Diary

Letters

Vol. 25 No. 24 · 18 December 2003

From Eva Gillies

Michael Wood says that the first European settlers on the ‘smelly coastal swamp’ beside the River Plate called their new city after Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Aire, ‘Our Lady St Mary of Good Air’ (LRB, 20 November); and that even if the Spanish phrase del Buen Aire were to mean ‘of good aspect’ this ‘would still be quite a splash of bravura’. So it would have been – but in fact those Spaniards dedicated their city to ‘Our Lady of Good Wind’, patroness of sailors, in thanksgiving for their safe passage. I grew up in Buenos Aires, and my parents’ quinta a little outside the city was named ‘Buen Aire’. We had a ceramic-tile representation of Our Lady of Good Wind let into one side of the house; she is shown holding the child Jesus on one arm, and on the palm of her other hand a three-masted sailing-ship.

Eva Gillies
Lewes

From Rex Winsbury

My first visit to Buenos Aires was different from Michael Wood's. On the pretext of attending a conference, and inspired by too many Hollywood movies of the Bogart era, I went in search of a seedy waterfront bar where, clad in a grubby white suit and Panama hat, I could romantically drink away my declining years. Alas, I couldn't get to the waterfront at all. There was the old port, the new port, the public gardens (out of bounds because of subsidence), the railway station, the municipal airport; and the only bar I could find was cut off from the river by a busy highway. Disconsolate, clutching a bag of exam papers due for marking, I trudged on until I found a cracked and disused concrete pier sticking out into the River Plate. I'd walked to its end and settled down to the essays when a gust of wind carried off half the papers; I watched them sink slowly into the South Atlantic. When I told my students the story, most of them didn't believe a word of it. I had to give them all good marks.

Rex Winsbury
London WC1