Travel
The barrios and museums of Buenos Aires bear traces of Jorge Luis Borges’ history, but for a new generation of Argentine authors, his rebellious spirit is very much alive. By Konrad Muller.
Buenos Aires with Jorge Luis Borges
In Buenos Aires, it sometimes seems Jorge Luis Borges left a plaque wherever he rested his head. Across the barrios of Palermo, Recoleta, Retiro and San Telmo are scattered the many addresses that the Argentine master and renovator of fiction – with his fantastic tales, his hybrid texts and literary hoaxes – once called home. Most display a plaque in his honour. Together with a museum, a couple of libraries, several bookshops and vanished confiterias, these form a Borges walking trail through the fine bones of this great city now struggling. It is appropriate to follow Borges through the streets he traversed, because he was always an avid walker, often at night by himself as a troubled young man or, later, a metaphysician on foot, out bitching and discoursing with friends.
I begin in Palermo, a fashionable district that is an ensemble of Belle Époque France, shabby art deco terraces touched with graffiti, and apartment towers from the 1960s and ’70s. Borges lived here as a boy, when Palermo was on the fringes of the city, peopled by Italian migrants and knife-wielding delinquents he would immortalise in such classic tales as “Streetcorner Man” and, later, “Juan Muraña”. At Calle Serrano 2135, I discover the plaque to his memory has itself gone wandering, and the family villa that once was here has been replaced by a glassy structure housing a tennis-gear shop. This is one of history’s jokes, as the young Borges was bookish, short-sighted, clumsy – he kept falling off horses when visiting wealthy relatives in Uruguay – and he hated spectator sports as largely the preserve of idiots.
I weave my way through swankier Recoleta. On the cobbled backstreets, the din of traffic, the dangerous screech of the metrobuses, recedes. Now it is stone walls, wrought iron balconies and dark rosewood trees, their sinuous trunks forming structures overhead like the naves of green cathedrals. At Avenida Quintana 222, where Borges lived with his fiercely devoted mother and his blind father from 1924 to 1929, I locate a plaque with lines from an early poem:
Así voy devolviendole a Dios unos centavos
Del caudal infinito que me pone en las manos.
(Thus I give back to God a few cents
Of the infinite wealth put in my hands.)
Across the road at Quintana 263, where Borges dwelt from 1942 to 1944, another plaque records that here, the splendid nom de plume H. Bustos Domecq was conceived for the detective spoofs he co-wrote with his friend and disciple Adolfo Bioy Casares, the author of The Invention of Morel. (The two also inaugurated an annual award for “The Stupidest Writer in Argentina”.)
Yet, stepping between these and other sites, it’s plain that much of Borges’ Buenos Aires has disappeared, swallowed into the ever-changing city. Inside Galeria del Este, an art deco arcade in Microcentro that has fallen on hard times with many empty shopfronts, is the Librería La Ciudad. The famous bookshop that once published several of Borges’ volumes now sells not books but vinyl. People sleep rough by day in the metro and on pavements out of the rain. Others comb the municipal garbage bins or wheel in trolleys the cardboard they have collected. The faces on the streets look not just tired and strained but often hungry.
In moneyed Recoleta, however, I enter the Museo Borges, founded by his much-younger widow, María Kodama, the personal assistant Borges married in his final days, when he’d become the self-confessed conservative and feted blind sage lapping up global accolades. Kodama died in 2023, and I am led – half-rushed, really – through this small shrine by her niece. There is something mummified about the place – all these old photos and special editions in glass-doored cabinets, Borges’ walking sticks, a knife and the endless orders of merit he collected late in life, from Portugal, Peru, Spain and Pinochet’s Chile. I am happy to leave. Back on the street, I find myself asking: “Where are you, Jorge Luis Borges? Are you now just a museum piece, too?”
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara is a key figure in what’s known as the “New Argentine Narrative” – often women with works exploring the dystopian or fantastical, published to considerable acclaim. Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron – which inverts the national gaucho myth of Martin Fierro, recasting it as a feminist road journey – was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. I meet her for lunch at the Bar Britanico in San Telmo. We eat steak and discuss the end of the world. The day before, about 450,000 people had gathered in Buenos Aires’ fulcrum of the people, Plaza de Mayo, to march against savage cuts to public education, effected by right-wing libertarian president Javier Milei. After taking office last December, Milei compounded runaway inflation by devaluing the peso and removing price controls – it jumped to 289 per cent for the year through April.
“This is love,” Cabezón Cámara says of the protesters. And then of Milei, “These far-right guys are full of naked cruelty – of pornographic cruelty.”
We move on to Borges. I ask if he is now a museum piece? Over her coffee, Cabezón Cámara looks at me. “No, Borges still casts a kind of aura, he is very important. He is still alive for writers of my generation.
“Borges taught us writers from the periphery that we can write about anything – with freedom, with incorrectness – as we don’t have important intellectual traditions to respect,” she says. “Our tradition is the world. That is his great contribution.
“And unlike the US or Europe,” she notes, “we writers in Argentina also have no money, and so we are freer still.”
Another writer later expresses the same sentiment to me: “Borges opened the door to the playground,” says Maria Gainza, author of the powerful, critically acclaimed novel Optic Nerve.
There is one more place I must go – the public library where Borges once worked. In fact, there are two: the grand old Biblioteca Nacional in San Telmo, where Borges was appointed director in 1955 after the fall of the demagogic politician he bravely opposed, Juan Perón; and a second, far smaller, library called the Biblioteca Miguel Cané. It is to this second building I walk, headed west from Microcentro, several kilometres down backstreets that suddenly feel sketchier – broken façades, pavements rutted, pools of water everywhere, mosquitoes and dengue in the air. Borges, down on his literary luck, worked here for nine years from 1937 as an assistant librarian on a measly 210 pesos a week. He was surrounded by colleagues he considered lazy, smutty, football-obsessed and generally philistine. On his second day, Borges was taken aside and told not to work so hard or they’d all be out of a job. Thereafter, according to legend, he did his cataloguing in an hour and retreated to the rooftop or the basement to write. The result was his Ficciones, a revolutionary text in literary history. Such compositions as “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote”, in which Borges dissolves the very idea of authorship, or “The Aleph”, his absurd exploration of bereavement and infinity, were envisioned within these walls.
The suburban library seems strangely immune to the passage of time. Inviting from the street, it is a beautiful art deco building lovingly maintained. Up a well-trodden flight of stairs, I find the Espacio Borges, housing antique desks for the local students, shelves of books, tiled floors, a small lecture hall with a timeline down one wall, and a theatrette where faded black-and-white television footage of Borges plays on loop. Standing in the doorway, I hear him say, The work of the poet is endless. We have the duty of turning everything into symbols. At any moment a revelation may come.
Later that evening, in Palermo, somewhere between Avenidas Córdoba and Santa Fe, it seems I have a glimpse of him. Not the blind eminence he became, but the humble suburban employee he once was, walking the streets of Buenos Aires, absorbing the surrounds – an iron grille on a balcony, two strumming guitars, the perfume of a passing cigar – losing himself in his ruminations, quietly conjuring his masterpieces, a presence inferred, footsteps chewing thought.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 15, 2024 as "Walking with Borges".
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