Afterword: The Buenos Aires Affair

When I Wrote My First Novel, En Breve Cárcel, I was Determined to Erase References to Space and Have All Action (If That is the apposite word) occur in a place devoid of particular markings, as close to abstraction as I could possibly make it. This rather pretentious gesture was destined to thwart any recognition by the reader, rendering the city—or, in this case, the cities—unrecognizable and therefore a little (but not excessively) uncanny. Then, toward the end of the novel, with an equally pretentious gesture, I identified those cities and arbitrarily revealed their names. One of those cities was Paris, where I had lived for many years, the second was Buffalo, where I had lived briefly, and the third city was Buenos Aires, where I was born and spent the first thirty-odd years of my life. Looking back, I think my desire to mask all three cities may have been less frivolous than it would appear. I suspect that I didn't want to identify Paris because it was too obvious as a place of exile, especially for a Latin American. Buffalo I preferred to avoid because, although I had spent some time there, it felt very much to me like Alfred Jarry's Poland—c'est à dire nulle part. Buenos Aires, I'm guessing now, was masked for reasons more complex: mainly, I think, because the city, which for a long time had been for me a more or less familiar and stationary construct, made out of manageable and no doubt embellished memories, was becoming more and more disquieting with every trip I took there. Political repression makes short shrift of auratic illusion. It is difficult to recognize a city, or what you remember of that city, when you see soldiers with machine guns on every corner.