Literary Buenos Aires

By Federico Scigliano, Eternadas -Historicaal Trips-

A city is inhabited by ghosts from the stories that have been told about it, and echoes with the footsteps of its storytellers. Those of us who love literature are eternally seeking encounters with these imaginary residents and their creators.

This was my mindset when I arrived at Buenos Aires, an immense and daunting city. Its modern and European center, its dark and intriguing suburbs, its neighborhoods of wide and shady streets were pregnant with the promise of stories. All that I needed to begin the search was to meet some porteño* who would be willing to assist me on the trip.

And that was how I came upon the Eternautas, a group of historians from Buenos Aires University who for the last three years had been offering cultural and historical tours around the city. A short exchange of words was all it took to begin the journey.

Our first move was to use our imagination to place ourselves in the 1920s, the decade marked by specialists as the birth of modern Argentinean literature, thanks to an important literary renovation that took place. During those years, some young porteños from the more affluent social circles traveled to Europe and became connected with the artistic vanguard promoting an aesthetic revolution that had the Old World in an uproar. France, Italy and Spain were the places these young writers chose to settle down in.

Upon their return to Buenos Aires, they began to publish a series of magazines that put forward the avant-garde postulates they had become acquainted with in Europe. The most important of these projects was the publication of Martín Fierro magazine, core of the Buenos Aires avant-garde experience.  

Borges Library

One of these young men was none other than Jorge Luis Borges, who had traveled to Madrid in 1914 and then stayed in Geneva. due to the First World War. until 1919, the year of his return to Buenos Aires.

I heard this whole narration while sipping a coffee in the elegant and centenarian Richmond Café on Florida Street, in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires. It was this café that hosted the meetings of these restless young men who came to represent a total modernization of their country’s literature. Florida was the downtown street par excellence, and one of the most characteristic places of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires. The city was then undergoing a major urban, architectural and demographic transformation brought on by the latest fashions from Europe, which were closely followed by the porteños.

To experience what my guide is telling me at that elegant coffee table, we walk down  pedestrian-only Florida towards San Martín Square, a space that preserves the Belle Époque atmosphere imprinted on it by the bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires. Powerful landowners and their sophisticated ladies reveled in the “joy of life” within imposing Beaux-Arts palaces that recreated those owned by their peers on the other side of the Atlantic. These were the streets where Borges spent most of his life, and many of his remarkable texts were imagined while he strolled through these places. Since our journey will focus on this extraordinary writer, we go north to the neighborhood of Palermo Viejo, on the edge of the old town.

The air of a place where time has stood still surrounds us as soon as we arrive. Borges spent his childhood here, in a house that had a palm tree planted at the front. (That tree appeared in several poems of his youth.) The streets are very wide, and the aged trees that outline its sidewalks cast thick shadows that generate a very particular atmosphere. We are on Jorge Luis Borges St., and we walk searching for the corners inhabited by his ghosts. One of them must surely be sitting by the pink grocery store on Guatemala St., which has presided over the corner with remarkable dignity since 1875. Shortly after beginning our stroll we come to the plaque informing us that we’re on the block of Buenos Aires´ mythical founding, another of Borges´ literary inventions. Before leaving Palermo we stop at one of the bars in Cortázar Square, meeting point for neighborhood intellectuals and artists, a place which seems to preserve in its new writers part of the heritage of Borges and his friends. Palermo Viejo is today a very fashionable section of Buenos Aires, a place with a bohemian tint, where old sits side by side with new.

We leave Palermo and travel to the south of the city. On the way, the Eternautas tell me that in the early years of the 20th century the city’s southern part was inhabited _toply by workers, and that this homogeneity fostered a very intense popular culture in the area. The southern suburbs, from the port of La Boca to the neighborhood of Boedo, were the backdrop for the hard life of the workers, but also for their social movements and their cultural manifestations.

Our itinerary stops in Boedo, a small neighborhood of workers and immigrants where a literary and aesthetic movement of great importance to the city’s life took place. At the same time at which vanguard magazines were being founded downtown with Borges at the fore, the young proletarians here were forming an intellectual and literary group known as the “Boedo Group.” I hear their story while at the Dante, an old dusty bar on Boedo Ave., meeting place for the proletarian intellectuals in the 20s.

“Art for the people and not for an elite,” was their motto. The Boedists, of socialist and anarchist tradition, created art groups, organized painting exhibitions on the neighborhood streets and funded their own magazines as well.

In front of San Ignacio Alley sat the house of Alfonso Reyes, a sculptor who organized sculpting workshops for the local workers. Across the street was the Pacha Camac Art and Crafts Workshop, a virtual factory of proletarian art. We walk down Boedo Avenue and the signs of a proud past reveal themselves one by one; the bars and old houses are there to give their testimony.

Our walk finally ends at Homero Manzi corner, so called as homage to one of the most important tango lyricists of Buenos Ares. He used to make a daily stop at the “El Aeroplano” Café, located precisely on the corner which now bears his name. This bar was for several years the _top meeting point for the Boedo Group. It was a small and old-fashioned place, full of talk of tango and football, of political discussions and sleepless writers. Today it still stands there, stoically, telling us of past moments in a Buenos Aires that is still traversed by imaginary characters and the people who conjured them. The houses, the corners, the bars are full of plaques and paintings that commemorate the artists they honor, another means of preserving memories in a place that is expert at resisting the passage of time.

At Homero Manzi corner we have the last coffee of the tour and then it is time to return, remembering the luxurious and avant-garde downtown of the “European” young men; the nostalgic and old-fashioned Palermo of Borges; the working-class militant South of Boedo.

And today, settling down to write these lines, I sometimes feel that the porteño ghosts that I visited on that sunny afternoon are now with me, assisting me in writing about these memories.

*Buenos Aires is Argentina’s _top port. Over the years its citizens dubbed themselves porteños (“people of the port”) in recognition of the city’s commercial position.