I moved to Pennsylvania, and got a massive, massive shock.
“Let’s go outside and make a snow angel!” my new friends would exclaim, and I’d rifle through closets stacked with sunset orange Bermuda shorts for the nonexistent winter coat I didn’t pack.
It last snowed in Buenos Aires in 2007. The last time it snowed before that was in 1918. Nevertheless, every winter, porteños insist on acting like they’re living in Act III of La Bohème. They wear bloated ski jackets with extravagant fur hoods as honeyed beams of sunlight pour through the leafless branches. They shiver and hack and spit and moan incessantly about how “freezing” it is.
“What a lovely day!” I say to building porters in a friendly sort of way, and they glare back at me like I’m an escaped lunatic.
“Are you joking? Today? It’s so cold outside! Inside here, too! Even sitting next to this heater!”
“Well,” I say with a shrug, “I’m not Argentine, so…”
To which they usually growl.
Traditionally, winter is a time to return home. It’s summer now in England, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m stuck with this misfit winter. Perhaps I am home. I honestly don’t know anymore. Instead of facing ghosts of the past, I face the ghosts of the future, in a country anticipating 90% inflation, or worse, by the year’s end. Prices here rise 20% overnight, and the headlines keep screaming about supplies of coffee and toilet roll running out.
These are dark times, here and anywhere else one dares to look. I long for the summer days to return again, when idle, sundrenched life goes on under gigantic spanning skies.
