Evita [antikvár]

BUENOS AIRESBuenos Aires is my home town as Syracuse or Omaha or San Francisco may be yours. I have of it those childhood memories that hold the power to reawaken all five senses to old ecstasies. I have known its tempó quicken firom the clop of horses' hoofs on cobblestones to the sigh of cars on as-phalt avenues and turn to the anxious pattering of feet that herd up subway stairs and into offices.There was a time when the gossiping of women servants under the languid trees of the plaza was as soothing as the croon of doves to the gleaning ear of childhood, a time of long, whispering siesta hours and of rooms shuttered against the heat, or against the dust that filmed the city before the storm, before the wind itself came booming in across the plains to drive children, like cattle, crazy with delicious rest-lessness. The First World War was half a world away and in another time than ours.But the ripple of its upheaval reached our becalmed lives at last and it was not against the dust that windows were shuttered and doors barred. An old man stood guard over us with a dueling sword and the ladies gathered in my mother's drawing room twittered like startled birds at the sound of gun-firing in the streets, or whispered in shocked voices of a President1 who seemed to think the working people had a reason and a right to disrupt our lives with violence.By the twenties the violence had subsided, and life became as sleek and opulent as the Rolls and Daimlers that glided slowly round and round the Rose Garden in Palermo Park, the ladies in the high tonneaus inclining their heads to their acquaintances, which was then the fashionable exercise 1. President Hipólito Irigoyen.