The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [1]
The motives of the other group are more complex. They arrive, Europeans, in the new world. “I’ve discovered the continent inhabited by more peoples and animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa itself, and I’ve found that the air here is more temperate and sweet than in any other part of the world we know,” wrote Vespuccio in 1507. “I hereby name it Mundus Novus.” The new world today seems to hold all the promise it ever did, exotic fauna and flora, potential for exploitation. Like the Belarusians and the Asians, these foreigners are taking their chances, only in a different tier and what they’re after is more fleeting—glamour, big wealth, upper-class status, things they can’t find at home, because they don’t make the grade. But in Argentina it’s different. No matter what their origins, by virtue of being European or American, as long as they’re basically decently physically assembled, they’re immediately endowed with a certain sheen, upper class unless proven otherwise, instead of the reverse. In the case of ugliness, of course, as always, other strategies must be sought. They learn to speak Spanish sufferingly well, with smatterings of other languages slipped in—among upper-class Argentines this is par for the course.
Though the potential for circulation is one of the great virtues of Buenos Aires, revolving city events, everyone goes, this particular group is interested in exclusivity. While at the end of the nineteenth century the places to be seen among the Argentine aristocracy were balls, dog walks, church masses, and above all the promenades of Palermo—on Thursdays and Sunday afternoons, four lines of cars would drive back and forth along the three blocks of what is now Sarmiento Avenue—and then later in the 1920s, the river islands of Tigre, where significant yachts would cross each other on the tranquil muddy waters, now the viewing places, as this particular breed of foreigner soon assesses, are museum openings, opera galas and cocktail parties. They can soon be seen at all the requisite events, typing contacts into their shiny cell phones.
For all its supposed glamour, the milieu ages you. Even the younger women look older than they are. The foreigners, starryeyed, don’t realize this yet. They still can’t get over having maids. They marvel secretly to themselves that they would ever have a maid, someone to fold and arrange their clothes, they who grew up the way they did, although here too there’s a cultural conundrum—every basic middle-class Argentine household has a maid. But they soon not only behave as if, but begin to feel that, they could never live without one. Still, their two main concerns are the concerns of most of us, commerce and love.
As for me, I arrived in Buenos Aires in 2002 in a peculiar state. was thirty-five.
My marriage of nine years had dissolved the year before. Around the same time, I’d switched jobs. My husband had been a theater director. When I met him, I’d started working in stage design, but I now found myself disenchanted with that world. We lived in Seattle, where I had grown up. While looking around for a different line of work, I signed on as the assistant to a botanist I met at a dinner party, as an intermediate step. Still, I had yet to get my bearings. It wasn’t that I’d been happy or unhappy with my husband. But the devotion I’d felt for