Bouchercon Week Re-post:Buenos Aires Through Their Eyes

By the time you read this, I will be in the car on my way to Albany for Bouchercon 2013.  Given the activities of the week, I am giving myself a break and re-posting my "researcher's notebook" from January 2012 when I went to Buenos Aires to research Blood Tango. 

Annamaria Alfieri

I am working on my third historical mystery — one that takes place in Buenos Aires. I came on this trip to get the feel of the city that is the backdrop for my story. After spending the past year reading deeply into the history of Argentina and especially of the Peróns and their times, I want to experience first hand the places I have been writing about. I have been here before, but not with such a story in mind.

On Day One of this research excursion, we took a tour of the Casa Rosada — the seat of the Argentine government. The palace is magnificent. It is pink because President Domingo Sarmiento (1811-1888) proposed they combine the Federalist red with the Unitarist white — to appease whichever of the violently opposing factions took precedence at any given moment during in the country's tumultuous 19th century history. The interior rooms are grand in the ornate style of that era.

My story does not go back that far; it takes place during October of 1945, a period when the Casa Rosada and the stately Plaza de Mayo in front of it were the focus of street demonstrations and popular uprisings. Chaos that ended on October 17th when Perón stepped out on the balcony of the Casa Rosada to address an estimated 300,000 low-level workers who had rallied to support him.

Perón called those men his descamisados — shirtless ones. In that era, men in Buenos Aires were required to wear jackets in public. They could not enter a restaurant or a movie theater without "proper attire." So the poorest laborers were not really shirtless, but jacketless. They did the dirtiest jobs in the country.

As elsewhere in the New World, the skilled laborers were European immigrants — mostly from Italy and Spain —Basques, largely — and some Irish and Germans who poured into the country during the tsunami of migration at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. They built buildings, made shoes, played music, all manner of work that required training. Argentina was rich then, off cattle, which were shipped live to England and the Continent. Once refrigeration was perfected, the meat was butchered in Buenos Aires and then shipped, rather than sending it on the hoof.

During the Great Depression, thousands of Indians and mestizos from the vast plains of the Pampas came to Buenos Aires looking for work just in time to man the slaughterhouses and the meat packing plants then springing up. These were Perón's descamisados. To secure them as his power base, from his position as Minister of Labor, he had raised their wages and gotten them health insurance and paid vacations. During the week before October 17th, his superior officers in the military government had forced him to resign. Now the descamisados wanted him back.

On that fateful day, they flooded into the center of the city from their villas miserias, slum towns, down across the Riachuelo to the south of the capital. They had never seen the city of Buenos Aires before. The "Paris of the South" must have seemed like a fairyland to them. They massed in the Plaza de Mayo and demanded their man.

I have walked some of the streets the men from the desolate interior walked on that day and tried to see through their eyes, buildings, wonderful even to me, who has seen the real Paris, Rome, Venice. Awestruck would be the word to describe it. To get the same feeling I have to imagine what it would be like to look at the earth from the moon.

Annamaria Alfieri

Immigration

*

You hear the word in news broadcasts weekly, if not daily, mostly in connection with the attitudes of the Republican candidates toward illegal immigrants in states where primaries are taking place. But I have been thinking about what happened a hundred years ago and more.

My recent visit to Buenos Aires and the research into my story that takes place there in 1945 reminded me that people very similar to those who poured into the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries also streamed into South America. Especially into Buenos Aires, which is called the "Paris of the South," but given its diversity of people of European background (and its 24/7 life style), it's more like the New York of the South.

Many of my 1945 fictional Argentine characters and also a number of the true historical characters in the story are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Writing about them got me to thinking about what it was like for people who left their families to cross the ocean. My elegant grandfather Gennaro Pisacane left Italy at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. He was 16. He came from an important but impoverished family, where tradition demanded the eldest son inherit the property, the second become a priest, and the third go to the army. Born a second son, he had expected to grow up to be a clergyman.

But then his older brother died. As he was leaving school at age 16, he found himself the head of the family, with a mother, two younger brothers, and four sisters to take care of in a land of starving people. He took nobleman’s sense of honor and his education (considerable for a poor immigrant of his era) to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Here he endured, married the beautiful Maria Sabina Alfieri, had seven children, and managed to support all of them, as well as his mother and siblings until they were old enough to take care of themselves. Eventually, he brought most of his siblings to the New World, where they thrived.

Gennarro Pisacane and little Patty, 1945

Lucky for all of us, he chose New York rather than Buenos Aires. Life here was no piece of cake, but it was calmer then the tumult and violence of political life in Buenos Aires in the twentieth century. They don’t have the Statue of Liberty in their harbor! We do.

Emma Lazarus's House

Just about every day, I pass the house where Emma Lazarus lived. There is a plaque on it with part of her moving sonnet, “The New Colossus.”

Here is the poem, in case you have not read it in a while.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus, 1883

Emma Lazarus

When I pass there, I think of Gennaro. Sixteen is such a vulnerable age for a boy. He said good-bye to his mother knowing he would never see her again.

He taught me to love music. Here is song from his native land that is generally taken for a love song about a man and a woman, but when I hear it I think of Gennaro and his mother — how he must have longed to see her and the places it describes again and how, when she heard it, she must have longed for her son.

If you want to know the lyrics in Neapolitan or English, look here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torna_a_Surriento

Try not to weep!

Annamaria Alfieri


* Jewish Women's Archive. "Photo of immigrants on boat looking at the statue of liberty." <http://jwa.org/media/photo-of-immigrants-on-boat-looking-at-statue-of-liberty> (March 6, 2012).

Surprises in Buenos Aires

Whenever friends go to a new place or a relative comes to New York for the first time, my favorite question to ask is "What surprised you about what you saw?"

I’ve decided to ask this of myself about my recent trip to Buenos Aires. First, I should say that I took this trip to get a better sense of the setting for my next book. I had not been to BA, as everyone there calls it, for over twenty years. The trip fulfilled all my hopes and more. And gave me some really pleasant surprises to boot:

In the “Paris of the South,” corner restaurants that look like tourist joints from the outside very often turn out to be lovely, with white tablecloths and excellent food. You could have fooled me. The buildings are almost always curved at the entrance and often have huge Coca-Cola signs over the front doors — nothing at all like the charming little mid-block bistros and trattorias I was seeking and would have easily found in the real Paris or Rome or even London, for that matter. There were none of those little places that I ever discovered. What we did find when looking for a good lunch were huge eateries that seemed as if they belonged in Times Square. But — we ate very well at most of the ones we visited and in one, near the subway stop for Plaza Italia, we had Brochette de Lomo (filet mignon en brochette) that was spectacularly good and would have cost $34 all by itself for one person in NYC. In BA, it was $30 for two and included good salads, desserts, and two glasses of very nice wine.

Almost as delightful was the male pulchritude that was on display almost everywhere. There are more good-looking men by percentage of the population in BA than in any other city I have visited, except for Reggio di Calabria. (ALL the men in my next book are going to be handsome—maybe even the murderer.) I spent a little while trying to figure out why this might be, but then I realized it was way too much of distraction from the task at hand. I went back to looking at the buildings, the statuary, and the trees. Except for the occasional sidelong glance.

My biggest surprise actually began in New York. During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, we walked out of our building onto 11th Street and saw a woman looking at a map. She was accompanied by a girl in her late teens. As is our wont when we encounter lost tourists, we asked if we could help her. During the ensuing conversation, we found out that she was from BA, told her we were going to visit there in a few weeks, and exchanged email addresses so we might have a coffee together while when we arrived.

After a warm correspondence in the intervening weeks, she offered to pick us up in her car at 8 one evening. (Eight PM is way too early for dinner in BA.) She came for us and showed us the university where she is a professor of hydrology. We then had dinner together on the Costanera, and then she took us for a midnight drive through the city all lit up and looking absolutely gorgeous.

Upon hearing of my interest in seeing the villas miserias — the slum towns where Perón’s descamisados lived, she arranged to pick us up on Sunday morning and take us through them. The hovels are still there and still occupied by the poor. The factories are abandoned shells for the most part. I cannot imagine that I would have gone there on my own. What a gift! Now I can say, not only that I have seen Buenos Aires, but that I have a dear friend who lives there!

Annamaria Alfieri