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By Kaitlin Quistgaard

May 7, 1999 |Amid the pale purple jacaranda of Plaza San Martín, I fell into one of those impossibly long stares that strangers engage in here. I had been in Buenos Aires a week and my inner Argentine, developed during a previous four-year love-hate battle with the place -- a battle that had ended with my return to the States two years before -- was on an unprecedented high. Pheromones were no doubt wafting up from the crowd of park-bench lovers and the full-bodied Italianate Spanish was infusing my thoughts as the night jasmine perfumed the city streets.

So I playfully clung to his silvery gray eyes. We didn't trade smiles or winks, but my chest tingled with a soundless giggle. It was good to be back on the teasingly sensual Argentine streets.

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But that night, as the wooden plates were being cleared from a gluttonous asado in which we'd sampled every cut of beef that could be barbecued, my friend Peter challenged the longevity of such public sensuality. I didn't hear what prompted the thought, but his words rang out across the raucous dinner party: "They don't say as many piropos these days."

A piropo is the most simpatico of flirtations -- a kind of street poetry that a man whispers just when he's close enough to look a woman in the eye. Traditionalists might memorize a rhyme popularized decades ago, like "Adiós florecita de arroz, mañana voy a casarme con vos." (Goodbye little rice flower, tomorrow I will marry you.) But even a mundane "¡Qué piernas!" (What legs!), when delivered by a bewitching flatterer, is pure excitement -- a moment of unexpected intimacy with a stranger -- and then, before your cheeks have fully flushed, he's gone.

I had come to think of the piropo as the Latin-lover cousin of the white trash catcall. In the American version, a construction worker, towering above the world on a scaffold, whistles at a bouncy giglet on the sidewalk below, drawing upon her the cruelest attention. But the piropo is subtle -- with refined machismo, it replaces public humiliation with a private fantasy of romance. At most, a person walking beside you might hear, but often no one, not even the mystery man, looks to see your response. The compliment arrives quietly, like an anonymous gift.

I was horrified to think the tradition might be dying.

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