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By Root 217 0

grasped, was an Argentine institution, a public place lined with phone booths and computers where you could go to write an e-mail or make a call. They were always bustling. Even the cell phone culture hadn’t stymied them. You could sit down in the booths. Often there was a mirror. Women, as they were talking, fixed their makeup and hair. People who’d lost their offices during the crash ran their businesses from here, students without computers shacked up to write their papers. Kids sat in rows playing video games. Of course, there were undoubtedly all kinds of illicit things occurring there as well, in the privacy of telephone booths and computer screens. I would go every few days and read my e-mails, from friends, from my mother, from my ex-boss, the botanist. But I rarely lingered. My other life seemed, in all ways, far away.

Thinking it would be good if I met some people, I decided to put up signs at the university offering English classes. The Philosophy and Letters branch, previously a factory building, was far from the center of the city. I went there one afternoon. The entranceway was low and dim. The walls, ceiling to floor, even along the stairs, were papered with bulletins, calls for meetings, political tracts, torn off, recovered, torn again, giving the impression of an entire interior plastered with papier mâché. In the bathrooms, there were no toilet seats and no paper. Rather than carrying books around, the students for the most part carried photocopies. Later, I would learn that this was because books were expensive. I wandered around on the different floors, looking in doorways and posting my own signs.

In the afternoons, I walked. I always took the same route, down the hill to the big avenue. Along the avenue, there were brilliant green patches, grassy spots with trees. Thick pods from the palo borracho trees burst and spread tufts of cotton all over the ground. There were several statues I liked, one of a girl in rough stone, nearly featureless but with curves, sitting and leaning to the side, propping herself up with her hand, another of a faun. He was behind her, up on his hind legs. One night, he appeared in my dream. “I want to suck your armpit,” he said. I walked here almost every day, but then, as sometimes happened when I had nothing to do, I walked on endlessly for hours.

I circled outward into neighborhoods I didn’t know, the pale buildings, dark doorways, the plazas with dogs loitering, a fountain not working but half filled with copper-colored rainwater, the clanking buses hurtling by. I’d lose my way completely in streets whose names I didn’t know. The whole sky was light. The shadows looked blacker here than anywhere I remembered. I would get walking and wouldn’t stop. In the wide dark doorway of a garage a man stood in the center cutting up meat.

As I said, there were often crowds. Sometimes I skirted them, looked and skirted. One time I got caught up. Something happened. We were out in front of the government building. There were policemen with plastic shields, a helicopter overhead. The crowd started to panic, ran. One guy with his pants down was running right toward me. He must have been caught off-guard peeing. I ran too. We were in a square, dodging statues. My heart was racing. There was exhilaration mixed with the fear. People were scrambling, touching, in a way that would have been impossible under any other circumstance. In one moment, we were all rubbing against each other and the next we were dispersed. I found myself spiraling off, into a new neighborhood. I slowed down, catching my breath.

The Jardín Botánico was crawling with cats, hundreds and hundreds of them. They crept over everything, collected, preened.

The city would abruptly change the subject. I had felt this from the start. You were walking along a smooth Palermo street lined with bars and shops and would suddenly stumble into a wasteland, grass and dirt. Or you looked through a doorway into a huge empty hole. It was an unfinished city, but not only that. It seemed interminable, an interminable job. This was also