The Autonomous City
In this, the City of Borges, Stephen took a one-bedroom apartment in Palermo and arranged his things neatly in the half-empty drawers. “What do you think of Borges?” he asked everyone he met. He loved Borges, and had come down here to find him in the libraries and parks and coruscating trains that rolled out of Retiro into the Pampas, the perpetual steppe that catches fire every summer. “Well, I don’t think about him at all,” they’d say. They were too ashamed to tell him there hadn’t been trains like that for half a century. One woman said, “I prefer Cortázar,” and pointed out that Borges is buried in Geneva, not Buenos Aires, which Stephen already knew.
He spent the fall in cafés of damp and crumbling marble, reading Borges all over again, going blind from so much Borges, sometimes tapping with his middle finger passages he particularly liked, speaking very little, avoiding speaking Spanish, even though his Spanish was fine. He spoke Mexican Spanish, which is what most Americans who speak Spanish speak. But here they make a sound like sh for the letters ll and y, and use so much slang it has its own name, which is Lunfardo, which used to be lumbardo, from Lombardy, where many Argentines will tell you their families are from. Other Argentines, darker Argentines who wear dark clothing so their faces look lighter, will tell you their families are from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. They speak Lunfardo too.
The Lombards are from the North of Italy, and the Sicilians are from the South. Stephen couldn’t understand any of them, North or South, light or dark. He couldn’t understand why the waiters wore black bowties and pressed white shirts in these inhabited ruins. He could see trenches cut into the nacreous stone from people joining or quitting tables, dragging wrought-iron chairs behind them, café chairs imported from Paris, when everything was imported from Paris, even what people thought, and some of the people who made the trenches were still alive, tucked away in attics in Recoleta. They clawed at their windows when it rained, when the old smells of wine and leather leached out of the neighborhood and umbrellas popped open like mushrooms in the street below.
Besides, the waiters always acted like Stephen was keeping them from something better. Not grander, just more entertaining. Just standing by the espresso machine and talking about the patrons—most days Stephen was the only one—so, just talking about Stephen. During the dead time between four when the last Argentines finish lunch and eight when the first of them dine. During which time it is biologically verifiable that the hands of an Argentine waiter’s circadian clock slow to an almost imperceptible creep. Such that they can do little more than stare like salamanders in a tank, or perhaps smoke. For these reasons Stephen never corrected them when they got his order wrong, which was often. He just said perfecto, perfecto, and ate scores of empanadas and even a few steaks he never wanted. The empanadas looked like golden ingots and the steaks were fat with blood. Also he read Cortázar.
It started in early August, deep Argentine winter. A friend from his old firm was supposed to visit. No more than a friend, though Stephen had once or twice thought about her with his eyes closed, his lips parted, this particular sweater she wore. Don’t misunderstand. He didn’t expect or even hope something would happen. Indeed the thought that it might filled the back of his throat with a taste like a foaming battery. Imagine her expectations, in a season when people cling together, in a city that can look like Paris if you cross your eyes. No, he wanted someone to sit with him at the café and read, mostly in silence, someone the waiters might mistake for his lover.
He took a taxi to the airport, even made a sign with her name on it, but she never showed up. Many women streamed past him, Argentine women, with boots like secret police. No coltish red-haired American lawyer, auburn-haired or even brown-haired she could be, depending on the light, depending on whether she was wearing the green sweater, the only time you could know her secret, her swollen pornographic chest. Everything else she wore shapeless and dark. Medieval basically. Stephen thought the sweater unjust. It made him sore and tight like the memory or promise of an erection. It made him tell himself she would age poorly, that her breasts would turn pendulous, breasts are like glass, you think they’re solid but they’re actually liquid, a very slow-moving liquid, there was a word for that Stephen couldn’t remember. Once at their firm in Atlanta the sweater had made him seek relief in the always darkened bathroom on the 24th floor, a bathroom he’d never seen anyone else enter, it was important to remind himself in the crimson rush to the stall. Afterward repulsed, shaking his head in little avian motions.
There was no one to ask him. But if there had been, Stephen would have said he made the sign as a joke. He would have said that, as an American, he was incapable of making an emotional gesture that didn’t have a back door. He waited a few hours then hailed another taxi, gave his address on Calle Fitz Roy, Cashe Fitz Roy, such a strange name for a street in this, the City of Cortázar.
It started on the drive home, deep Argentine winter, rain on the nutritious grass by the side of the highway, concrete bunkers and the incongruous horses. Buildings off-kilter as if turning away from the bronchial trucks. The air so white. Something English, Stephen thought. About it all. Frosty playing fields in these weird mournful suburbs. So what is Buenos Aires. Not really English, not once you get into the city. Everyone says Paris but it’s more like Milan. But not quite Milan either. Then thinking is it truly like any other city or isn’t it just itself. And if it’s just itself then maybe it’s nothing at all, because things can mean things only in relation to other things. He’d learned that in college. So maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s disappeared into the white air, kind of smudged up into it, and when I cross General Paz into Mataderos there will be nothing but more fields and highways stretched out to the banks of the River Plate. And so forth. This is essentially what was going on in Stephen’s head when he saw the boy.
Other thoughts Stephen was having around this time, it’s not as if he was thinking them at this exact moment, they were more like the lattice on which all his other thoughts were coming to rest, were I don’t have a job anymore, I don’t have a wife anymore, but I still have children, two no it would be three now, one always has children once one has them now doesn’t one. These thoughts like branches, his thoughts about the city like russet leaves caught in the branches, decomposing there instead of on the ground.
The boy wasn’t doing anything extraordinary. He was playing rugby on one of the fields. He was kicking the ball across the field in long looping spirals. The field was hemmed in by curling fences, overgrown fences no one had bothered to prune. Seeing the boy broke something in Stephen. It wasn’t like the breaking of a dam. Being a literary sort of fellow Stephen would never use a cliché like that. It was more like a snapping he guessed. The snapping of a glow stick, so the seminal fluid in the tube suddenly goes neon.
Stephen’s brain lit up with memories when he saw the boy. Neon memories. Of playing rugby when he himself was a boy. On a field somewhere north of the city, in San Isidro or Tigre. His uniform was red, his dark hair long in the back. Only here’s the thing. Stephen grew up 30 minutes outside Tuscaloosa. He never played rugby. He played football, proud of the chips in the green paint on his helmet where the heads of other boys had clinked his like a toast. Proud of the stickers on his helmet that looked like tiny explosions. He got them for making good plays. They were supposed to look like sparks from a hammer hitting steel. There had been lots of steelworkers in his town a long time ago. Allegedly.
Stephen played football in the fall, under thick banks of nimbostratus. Sometimes after practice he’d pull his car over to the side of the road and watch the clouds turn to rain, kind of smudge down into the pine trees. He sulked a lot back then. Sulked about nothing, about being big and hairy, about how he didn’t actually know anyone. About how lonely Alabama looked from an airplane, all those lights, emanating concentric circles of light like someone threw a rock into a lake of light, but each light was just a house full of people who didn’t actually know anyone either.
So you can imagine his confusion, seeing the boy playing rugby, then seeing himself playing rugby in San Isidro or Tigre on a warm spring day, smelling the marshes like salt and death, looking over to the sideline at his raven-haired mother who was definitely not his mother, his mother being blonde, his mother having thick ankles, his mother never wearing boots like that, boots like secret police. There were other memories too. Hiding in a rubber tree, impossibly big. Dropping a piece of chocolate into hot milk to make hot chocolate. A long white house in the Pampas, where a gaucho with a knife nestled in the small of his back taught him how to dance.
It wasn’t so simple for Stephen to accept these memories. He couldn’t accept them as a fellow-feeling or a baseless nostalgia, and love Buenos Aires all the more for them, and save them for a time when the oblong lightbulbs in the foam ceiling were buzzing bright and fluorescent. Because he was an American, he had to explain them. There had to be an explanation for the memories, or several possible explanations, and because they existed, Stephen had to search them out. If he didn’t he’d always feel a dull unrelieved pressure like an ingrown hair.
He had his hypotheses, a scientific word for a practitioner of pseudoscience, and he shared the first with no one in particular while sitting in a bar off Thames near Plaza Serrano, that vortex of pigeons and pool tables, which decades before the government had renamed Plazoleta Cortázar. People kept calling it Plaza Serrano anyway, and pigeons kept shitting on it. In the bar there were metal masks coating the walls like cicadas that had alighted there in the 13th or 17th year since they last appeared. Cicadas sleep underground for such a long time so when they emerge they overwhelm any predator, there are too many cicadas for the predator to eat, and indeed Stephen’s eyes couldn’t take in all the masks, he was inundated, hundreds of masks, exoskeletons reflecting the lamplight back at each other and everything else in the bar, the quiet black bouncer sitting by the red phone booth who asked for the password.
That night the password was Schopenhauer. This aggravated Stephen, he knew nothing of Schopenhauer. He had to research the clue at the National Library, the stark complex rising out of Recoleta like a toothy robot, mocking the elegant volumes it had reluctantly swallowed. The statue of Borges out front arrogant and weary, the statue of Cortázar inaccurate, missing his wide-set amphibian eyes. There is a tendency, Stephen thought, to make dead writers more beautiful than they were. It is unnerving when beautiful things do not emanate from equally beautiful things.
Stephen’s first hypothesis about the memories was that maybe they meant he was an Argentine. Maybe they meant he’d been an Argentine all along, but he’d had some sort of episode and started believing he was an American. Like in a Cortázar story, you could imagine that happening. There’s the one about the man in the hospital who’s been in a motorcycle accident and keeps slipping in and out of a dream where he’s a Moteca running from the Aztecs during the War of the Blossom, but the hospital is the dream, not the war, and he’s stretched out on a slab at the top of a ziggurat and cannot escape the stone knife of the blood-soaked executioner-priest. He cannot escape back to the hospital dream, the world of motorcycles and red and green stoplights. What Stephen wanted to know was, which was the dream, being a South American or being a Southern American. Of his several hypotheses, this was the least serious, and he said it out loud to the reflection of himself in the mirror behind the bar.
Regarding the street called Thames, the street the bar was off, when Stephen was here it was a dirty formal street lined with boutiques and cafés that had thick ashtrays holding down the insubstantial tables. There were trees on both sides of the street, languorous trees shading languorous people smoking French cigarettes and drinking fernet con coca. Dog shit was ubiquitous. Here they say Thames like Thomas or Tom Ace, Stephen couldn’t get it quite right, but the greater mystery was why a street in Buenos Aires was called Thames at all.
“Because, of course, we’re in Europe!” Stephen said to no one in particular, there was no one within earshot, the bar was mostly empty and the bartender was at the other end bringing champagne to the sweating Russian and his Uruguayan women. The bottle was sweating too, the champagne was in a cold homicidal sweat at the prospect of being drunk, it had come so far and waited so long in the queer darkness only to be swilled. The Russian looked like a quarter horse after five furlongs. Lather was building in the creases of his neck and he wiped it away from time to time with his necktie. He tugged at his collar with mottled fingers. He meant to release heat, he was serious about it, but he turned the motion into pantomime when he saw his reflection in the mirror, saw Stephen watching his reflection from across the bar.
The joke about Thames was an inside joke. Stephen’s landlord had once remarked that Buenos Aires is among the most affordable cities in Europe. Can you imagine? They don’t even call Spanish Español here, they call it castellano, casteshano, Castilian, because if you don’t believe they’re from Italy maybe they can convince you they’re from Spain. Stephen would like to get them on the couch, the Argentines, and start with their mother.
When Stephen had been in Buenos Aires long enough to forget his barber’s name a man came to see him. The man came from London, where he lived, but he wasn’t from London. Not originally. He was from Ayer, Massachusetts. In Spanish ayer means yesterday and it was unsettling to Stephen that a man from literally yesterday was visiting him in his new life. Stephen suspected a cliché, just as he suspected that coming here in the first place had been one. You are caught after months of worrying about being caught, months of sour armpits and a locked office door, it is too late to give the money back, it has already been spent, and when the knock finally comes you flee to South America like a Nazi. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Jesus. Like you’ve read so many books and seen so many movies where that happens you had to do it too.
When the man from yesterday landed at Ezeiza (Stephen didn’t even think about making a sign with his name on it), the first thing he said was he hugged Stephen, an overcompensating bear hug. The second thing he said was he wished airline pilots would shut up and do their jobs, no one cares about cruising altitude. The third thing he said was he wanted to sleep with as many Argentine women as possible. It wasn’t on account of their boots like secret police, or their black-headed arrogance that could make Buenos Aires feel like Rabat before the French left. He didn’t know about these things and would never learn them.
That the women were Argentine was irrelevant to the man, whose name was Campbell. Stephen had been with him in other countries where it was the same. Often lust is likened to thirst or hunger but for Campbell it wasn’t that way. He could be tactical. He could delay gratification, which is how Stephen’s mother (the blonde one) had defined maturity for him when she took away his Jeep in high school. In those other countries Stephen had watched as traps Campbell had laid days or even years before snapped shut. He was ambitious for women, is how Stephen would put it.
It was often assumed when Campbell entered a room that he was famous, although he didn’t resemble any specific famous person. His arms were too long for his body and his hands were enormous, which lent him a simian air. He had eyes like Medjool dates, and it was necessary for him to shave only once a week.
On Campbell’s first night they went to a bar underneath a flower shop in Recoleta. The bar was long and narrow and covered in mirrors and the people inside were rich. There were ceibo flowers in vases on the tables but it was so dim you couldn’t tell they were red, they could have been any color like in a black-and-white photograph. They could have been the color of water in a gutter. The manufactured lips of the women who clustered along the reflective walls smoking cigarettes appeared to Stephen like slugs from the bottom of the ocean and their mouths were hydrothermal vents. Sometimes the vents blew out steam in neat plumes.
Each cocktail on the menu was inspired by one of the groups that had immigrated to Buenos Aires and made it the great city it is today. There was a drink for the Italians, which had fernet in it, and a drink for the Spanish, a wine cooler. There was no drink for the Indians because they were all of them murdered by the Spanish. There was a drink for the French, this surprised Stephen, he was unaware they’d ever come in great numbers to Argentina. They hadn’t, not compared to the Italians and Spanish. But you don’t have to colonize a place with soldiers in brightly colored tunics or squalorous families spilling out of boats. You can colonize it with culture, and the French had succeeded in ways the Italians and Spanish never had. Even the dog shit was an imitation. But the French wouldn’t like it here. It is too unlike France, and not enough unlike it to be like the lost deserts and jungles they pretend not to miss.
Campbell had experience with Dutch girls and had met three of them coming out of the bathroom while Stephen was ordering drinks. He remembered how to say are you Dutch in Dutch, you cannot imagine how simple the world really is. Two of them had thick blonde hair and the third had brown hair that was even thicker. When one of them nodded, they all nodded. They had to look down at Campbell and Stephen. There wasn’t a cocktail inspired by the Dutch on the menu, but there was a German cocktail with schnapps and Campbell bought them a round. The Dutch are after all a Germanic people, Campbell noted, and the girls bobbed their manes in agreement.
They liked Buenos Aires. It was as different from Amsterdam as you could get without risking viral hemorrhagic fever. They were embarrassed they came from a country of orderly canals that reflected parabolic bridges back at the people hanging over them. They were embarrassed by all the potatoes and barley and cows growing outside their cities—far more than they needed for themselves. They were embarrassed that the museums here covet paintings by the Dutch masters, but mostly can’t afford them, and they were embarrassed to be so tall, because their tallness meant there’d been more than enough potatoes and barley and cows for generations. When they were at university, which wasn’t so long ago, they were embarrassed by the Dutch East Indies and their jealous monopoly of the spice trade. By now they’d forgotten about the spice trade, but still felt a peculiar pang when they reached for the nutmeg at the grocery store. They found Americans obscene, but only in groups of three or more.
They were volunteering at a free clinic in Barracas. Their way of apologizing to the world was to grant it concessions, of time and logic. You could keep them waiting at a restaurant and they wouldn’t complain. They’d never point out the flaw in your argument. They came to their senses in middle age, married Dutch men, walked again beneath the high lissome buildings, proportioned so like themselves, trailing fair children, their bicycles weighed down with cheese and sausage.
Campbell wasn’t old enough to be their father, but he was old enough to be an obscure older half-brother, perhaps from their father’s first marriage. Stephen listened to one of them talk about Islamophobia until Campbell left with another, and when Stephen got home the door to his bedroom was closed. He drank a fernet with ice and slept on the floor in the living room. Before he’d left the bar his Dutch girl had put her hand on his knee, but it was an unenthusiastic gesture. The script had called for it was all. Stephen looked at the hand and it could have belonged to anyone. It could have been his own hand.
When he awoke the next morning the girl was gone and he and Campbell smelled like the herbs and spices from the liquor, saffron and myrrh. They had a couple of fernets and took a taxi to see the Pumas play the All Blacks at the Estadio José Amalfitani. Ringing the field were chain-link fences with barbed wire on top. There was no risk the fans would riot—in Argentina as in most other countries rugby is an aristocratic sport—but the stadium was also home to a football team. It was the fortín, the fortress, of Vélez Sarsfield. Campbell didn’t speak any Spanish so Stephen translated the national anthem for him as best he could. Let us live crowned with glory, or swear to die gloriously. Or swear to die gloriously. Or swear to die gloriously.
A few rows behind them were some Argentines wearing All Blacks jerseys. They were also wearing blackface. “Holy shit,” Campbell said, and rolled a cigarette back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. He kept looking back, pretending to stretch. There was a girl among them and she tugged on her father’s arm and pointed at Campbell.
The Pumas lost. Everyone had known they would. They hadn’t come to see the Pumas win, they’d come to hear meat smacking meat. Near the end of the first half a knee collided with a face and sprayed blood. The droplets were backlit by the field and suspended in midair they looked as big as grapes. The violence of the game shocked Campbell. He said it was downright barbaric. Oftentimes when Americans watch rugby they start talking like they’re English. In American football the injuries are actually worse, Stephen explained, you just can’t see them as well. The players are encased in their equipment like corn in a husk. When they’re hurt it’s like snapping the corn before you’ve taken the husk off. Unless you can feel the reverberations from the snapping it isn’t so bad. And you can never see their eyes. Some of them wear visors for that purpose. It’s more for your protection than theirs.
After the game they couldn’t get a taxi so they walked from Liniers through Flores and Caballito, not certain of their route, using the North Star to navigate northeast toward the pewter river. They walked for hours. There was hardly anyone out, it was an evening ruled by dogs and cats. After a while they lapsed into silence and a harmonious stride. They stopped to buy some Quilmes from a window in a brick wall. You couldn’t see the man’s face through the window, only his chapped hands. The money they gave him felt like the cloth Stephen used to clean his glasses, and he thought about all the people who’d touched it, and what they’d bought with it, and where those things were now. They drank the beer as they walked, and from the apartment buildings they passed came the smell of crackling onions and marijuana.
Stephen’s second hypothesis about the memories, his Argentine memories, was more complicated than the first and much more serious. He had to be careful about whom he told. There was great potential for embarrassment, to be written off as melodramatic, to be thought of as someone who crafted untenable theories in bad faith, not because they explained the world but because they were useful at parties. So he didn’t say it out loud. He said it through telepathy to the dogs and cats of the night. He told them he thought there might be something to the idea that Argentina and Alabama are both the South, that the South isn’t a place but a feeling, was the best word Stephen could summon, though it wasn’t the right word.
He imagined himself standing in front of a blackboard in a classroom, a classroom from his youth, which youth he wasn’t sure, and it was full of dogs and cats. On the board he drew for his attentive audience the obvious connections. In both places there are great white houses in the country, houses that are now abandoned, surviving at the edges of a dream, or converted into sites of historical interest with informative placards that people from the North visit. There’s always a room in these houses with rows of small musty books arranged behind the glass bookcase, and the chair pulled back from the desk as if its occupant had been there a moment ago, and the people from the North marvel at how that man could have been so literary, could have read all those Enlightenment books, and still looked out the window at the people moving rhythmically up and down in the fields, picking and hoeing and occasionally stopping to wipe their brows and gaze at the dark river beyond.
Both places are flat fecund places interrupted by hills and mountains. They are georgic and riparian. They are the sites of equestrian wars. Or they are the sites of terrible chopping wars, where men were slashed and run through and left to walk endlessly in long matted columns when the cavalry fell back, in this sense it could be said they were walking wars, but now they’re remembered as equestrian wars in books and museums. Statues of men on horseback are prevalent. Here in the town square is José de San Martín or Nathan Bedford Forrest; there on the promenade is Manuel Belgrano or J.E.B. Stuart. Both places give the impression there was nothing before the ships came, that’s because there’s nothing left of what was there before, and because it is convenient to believe. Elsewhere people say they sprang from the earth, or were created from each other, but there’s a saying among the Argentines that they’re descended from ships. There would probably be a saying like that among the Alabamans too, but they’ve grown self-conscious of their sayings, and do not think in such terms. They feel in them however.
Then of course in both places there is race. Sometimes there is nothing but race. It is a humidity that will not lift. How do you explain race to dogs and cats? Stephen saw himself in front of the class, shrugging, his palms turned upward, asking the question. The dogs and cats got it. How indeed. They all had a good laugh about that. A Jack Russell terrier in the front row laughed so hard he had an accident, and Stephen was forced to hit him with a rolled-up newspaper.
Stephen mentioned, toward the end of his lecture, that Borges had been a great admirer of Faulkner. That he, or maybe his mother, had translated Faulkner into Spanish while writing for the magazine Sur, which means South. That Borges believed Faulkner was writing about what he himself was writing about—the white houses, the Stygian rivers, the equestrian wars—and that all of it was Southern. Stephen used the word postcolonial, but wrinkled up his nose at it, to show he found it unbearably academic.
The next day Stephen took Campbell to do the things you’re supposed to do in Buenos Aires. It’s hardly worth describing. They ate lomito sandwiches and drank beer at La Rambla. They saw the giant ficus elastica, older than the country itself. They spent several hours in Recoleta cemetery, which reminded Campbell of New Orleans. They visited Evita’s grave so Campbell wouldn’t have to explain to people in London why he hadn’t. They had coffee and medialunas at La Biela, Stephen pointed out the ancient scratches in the floor and the eerie statues of Borges and Bioy Casares seated at one of the tables. It was Bioy Casares who set in motion the events of Stephen’s favorite Borges story, by recalling that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men.
At the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes they spent the most time in front of a painting called First Confession. That poor boy in the white suit, his shirt and tie also white, his oversized collar a gorget against temptation or a bib for the Eucharist wine. They skipped MALBA because the rotating exhibit was by Yoko Ono, Stephen had seen it, it was mostly video clips of bare asses and broken pottery you were supposed to tape back together laid out on a table. You could never find all the pieces so the table was full of these partially reconstructed Frankenstein tea services. There was probably some timeless message to extract from the table about fragility and how something broken can never really be fixed, but that obviously wasn’t Yoko’s intention, and Stephen couldn’t stand that she may have stumbled into some truth, you deserve the truth only if you’re looking for it.
By this point Stephen and Campbell were in quiet crisis. Like many people who visit strange places, they discovered when they got there and the context undergirding their relationship was removed that in fact they had no relationship at all. You can discuss people you both know and your immediate surroundings for only so long before the conversation becomes little more than free association. And you start wondering who is this stranger, and why are we following each other. Why not follow someone else, at random. They’d walk past an advertisement for Fernet Branca, Stephen would translate it, it said shockingly unique, Campbell would ask whether they’d meant to write shockingly, unique, like it was shocking that it was unique, instead of so unique it was shocking. Stephen would say hm and nod and they’d walk on silently until the next advertisement or anti-capitalist mural or whatever. At meals they said mm, this is good, isn’t this good, in between long stretches of nothing. Stephen looked at Campbell and it was like he was seeing him for the first time. He could really see his nose. Before he’d known Campbell had a nose, but now he could see it. They stayed always slightly drunk.
“What do you say we fly over to Mendoza and drink all their Malbec?” Campbell asked. They were eating wild boar risotto at Las Pizarras, where the menu is written on the wall. “The airstip is out,” Stephen said. “And the bus takes a whole day.” Someone had finally told him about the trains. “But we could fly to Salta, in the northwest, near Bolivia, where they make Torrontés.” So they did. It was like trying to save a marriage by getting pregnant.
In Salta, no one really knows why it’s called that, most likely it’s a mispronunciation of the word sagta, which means beautiful in Aymaran, which has meant beautiful since before the Incan Empire, they saw a few churches that looked like Fabergé eggs and ate a dozen miniature empanadas at a restaurant named after a conquistador. They had no intention of spending the night there. Salta is nothing like Buenos Aires, but one city had failed them already, and they reckoned any city would. They rented a car and started climbing toward Cafayate, 5,000 feet above sea level, past titanic striated pillars and evaporated lakes. Campbell said it looked like a Pendleton blanket, the purples and oranges and reds almost sequential. They could have been on Mars or in New Mexico.
The road followed a rusty river. In the straight places the water rushed over smooth rocks and logs and in the bends it panted and gathered strength. There was an army of cactus on the other side, millions of people with their arms up saying halt. If you tried to count them your eyes would fall out of your head. Weird birds sat on the cactuses and watched their little silver car hum up into the mountains, insects wrecked themselves in creamy blots on the windshield.
When they rolled down into the valley the town was laid out before them. Politely. After all the burnt stone they could barely process so much green. The town itself was desiccated, but radiating outward in every direction was the most important thing people have ever planted. Stephen knew there were spaces between the grape vines, between each row, the plants in each row, the branches on each plant, etcetera. He knew there were colors other than green, the Malbec grapes the color of broken blood vessels, the Torrontés the color of light creeping down a sundial or hungover piss. But that’s not how it looked from the turnout where they parked and unstuck their shirts from their backs. It looked unremittingly incessantly green. Like how Stephen knew that even though he appeared solid, there were immeasurable distances between his atoms, if he could arrange them precisely he could fall through the earth and come out the antipodes.
They stopped at a gas station to ask for directions. Two men were standing by the pump smoking. It was out of order. Stephen asked if they knew where this one street was, this calle, he said calle like cashe, like the Lombards and Sicilians. The men didn’t look like Italians, they looked like Bolivians, Stephen supposed, though he didn’t know any personally. Cashe, one of them repeated, but to his friend, and elbowed him in the ribs, and they chuckled and stamped out their cigarettes and turned their backs on Stephen. They thought he was from Buenos Aires.
The street they were looking for was barely more than an alley, so narrow the waxy leaves of the lemon trees in front of the houses on one side touched the white brick buildings on the other. At the end of the street they found the tasting room. Campbell had bought a book about the region, it said you had to visit this place, if you didn’t you might as well not go to Cafayate. It was the off-season, and a stout woman who looked like the men at the gas station was getting ready to lock the tall wooden doors. “Excuse me,” Campbell said, and gave her some pesos, and pointed inside and pretended to drink wine. She didn’t even look at the pesos before putting them in the front of her apron. She’d been planning to go home and make dinner for her daughter, no matter, her daughter only got hungry when she started cooking. Aren’t children and really all people funny like that.
She led them into a large room empty except for a few barrels of wine that looked like giant avocado pits and a bar in the corner. She went behind the bar and Campbell rapped his knuckles on the counter. His book had a whole page about the Malbec there, a high-altitude acidic Malbec it was hard to find where they were from. Not that they were from the same place. Campbell was a Northerner if Stephen had ever seen one and he figured the woman must have noticed. He tried to share with her a conspiratorial wink, a wink between Southerners, but out of courtesy she decided he must have had something in his eye or an unfortunate twitch.
“No wine,” the woman said. “First you smell. Okay?” She brought up from underneath the bar a colorless briefcase and opened it in their direction. It contained several dozen vials of clear liquid. Taped to each was a scrap of paper on which a number had been written in faltering cursive. “I know all the smells,” she said. “I know all the numbers.” She unscrewed one of the vials and handed it to Campbell.
He gave her a skeptical look and sniffed. “Lime,” he said. The woman nodded. “Muy bien.” He got the next one too. It was mint. And the one after that, which was tobacco. He turned to Stephen and put his hands up as if to surrender and grinned, it was the grin of people who are good at meaningless things and think they owe the world at least an insincere apology for their brilliance.
It was Stephen’s turn. The woman handed him a new vial from the briefcase. He brought it to his nose and recalled the dumpster behind his apartment building in Atlanta and the marshes where he’d played rugby. “That’s an orchid,” he said. “That’s one of those orchids that smell like rotting meat. My mom used to grow them in our greenhouse.”
“Orchid?” the woman asked. “What is this? Orchid.” Campbell drew a picture for her on the back of his business card. Stephen explained about the rotting meat in Spanish and she put her hand to her mouth, whether she was embarrassed or something else he couldn’t tell. “No, no,” she said. “Strawberry.” Campbell sniffed and agreed. Later Campbell would claim the woman had crossed herself when Stephen said orchid but Stephen certainly didn’t see her do it.
After the tasting they checked in at an estancia that a certain Don Pichot had built before independence. The sheep grazing in the paddock had their backs to the severe geometry of the mountains. Inside it smelled like wax and rosemary. They couldn’t have been the only guests, all those other rooms down the silent hallway with the candles in the corroded fixtures couldn’t have been empty, but it felt that way. Campbell spent the night with the middle-aged masseuse, they’d met in her professional capacity before dinner, and Stephen was left to drink a bottle of dessert wine alone in the dim lounge where the chess pieces on the board near the gramophone seemed to flicker between the black and white squares.
By the end of the week they’d visited most of the vineyards in the Calchaquí Valley. They found Bodega Colome at 7000 feet, rumbling up Ruta 40, hovels of corrugated tin flanking the road. In three hours zero other cars. At the winery, almost deserted, they were given a flight of Malbec at a table with white linen and spotless glassware and shown a museum set apart from the main building. It was the work of someone called James Turrell. According to Campbell’s book he’d mastered the ganzfeld effect, the book seemed unsure exactly what that was, something about missing visual signals and the amplification of neural noise. It caused essentially hallucinations. On their tour were two French girls they’d seen at the restaurant in Salta and again when they were renting their car. All four of them felt obligated to put on wry smiles at the end like how crazy is this, or how predictable. Campbell avoided eye contact with the girls and said to Stephen under his breath not attractive.
They left Cafayate one morning before the sun had burned the dew off the vines. On the drive back Campbell curled up against the passenger door and fell asleep. Stephen drove stick poorly, the car made a sound when he shifted gears like bones grinding together with no cartilage in between. On a hill outside town they passed a religious procession, scores of people in single file pushing carts and holding aloft crosses and cardboard images of a saint. It was the Virgin of Rosario and unlike any of the pilgrims she had blue eyes. There was sweat pouring down the face of the man in front, he was wearing a shirt that said Atlanta Falcons World Champions Super Bowl XXXIII. The Falcons lost that Super Bowl to the Denver Broncos, but they’d printed thousands of shirts beforehand proclaiming their victory, and somehow one of them had wended its way to Salta Province, in the foothills of the Andes, the empurpled high desert.
The falcon on the man’s shirt was better suited to an imperial banner than a football logo. For Stephen it meant memories of his father drinking beer out of his faded plastic Falcons cup, never too much. At the stadium the tribal chanting, the black multitude, we are dressed in black because we are not them, they who dress in gold or blue. Watching on television at home but still dressed in black. A player was rolling from side to side in agony on the artificial grass, the angle of his leg impossible, every light trained on him like he was performing a one-man show or escaping from prison. There was a commercial break but before Stephen and his father were encouraged to buy heart medication and detergent the camera zoomed out, retreated into the glutinous air above Georgia where there were no real falcons, only low-caste common birds, sparrows and blackbirds and the plodding blimp from which the camera hung.
It is unnecessary to explore the final hypothesis Stephen developed before he left Argentina, which he did soon after he and Campbell flew back to the Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires and found it hadn’t changed in their absence. It was autonomous like independent from the provinces but also like it didn’t need Stephen or Campbell or anyone else to exist. If they never saw it again, if no one else did either, it would go on being. The marshes would take it back, vines would tear apart the cemeteries in slow motion and choke out the supercilious columns of the law school at UBA. Jaguars and not students would sun themselves on its steps. You could imagine Borges or Cortázar writing a story like that.
If you want to know what it might look like, take a walk through the ecological park jutting out from Puerto Madero into the Río de la Plata. Go early, before the sun has fully broken over the horizon, when the dark water is an upside-down lampshade blocking out most of its light. Put the sun to your back, even if it has an imperious human face like it does on the flag of the Argentine Republic. View the city from across the two lagoons, one is named for the ducks and the other for the seagulls. They disavow this segregation and mix freely.
Facing west you won’t see anyone. You wouldn’t see anyone even if you could see through walls. No joggers gliding down the Avenida de los Italianos or grifters in the Parque Cristóbal Colón, waiting for the tourists to press up against the gate outside the Casa Rosada. No students hurrying to class at the pontifical Catholic university or squat men selling choripán along the alameda. Only the skyscrapers gleaming like a fleet of forsaken spaceships. And the river rushing past you, like the country has been stabbed and is bleeding out, draining into the Atlantic, mixing there with other rivers, the Alabama and the Mississippi.
