Storefront Display, Constitucion

Buenos Aires, Argentina 12.30.04

10:00pm. It could be 4:30am. Heat is heat. But if you can say summer is hot then a toucan is a bird. New York is frugal with its seasonal changes. They occur in blurted-out phrases and just as easily renounce their position. If spring becomes summer on 18 May, then by 24 May it has taken back some early morning hours. Mid-afternoon rolls around and summer is back to being an expectation, not the conspirator you want it to be.

Off the plane for 12 hours, it has yet to conspire with you. Only a man who comes from winter can see these cheap splaths of orchard fruits as an “offering.” Stare at them all you want; when winter returns you’ll tell yourself, “A man cannot stack plums in pyramids and coliseums. There just aren’t enough fucking plums.” The rationale of an imagination where summer has not seeped quietly through the soil like a seedling. When summer happens in a single day, from winter, all the world’s fruit is pornography. Ripened curves are everywhere, and everywhere their scent is spilling into the street, stretched out crepe-thin by passing cabs. Just as sex abandons you in lust and haunts you in solitude, these oranges and peaches are not of a fickle season but a season cock-sure and driven. Like the only winters you’ve ever known. No matter how many excuses past summers have made for winter, Buenos Aires offers no sympathy. You have only the sweat that clings to you.

Avenida Santa Fe

Buenos Aires, Argentina 12.30.04

Pedestrians and traffic lust after each other in the late afternoon, but this is the last time you will see anyone on the streets for four days. Tragedy looms like a crane atop an unfinished highrise, eclipsing the skyline around it. The stores are filled with shoppers who are comfortable acquaintances as much as customers, the congenial elbows on the bar atmosphere in a shoe store. They don't have your size, but you sit there anyway. With its endless procession of shops, with beautiful residential streets too close to pull foot traffic away from it, Santa Fe nods to every major shopping street of any major city. It has its odd billboards to no one, its music spilling out, its air-conditioned fineries. Back on the avenue, the crowds are like your feet: swollen in a sneaker with a roof of laces, holding the humidity hostage between your toes. Tomorrow the streets will be deserted. And everyone will no why. Except you.

Corner of Paraguay and Ayacucho

Buenos Aires, Argentina 12.30.04

Back at the hotel. Where everything is as unfamiliar inside as the city outside. The first thing you warm to in a foreign city is the cross streets near your hotel. When you amble in from side streets the city gathers itself around this focal point. And the landmarks that signal your arrival, back to a vague home, are beyond their intended purposes. All good hotels should find themselves near a strange monument, an old church, a decadent building. You leave sweat-clung through a dead heaving sigh of hotel air to the street, and there it is. A baroque palace to nothing. Don't learn what it is for the duration of your stay. It's like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam except you didn't go in and see Rembrants. You saw it surrounding the palm trees lining Avenida Paraguay and you let out a sigh of relief: "The middle of everything, where evenings and mornings and the in-betweens begin." If the surrounding architecture has no purpose you can discern, then you don't need one either.

Recoleta Cemetery

Buenos Aires, Argentina 30 Dec 04.

It’s 11:15am. You’ve logged two hours of your life south of the Equator. Drop your bag at the hotel (twenty-five pounds of compressed heat on your back) and stanch the cruel faucet dripping sweat down the crack of your ass. Pick streets to “wander.” Tourist. You like movies. The first alleys are lined with apartment buildings slung gracelessly as a skyline. The architects and the government contractors dream the same stale dreams in Montreals and Munichs and Madrids. Turn a corner and the alleys tighten, an austere gate, some digital cameras, fanny-packs. Mortality has much in common with you; it too is never persuasive in the presence of so much blue sky. Acclimate. Inhale and say “graveyard.” Smells don’t take to your winter nostrils; humidity has a texture but not a scent. Your shadow is small, like a tension between jealous lovers. All the articles in The Economist about a currency devalued, defaulted loans, troubles with the IMF, an economic crisis. A political crisis. What does a crisis sound like to you? These tombs are the tambourines of the orchestra. Archways. Domes. Embroideries. Praise death? No one you’ve ever known will be celebrated in death as we the living celebrate our only possession. Collect dumb stones and stack them in the sun. All you need is a bland name to carve into them.

This is your first neighborhood in Buenos Aires. You’ve begun at the end, the last page. Here is what man can do, even with the inevitable, to leave no aspect of a city sequestered. Those of us who listen for the past become a part of it. Those who claim to know its every note already have.