The Chaos of Memories
by Joshua Ellison · 02/05/08
It’s winter in Buenos Aires, one of the coldest ever. This is a port city in the southern hemisphere—low and humid—and the winds here have a raw, sudden sting. People look restless. If they are outdoors, their heads are down. Most activity has been driven inside. All the life that usually takes place on the street has been corralled into narrow spaces. Noise floods out through the openings in every border or barrier.
The city is always moving, almost compulsively, but it’s also breathlessly studying its own reflection, taking its own pulse. The very existence of the city seems to depend on the psychic exertion—urgent, anxious, and loving—of the people who live here. As if the whole metropolis might vanish if their attention flagged, even briefly. The city has to be conjured anew every day through sheer resolve.
Trying to understand Buenos Aires feels like trying to master the human heart. This is not a place that can be learned in the usual ways: it’s too fragile, too volatile, cobbled together from too many unlike parts. The journalist Jacobo Timerman writes, “Argentina…does not yet exist. It must be created.” Over the generations, Argentines have shaped the city out of desire and discomfort, and these heavy emotions seem as real as all the towers and avenues and parks.
In Palermo, the neighborhood of the writer Jorge Luis Borges, what was once a seedy immigrant district is now one of the most fashionable. A section has been renamed Palermo Hollywood, another SoHo. The area is awash in foreign money and luxury goods.
Some of the old buildings have been rehabilitated; others were torn down and replaced by glass and steel high-rises. But walking down the street that’s been renamed for the author, you can still see some of the old worldliness. When Borges imagined, in his famous story “The Aleph,” a mystical point in space that contains all other points, it’s not hard to picture him wandering the alleys of Palermo. In Borges’s youth, this was a place where foreigners and outsiders from all over the world had gathered. It’s still tinged with that fantastical image of the Aleph: “The only place on earth where all places are.”
Buenos Aires gives you just that feeling of being both everywhere and nowhere: on a lonely island and, at the same time, at the crossroads of the universe. Its scale is enormous. Its edges are vague. The avenues are wide and chaotic. Alberto Manguel writes that this is “a city that foreshadows all others.” Every block seems to recall another part of the world, though it seems less planned than deeply willed. Here Paris or London, there Rome. The city describes itself in foreign forms: always elsewhere, never at home.
Not quite European, and not fully of the New World, either. “Our patrimony is the universe,” Borges insists. Like Jews in Europe, or the Irish in England, Borges believed, his national experience gave him the outsider’s special ability to approach Western tradition without sentiment or inhibition. Still, this society struggles to define a relationship to the world and, therefore, to describe exactly what it means to be Argentine. Rodrigo Fresan, a contributor to this issue, once said that, for other Latin Americans, “their roots are in the ground. Our roots are on the walls…of our libraries.”
On the Avenida Santa Fe, as the once-elegant avenue winds through the Barrio Norte, you can tell that the written word enjoys a kind of exalted status here. The street is lined with bookstores. El Ateneo, in a converted theater, feels more like a cathedral. Even in the subway station, you can buy a Spanish translation of Nietzsche at the newsstand.
Books here seem less read than consumed, hoarded, clung to. They offer admission to unreachable worlds that, nevertheless, still resonate deeply within the souls of many Argentines. Like the buildings and public squares that evoke old Europe and beyond, books help narrow the distance between margin and center. The uncertainties of the past—which are also the enigmas of the self—are stirred with language and imagination. It brings to mind something Walter Benjamin wrote about his own library: “The collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”
