It’s the 13th of February. Today my friend Stace and her dad, who are staying at my house, took delivery of a portable air conditioner, which they’d bought on my behalf from the Coto department store around the corner. My apartment is cooling down now.
On Thursday, the 23rd of January, the official exchange rate had jumped from $6 to the dollar to $8 to the dollar, apparently as a result of a small sale of a few million pesos by Shell Oil. The official market is tightly controlled (payments for imports, for example, must be immediately liquidated in it, providing it with a large captive supply of dollars; and access to the peso side of the market is strictly limited) and, apparently as a consequence, has very little depth on the selling-dollars side. The central bank stepped in to force the closing price back down to $7.75 to the dollar, and the newspapers were full of dueling accusations the next day, Friday. The true price went up from $10 to $12, and the buy-sell spread widened to 15% or so. The government issued panicked pronouncements that the restrictions on Argentines buying dollars would be lifted.
In the midst of this, I went to check out the price on this portable air conditioner on Saturday, the 25th of January. It was priced at $4900, which is US$410 at the new true rate, or US$490 at the old true rate, or US$600 at the new official rate, or US$800 at the old official rate.
I was talking with my landlord during this time about repairing the current air conditioner or replacing it with a new one, and he was taking a while to get back to me; so on Tuesday, the 28th of January, I went back with $5000 to buy the portable unit myself, so I wouldn’t have to wait for him. Within those three days, the price had been increased by 40% to $7000, so I didn’t have the money.
The promised restriction-lifting turned out to be kind of a dud; it entirely excludes the majority of the population (I guess the government figures that poor Argentines don’t need to be able to save money) and allows high-income people to purchase only very small quantities.
The air-conditioner repairman called to tell me that the replacement compressor the apartment’s unit needs no longer costs $800 or $900 like he’d expected, but rather $3000. The landlord asked if maybe I could pay the repair cost up front and then deduct it from my rent a little bit at a time over the next few months. I declined.
In an effort to stem the inflationary spiral, the government signed agreements with the big supermarket and department-store chains to freeze their prices at the levels of January 21, or in some categories (like home appliances) to freeze them at 7.5% above the January 21st levels. I returned to Coto hoping to find the air conditioner price reduced to $5375, but it was still $7000.
So I sent Stace with my money to buy the air conditioner and arrange for delivery while I was at work. She succeeded, but delivery wasn’t scheduled for another week.
So now I have a sort of monochrome R2-D2 in my bedroom belching out hot air onto my patio, cooling off my apartment and periodically urinating into a bucket I’ve placed next to it.
Around town there are posters with the faces and names of the heads of major chains: Walmart, Frávega, Coto, Shell. The posters blame the inflation on these chains’ choice to raise prices, which seems plainly absurd to me in an environment where unions have been regularly getting yearly raises above the rate of inflation.
Thursday morning, I took a bus home from an outlying neighborhood. The fare was $8. When I arrived in Buenos Aires in 2006, the highest fare was $0.80. But this is somewhat of an overstatement of inflation, because I was only charged the cash fare rather than the $3.90 card fare because my prepaid bus card was empty.
Some months ago, a garbage truck caught fire in the street outside the office where I work. The fire ignited six cars parked along the street. They burned until nothing was left but metal and carbon. The heat blistered the stucco and paint on the buildings on the street and melted parts of the engine, which puddled in the street. A chunk of melted engine is now sitting on my bathroom vanity.
A week or two ago, I saw the last four of the six burned-out cars finally being loaded onto a tow truck. Now only the melted plastic and blistered concrete bear witness to the conflagration.
When Darius was here, I tried to persuade him to buy a set of reading glasses from a Senegalese street vendor, though without success. A couple of weeks ago, the Senegalese street vendors of Buenos Aires suffered a sudden setback: the police raided all their houses early in the morning to confiscate the watches, cheap jewelry, and eyeglasses they sell on blankets around town --- as well as the blankets themselves. They protested by cutting off streets, but since they are immigrants, public opinion is against them.
Macri, the mayor, used his new metropolitan police force to repress the various street vendors. This has been a project of his for some time, and in at least one case they have shot street vendors with rubber bullets to drive them out of an area.
Still, early-morning house raids seem like a new extreme of repression against such a previously tolerated activity. I wonder how much longer San Telmo’s famous Sunday open-air market will last. Perhaps it will be spared, since it attracts so many tourists.
Macri’s party, PRO, is popular here in Buenos Aires, but fortunately has little support nationwide.
The cockroaches are back. I’ve set out fresh roach-bait traps, and that seems to have slowed them down, but I still have a long way to go before they’re eradicated.
I still haven’t reassembled the hot-water heater. There’s a bag somewhere in my apartment with the absolutely crucial faceplate and spring parts of it, which I haven’t been able to find in months. This is starting to become a problem again as the weather cools down from sweltering to merely sweaty.
Yesterday, we went to look at an apartment that we could possibly share. It’s 110 square meters with four potential bedrooms (one of which is rather too small, and one of which lacks a door); the cost is $4400 (US$400, say) plus $1300 expenses. Gorgeous parquet floors, huge living room, well-equipped kitchen with granite counters, noisy. I was expecting the realtor to call me back today with information about the water damage in the walls and access to the roof.
The other apartments we’ve been looking at have been similar in size, but in large part since they’re in richer parts of town, they’re two or three times as expensive.