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forces it down. But Martel was heard in all the tributaries of the tunnels because his voice swerved around the obstacles like a thread of water. It was
the only time he sang
Caminito (Little Path)
, by Filiberto and Coria Peñaloza, a tango inferior to the demands of his repertoire. Virgili thought he’d done it because everyone
around there could follow the words without getting lost, and because he didn’t want to add another enigma to an underground labyrinth where there were already so many.
    No one knew why Martel performed in such inhospitable places, without charging a cent. At the end of the spring of 2001 there were lots of clubs, theaters, bars and
milongas
in Buenos
Aires that would have welcomed him with open arms. Perhaps he was ashamed of exposing a body mercilessly abused by illness day after day. He spent two weeks in hospital with fibrosis of the liver.
Sometimes he got nosebleeds. His arthrosis was relentless. Still, when no one expected it, he showed up at these absurd locations and sang for himself.
    Those recitals must have had a meaning that only he knew, and I said so to Virgili. I proposed to find out if the places Martel went to were linked by some order or plan. Any logical device or
the repetition of a detail could reveal the complete sequence and allow me to get to his next appearance ahead of him. I was convinced the outings had to do with a Buenos Aires we didn’t see
and during an entire morning I amused myself composing anagrams from the name of the city, without getting anywhere. The ones I did come up with were stupid: Serious bean / Bruise a nose / Easier
on bus / I sane, U sober.
    One afternoon, about two, Martel went all the way into the Waterworks Palace, where the ironwork footbridges, the valves, tanks, pipes and columns, which one hundred years before had distributed
seventy-two thousand tons of drinking water to the inhabitants of Buenos Aires, were still preserved intact. I heard that he’d sung another obscure tango there and left in a wheelchair. So,
it wasn’t important to him to repeat the patterns of history, because history doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, everything in it has already been said. He wanted, rather, to recover a
past city that only he knew and transfigure it into the present of a city he’d take with him when he died.

TWO
October 2001
    As the days went by, I began to figure out that Buenos Aires, designed by its two successive founders as a perfect checkerboard, had turned into a labyrinth that occurred not
just in space, as they all did, but also in time. I frequently attempted to go somewhere and found I couldn’t, because hundreds of people were waving signs protesting against unemployment and
salary cuts. One afternoon I wanted to cross Diagonal Norte Avenue to get to Florida Street, and a fierce wall of indignant demonstrators, beating a drum, obliged me to make a detour. Two of the
women raised their hands as if greeting me and I replied in kind. I must have done something I shouldn’t have because they spat at me, hurling insults I’d never heard and didn’t
then know the meaning of: ‘You a rat, informer, faggot? Did you get a good pay-off? What’d they paid you?’ A woman tried to hit me, and they held her back. Two hours later, when I
was going back along the street where the Cathedral is, I ran into them again and feared the worst. But by then they seemed tired and ignored me.
    What happened with people also happened with places: they constantly changed their mood, seriousness, language. One of Buenos Aires inhabitants’ regular expressions is: ‘I
can’t find myself here,’ which is the equivalent of saying ‘I’m not myself here.’ A few days after arriving I visited the house at 994 Maipú Street where Borges
had lived for more than forty years, and I had the sensation that I’d seen it somewhere else or, which was worse, that it was a scene destined to disappear as soon as I turned my back. I took
some