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I arrived in Buenos Aires 32 years ago this week. Then, as now, it was the run up to Spring. The cool air of Winter was cut by warm shoots of light that made walking her streets like pushing through the folds of night and day. Flower sellers hawked little bouquets of waxy-petaled jasmine from buckets, perfuming the streets. Birds sent their hopeful melodies into the air and the insects who had sat out winter in silent protest for those missing degrees once again began their sunset symphonies.
But of all the Spring creatures, it was the Porteñas that most fascinated me. They hate winter and the extra clothing it imposes. While Winter in Buenos Aires is mild by any but Caribbean standards, the Porteñas cannot wait to shed their outer coverings. They yearn toward the Spring like the heliotropic creatures they are. Just add a few degrees to the city and all those flowers start to bloom.
I live in a building from 1900 with sturdy brick walls. Last week I had been indulging a much-longed-for urge to write and had not left the house in several days. From my desk, I admired the changing light outside my windows but inside my apartment the walls remained cold and the warmth from the radiators was still needed.
When I finally emerged from my chambers to run an errand, I dressed as I had for the past several months. I wore a down parka over a thermal vest. I threw on a flat cap for good measure, as I don’t like a cold head.
But standing in the middle of the sidewalk outside my door in the flurry of pedestrians, I felt like the kid in high school at the moment he realizes he’s the only one who hasn’t been invited to the party everyone else will be attending. On the street, everyone had ditched their winter garb for lighter fare and the Porteñas had gone all in for tank tops, crop tops, see-through tees, blouses with an extra button loosed, even bikini tops of two miniscule triangles.
From one day to the next, breasts of all styles and sizes had taken over the streets. Small breasts, large breasts, assertive breasts, shy breasts, elegant breasts, sloppy breasts, pert breasts, careless breasts, all had come out to celebrate the great news: Spring at last had arrived to set them free.
It is fitting that one of the best-loved sculptures in Buenos Aires is a massive, moving flower of steel and aluminum. Eduardo Catalano, a renowned Argentine architect who taught for decades at MIT, gave Floralis Genérica as a gift to Buenos Aires some years ago. Though his other brutalist works around the city are endured rather than cherished (e.g. the blast-ready US Embassy and other equally-imperturbable municipal structures), with the stunning and playful flower that opens and closes to the light of the sun, he created an enduring and fitting public work of art that captures the essence of this city.
When Spring comes to Buenos Aires, the city opens like the petals of a flower.
And it is something beautiful to see.
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