I would like to share with you this note that appeared in the New York Times

Buenos Aires
By LEWIS NORDAN

In a recent autumn afternoon in Buenos Aires -- just-spring in the United States -- when the relentless blue of the Argentine day was softening to a richer gold, I found myself wandering alone on Avenida de Mayo and in its plaza. I was near the end of my trip. I laid tired eyes on the cathedral and Casa Rosada, the impressive pink government house, and on a statue with an Argentine flag; farther along, I saw speeding taxis and rare book stores. I was both exhausted and giddy with the romance of the city, for I had also just spent a week drinking gallons of espresso and eating dulce de leche (a caramel-like jam that I almost became addicted to) and staying out in clubs until 4 each morning in this 24-hour city. My head was filled with the brilliantined nostalgia of tango shows. Then something happened that told me just how good a time I was having and how far compromised my judgment had become by a diet of caffeine and sugar and tango.

I came upon the Cafe Tortoni and felt drawn inside by its marble floors and wooden tables and dark wood walls with large mirrors. The ceiling was stained glass, and watercolors and caricatures hung on every wall. Some of these likenesses I recognized, including that of Carlos Gardel, the Elvis of tango culture, and the writer Jorge Luis Borges, a personal hero of mine. There were old photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings of these and other luminaries of the 1930's arts world: Pirandello and Lorca and the feminist poet Alfonsina Storni. If my head needed more excuse to spin than it already had, the sight of this magical literary gathering place set it flying. I learned that the Hotel Castelar sat somewhere along this same street, the spot where Lorca stayed when he came to town. I finished my coffee and crepes and left to find this hotel, which in my mind had become a sort of shrine.

And then an odd thing happened. On a crowded street, on a bright afternoon, a young man and woman suddenly approached me and threw ink onto my jacket. As I stood frozen in surprise, they began to clean me up, dabbing at me with handkerchiefs. Then the man jerked my jacket down so that I could not move my arms, and at last I understood that I was being robbed. They took my wallet, then fled into traffic. They jumped into a taxi, which was pulling away as I stood on the curb looking on in confusion.

And this is where everything I had ever learned about personal safety flew out of my head. I chased the taxi and (straight out of a Martin and Lewis movie) leaped onto its hood and rode a wild ride until the car stopped. I shouted: ''La plata! La plata!'' which I hoped meant ''money,'' as a chorus of helpful onlookers took up the cry. Why I would do this thing -- I, a middle-aged man with gray whiskers -- will be incomprehensible to anyone who has not fallen under the spell of this city and its culture of the tango. This is my explanation, anyway. I was not angry, the amount of money was small, I had not the presence of mind to remember that my papers were in the wallet. I was doing this thing out of some weird exhilaration that I can only attribute to bitter coffee and sleep deprivation and dulce de leche and the tango. Most of all the tango, I insist.

The cab finally stopped. The muggers threw my wallet out of the cab window and raced away on foot, marking a zigzag path through traffic.

The end of this ridiculous display took a pleasant twist. When the very helpful policemen, who soon arrived, realized I could not communicate well enough for them to take a statement, they drove me to a place where they knew a translator. Where else? The Hotel Castelar, where I was debriefed in the spiritual presence of Lorca.

If this incident provided the adrenaline highlight of my week, it was certainly not the first. I had not known, had scarcely suspected, the magic of the tango until I saw it performed in Buenos Aires. At El Viejo Almacen in the San Telmo neighborhood the week before, my first night in town, I had felt no less transported than when I was flying along the street on the hood of a cab. I had entered the cabaret that evening to witness my first tango show. When the dancers appeared, the four men came onto stage first. They sported fedoras and black suits, reminiscent of Carlos Gardel. In their faces I saw also his sly smile. The men began to dance as partners, as men had danced together in whorehouses and dark streets in the dawn of the tango. Then came the women, also dressed in black. The men then partnered with the women, and when these four couples began to dance, I fell under their spell. The musicians behind them played violins and piano and double bass and, very important to the sound, bandoneons -- accordionlike instruments that virtually weep with nostalgia and sentimental expressions of lost love and the need for a good mother. Some numbers were serious and dramatic and others were playful and ironic. The dancers' intricate steps and glances, sometimes sly, sometimes bold, allowed me to believe that I was somehow a tanguero too, an insider, and that I shared some special knowledge with the dancers. I shouted my encouragement.

All these sights were the heady lead-up to the moment my wallet was taken and I found myself on the hood of a speeding car. My penchant for romance, maybe, the magic of the tango, I'm not sure how I got from point A to point B, but it all felt connected somehow. I loved Buenos Aires. I loved the way I felt when I walked its streets and shouted in its milongas. I loved the cabdrivers, and enjoyed many hilarious conversations with persons who spoke as little English as I did Spanish.

A cabdriver told me a joke in broken English. It requires a little setting up. First you have to know that when Juan Peron died and was entombed, his tomb was raided and his hands were cut off and stolen. Second, you need to know that this April was election time in Argentina and a former -- and disgraced -- president, Carlos Menem (later to withdraw from the race), was running again as a Peronist candidate and likely to make it to the runoffs. So this was the joke: Did you hear? Peron's hands have been found. Where? Around the throat of Menem. Well, maybe the joke loses something, and I've since learned it's the oldest joke in town. But that night, in our shared clumsiness with language, it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard.

After the attempted robbery I found myself exhausted beyond belief. Until that point I had lived on coffee and dulce de leche and denial, but now it had all caught up with me. I dragged myself out to one more tango show the night before I left town, but my heart was not in it anymore. I slunk back to my hotel in the small hours of the morning and collapsed with the thought that I was through, I would not go out into the barrios again, though one more day of this visit remained before I would leave to go back home.

Yet when I finally roused myself the next day at noon and realized I had only hours before my plane left and that I would see no more tango, I caught a cab and sailed into the south of the city for one more crack at the life.

Barrio la Boca is one of the poor southern barrios that the guidebooks tell you to avoid at night. And though I was more wary than I had been, I told myself it was not night, after all, but afternoon, and so I would go. The cab drove away and left me standing on a strange, deserted little street, the Caminito.

The Caminito is really only a cobblestone alley. Along it there are many tiny bars and cafes, a few gaudy paintings of tango dancers, even a place with cardboard cutouts where a person could stick his face through a hole and seem to be a tango dancer. The thing that makes the street amazing is the buildings. Their colors, really. The buildings are poor structures faced with corrugated sheets of zinc. They are painted in the most dazzling colors I have ever seen on architecture -- green, orange, blue, red, yellow. Impoverished as the barrio might be, the colors seemed a vivid expression of something beautiful deep inside these people that poverty had not taken from them.

And finally, on the cobblestones, appeared tango dancers, as if to help me say goodbye to the city, practicing their songs, their graceful steps, there on the Caminito in the lemony sunshine, beneath the bright walls.