The City at Three P.M. Read online

  In Spanish, I ask her about the museum, but she tells me it is closed down. I ask her for how long, and she says since last December, which means that it might have folded right around the time that the entire Argentine economy crashed like the Hindenburg on a particularly bad day; she advises I head up to the Centro Cultural Borges. I’ve already seen the small display they have on his life in that too culturally conscious new arts complex, named after him but principally devoted to dance recitals and art exhibitions and foreign films. Nevertheless, possibly still feeling a little creepy myself for poking around a YWCA, I energetically thank the woman for the valuable tip, which seems to be what she wants to hear.

  Outside, I look back into the closed museum. That one front room deserted, then a door opening to a smaller back room, just as empty. And I confirm what I thought I saw. There is, in fact, one item left—a single large, round, un-framed mirror on the back yellow wall, which reflects me smack in the middle of it as portrayed looking into it, through the grating and glass with cupped hands. I take out my little pocket notebook and Bic. I write down that it is more than ironic that Borges confessed throughout his life that he had always harbored a terror of mirrors, the watery way they attest to our own incorporeality and even ghostliness, or constantly double us to the point we are not sure if we are who we really are, and now in a museum devoted to documenting his life (the museum was created in 1999, a brochure I have tells me, by the Asociación Borgesiana de Buenos Aires) the only thing that remains, triumphant in a way, is a single mirror.

  I get a woozy rush of the metaphysic I came in search of, if you want to know the truth, and the purpose of the trip doesn’t seem mere whimsy at all right then.

  3. Maps

  The map of the city I’ve gotten from a tourism office is laid out so what is north is on the lower half, what is south at the top. You read it that way. I get a different map from a different tourism office (but like the other map, with ads for local bars and boutiques, on glossy full-colored paper), and it also has the same upside-down configuration.

  4. The Hooker, Decidedly High Class

  It’s a couple of days later, night now.

  I’ve bought some books in Buenos Aires bookstores that have given me solid information on Borges and the city. Several local proper scholars have already done professionally, and much better, what I’m doing as an amateur, tracking down not only the biographically important sites but also many places alluded to in the stories and poems, even the essays. And, of course, Borges’s essays are not to be forgotten, and included in that New Directions Labyrinths, a volume that blends many of the stories from the seminal 1944 book Ficciones (which some say changed the look of world fiction forever) with a scattering of nonfiction pieces, is the flatly amazing (mind-blowing?) two-part piece, “A New Refutation of Time.” For me it’s a powerful treatise on the outright fluidity of what we sometimes believe, mistakenly, clocks are rather rigidly trying to tell us, commentary akin to that in Eliot’s Four Quartets, but with a more direct daring in the leaps of thought, less hemming and hawing about it; I’ve already reread that essay twice while in Buenos Aires.

  No guidebook is needed to find the address where Borges lived the largest chunk of his adult life, between 1944 and 1985, most of that period as a bachelor with his mother. That is my specific mission this evening—to take a good look at the spot that I have already passed a dozen times or more in my wandering around. Actually, it’s tough to miss the place. The very image of an older, cloudy-eyed Borges, who was for a long while often ignored at home during his lifetime, now has become as much of an icon in Argentina as a smiling blond Evita or the wider-smiling, slickly-coiffed legendary tango crooner Carlos Gardel, and as you come out of the subway at the San Martín stop, there at the top of the posh pedestrian walkway for upscale shopping, Calle Florida, a lit plastic sign with a map gives the principal attractions of the Plaza San Martín/Retiro district, including an orange bull’s-eye dot for item “H” on the plan: Casa de Borges. It’s only a few streets over from both hotels where I have been staying, in fact.

  Nine-ninety-four Calle Maipú is an eight-story apartment building of functional gray concrete architecture, maybe from the 1930s, built on the corner of narrow Maipú and equally narrow Charcas, also called Calle M. T. de Alvear. Borges’s place was on the seventh floor, and stepping back, looking up from across the street, I can see the apartment, recessed and right under another on the very top floor; it has a terrace with a sort of ship’s pipe railing, green awnings shading the windows, and a line of potted plants on the terrace itself. It is said that Borges’s own bedroom was just a tiny one, with a stubby cot, a night table, and a bookcase. His widowed mother had the apartment’s larger master bedroom, which he kept as almost a shrine to her after she died; reportedly, he announced even then when he came into the apartment at night, “Mother, I’m home.” He also had a white cat, Beppo, shown in some photos rolling around the carpet on its back and boxing maybe imaginary butterflies. The neighborhood is a good one, near Calle Florida and across from the quite formal, more-than-leafy Plaza San Martín, a British-style park, and just around the corner from a shop stocked with a large supply of high-priced polo gear. Next to the apartment building’s lobby is a women’s clothing boutique, where the ground-floor exterior has been given a reddish polished-stone overlay. While I take more notes, looking through the glass doors to that small white-marble lobby with its elevator and twin Art Nouveau marble staircases, cramped and curving, a group of attractive, hi-ply dressed young women come out of the boutique; they are closing up for the night, locking the pulled-down galvanized shutter and talking. I keep taking notes, writing by the streetlight, nobody else but the young women around. I like the idea that Borges wrote much of his major work here, my being at the spot, and I move backward a step or two as one of the young women from the shop walks by in front of me. I keep taking notes on the layout of the place, the way it faces the corner, with a separate plane of the building there to make for a façade of three sides; across Charcas is an edifice in full-fledged Louvre style, an officers’ club and a military museum. A half dozen of what can sometimes seem like the millions of black-and-yellow Buenos Aires taxis now stop for the light at the intersection, then move on. Borges commented in later life about the growing problem of this intersection’s traffic noise, which must get bad during the day. In a poem from the stack of them I photostatted to bring with me, “The Leaves of the Cypress” (actually a prose poem), he offers a wonderfully haunting little account of a dream in which Death comes up to his apartment right here on Maipú and takes him for what seems a test ride to the cemetery: “At the corner of Charcas and Maipú, outside the tenement, a carriage was waiting. With a formal gesture tantamount to an order, he directed me to step in first.”

  I glance up to see that the young woman is walking by me again. She is tall, a long-haired brunette with high cheekbones, wearing trim beige slacks, strapped heels, and a knit black top; she smiles at me and I nod. She looks classy, perhaps “Upper East Sidish,” and it’s only when I move on and notice her now walking back and forth in front of a hotel down Charcas a ways, a doorman and another guy standing beside him smilingly ogling her as she passes, do I realize that she wasn’t with the others closing up the store at all. She is a hooker, and what I come to learn in subsequent trips to scout out the area is that this whole pocket is a favorite one for very classy hookers. Some stroll the streets alone, groups of them chat and laugh outside of normal-looking bar/lounges that are actually a part of the business, like one called “Friday’s Club” (not a TGIF franchise), which faces the closed-down old Harrods department store. In Argentina prostitution has been legal since the Perón regime.

  The next morning, thinking about the encounter, I suppose I feel naïve for not spotting her as a hooker right off. Some man of the world I am—I mean, there I was lost in what most of my life has been lost in, these obsessive imaginings in and about literature, wildly taking notes, and I didn’t even know e
nough about how the real world works to recognize a hooker when I saw one, when I was solicited by one. It leads me to rereading another Borges poem I have photostatted for the trip, “Remorse,” where Borges says he never fulfilled the basic message of life that his kind, caring parents wished to instill in him—simply to be happy. “I wasn’t happy. My ways/ Have not fulfilled their youthful hope. I gave/ My mind to the symmetric stubbornness/ Of art, and all its web of pettiness.”

  I hope it’s not going to turn out to be one of those brooding trips where, given the solitary, idle time that travel alone affords, you start evaluating every little thing, which often echoes every big thing, in your life. (The women you didn’t marry over the years, the way that lately you haven’t seen enough of, and seem to have drifted away from, your own immediate family all living elsewhere, which would break your own dead parents’ hearts—that variety of dangerous thinking.) If I hit the metaphysic at the closed-down museum with the mirror, I know I came up completely empty in that department with my do-si-doing with the young woman, the smiling hooker, there in front of the Casa de Borges the previous balmy night, big yellow clouds floating by the half-full moon.

  5. Other Spots

  I keep reading at the hotel in the morning (the Phoenix, where I eventually settle after a hydrofoil-ferry ride across the wide Plata and a few days in a small coastal town in Uruguay, which seems to be a sweet, sweet country), then walking more in the afternoon, right into the evening. I sometimes use city buses, the subway, too; I check out more Borges landmarks. A bunch of single Australian women book into the otherwise quite empty hotel for a weeklong conference for tango aficionados, and they are fun to talk to at breakfast in the hotel dining room. They speak enthusiastically about tango as if it is a way of life, a yoga. Among them is a physical therapist from Sydney named Brendie, not far from my own age and with a strikingly good figure, probably from all that hearty tangoing (she knows it, likes wearing low-cut leotard tops); she has large dark eyes fringed with incipient crow’s feet, a toothy smile, and what we used to call a Prince Valiant haircut, black. Quieter than the others, she does invite me to go to a professional tango concert offered as part of the conference one evening, though I duck out, telling myself that, if nothing else, innocently flirting with a woman like Brendie at breakfast is really more like my usual territory, and I’ve never been a hooker kind of guy. So how should I have been expected to know what was going on in front of the Casa de Borges?

  Buenos Aires in March sometimes seems absurdly hot, ninety degrees and ninety percent humidity. It’s tough even on me, somebody who has lived in central Texas for more than twenty years and should be accustomed to anything a summer can dish out. The end-of-the-day thunderstorms— brief but inundating, the gusts bending the tall palm trees in the parks—don’t manage to usher in any relief and just make the humidity worse. I go out to the Palermo neighborhood of Borges’s childhood, originally a barrio of diverse immigrants and where the established and relatively well-to-do Borges family (his ancestry shows many Argentine notables, including nineteenth-century military commanders on both sides) moved when Borges was very young. It was in Palermo that Borges immersed himself in his father’s extensive English library, and I never fail to get a kick out of the detail of how bilingual Borges first read Don Quixote as a child in an English translation, which was right before the father, a lawyer, took the family to live in Europe for several years. Palermo looks yuppified now; the Borges had a substantial two-story home on Calle Serrano (today Calle Jorge Luis Borges, where the original house is gone), though the neighborhood back then was apparently still a little rough, with tango barrooms and the kind of knife-fighting characters found in B.’s many realistic, and often overlooked, short stories about Buenos Aires street life. Nearby I find other homes the family lived in. There’s no grave to visit; Borges died in Switzerland in 1986 only weeks after marrying his former student and companion/secretary María Kodama— she was thirty-nine, he almost eighty-seven—and is buried in Geneva.

  I ride on a rattling red bus with goofy whitewall tires (the breeze through the windows is nice) to ramshackle La Boca, farther south and toward the mouth of the river, where the tango was reportedly born. In La Boca, touristy tango nightspots still thrive in the makeshift old buildings with their distinctive corrugated metal sides painted wildly bright colors. One Sunday morning, walking the length of the long park that runs next to a wildlife refuge on the river, an esplanade called the Costanera Sur not far from downtown, I seem to recognize the asterisk-shaped cast-iron patterning repeatedly inset in the old, formal cement railings of the walkway. I wonder where I have seen that. Then I remember. There is a great picture in nearly all the books about Borges’s life—not only my on-the-scene guidebooks but also the standard biographies I read before the trip—and it shows a dark-haired younger Borges in a good suit standing beside a petite, pretty young woman in a summer dress who is sitting on that railing, Estela Canto, in March 1945; Borges was head-over-heels for her, but the relationship didn’t work out. In the photo, Estela, long curly hair and daintily snub-nosed, has a white purse and open-toed white shoes, and she is holding up for the camera a copy of a book on which you can see on the cover big letters spelling out “Henry James,” but not the full title of the particular volume.

  I remember having lingered over that photo when I first saw it. And I remember noticing the distinctive patterning in the railing when reading, a year or so earlier, one biography it appeared in. It is painted green, I see now. And I assure myself that I have logged some real progress in covering the city, or at least the central pocket of it (metropolitan Buenos Aires at twelve million inhabitants is simply huge, going on for miles), if I can stumble on something like this ironwork and in a way recognize it. I tell myself that the moment probably marks for this trip the important pivot point in any trip, when the foreign country doesn’t feel so foreign anymore. That’s nice, too.

  I eat a lot of steak on the trip, because carne (the word seems synonymous with “steak” in Argentina) is indeed the country’s staple. Nevertheless, even at my size, six-two, I can only handle what they call a mini-bife and not the thick, plate-size slab the average slim Argentine male is able to put away daily at lunch with no hesitation. There’s an awful lot of pizza and pasta, too, evidence of how Italian Buenos Aires really is, with Italian immigration having been very large and possibly more Italian than Spanish last names in the city phone book today, I think I read somewhere. There are also big street demonstrations going on pretty much daily all over town during the whole time I am here. They attract me at first, an opportunity to be maybe a Witness to History in this period of the country’s huge economic upheavals, now that the government has let the peso float entirely freely (without much buoyancy, by the way), but the street marches are inevitably played out to guys setting off ear-splitting firecrackers. After a couple of bursts igniting only a matter of yards from my tympanic membranes, I learn my lesson, and I don’t follow the crowds when I see the demonstrations building.

  6. Café Richmond, Calle Florida, 6 P.M.

  What proves to be another minus on the metaphysical chart, but a revealing sequence, nevertheless.

  This particular afternoon I decide to go into the Café Richmond on Calle Florida. Apparently, Borges, a regular, would bring visiting scholars and journalists there when they sought him out in the city, not far from the Calle Maipú apartment; it seems he let just about anybody who showed up at his door interview him. I admit I would not venture into the Richmond if it weren’t for the Borges connection, and with gleaming brass pillars out front and abundant staid wood paneling visible behind the glass exterior there on the ritzy shopping concourse that is Calle Florida, it looks like an overpriced, somewhat official landmark of the sort that it’s just a given you should avoid. Like Deux-Magots in Paris. And in front of the Richmond, I maybe smile to remember how Richard Ford, a predictable writer who many critics tend to take too seriously, once commented that he liked to write in a Pa
ris café, but never Deux-Magots—as if he had some insider’s knowledge that Deux-Magots is nowadays by and large terminally square, which anybody who really knows Paris merely takes for granted. And to think about Ford’s straightforward, easily marketable writing is somehow to remind myself how it is typical of the kind of cookie-cutter fare that currently rules the American fiction scene, so much safe realism displaying no real verbal and structural daring, let alone transporting vision; possibly that American fiction scene is deservedly Oprah-ized. And I maybe think that part of losing myself in this whole Borges obsession is probably to ultimately remind myself what matters in writing, in art itself; an uncompromising and risk-taking career like that of Borges—by every account always a modest, unassuming man, even if he could turn noisy with his occasional awkwardly conservative politics—is something worthwhile in being obsessed with.

  The Richmond inside spreads huge, a cavernous expanse of tables, with some businessmen unwinding, ditto for the women having finished a day of shopping and the few couples in low conversation here and there. Downstairs, where I have taken a look, it is livelier, an equally big expanse and well-heeled citizens playing billiards and chess, all male there. The waiter struts over to me, and in my Spanish that I am getting more confident with daily, I tell him I don’t need the menu. I say I will just have the promoción for five pesos, which includes a chopp (draft) of beer and a plate of canapés; I saw it advertised on a placard outside, it seeming one item that will spare me from a gouging. As he walks off, I remind him again, too loudly, “La promoción por cinco pesos” Mustached, gray-haired, dignified, he simply waves my addendum away, as if to say, “Yes, yes, I heard you.” I realize that going on with my talk of a promoción, which loosely translates as “sale” or “special,” wasn’t the classiest of lines. What the hell.