pocket map, and went looking for the address I’d written down in my notebook: Flat 20, 865 Esmeralda Street. The flat where my father was born.
We followed Sarmiento until we reached Esmeralda and then headed north, crossing Corrientes, Tucumán, Viamonte and Córdoba at the brisk pace maintained by the locals even on public holidays. If we spoke, we did so through our scarves, not looking at each other, focused on dodging the crowds walking in the opposite direction. Suddenly the eighth block of Esmeralda opened up before us like a rift valley. We drank a coffee in Saint Moritz, the patisserie on the corner. It was a quarter past three.
We walked down to number 865. To my surprise, the mansion house where my father was born over eighty years earlier remained unaltered. I had seen the façade in photographs, so I recognised it straight away; when I peered inside, though, it looked more like an ordinary apartment building than a converted mansion. It was the only building of any age on this street bristling with office blocks, restaurants, bookshops and general goods stores, a wedge of the past that pertained to me amid an irrelevant modernity. Hearing the doorman’s voice on the interphone, I began to stammer. He must have got bored of listening to me because the buzzer sounded and the outer gate opened while I was still trying to explain the reason for my visit.
Walking into the entrance hall felt like plunging into a tunnel in time. Everything was sepia-toned, humid, peeling: the faded floor tiles, the relief of the majolica wall tiles rubbed down by repeated passage, the skylights, the jerry-rigged pipes, the water valves, the precarious electrical fittings, the rusting apartment windows, the frames of doors you didn’t have to open to know that they creaked like coffin lids. The high ceilings of the corridors were hung with wrought iron lamps that swayed like decapitated heads. The apartments were distributed over two four-storey buildings. Each building had a courtyard and each courtyard a palm tree. The bark of both trees bore a few traces of incisions that could have been carved there years ago by long-dead occupants. Everything felt old. Even the tricycle parked on a landing. Who did it belong to?
As I observed the scene, I progressively unwound my scarf and removed the layers of warm clothing: the woolly hat, glasses, gloves, cravat, and the first of the two jackets I was wearing. Rafael was photographing everything from all possible angles, as if he was planning to recreate the building in model form.
Soon we heard slow footsteps. A very old man appeared and raised his cap to us in greeting. I approached him to ask how long he had lived there. ‘All my life,’ he replied. His breath smelled of stale oats. I asked him if by any chance he recalled a large family from Peru who had lived there some eight decades ago. The Cisneros Vizquerra. The parents were Fernán and Esperanza, and their children were Juvenal, Carlota, the Gaucho, Gustavo, Pepe, Reynaldo and Adrián. His face remained blank for a few seconds, as if trying to fit these names to the countless faces that ran through his memory, before he said yes, he remembered them well, but he couldn’t say more because he had to hurry so as not to miss his four o’clock train. ‘Could I take your telephone number, sir?’ I asked. ‘I don’t have one,’ were his last words before he faded into the cold air.
I then decided to look for the stair that led to flat number 20. I climbed the same sixty marble steps that my father must have tired of ascending and descending as a child. I put my ear to the white door as I rang the bell, encouraged by the sounds of dishes and cutlery from inside. No one came. The clattering continued, accompanied now by a clacking of adult voices I couldn’t quite make out. I rapped on the door with my knuckles and spent a few seconds admiring the elegant two numerals of the number 20 inscribed in black ink to one side of the great window that dominated the landing between the third and fourth floors. The box for the fire extinguisher was empty. No one answered the door. I was about to knock one more time when I was struck by how implausible the speech I was planning to give would probably seem, how absurd my intention was going to sound. What exactly did I hope to achieve? To go inside and search a surely refurbished flat for the hardships into which my father had been born and raised? Breathe in the thin air of my grandfather’s years of exile? See the kitchen and imagine my grandmother Esperanza preparing dinner for her children – and also for her husband’s legal family? I felt a sudden unease that caught in my throat like a stuck walnut. I understood that I was forcing the experience in order to make it, I don’t know, more literary somehow, more worthy of consideration, when it was obvious that this place no longer represented anything at all. It was just an old flat in a crumbling tenement house. There was nothing romantic, quixotic or worthy about bursting in like this. The ghosts that once inhabited the building had long fled.
I told Rafael it was time for us to go. After closing the front gate and stepping back onto the street, we entered the adjacent second-hand bookshop. It was called Poema 20. Rafael wanted to buy a present for his brother. I left Rafael talking to the man at the counter and stretched out an instinctive hand to take a book at random from the first shelf I stopped in front of. I don’t want to suggest that the book I picked up was a sign, but in some sense it must have been. Or at least, that’s how I want to remember it: a subliminal synchrony. The book, with its distinctive white and red cover, published by Escorpio, was by Andrés M. Carretero and its title was The Gaucho: Distorted Myth and Symbol. I held it up to show Rafael, and he crossed the length of the bookshop to embrace me. This scene must have been disconcerting for the bookseller, to whom I handed a banknote in lieu of an explanation. A few minutes later, at four o’clock precisely, with one foot back on the pavement – perhaps the left – I felt a light, cold brushstroke against my cheek as if a substance somewhere between cotton and spittle were falling from above. I then saw that the black asphalt of the street was gradually being covered by a kind of white foam. It took me several seconds to realise that these soft, wind-blown icy blades were splinters of a miraculous snowfall over the city. We mingled with the crowd of people running towards the Obelisk to marvel and celebrate no longer just Argentina’s independence but also this natural phenomenon that – as the evening news would confirm – had not occurred in the capital for eighty-nine years. The survivors of that ancient snowfall watched the spectacle from behind the windows of their homes. The rest, conscious of how rare an event this was, left their buildings to wander the broad, frozen avenues that gradually began to resemble Siberian steppes. Euphoric pedestrians tried to catch snowflakes in the air. The older men, clumsier, rubbed them into their faces or swallowed them as if they were a manna or an elixir. The women caught them delicately in their hands, improvising songs of delight. A few younger folk filmed the experience on their mobile phones while others leapt around half-naked, their football strips clinging to their backs. The children, meanwhile, forgot the cold to solemnly build plump, once-in-a-lifetime snowmen. Rafael stayed by the Obelisk shooting photos until the early hours of the morning.
By that time I had abandoned the snow party to go and meet the poet Fabián Casas, whom I had emailed before leaving Lima. The poet welcomed me with a Cossack hat on his head and a neat whisky in his hand. We swapped books, talking about who we were and what we liked to do, and I allowed his dog Rita to mount my leg beneath the kitchen table. Night had fallen when we said farewell three hours later, but it was still snowing in the street. A few minutes later, huddled beneath a bus shelter waiting for a taxi, I felt like a writer. More like a writer than ever. As if the drinks and the talk with Fabián, combined with the snow that was blanketing Buenos Aires for the first time in a century, had yielded a poetic circumstance I deserved to belong to, I already belonged to, even though at this hour of the night there was not a single damn passer-by in the avenue to witness this fact. So I leaned against the illuminated sign on the bus shelter to read the book of poems Fabián had gifted me. I opened a page at random and read:
Not all of us can escape the agony of our time
and so, in this moment,
at the foot of my old man’s bed
I too prefer to die before I grow old.
Thick flakes of slantwise-falling snow were covering my shoes. I felt a desire to let myself be buried by the snow right there, to greet the dawn transformed into one of those expressionless figures the children had been building around the Obelisk. Perhaps from this new compartment, I thought, I could better understand something of what had happened on this fabulous day that was already dying, already thrashing like a fish on the damp ground. So I thought about the verse by Fabián Casas, about the distorted man my father