With a fine frosting of gray hair, a well-rounded belly and deep brown eyes that barely shielded his heart from full view, Peter was always surrounded by women, playing confidant and romantic advisor to many -- including, I must admit, me. He had been my best friend in the final days of my expat extravaganza, the one who suffered through every grating argument about the narrow-mindedness that could flourish in these narrow streets -- and in my ex-lover. He also had an inquisitive mind and when we'd gone on assignment together -- he as photographer, me as journalist -- he would end up asking all the questions. Now I presumed he'd been interviewing piropeadores.

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Viviana leaned into the table, pushing herself into the conversation with a coquettish wink, and said, "I don't hear as many piropos these days, but it's hard to know whether that's because they say them less or they just don't say them to me." There was an eruption of little-girl giggles around the table as the women -- every one a vibrant young babe sculpted into a form-fitting dress -- inwardly tallied their recent piropos and laughed. Cecilia, with her ebony tresses and voluptuous curves, took the apparent deficit of piropos with the same good humor with which she received the verbal ogling itself. Gisela, too, shrugged off the dearth of piropos and set her fairy-blue eyes teasingly upon Felipe. He and the other men at the table tickled their wine glasses and crumbled their bread, but said nothing.

I wasn't so quick to kiss the piropo goobye. How many times had I been hurtling down Avenida Santa Fé, plagued by some inane job-related worry, only to have it washed away by a furtive smile and a flattering line? "With eyes as bright as yours, who needs the sun?" There were times when a morning greeting of "¡Diosa!" (Goddess!) was enough to bring on a secret, blushing smile that lasted all day.

It wasn't that I was so hard up for attention. Like many an expat, I had bound myself to Argentina with a passionately woven romance. I think, actually, I had gathered piropos like tokens of acceptance from my new country. Their delivery was predicated on the belief that I understood both the language and the culture of the piropo, which is so foreign to my American roots that if there existed some kind of world consciousness that could identify me as a yanqui, I never would have been treated to a single one. But these mysterious piropeadores behaved toward me as if I was Argentine, and it was as if by comprehending them, I became one.

A bittersweet nostalgia for that señorita I had struggled to become rippled through me as I polished off a final espresso and began the requisite round of cheek-kissing goodbyes. Peter directed the taxi to Viviana's place, where I was staying while working on a travel video. Then, sitting up front while Viviana and I commandeered the back seat, he asked the driver if it was true that they said fewer piropos these days. The taxista, who was in his 50s and surely putting in 14-hour days to make a living, agreed. "There's no time," he said flatly. "Everyone's in a hurry. There's no siesta anymore, no time to dream up silly verses."

By then we had left the curving cobblestone streets and crumbling, belle époque barrio of San Telmo and were barreling down Avenida 9 de Julio, heralded as the widest in the world since the government bulldozed a collective of neoclassical mansions to roll out eight lanes in each direction. During the day it was a motionless sea of traffic, and even now, at 2 a.m. on a weeknight, it was busy -- quick schools of red tail lights darting past the opulent opera house and into the current of another rushing boulevard.

Memories of my Argentine life cascaded down these avenues, and I recalled discomforting moments during my education in the ways of this sensual culture: It had been unnerving to learn that the piropo was not always an anonymous affair. Countless times, I had arrived at the office of some government minister or well-known executive whose secretary had put me off for weeks, and the big muckety-muck would size me up while shaking my hand and purr, "If I had known you were so beautiful, I would have agreed to the interview ages ago."

At first, I would just freeze and return their winking words with an icy handshake. But gradually, as the filter through which I had been trained to view the world dissolved, I found humor in these fawning men in suits. Sure, they were sexist and a bit grotesque, but they hadn't been schooled to not say what they were really thinking. And their admission of attraction -- if you could even call it that -- seemed harmless. I suppose any feminist would have howled at my apathy, but by then I would have howled right back if I could have found the party responsible for draining the sweaty-palmed humanity, with its unchecked crushes and flirtatious freedoms, from my homeland. Over time, I came to revel in Argentina's unbridled acceptance of everyday sexuality, and with my feminist education and Seven Sisters diploma in tow, learned to offer a smile and genuine thanks to these piropador-acquaintances, before turning to the interview at hand.

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