Resumo de Bad Times In Buenos Aires

The title and the opening quotes immediately brush the colour into this story, and it is grey. Her arrival and first impressions of summer in Buenos Aires pull you in. It is hot, humid and noisy with a palpable tension rising from crowded streets with dis-functional traffic lights. Dis-functioning lifts and smog are the main killers of a population suffering from ?urban stress? and outnumbered by rats by about one to eight. The grand buildings of European architecture are equally depressed, succumbing to thorough dilapidation and the weight of the graffiti-ed anger of the porteños, the city?s inhabitants.

The first people we meet are her neighbours. They are, a retired banker who lives with his aged mother that yearns for a Britain he has never visited, a psychoanalyst touched by the daily city crises, a homosexual man again living with his mother, convinced the women of the building want to kill him, and the quietness of the fourth floor apartment to where the last surviving relatives of a uniquely honest president had returned from their exile in Italy. As a cross section of Buenos Aires inhabitants, their lives seem full of despair and disappointment.

In part explanation of the present mood, a brief political history is given. From the end of the 1960?s, rebellion and uprising from years of dictatorship resulted in a time of repression that lasted until 1983. In this time about 30,000 people disappeared, supposed subversives, plotting against the Argentinean government but were mainly young, between twenty and thirty-five years old, educated individuals that were picked up from the streets and never heard of again. This ended with a democratic government but the few held accountable for the atrocities were released under threat of a military coup. The government then proceeded to add injury by telling people to forget and get on with their lives. This is how present day Argentineans live, with black and white pictures of loved ones, no answers and the fear of bumping into former tormentors in the streets of Buenos Aires.

The fundamentals of life in Buenos Aires are grim, from a hellish bureaucratic system that keeps everything at standstill, to the lack of and the acceptance of the lack of state help for the city?s poor. The writer finds that the people deal with their daily grind with mass demonstrations and more telling, a heavy reliance on psychoanalysis. She uses great wit and wonderful one-liners throughout to describe the various characters she meets as she weaves her way through the various levels of Buenos Aires life. Yet, the history of Argentina weighs heavily with her. Her empathy fills her soul and it is this that permeates through an achingly intimate account of the life and times of Buenos Aires.

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