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.