Buenos Aires in the 1950s was home for nearly eight years of my childhood. This sprawling port city on the Rio de la Plata in the southern hemisphere was a melting pot of European refugees from both world wars. It was a time of political repression dominated by the dictator, Juan Perón, and total adulation by the Argentines for his wife, Evita. We came to this far away place in 1950 when I was five years old, and my father was a junior diplomat beginning his career with the U.S. government. We were to live here through the death of Evita, two revolutions, and a polio epidemic.
The Argentines liked to boast that their capital, Buenos Aires, was copied after Milan, with a touch of Paris. It was a city of wide avenues, an obelisk (much like the Washington monument), the Casa Rosada (Pink House) where Perón resided, an elegant the Teatro Colón opera house, many green parks and plazas with statues of heroes such as the one of the liberator San Martín on horseback in the Plaza San Martín. Harrods, the London department store, was there along with fashionable boutiques on Calle Florida, the walking street, selling leather goods and cashmere sweaters.
It was a city full of restaurants offering beef of all kinds and flan for dessert, cafes where Argentines enjoyed cafecito con media lunas (small coffee with croissants) and bakeries that sold my favorite alfajores, that were two cornstarch cookies with dulce de leche (sweetened condensed milk) in the middle and rolled in powdered sugar. Walking on the downtown streets, I remember the succulent aroma of “bife” being cooked on an asado or outdoor grill, the sounds of the accordion and the bandoneón playing the popular tango music coming from the cafes, and the lively chatter of the Argentines as they spoke loudly in their distinctive porteño Spanish always gesticulating with their hands.
Argentine women in the 1950s dressed fashionably in smart suits or dresses accented with hats and gloves and were never seen in slacks, while men slicked back their dark hair with strong smelling pomade and wore black and dark gray suits and sweater vests. Old men often wore berets in the European style.
We came to live in the suburb of Acassuso on Calle Balcarce 335, a quiet residential street lined with orange trees that seemed far away from the sights and smells of the center of the city. Mother and Dad rented a new two-story house with low white fence in front, a big picture window that was shattered once by my younger brother, and a large back yard with a high wall around it. The house had a front porch and a large covered back terrace that we children turned into a stage by rigging up old bed sheets for curtains and presenting variety shows to anyone who would come and watch.
Behind the high wall in the back of our garden was the Coq D’Or Bar and Restaurant with a flashing sign of a golden rooster that lit up at night, and where people gathered on weekends for customary late night meals. In the summer, when our windows were open, we could hear the tinkling of glasses and silverware, the laughter and voices of diners, against the background tango music.
Calle Balcarce was a microcosm of a world where as a child I felt safe and happy, and where we played in the street speaking Spanish with all the children in the neighborhood. The street was where the boys would get up a fútbol or soccer game or sometimes pick the oranges from the trees, which were not edible, and have an orange fight not unlike a snowball fight. It was in September 1955, that all of us children built a large bonfire in the middle of the street and burned our books after the revolution that ousted Juan Perón. Because our textbooks were full of propaganda about Evita and Juan Perón, schools were closed until new editions could be printed. That was the same year that the polio epidemic broke out and we spent many months at home.
I only became frightened when I would spot the gypsies in their long, billowing, gauze skirts coming towards our house ringing doorbells and asking for handouts along the way. The maids had told me that gypsies kidnapped children and would take you away if you didn’t behave. When I saw them coming, my heart thumped painfully as I tore into the house to hide in my room until the coast was clear. The other scary times were when the dogcatchers suddenly appeared in their horse drawn cart brandishing large whips and looking for stray dogs. They were put in small cages in the back of the cart and taken to the pound to be killed. Once our neighbor’s dog Soda, a lovable Airedale, was taken away but her capture was discovered in time to get her back safely. I lived in constant fear that our beloved cocker spaniel Mandy, would get loose, as she often did, and appear on the street just as the dog catchers were coming.
Next door to us lived los alemanes or the Germans, whose boys of various ages went to the German school. (My mother would later tell how she often heard them playing Nazi songs on the record player.) On the other side of us lived Maude and Jack Stein, retired American expatriates homesick for the U.S., who poured their love and attention into an over weight, smelly, and unfriendly dog that we children disliked intensely. A few doors down from the Stein’s house lived our friend Pedro, el húngaro, who came from a Hungarian refugee family and whose parents worked in a clothing factory.
Across the street lived my Swiss friend, Marga, and her older brother, whom we rarely saw. Stocky and blonde, she went to a Swiss-German school and lived in a big house hidden behind a very high wooden gate that was kept shut to outsiders. Marga would play dolls with me in Spanish and on special occasions, I was invited to go to her house, where everything was quiet, neat, and orderly. Marga had beautiful dolls and outfits for them even included matching kid gloves. Next door to Marga, lived our best friends the Harris-Smiths, Anglo Argentines who went to the British School. Anthony, Teeny (short for Christine) and Tommy were exactly the age of my two brothers and we were in and out of each other’s houses. However, when they were having their “tea” at 6 p.m., we would be having our supper, and were made to go to bed soon after.
I went to the American Community School in Belgrano where the curriculum mandated by the Perón government was that all Argentine subjects were to be taught in Spanish in the morning, and only in the afternoon, after an hour long, three course school lunch, could we study the American curriculum in English. I wore the required starched white smock with a light blue and white flag pinned to my lapel, and started each day saluting the Argentine flag. In the Argentine system of rote learning, I memorized all the capitals and names of the Argentine provinces, knew all the Argentine historical facts and dates, and proudly sang all verses of the national anthem far better than the “Star Spangled Banner.”
The back yard of Calle Balcarce 335 was the gathering place of all the neighborhood children especially in the summer months of December, January, and February. Because the house was new, there was not much landscaping that needed taking care of, so my parents let us and the dog Mandy, and her many litters of puppies take over the back yard as our playground. There was one very large tree with many low wide branches that had been left in the back corner of the garden. I was immediately drawn to this natural “tree house” and would cart all my dolls outdoors, propping them on branches, after climbing up into the tree myself, and spend hours playing house.
One December 31st summer afternoon when I was seven, I was playing in the tree when I heard my mother call for me to come indoors for supper as she was preparing to have a New Year’s Eve dinner party. While balancing on the lowest tree branch and reaching to fill my arms with all my dolls at once, and then contemplating how I was going to climb down with my arms full, I lost my balance and fell onto the ground. It was not a long way down but when I cried out for help, Irma, our maid, and my mother came out to see what had happened. The arm that I had fallen on hurt terribly and I spent the rest of the day lying still and not moving it. The next day when I still refused to move my arm, my mother took me to the doctor and I came home wearing a complete cast that went around my chest and arm.
My mother often took me with her to downtown Buenos Aires and would drive our big American Mercury and park on a city street which always attracted a great deal of attention as there were few new American cars in this city. On special occasions, my father would take me to the Colón Theater at night for a ballet performance. Dressed in my turquoise, princess style corduroy party dress with the white collar, ordered from the Best & Co. catalog, and my black patent leather party shoes, I would perch excitedly on the edge of my red velvet seat, thrilling to full three and four act performances of “Swan Lake,” “Coppelia,” or “Giselle”. Like many young girls, I dreamed of being a ballerina and took ballet lessons from Maria Luisa Lemos, who danced in the corps de ballet at the Colón.
One year my mother let me have a birthday party downtown at the Confitería Paris (Paris Tea Room) just a few blocks from the Colón Theater where I invited my best friends for tea. The Confitería Paris with its gold gilded woodwork, mirrored walls, and shiny black and white tiled floors, was elegant in the 1950s and during the late afternoon, waiters in white jackets with black bow ties brought around three tiered plates of freshly baked pastries and large china teapots of steaming tea they would pour into delicate china cups.
Despite times of political turmoil in Argentina in the 1950s, I lived a sheltered life on Calle Balcarce, although my father, who worked in the Embassy downtown, might tell the story differently: he was caught in the 1955 revolution while the Casa Rosada was being bombed and was unable to get home for several days.
It came as a shock to me when it was time to leave this home in the southern hemisphere where I had only known Christmases on the hottest summer days, greeted everyone with the familiar Argentine ché, danced in afternoon ballet recitals at the Colón Theater, and learned to play the accordion from my German teacher. My family boarded the Delta Line ship in Buenos Aires harbor in December 1957, for the two week journey back to the United States to what I was told was my real “home”. Having said the last good byes to our beloved maid Irma, who had helped raise us, and with painful thoughts of having to leave our cocker spaniel, Mandy, behind, life on Calle Balcarce went on without us. For me it has remained forever my childhood home.
