zine7/submissions/vilmibm/buenosaires.txt

I Look For Bones Everywhere I Rest My Gaze, or, The Trouble With Buying Things.

Being one Yankee's honestly retold recollection of visiting Buenos Aires in September of 2023

Buendía. I have returned from Buenos Aires. For me, Argentina was "the place where Jorge Luis Borges is from" until one of my best friends moved to live there permanently in 2013. I played a decade long game of chicken with his return to the states that I have now lost.

On the first day I woke up and tried to drink airplane orange juice that smelled like dirty socks woven from steel wool.

It also tasted like dirty socks woven from steel wool. I could not finish it before the turbulence of landing began and prepared to take it as one horrible shot before it splashed all over my pants. They were the only pair I brought on the trip. I was saved by a flight attendant just as things became dire. My time to bienvenidos was short and I emerged into the smoking area by the international arrivals door. My friend was to meet me there but I was 45 minutes early. To pass the time I pulled out the one book I brought to the country: the Labyrinths collection by Borges. I have owned this copy of Labyrinths since 2006 or so when this same friend showed it to me at a used book store in Poughkeepsie, NY, USA.

"His stories are like murder mysteries where the killer is infinity," my friend had explained. When he showed me the book I realized I had no idea how to pronounce Borges and thought it might be "boar jizz." I also realized I was very intrigued by his description. I don't remember in which year I actually read the book but reading it changed my perception of reality and the world forever. When I first read Borges it felt like the first step on a long journey. I didn't know what the journey was or where it was going, but every book I have read after Labyrinths has been part of a conversation with Labyrinths. I sometimes feel like that journey is near a kind of completion. Perhaps it would complete in Buenos Aires? I couldn't say, but I felt I had no more choice in whether to bring the book than I had the choice of inhaling clouds of cigarette smoke outside of the international arrivals door of the Ministro Pistarini International Airport.

My friend arrived in a cab that was also an Uber and I squeezed in with my one backpack and my one metal case of modular synthesizer equipment. I could not make the country around me seem foreign. The sprawl, the highway system, the trees, the billboards, and the gray skies all looked like they could be in USA. This disappointed me. I deposited objects in my friend's apartment and hugs unto my friend and brunch into my body. I would have napped, but we had synthesizers. We spent the rest of the day on the floor in and out of headphones basking in a video synth playing on a big TV propped up on chairs looming over us. After synths, talking, a break for exceptional Armenian food at Sarkis, and more talking.

On my second day in Buenos Aires I stared into the water heater of my friend's apartment.

A tiny charred portal on the metal box let me see the secret world inside. Tiny mountains of flame filling a black void with blue light. I had never considered the beauty inside of a water heater. I think we ate medialunas. We took an Uber to the Recoleta Cemetery where the driver observed that if he followed the application's direction we would have to scale a very large wall.

"Gracias, la puerta es mucho más fácil," replied my friend. Recoleta was promptly overwhelming with its beauty. A dense sepulchral city covered in Art Deco and Belle Époque iconography decaying elegantly yet filled in its corners with discarded bottles and wrappers. Below the crypts I saw pits descending into abject darkness. As we walked I saw statuary so magnificent and yet so cramped I felt surrounded by a vast empire with eons of history clicked, dragged, and re-scaled into a city block. Metal wept green and stone sprouted weeds all around me. My friend wanted pictures for his online dating profile among all of this. I did not know how until I saw him reflected in the glass door of an overgrown crypt. Friend merged with plant merged with shadow merged with me merged with darkness.

From Recoleta we walked and then cab'ed. I again tried to nap, perhaps, but failed. Memory resumes at a bar where we met with a person who became a new friend. The bar turned us away because of a private motorcycle club event. Another bar, many blocks away, welcomed us. The bar remains a mystery of memory but they focused on vermouth based cocktails. This was a nice time. I finally worked up the courage to go inside from the patio and ask,

"Baño?" I was not understood. I repeated myself with a more nasal "ñ" and a tentative "donde esta el" and was motioned as needed. After the bar came our actual venue: a drag show in a warehouse. I enjoyed this drag show, though I caught myself being more enchanted with the wall sized projection of Divine music videos than with the show in front of me a few times. A thing that scandalized me was how drinks could be ordered with "speed." Given Argentina's reputation as a cocaine enjoying place I, in my tired state, completely believed that this meant amphetamines could be added to beverages. My friend later explained that speed is just a popular energy drink of the country. A long walk and far too much Argentine pizza later I slept. I rather liked la fainá and resolved to eat any further Argentine pizza on horseback.

Photographs from my phone inform me that on the third day my friend took me to San Telmo.

I was very tired this day and recall it faintly. We looked upon many beautiful buildings and I purchased Simpsons magnets from a vendor at a street market. We circled the market and I caught a glimpse of tango. We looked in the windows of many antique stores but did not enter any. I pet a cat in the entryway of a witch (brujxs) supply store. We became lost in an indoor market and spiraled around our need for bathroom, coffee, and food. We pushed through a confusing altercation between the police and a couple for the former. We drank fancy Brazilian coffee from Coffee Town for the middle. For the latter the easiest option seemed to be empanadas but we could find none sin carne. We gave up and left in haste for my friend had an appointment. That night I loved a maximalist dinner at Salgado and had my first glass of Argentine red wine since arriving. I selected the wine at random and was not disappointed. Between this Italian meal and the earlier Armenian meal my dire fear of every meal in Argentina being a meat mountain subsided.

El cuarto día en Buenos Aires I arose on my own and got in an Uber for Tigre where another old friend of mine lives.

This friend is inextricably linked to my other friend. They do not live together anymore, but in my mind are always interwoven. As this was my first solo trip in Argentina I felt panic. A food truck on the side of the road going into Tigre read "You do not need teeth to eat my beef" in English which I could only interpret as a threat. Near my destination my panic briefly abated when I saw a horse, unadorned and seemingly wandering free, grazing on a pile of dirt and garbage next to a polluted waterway.

The day's visit was the first in many years. My friend gave me a tour of birds, trees, canals, sadness, love, endings, beginnings, fear, reunion, and a large abandoned boat. The boat evoked the glorious decay of the Recoleta Cemetery as it sat rusting in the quiet water of el río Luján. The sun began to set and I realized I would be late getting back in time for evening plans. I returned to panic.

Against most odds I made it on time. We took in a gender fucking cyberpunk opera in a building where thousands of people had been tortured and murdered during the dictatorship. Like in Recoleta, I could feel a kind of folding of time and space.

My friend and I had gone to the opera with the new friend and a new new friend. The new new friend was a food writer. Such a friend is a good friend to have when dinner is needed. We ate comida perfecta at Divino, a restaurant so new I was unable to find it online. I was relieved that our server was eager to practice English.

On the fifth day I had enough feelings to fill a mountain.

I needed to walk and exist outside of cars. So, with my friend: un día de los flâneurs. From his apartment we walked and walked. On days like this a city becomes a smeared gradient. We oozed from the mostly middle class Villa Crespo to the canned and stale Instagram aesthetic of Palermo to the big money of Belgrano to the canned yet fresh Instagram aesthetic of chinatown. Somewhere in the middle was the market of the fleas. On this walk I learned about the need for a law to regulate neighborhoods being renamed as a new subset of Palermo. Everything is Palermo. I shuddered imagining an imploding city of Palermos. In chinatown exhaustion and confusion led us to receive a double espresso carefully portioned into two tiny cups. It was enough to get us home and then out again to La Conga. This restaurant is a chance to encounter the divine. Every seat inside was occupied and the line to enter stretched down the block. Staff wired with radios and with the attention of show runners on a film set moved everything so swiftly, however, that tables were never left unoccupied. We were seated in the corner of what used to be another Peruvian restaurant that was absorbed by La Conga as a result of La Conga's indefatigable commercial spirit. Everything is La Conga, but its unbounded growth did not frighten me like that of Palermo's. La Conga's madness was virtuous and real. Palermo's was just another real estate developer's greedy dream.

The speakers above intermittently rang out with the sound of Windows 10 alert notifications and abruptly launched into an EDM rendition of FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS at least five times while we ate. Our order: lomo saltado de pescado, chicharrón de pescado, leche de tigre, papas a la huancaína, and chicha. I had worried that our tiny two top would not contain the bounty and was proven correct. Everything was so good that the lack of space did not bother me. I hunched over our mountain range of food clutching my plate with one hand like a plateau of earth split by seismic activity and flung into the air.

Eventually the couple next to us left and in light of us lonely two having irrationally ordered enough food for five people the staff kindly converted our two top into a four top. I ate and I ate and indeed it felt like a feliz cumpleaños. I danced in my seat whenever the music came on and became so shoveled full of satisfying food I imagined myself as a piñata I could pop whose innards I could then eat all over again. We got our many left overs to go and resolved with boldness to walk home through Plaza Miserere but it was very cold and some men stared at us so we entered a cab waiting at a red light. At home we talked until the eve of dawn.

On the sixth day in Buenos Aires I awoke to construction sounds as usual and inserted my ear plugs in order to sleep more.

Unhappily I awoke, again, to drilling and hammering in the apartment above as opposed to the construction site next door. I gave up and shuffled into a breakfast of leftovers. My friend was busy all day so I walked down his street until I found a park. This took a few kilometers. On the way, I mentally catalogued every shop that sold wine. In the park I recorded the sound of traffic washing over construction noise and the rhythmic screeching of a swingset with the sound of a ghost clearing its throat. Parakeets visited the trees over my head. I read Borges and resolved to resist Tlön. I finally looked up Thomas Browne's Urn Burial. On the return walk I evaluated my wine shop catalogue and resolved to try Brooklyn Bebidas in the hopes of their NYC iconography implying a command of English. No English was spoken, but I did obtain an incredible bottle of Patagonian red wine. While I walked the rest of the way back to my friend's house I devised the rules of a game I called "El Juego De Buenos Aires." This game has two win conditions and two loss conditions. You lose by being hit by a car or stepping on dog shit. You win by finishing your trip to Buenos Aires without having been hit by a car or stepping on dog shit. You can also win by being hit by a car the exact moment you step on dog shit. That night my friend and I were treated to a dinner cooked by a friend of my friend. We watched a movie. I enjoyed petting my friend's friend's cat. On his wall my friend's friend had hung an image of a labyrinth.

After one week in Buenos Aires it was time to go to another cemetery.

Recoleta had been awe inspiring, but I was not prepared for El Cementerio de la Chacarita. My friend and I entered the nearest burial gallery: an open air concrete pit three stories into the ground with thousands of burial drawers. Feral cats darted away at the edge of my vision and the noise of startled birds echoed through the hallways. Dim pools of water collected at gallery bottom. Plants had overgrown their containers and spilled into the burial shelving. My friend knew someone buried there and we tracked down the drawer number only to realize we were in the wrong gallery. It seemed inconceivable that there were other galleries the size of the one we had entered, but there were several. We descended into the correct gallery and studied the dead's dewey decimal system. My friend double checked the burial information on his phone, saying "I'm searching my email for a message from one person who is dead about another person who is dead." I realized that, one day, the Internet would be the biggest necropolis of them all. We found the correct shelf but it had been stripped of all information. It was likely empty but we paid our respects anyway.

Above ground we followed an outside wall. In both directions, the towering wall consisted of more burial shelves. These shelves were uniformly in disrepair. Cracked and missing doorways framed bones in boxes and garbage bags. The shelves had been adorned with small black and white portraits of their residents. These portraits stared at us now from wherever they had been propped up among the bones that had once given their pictured faces structure. We tried to joke and accept what we were passing by. The weight of time smothered us and we could only feebly sing the lyrics of hair metal hits replacing certain words. Truly, I had been taken down to the sepulchral city where the bones are broken and the shelves are filthy.

After los baños I dropped my phone onto some sharp gravel and shattered its back. I have dropped my phone many times but until then it had never gotten more than a light dent. My friend remarked,

"Welcome to Argentina, the country where everything breaks."

We made to leave Chacarita and passed the kind of Art Deco and Belle Époque designs that filled Recoleta. Their beauty felt distant after the wall of bones. We walked quickly but failed to make it to the German and British cemeteries before they closed. The only thing to do was walk so we entered a Parque Chas, a spiraling neighborhood, to lose ourselves among the living. At the center of the neighborhood we talked while traffic flowed around us. Out of the spiral for coffee and empanadas in an old style cafe bar where a waiter insisted we were wrong about a basic coffee order and then gave us the wrong empanadas. This gaslighting of the gringo, even one who speaks perfect Argentine Spanish like my friend, is a hallmark of the Buenos Aires experience. I attempted to use the toilet upstairs and noticed the flushing mechanism was broken in the exact same way as the toilet at my friend's house. Though I appreciated this familiarity I decided to use the urinal instead.

A cab deposited us across the city in the Broadway of Buenos Aires along Av. Corrientes. Av. Corrientes intersects Av. 9 De Julio, really a very wide avenue, at the site of a massive obelisk along the lines of the Washington Monument. I insisted on crossing Av. 9 De Julio, then crossing Av. Corrientes, then crossing Av. 9 De Julio, then crossing Av. Corrientes. This put us back where we started but allowed a view of every side of El Obelisco as well as the buildings and signage surrounding it. We stared at El Teatro Colón while basking in the glow of a glitching LED advertisement screen and discussed all of the things we had never seen there.

A lot of this walking was to distance our stomachs from the incorrect empanadas. My friend and I are two people incapable of deviating from plans without significant mental energy and suffering. Our plan was to eat a large Argentine style pizza at Banchero which requires as empty a stomach as possible. Our hours of walking primed us well but I was still not capable of finishing my three slices.

On the way to the final cab my friend told me a reason he appreciated living in Argentina: "In the states people say 'those who can, do. Those who can’t teach.' Here, people say 'él que sabe sabe, él que no es jefe;' If you know you know and if you don't you're the boss."

Too much dairy and my sleep is threatened. Banchero made good on its threat to my sleep. Despite going to bed at 5:00 I woke at 8:00 as a result of the bed under me breaking and the construction work. Ear plugs and white noise did not help return to sleep so I put on my big noise canceling headphones and created a playlist of Fennesz albums after two hours of playing word games. I found that if I lined my body up parallel to the wall on the unbroken half of the narrow bed I could ease the pain on my back, but my body had to spiral so my head could lay flat due to the large headphones. I slept in a way: two hours of lucid dreaming. I dreamed of Chicago. I biked, while wearing the headphones and listening to Fennesz, to the downtown DePaul University campus. I found a dumpster full of the contents of a gutted apartment building and dragged three filthy mattresses out. With them stacked under me I laid and stared up at the skyscrapers black against a gray sky. I put one hand on my bike and waited for something I could not imagine.

On the eighth day in Buenos Aires my friend made me eggs.

I still felt like I was dreaming so instead of anything else we sat and made music in our headphones.

I ceased my dreaming and music for a long walk to a synth workshop where my friend took classes and learned to build eurorack modules from scratch. For hours a wonderful man from Córdoba showed us his instruments both acoustic and electronic. My favorite things were an analogue/acoustic drum machine made of telephone and telegram parts but controllable with voltage, an acoustic guitar hacked up into a bass, and an oscillator module that could blend between symmetrical analogue and digital circuitry. As he demonstrated his work to us I watched his fingers gently holding patch cables at the end of a hand seeking the right jack like a heron looking for fish. He inserted patch cables swiftly and decisively. I left humbled by the knowledge that for all of the inspiring things the man showed us he had no formal training in electrical engineering. I was thankful for how generous he had been with his time.

My friend and I wanted to invite him to dinner but social anxiety and windy rain made us both falter. The two of us returned to Salgado for pasta. I tried Fernet con Coca which is exactly what it sounds like: fernet mixed with coca cola over ice. As a lukewarm fan of Fernet and an avowed enemy of coca cola I prepared to hate but instead enjoyed every sip. Home for talking, fixing the bed, and a very early bedtime.

On my penultimate day in Buenos Aires we met our new friend from the other night for lunch.

Prior to coming to Argentina I was worried about not being a fan of eating meat. I ate very well, however, and especially loved the all vegetarian and mostly vegan meal at Sampa we had for lunch. I enjoyed a walk with our new friend to her place which was a multi-level maze of wonder and home to a fabulous cat. We stood on her roof where she said apologetically, "the view may not look like much but when the sun sets I promise it's very beautiful." I could not understand. Even in the slump of midday it was magnificent. Below, what looked like a two meter high sculpted head of Jesus stared blankly at us. Above, a train slid by. Around us a cat quietly nuzzled a cactus and a sea of rooftops rippled with ferns and barbed wire like a concrete sea.

My friend and I headed back to Chacarita Cemetery in another attempt to see the British cemetery only to find a locked gate despite it being thirty minutes prior to closing. My friend, charming as he is, convinced a grimacing older woman to let us in for a quick walk. I regretted having to rush but was thankful to get in at all. The statuary was beautiful and the grounds dense with trees and ivy. On the way out a statue exhorted, "THY WILL BE DONE."

Our will was to drink yerba mate in Parque Centenario. On the way back to his apartment we stopped in a labyrinthine multi-level supermarket to buy a new thermos and yerba. Two developments threatened my resolve to do our will upon return to my friend's apartment: he could not find his mate and I discovered, through an unfortunate interaction with boiling water, that his new thermos leaked. I held my burned hand under cold water and felt that Argentina was truly a land where things broke. I poured a tea cup of malbec and sat down defeated.

My friend's will was stronger than mine. He knew a place, he said, to get a new mate. He wrapped the thermos leaking scalding water in towels and crammed it into a backpack with the yerba. I allowed myself a sliver of hope as narrow as the orange on the dusky horizon. After an eternity standing at the mouth of the subte staring at the sign for the Club Inglés which was inexplicably fully in Spanish my friend emerged from the home goods store next door. He had succeeded. Argentina is a place where things are mended, too. We paused at the Naval hospital for pictures and spiraled into the park. The sun set, the mate ritual began, and unseen ducks quacked themselves to sleep as the sun finished setting. I burned my tongue on the first sip yet was still so moved by the experience that I resolved to re-obtain a mate. I lost mine years ago just like I lost touch with the person who gifted it to me.

We returned to Sarkis and stood in the crowd. Unlike our first visit we waited for almost an hour, sitting down to eat around 22:00. This is evidently a normal dinner time for the people of Buenos Aires and I love them for it. At home my friend asked me if I believed in free will, meaning, and purpose.

On my final day in Buenos Aires I wanted to end as we began by eating medialunas.

I packed and took stock of the red wine that had accumulated, partially of its own accord, in my friend's apartment. Our new friend asked if she could come over with ice cream; we countered with having ice cream and the rest of the wine. I felt it was a Friday fit for royalty. I got in my car to the airport sad to say goodbye to old friends, new friends, and a city that managed to win my affections despite all of the dog shit and steak.

As for my Borgesian journey: I barely read Labyrinths. Instead I talked labyrinths into existence until dawn with a friend whose mind has played a huge part in shaping mine. I walked labyrinthine paths in a city that played a huge part in shaping Borges. Nothing feels completed or finished and I did not expect anything to. I had gone to the land of the gardens of the forking paths where there can be no true endings. Only new alleyways of being beckoned me.

EDITOR'S NOTE: As of publication, the author is a winner of El Juego De Buenos Aires.