Alem y San Martin 6:05 pm Monday

Buenos Aires is the city where I have lived longest. As such, it will always be alive to me. It is beautiful, sexy, glorious, dishonest and filthy. The concept of truth is cheap and mercurial here: everything depends on the eye of the beholder and whether the beholder is having a good day. The city and its people are by turns welcoming and unforgiving; this is a city that hates and loves in the same breath, but it breathes, it moves and it is alive.

My bus on the way to work passed an olive green 1970s Ford Falcon, broken down in the middle of a busy road. The sight of the car still makes me shiver.

From the tenth floor of an office building on the corner of Plaza San Martín, one can see a snapshot of Buenos Aires resplendent, particularly in the glowing twilight of early evening. To the left there is Retiro, almost invisible, obscured by the politely dominant clocktower. Built by the British when the British were still openly respected (but never loved), its four faces are vital yet often disagree. The tower stands surrounded by a quaint little fence in a pleasant square and although it is passed by hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis, it is probably the monument in Buenos Aires that has been least-defiled by graffiti. The graffiteurs, strangely, respect the fence.

To the right, Alem, the business district avenue, stretches into the middle distance, flanked by tall, proud office buildings that are only remarkable because they are set against the wide horizon of the river behind. The towers themselves seem dated, and have no bearing on the lives of the antlike beings scurrying at their feet. In the distance, new monuments are rising in Puerto Madero, designed for gawping rather than inhabiting. Glass pantheons that will stand in tribute to an imagined progress that has yet to materialize – a testament to a city that often forgets itself, stretching beyond the present to a projected future that may never make it.

And in the center of the frame, beyond the depressingly predictable Sheraton, lies the river. The ‘silver river’, as the Spanish first called it, and which for decades has been nothing but brown, thick like Willy Wonka’s chocolate river – except that isn’t chocolate. Two centuries of overuse and under-cleansing have left it tired and worn.

And yet…

When the sun is setting...when the sky is so clear that the casual observer can see Uruguay on the far bank…when the storm clouds have turned the sky to pitch and a small sliver of light penetrates the dark to cast a silver line across the moody surface…The river is Buenos Aires, and it is beautiful.