The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  All the doors to the three balconies are open now, and there is a breeze, slowly lifting then dropping the long maroon drapes gently, as if they are breathing. The latest round of overdramatic thunderstorms that afternoon has finally cleared out the air, and around town in the last couple of days I’ve seen school kids in uniforms returning to the start of fall classes; the season is changing. Going out to the center, corner balcony above the major downtown intersection, I look to the wedge of the glassy black river a few blocks away, tall yellow cranes at the docks framing the view; there is a moon, full. I sip the cold Brahma. The night smells muddily sweet, if that makes any sense, and I am at that last stage in a trip when you start missing things already. I know I will miss this giant room, the best in the old, well-worn hotel, so maybe it was where the Prince of Wales himself stayed. I will miss eating those good steaks and not worrying about blood pressure and cholesterol, because, as I tell myself at the table every day, “You’ll only be in Argentina once, Pete.” I’ll even miss goofing around with the group of Australian women at breakfast. Just that morning, Brendie (in a tight top displaying a lot of peachy cleavage, as usual) was giving me more commentary on the tango, with her pal named Georgia noddingly agreeing. Brendie said: “The tango really freed the poor here. It struck some rhythm in them that made them forget their sadness for a while.” The whole of which could have been trite, a platitude, until Brendie added, talking more to herself than anybody else: “There’s so much sadness that people need to forget.” Brendie is OK. Despite any early doubts about the trip (those fears of indulging in too much self-examination concerning my admitted mess-ups in life), I realize that this is turning out to be one of the best trips I’ve taken in a long while, probably since going to India and especially Bombay, which was something else, too. (I traveled around for a month to give some lectures in India, had a great time with the bright and wonderfully energetic Indian students while in residence as a visiting faculty member at an American studies research center in Hyderabad; it was a place where everybody was wild about books—long informal sessions with the students late into the night, talking literature, long walks with them to the dusty hills behind the center’s compound in the afternoons, talking literature. And then a week in shimmering, forever mysterious Bombay, a major world city on par with London or Paris or New York, I tell myself now.) I guess I’m also thinking of everything I have to do back in Austin. I have to plow through the chore of really complicated income taxes this year, and though I am on official academic leave now for a semester, there’s waiting for me back home the ongoing baloney that can surround academia sometimes. Not from the students, who are great, but from vapidly self-important administrators, “politic, cautious, and meticulous,” and lately such campus careerists can even be found on the creative writing end, another sign of the dim and commercialized literary times. But one must keep loudly bucking the likes of them, try to make things better, also always try to instill in graduate creative writing students specifically, I remind myself now, a hunger for the lasting and significant, the old Borgesian ethos, all right. On the balcony, I tell myself that a duration of a couple of weeks in my adult life is about as long as I can go without working on my own fiction, and I admit I’m jumpy to get back to that, already planning new projects. I go inside again. I stretch out on the bed again, continue reading the paperback history of the Argentine short story.

  10. Thinking Some More at Night

  And from the bed I can see myself reflected—me, comfortably tired after walking, relaxing like that with book in hand, the ceiling fan above lopsidedly looping around and around—in the full-length mirror on the huge mahogany armoire with its tarnished brass fittings. That reminds me again of that Borges museum, which was empty except for the single round mirror left to reflect people passing by on the busy sidewalk of Calle Tucumán, or reflect a stranger like me cupping my hands at twilight there to look in—Borg-es himself long gone but the mirror still very much around. Borges was right to be suspicious of mirrors, and often it’s easy to feel that not much of anything is close to what we commonly call real.

  I sip the beer. I continue with the book on the history of the Argentine short story.

  11. Brendie Says

  The next morning at breakfast I ask Brendie if maybe she knows what the deal is on those tourism maps, how north is south and south is north. Is it because the layout of the city just fits better on the page that way? Or, possibly, is it because we’re below the Equator, and it’s like the sink draining the other way? Is it the same on maps in Australia? Pretty and practical Brendie, the physical therapist, pauses in her spooning the cornflakes into her lipsticked mouth (the Hotel Phoenix harbors Anglo airs), and she says she hasn’t noticed it, adding with a grin, “Don’t be daft—of course maps aren’t that way in Australia.” Perfect.

  12. Books as Pure as Air Itself

  The former Biblioteca Nacional is on Calle México, number 564, in a funky district of older, colonial-style architecture called Barrio Sur, south of the Plaza de Mayo. It’s siesta time, early afternoon, hot again but without the humidity, and the streets here are all but deserted—or more than that, everything is perfectly and utterly still. I see the high façade rising above the low houses around it on narrow Calle México, flat granite lower down and a row of six huge pillars above that, like a proud old American bank, imposing; however, as I already know, it is no longer the Biblioteca Nacional, granting the Roman lettering chiseled in the top peak’s triangle still announces exactly that. The library has been moved to a new venue of reinforced-concrete brutalist architecture—pretty ugly—in an outlying park, and now the former library serves as a national music center, with performance space and offices for administration. As a cultural seat, therefore, it hasn’t escaped the recent protest that is currently questioning any elitism in Argentina—financial, cultural, or otherwise—and in swirly spray-painting, red and black, on the walls near the sidewalk you can read:

  “ATACA EL ESTADO!”

  and:

  “COLONIALES!’

  and:

  “EL SECTOR DE LOS MESÍAS LOCOS!”

  The first two needing no translation or commentary, and the last identifying the music center as another operation of the crazy messiahs, who I assume are the allegedly corrupt government bigwigs who are charged with landing the country in the current economic mess. If nothing else, it’s free of the particular graffiti that blankets just about every bank building downtown: “LADRONES!” Thieves.

  The tall carved-wood front doors are open, and I head up the granite steps. It’s cooler in the expanse of the foyer, tiled with squares in a red-and-yellow floral pattern. A slim young guy in black slacks and a white open-neck shirt but no hat, his security uniform, is at the desk, very soft-voiced and friendly. After he seems assured that I am not mistaken that this is the present seat of the national library and understand that it is now the music center, he affirms that it once was, in fact, the Biblioteca Nacional, and that Borges indeed was the director. I ask him if I can look around, and he tells me of course I can, ushering me through a set of high doors to what had been the central reading room. He leaves me alone there, goes back to his desk in the lobby, deserted like everywhere else, it seems, during a weekday siesta time.

  The place is wonderful.

  I am standing alone in the middle of an octagonally shaped empty space, five stories high. The floor is planked; each level above me is ringed by a gallery walkway, with doorways at the corners showing very intricately carved trim; there are long plaques listing the great names of “Ciencia,” “Filosofía,” and such in gold (Plato, Herodotus, etc.); the walls themselves are all bookshelves and paneling, the fine, aged woodwork the color of walnut; up top is a domed skylight, and in the middle of that is what looks like a Tiffany-glass insert with huge stars in an indigo-blue night sky (harking back to the building’s original intended use, as a center for the government lottery—the stars of luck?). A stage has been set up in front, for recita
ls, but it still feels entirely like a reading room, and a magnificent one at that. I think of Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel,” about a mythical library where books endlessly lead to still more books about those books, then books about those books about those books, and so on, a dizzying, infinite maelstrom of verbal information that maybe foretold the computer age. And while nearly every commentator on the story, including Borges himself, noted that its inspiration traced back to the seemingly endless cataloguing travail when Borges worked at Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané, I remember that in his “Library of Babel” the rooms of the imagined library are six-sided, giving a spiraling sense of continuity—that touch surely must have been influenced by the time he spent here in the course of his life, as far back as when he had first visited the library as a schoolboy poring over the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And it’s so quiet in here. Of course, I’m back to taking notes. I’m also thinking how it is pleasant to picture Borges finally having “arrived” in his native land, the lord of this domain, when it suddenly hits me: There is everything here for a library but the books—the shelves are completely and achingly empty. It deals me a measure of near vertigo even greater than that from having seen the mirror in the museum, and I sense for a moment maybe the ultimate idea of books, the purity of the thoughts and the knowledge, often the veritable transcendence, they convey, all of which in a way isn’t the least bit corporeal; it is one message certainly at the center of Borges’s basic credo. (Stories like “The Library of Babel,” or “The Approach to al-Mu’Tasim,” a fiction in the form of an imaginary review of an imaginary book, or “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” where an obsessed contemporary man tries to rewrite the Cervantes masterpiece by virtually becoming Cervantes—learning his seventeenth-century Spanish, schooling himself in the ways of Cervantes’s own day—to the point that he does eventually sit down to rewrite it, but as himself now, Pierre Menard, and the product is exactly the same Don Quixote, which shows how invisible, but enduringly constant, any book is in the mind, almost beyond and independent of the author.) The physical absence of books here is somehow the magical essence of books. And for me in the Biblioteca Nacional, mark a hole-in-one, a perfectly pitched game, a ninety-yard run, whatever, on the Scoreboard of Metaphysical Moment.

  When I walk out to the foyer, the young guy hands me a brochure on the music center, which will be good to have for future reference because it does contain color photos and a floor plan of the building. I tell him Borges interests me very much and that I am, though definitely not in the league of Borges, an “escritor norteamericano” myself. He nods, smiles. I walk back out into empty Calle México. When I return the next afternoon to take another look, check some things for my notes, the young attendant comes into the reading room to talk to me a little. He asks me in his soft voice if what I said is true, that I am an “escritor norteamericano.”

  I tell him yes, repeating that I am very interested in Borges. He tells me that others are, too. I ask him if people come every day, and he says not every day, but they come often for a look. Then he looks at me, and says in his Spanish, serious:

  “An American writer, that is a good thing to be.”

  I thank him, feeling good about that myself, while knowing I seldom introduce myself as any kind of writer at all—I have managed to publish a few books of fiction, but I must admit that I usually feel a complete interloper in claiming to be a real writer (no need to dive noggin-first into that particular lack of assurance or soul-searching here).

  I leave Buenos Aires a day later, totally enamored with the city, a most complicated one, and deeply hoping, as well, that Argentina tugs itself out of its financial quagmire soon—the place is too special for that sort of stuff.

  13. Where I Really Am

  Needless to say, where I really am is here in my apartment at 1407 West 39th 1/2 Street in Austin, Texas.

  It is Easter, March 29, 2002, and earlier I went to a seven-thirty Mass, had breakfast, then returned here to get back to work on this piece, the computer screen glowing. Since I’ve been back in Austin, I’ve been alternating working on this with working on a long short story set in Buenos Aires, “Southern Majestic Zone,” which is going really well. Now and then I slip a CD of orchestra tango classics—the thumping bandoneon accordion, the sighing violins—into the computer’s player for mood while I write; I have maps and notes and the books bought on my trip spread out on the carpet around my desk. Naturally, I hope that for anybody reading this it has felt as if you were actually with me in Buenos Aires, and I can say (here comes the shameless Borgesian imitation, pulling out the rug from under the wobbling guise of reality in the artifice in order to dispose of any pretension to such easy reality in the artifice, as the narrative hopefully evokes and enters into some yet higher reality well beyond artifice; but in this case I probably blew it a while ago when I awkwardly abandoned present tense for past in the section that moved back toward my remembering seeing Borges in person at Sanders Theatre at Harvard that cold late November night), yes, I can say that writing it, I truly felt I was in the moment, actually there.

  Believe me, my flimsy initial premise for the trip didn’t backfire after all, and I think I did tune in on (be a son of the sixties and be forever shackled to its loopy jargon) the metaphysic in all my rereading of Borges there, in all my tramping around town and playing the old, and thoroughly exciting, literary fan’s game of following in the footsteps there. The place was laced with metaphysic, if you know what I mean.

  14. On the Other Hand

  I get up to take a break from writing, stroll around my bedroom/study. I walk to the large sliding-glass doors and look out beyond the second-floor deck at what should be my neighbors’ sun-splashed, fenced-in backyard with its uncut emerald grass and its dog pen for the obnoxious, neurotic golden lab and its clutter of kids’ bicycles...and, no kidding, I seem to be much higher up, I seem to have a balcony view of Avenida Córdoba in Buenos Aires, busy with horn-blowing taxis right down to the docks and those tall yellow cranes there, where the Plata is now strikingly silver and not its usual cinnamon tone as the noontime sunlight hits it just the right way, living up to its name.

  That’s what I’m looking at.

  No kidding, that’s what I see!

  15. (And 16, 17, 18, 19, etc.) Plus, What About?

  Plus, if you don’t follow me on that, what about that kid who was sitting like a statue there outside the airport, reading Labyrinths, something that has to go well beyond mere coincidence? I mean, you tell me.

  2004, FROM AGNI MAGAZINE

  THE CITY AT THREE P.M.:

  AN ESSAY ON WRITING

  1.

  The bars on Ninth Avenue are empty in the warm October sunshine. Walking the grimed sidewalk and passing the narrow cross streets, you can look down any one of them and right across the fragilely blue Hudson, to the other side and New Jersey, where the trees have already turned to pastels—soft red, soft yellow. If you are walking around rather aimlessly at this hour, taking a break during a full day of writing, you could do what you have done before. You could work your way over to Broadway and Times Square, cutting up Forty-third Street to look at the Hotel Carter again. And the Hotel Carter is for some reason mesmerizing, if only for the fact that just the other day you discovered that it had once been called the Dixie Hotel. The Dixie Hotel was where poor Delmore Schwartz was living when he returned to New York in 1966, half mad and broken in his last days, after all the early success and adulation from even the likes of T.S. Eliot. Once-handsome Schwartz, the poet of such sweeping blond hair and a matinee idol’s high cheekbones when young, was by that point physically as well as artistically spent, strung out on alcohol and pills and convinced the CIA was plotting against him, before he died of a massive coronary at the age of fifty-two (not in the Dixie but another Times Square hotel?) while taking garbage from his cramped room out to the steel-grated back landing; the body was unclaimed in the morgue for days, so the story goes. The Hotel Carter rises
in a pile of beige brick, “Seven Hundred Rooms” the faint paint of the lettering touts high up on one side; it is flanked by closed-down shops that are all part of the maybe evil movie-industry conglomerate’s plan to “rehabilitate” the area (literal Disneyfication), and across the street are the staid white lamp globes outside the Times Building. But it is too sunny, too warm, to just stand on the pavement and stare at the Hotel Carter again, think of the sadness at the end of a truly talented poet’s life, think, too, about the larger question: How could anybody who knew so much about the way the heart works, in those poems and the handful of short stories, end up denied any soothing knowledge about anything, in so much pain? Which has often been the, yes, larger question, and you know you should probably avoid being anywhere near the Hotel Carter right now. On Ninth Avenue there is a bar called the Film Center Café. It has a streamlined chrome façade and blue neon sign, taking its name from the nearby Film Center Building, a genuine 1920s Art Deco behemoth with offices for assorted media and other enterprises now, though somebody once told you that years ago it actually was the very heart of the film industry in the city. You could go over to the café, a bar and restaurant setup, and talk to the tall, dark-haired girl from Newry in Northern Ireland who tends bar there. She has been in the States for only three months, lives in Astoria, and has a Northern Irish bartender boyfriend here in New York (they are Catholics); she plans to marry him soon, return to Northern Ireland with him. She is that rarest of entities, a true beauty without realizing it, wearing black turtlenecks and black jeans, also makeup and lipstick that she really doesn’t need; her eyes are large and green. To talk to her is to tell her about your own time in Ireland years before when you lived in Dublin for a while and did some work as a journalist, and to talk to her is to have her always listen without pretense, because it is obvious she’s relaxed with you, likes you, as she would a favorite uncle, maybe. And who else comes into the empty Film Center Café in the afternoon to say to her that, sure, she could be the only twenty-five-year-old girl in America who regularly goes to Mass, and who else listens to her go on about how all she wants to do is return to Ireland with her Sean: “I want to have a lot of babies, I suppose”? If most things in your life have to suggest some literary tie, then she is the quiet, level-headed, lovely Nora Barnacle whom Joyce married, so naive that when you ask her the population of her town, little Newry, she says in the lilt with a touch of Scottish flatness that is the Northern Ireland brogue, “A million, I would guess.” So, to chat with her at the Film Center Café now at almost three in the afternoon would be to watch the sunlight streaming in through the unwashed windows, onto the dented mahogany bar, the authentically red-and-black checkered linoleum. It would be to think how lucky Joyce had been to realize early on that Nora Barnacle in her apparent, and deceptive, simplicity possessed a strength that he himself never really had, that she was very rare. But it is such a beautiful day, and being indoors at the Film Center Café might be as much of a mistake as gazing at the Hotel Carter again. You could always head up Ninth Avenue, eventually find yourself on Fifty-eighth Street, let’s say, west of Central Park.