The idea: go to the San Telmo Market, today a Babel of tourists who go to eat from Creole empanadas to Spanish tapas, and find those who lived what that place was, that is, an ordinary fair.
In the butcher shop of José Luis Arribas, men in white aprons chat and fish something that looks like a chorizo on the finish line. The owner is not and will not be maybe for a while.
His health has just become complicated and the employee who was left in charge says he does not know if he will be able to give interviews and tell me what the San Telmo Market used to be like.
Arribas is the oldest stallholder. The search, then, is oriented towards a chicken shop, that of the Amitrano, founded more than a century ago by an immigrant from Nerano, a minimal and coastal town in the province of Naples.
As a child, I saw the Market as immense and it was like a labyrinth.
Jorge Amitrano
Jorge Amitrano (52) points out that his grandfather was one of the first to open a position there. At his side, his wife, Luján Napolitano (46), apana chicken milanesas.
They can talk because at noon the Market is quiet: people do not come to buy food but to ask for it in the restaurants that some years ago began to occupy the premises that the crises of the homeland were leaving vacant.
The Market is a work of the architect Juan Antonio Buschiazzo (another Italian, but from the Liguria region) and was inaugurated in 1897. According to Jorge Amitrano's calculations, his grandfather opened the chicken shop twenty years later in the same stall where he now talks with Viva.
He says he would have liked to be an architect, but couldn't. He did high school at the prestigious Otto Krause Technical College: a career in architecture would probably have been within his reach.
But when his father, Rogelio, became ill, Jorge and his brothers had to support the business and leave school. Over time, they left one by one, but he stayed. It is the last link in a chain that may soon begin to close.
Jorge says that his father brought him as a boy and put him to wrap eggs. Although what he really did was accompany Rogelio's long working hours.
Thus began, inevitably, to know the business. When the time came, taking charge of the Amitrano Farm (strictly speaking, taking charge of a family tradition) would come naturally.
Jorge Amitrano remembers that as a boy he wrapped eggs in the family chicken shop. Photo: Maxi Failla.
"Now our children don't want to come," Luján clarifies, "nor do they enjoy wrapping eggs." They're a whole new generation, Jorge says. He is clear that, while he is there, he will not ask his children to come. "I prefer that they travel, study, do something else," he admits.
Both think their children have another head, "And we also have another head different from that of our parents," adds Luján, who one day disowned this neighborhood to which he moved for love, but today, he says, he would not change for anything.
Her husband grew up right here, where today waiters, butchers and tour guides swarm.
Luján says that there were many children who walked the corridors, while their parents, children of the first immigrants, worked to maintain the legacy of those who had come from the sea.
When the help at the stall and homework ran out, Jorge joined the other children of merchants who frolicked between crates of fruit and customers carrying bags.
"I saw the market as immense and it was like a labyrinth," he recalls. The children made the most of the nooks and crannies by playing hide and seek, ran in the free spaces to pat the stain on their backs or capture (if they were captors) or escape during the game of the thief.
With the crises that the country experienced, it seems miraculous that such a building, such as the San Telmo Market, is still standing.
Today, working here, there is almost no one left of Jorge's generation, the one of servants in the Market.
Origin Mark
Jorge Amitrano is one of those men who loves the place he comes from. He knows how delicate the Market is with its iron arches to the roof and its central dome. He also knows the story of Buschiazzo, "the European architect" who designed it.
Sometimes he observes tourists walking through the eaves taking pictures of the roofs or columns and understands them, of course he understands them: they also come to admire a part of their history.
With the crises that the country has experienced, it seems miraculous that such a building is still standing. The last reform it had was made by the City Government, which renovated the façade.
But there was a time when, like the whole country, the San Telmo Market was falling apart.
In the San Telmo Market, old fresh food establishments coexist with antique shops and restaurants. Photo: Maxi Failla.
"In 2001 it was about to melt, until tourism arrived," recalls Jorge. Before, in San Telmo no foreign languages were heard and less in the Market. And at one time, the worst, not even those from here came, Luján clarifies.
Things change when gastronomic venues appear and gain more and more ground. Perhaps there is no point in debating whether the transformation was good or bad. "It was either that or the market tended to disappear," Jorge concludes.
Finally, the story advanced towards a good coexistence between the butchers and greengrocers who remained, and the antique dealers, the cafeterias and those who offer the respected choripán of always with different clothes.
It would be difficult for anyone today to want to rent a stall in the market to sell food instead of cooking it. Rents are high for the time it takes to arm yourself with regular customers.
But the future of the Market as a Market does not depend on the owner (it is not a public building), says Jorge, but "depends on the people who want to start a business here."
The Amitranos opened the chicken shop in 1917: it is one of the oldest stalls in the place.
Thus, the place retains its identity in those who, like Jorge and Luján, resist. While customers continue to arrive at the counter of the Amitrano Farm, in the butcher shop of Arribas the row of empty changuitos lengthens and a mountain range with its back hides the bars of the restaurants.
For Jorge Amitrano, today the most satisfying thing about his job is to be in the Market itself, to serve the people of the neighborhood he has known for so long.
Knowing that where he now stands, his father and grandfather stood before. To say, as few can, that it is third generation of workers of the San Telmo Market.
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