In my room at the Hotel Continental a thousand miles from nowhere, I heard the bulky, beefy breathing of the herds. Cattle furnished my new clothes: my coat of limp, chestnut-colored suede, my sharp shoes that hurt my toes. A false fin de siecle decorum snored over Buenos Aires, lost in the pampas and run by the barracks. Old strong men denied apotheosis, bankrupt, on horseback, welded to their horses, moved white marble rearing moon-shaped hooves, to strike the country down. Romantic military sculpture waved sabers over Dickensian architecture, laconic squads patrolled the blanks left by the invisible poor. All day I read about newspaper coup d’états of the leaden, internecine generals— lumps of dough on the chessboard—and never saw their countermarching tanks. Along the sunlit cypress walks of the Republican Martyrs’ graveyard, hundreds of one-room Roman temples hugged their neo-classical catafalques. Literal commemorative
Una memoria textual