Darkness uncloaked

You get an entirely different sense of a city walking around its neighbourhoods after dark. In Spanish or Latin cities especially, what is hidden during daylight hours reveals itself: windows go unshuttered now that the heat of the day has passed, bringing lush interior courtyards into view; music, in this case tango and salsa, waft from open doors inviting one to linger and listen; and families stroll before dinner, usually with a dog or two in tow. Here, teens literally hang out on street corners, sitting on sidewalk curbs talking until all hours. Obedient dogs linger in doorways patiently waiting for their people, without being tethered or physically restrained in any way. The dog owners of Buenos Aires could give lessons on keeping dogs calm and loyal.

But there is another side to Buenos Aires at night as well. Darkness brings out armies of scavengers who patiently sort through the day’s garbage looking for anything they can recycle, reuse, or sell second-hand. This is the side of the city the brochures and travel books don’t tell you about. About the people, and there are many of them, of all ages and both genders, who are desperate to make ends meet and resort to any legal method to facilitate that. (There are also, of course, armies of people who resort to illegal means of earning a living, but thankfully, I had no contact with any of them).

You see the scavengers everywhere - the cardboard recycler guys with their enormous wheeled bins, tearing open the trash bags outside local businesses and homes, pawing through every last scrap and examining it closely to determine its value. By mid-evening, they have literally filled their bins and are wheeling them off to parts unknown down the middle of the road. BA has no official recycling program - homes and businesses throw everything into the same trash bags - but evidently there is some sort of unofficial recycling program, as there’s no shortage of people meticulously salvaging cans, bottles, tins, and cardboard from every bag on every corner. They must be taking it all somewhere and earning a few pesos for their trouble. It is a significant industry.

Then there are those who are just trying to stave off the hunger. Last Thursday night, I saw a man literally peeling the layers of an onion outside the San Telmo Market, trying to figure out if any part of it remained edible after an outside layer had started to moulder. A middle-aged woman was a few feet away, examining some carrots that had been set aside by merchants. At this market at least, merchants offer the small kindness of not placing the spoiling food in plastic bags, leaving it instead on open pallets at the curbside for anyone to take.

You would think with all this ripping open of garbage bags, and scattering of remnants, that the city would be an unholy mess, but it isn’t. I don’t know what army of cleaners comes along in the dead of night, but by morning, all the trash has been removed and the cycle begins anew. You might also think such a hot, humid city would be battling an onslaught of vermin like rats and cockroaches, and that the exposed trash would attract them into the open, but I can honestly say I never saw one rat or one cockroach in my entire stay in San Telmo.

What you also don’t see in Buenos Aires are beggars or street people. At least not in the downtown areas where you might expect to find them, those areas being travelled all day by shoppers, tourists, and business people, folks with cash in pocket. There are no panhandlers here to speak of. The buskers on Florida Street are, in my view, different, as they are performing music or magic or a puppet show in exchange for a donation.

And yet, taking a train out to Tigre, or a taxi to the airport, one passes what can only be described as shantytowns, places where the bricks are literally crumbling from the facades, the roof lines are heaving and uneven, and there’s an accumulation of industrial plastic bins, like the kind you mix cement in, lining the roof, filled with who knows what - rainwater? There are also any number of abandoned construction projects, victims of the peso’s crash a few years back and the general economic upheaval since late 2008. Many of these sites, most without facades or windows, just open concrete structures, are clearly being lived in, with many a line of laundry hung out to dry by squatters. There is obvious poverty here, but you don’t see it unless you look for it, and then it slaps you in the face.

In the meantime, the sun comes up and the army has retreated behind closed doors until darkness falls again, while the working poor, those who earn perhaps a thousand pesos a month, hosing off sidewalks and sweeping stoops, are out plying their respective trades for 10 hours at a time.