On navigating Buenos Aires with a writer who mapped it from memory — the streets, the conventillos, and the neighbourhoods that exist mostly in the literature
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899, in a house on Tucumán Street, and lived in the city for most of his ninety years. His geography of it — the Palermo of his childhood, the South, the labyrinthine library — is the most influential literary map of any South American city.
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899, in a house on Tucumán Street, and lived in the city for most of his ninety years. He was nearly blind by middle age and increasingly so as he grew older. The city he described in the stories and essays — the Palermo of his childhood, the street corner fights of the orillas, the conventillos of the South — was assembled largely from memory and from literature before memory: the city he had read about before he was old enough to walk it himself. The Buenos Aires in his work is reconstructed twice over, which is perhaps why it feels more real than cities mapped by writers who kept their eyes open.
The Borges house on Maipú in Retiro, where he lived from 1938 until his exile in 1985, is now the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges. The building is open to the public on weekdays and contains the writer's library, personal effects, and a study of manuscripts and correspondence. The library is the important room. Borges spent his professional life as a librarian — first at the Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané in Boedo, a minor branch library where he worked for nine years between 1937 and 1946, and later as director of the Biblioteca Nacional, a position he held from 1955 to 1973. The Biblioteca Nacional building he worked in was demolished; its replacement, an inverted pyramid of concrete designed by Clorindo Testa and completed in 1992, is the current national library.
Palermo, the northern barrio where Borges grew up, is the neighbourhood he returned to in prose throughout his career. The Palermo of his stories is the frontier zone at the edge of the city — knife fights, compadres, the particular moral code of men who lived outside established systems. The actual Palermo is now one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the city, full of restaurants and boutiques. The transformation is so total that the neighbourhood exists in two irreconcilable versions: the literary one, which is the version that will survive, and the current one, which is subject to the usual processes.
The South — el Sur — is the compass point Borges associated with the city's authentic character. San Telmo and La Boca, the old portside neighbourhoods, are the territories. In the story 'The South,' which Borges considered his finest, a man leaving a hospital either takes a train south or dreams that he does — the ending refuses to specify — and arrives in a landscape that is simultaneously the Argentine pampa and the south of Buenos Aires, where the city ends and the country begins. The Constitución railway station, from which the trains south depart, is still operating.
The Argentine National Library, now on Agüero Street in Recoleta, contains the full Borges archive and a collection running to over two million volumes. The reading rooms are open to the public with registration. The building — Clorindo Testa's inverted brutalist tower, set in a formal garden — is best approached from the garden entrance on the west side, which gives the structure its proper scale. Borges never saw this building; by the time it was completed he had been gone for nine years. The city that outlives its writers, like the library that outlives its books, is the condition he spent his career describing.