Buenos Aires- City of Tango     and Tears

Dugald Jellie falls in love with a city where football is religion, tango is love and the disappeared will never be forgotten. Metaphor well serves a big city, with its great uproar of opinions and possibilities, the avenues of illusion, the ceaseless spectacle - as with the idea of melancholia in a city as big as Buenos Aires. Don't cry for me Argentina? I well nigh weep among her fallen angels.

It's in crisp Sunday morning light that I walk amid the dead at Cementerio de la Recoleta, through a labyrinth of Catholic crosses and sparse Latin and a string of fatal dates in the heart of the city. "The last surprise party of a dying class," is how local scribe Juan Jose Sebreli described this patrician graveyard and baroque marble fantasy. V.S. Naipaul called the must-see attraction a "mimic city".

I come here looking for a poem. It's by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian oracle who once declared: "Buenos Aires is such a boundless city that nobody can know it." It's here, somewhere, on a bronze plaque on the Alvear family mausoleum and begins: "She once had everything but one by one/Each thing abandoned her. We saw her armed/With beauty."

These opening lines of love and death and forsaken dreams I think of as a story of the city. Of a place founded in 1536 by a Spanish aristocrat, on a river of silver, named after a patron saint of sailors - the Virgin of Buen Ayre - and feeling as eternal as air and water.

Fresh arum lilies and red roses lie by the tomb of Eva Peron and in the necropolis everywhere I turn I see beauty. Four days in Buenos Aires has this effect. And I've not yet set foot in a tango hall, nor watched from terraces the choreographed passion of their futbol.

"It's like Paris populated by Italians who speak Spanish," says Randy Provence of living in the world's 10th-biggest city. He's a friend of the friend I travel with, who moved here from California with his wife last year. "It's all of Europe, at the end of the Americas."

He takes us to La Boca, the former meat-packing barrio where Diego Maradona is a saint, tango is on the street and corrugated iron on Italian immigrants' houses wears the colours of adventure. We see La Bombonera ("the chocolate box"), a football stadium where the legendary Superclasico is played once a season between Boca Juniors and uptown rivals River Plate.

Our airport taxi driver told us already of this team. "Traffic here is crazy," were his first words. "La Boca, number one," his second. We smiled and nodded. At lights he reached over and pulled out a Boca shirt from the glove box, signed by Maradona, who last week was named coach of the national side. We arrived in the city with it draped on the dashboard like a magic totem. ("He can sell his house but not that shirt," says a restaurateur when I later recount the tale. "Football here is something very strong.")

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