I’d recently passed my doctoral exams in literature at New York University and was writing a dissertation on Jorge Luis Borges’ essays on the origins of the tango. The work was slow and confusing. I was tormented by the feeling I was just filling page after futile page. I spent hours staring out the window at neighboring houses on the Bowery as my life drifted away from me without my having the slightest idea what to do to catch up with it. I’d already missed too much of life and couldn’t even console myself with the thought that something or someone else had taken it from me. One of my professors had recommended I travel to Buenos Aires, but I didn’t think it was necessary. I’d seen hundreds of photographs and films. I could imagine the humidity, the Río de la Plata, the drizzle, Borges tottering along the southern streets with his white cane. I had a collection of maps and Baedeker guides published in the same years as his books. I imagined a city much like Kuala Lumpur: tropical and exotic, falsely modern, inhabited by descendants of Europeans who’d grown used to barbarism.
