Buenos Aires

You know how seductive it is,
The possibility of chaos, of catastrophe,
The spires collapsing and the grand facades just crumbling away;-
It’s all there in the newspapers each morning.
Everywhere is danger and disaster,
A city that will kill you
Slowly, malevolently.
The psychoanalysts are doing good business,
Nodding and smiling and watching the clock,
Fairy godmothers to the rich and unhappy.
In grand cafes elegant ladies drink coffee from tiny cups
While white-jacketed waiters serve patisserie with silver tongs...
Sleek women totter along the pavements in miniskirts and high heels,
Thrusting through the thick hot air,
Desperate to be thinner, fitter, more beautiful,
And rats breed faster and faster in the alleys.

The ghost of Saint Eva Perón walks the streets:
For weeks after her secret death
Her corpse was moved from house to house,
Till her guard went mad with desire for her
And ended his life wandering the streets,
Raving about his lost love.
Meanwhile, Juan’s thirteen-year-old mistress
Was parading round the house in the dead Eva’s clothes,
While the ageing dictator lounged and watched.

You are stranded here, at the edge of the world,
And ruined days turn into ruined months and years, ruined lives,
By slow torture the state will vex and oppress you
And only Creole cunning wins the day.
Nothingness surrounds you,
Immense and malign,
And sometimes you feel sure you will lose your mind
With all this fury inside you
From the living nightmares of each day,
It all feels like a horrible accident,
As the ground shifts again beneath your feet
And hurricanes charge up from Antarctica,
Turning the city upside-down.

In the tango halls the band plays songs
Of love, misery and death,
And couples dance with solemn suffering faces,
Moving fluidly across the floor, with dramatic turns
And complicated steps,
Hips and legs engaged in erotic badinage,
Upper bodies held apart in tension,
Heads touching but eyes turned away,
In brief yet tumultuous trysts.
This, from the criminals, immigrants and sailors
In the ports, the desperate yearning
For happier days long gone,
They would dance all night till dawn
Then fall to knife-fights and murders;
Such excess could only end in violence.
Around the dance floor women sit alone,
Awaiting an invitation to dance,
While the men lurk at the back, in the gloom,
Brooding as they roll the whisky round their mouths,
And with a nod of the head a man
Invites his chosen woman to dance,
And, after she grimly assents,
They meet on the dance floor briefly
Then return once more to separate tables
Not even exchanging a word.

What lives between the city and the pampa?
This was meant to be the Promised Land,
Now see it-all squandered, corrupted and betrayed,
Home to frauds and chancers,
Everything imported,
That swagger and bravado just a sham,
A cover for self-hatred and mediocrity,
This is the beggared decaying land
Of the disillusioned,
Who came here just to get rich, not to found utopia,
And loved only Europe and the faraway.

Unhappiness starts from some dark seed
Within you, grows and takes root,
And pretty soon you cannot live without it,
It is all you cherish and rely on,
And each day you awake, resigned.

The dead have no names, but they walk the streets,
The people were warned but they turned away, paid no heed,
When faces began to disappear from the streets,
Or vanished from their homes,
The young and the clever, with too many ideas,
Kidnapped into unmarked cars in front of everyone,
While everyone else turned away and sleepwalked on,
Telling themselves “there must be some good reason for it...”
With the proper training,
Public servants, skilled in bureaucratic procedure,
Learned to interrogate, torture and murder.
“First we shall kill the subversives,
Then the collaborators,and the sympathisers,
Then the indifferent; who think themselves safe,
And last of all the timid.”