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photographs and, when I got them developed, I noticed that the entrance hall had been transformed in a subtle way and the floor tiles were arranged in a different pattern.
    Something worse happened to me with Julio Martel. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t attend any of his performances, which were extravagant and sporadic. Someone told me where he lived
and I spent hours waiting outside the door to his house until I saw him come out. He was short, with thick, black hair, stiffened with hairspray and lacquer. He hopped along like a lobster, perhaps
leaning on a cane. I tried to follow him in a taxi and lost him near the Plaza del los Dos Congresos, at a corner cut off by a teachers’ demonstration. I had the feeling that in the Buenos
Aires of those months the threads of reality moved out of step with the people and were weaving a labyrinth in which no one could find anything, or anyone.
    El Tucumano told me that some companies organized guided hour or two-hour-long tours for Europeans who disembarked at Ezeiza airport on their way to the glaciers ofPatagonia, Iguazú Falls or the inlets of Puerto Madryn, where the whales went mad as they thunderously gave birth. The buses often got lost among the ruins of the Camino
Negro 11 or in the quagmires of La Boca and wouldn’t reappear for days, and even then the passengers would have no memory of whatever it was that had held them up.
    They muddle them up with all kinds of gimmicks, El Tucumano told me. One of the excursions went to all the big soccer stadiums simulating a day of classic matches. They get a hundred tourists
together and go from the River Plate stadium to Boca’s, and from there to Vélez’ ground in Liniers. By the gates of each they have people selling chorizos, t-shirts, pennants,
while the stadium loudspeakers reproduce the roar of a non-existent crowd, which the visitors imagine to be there. They’ve even written articles about this fakery, El Tucumano said, and I
wondered who the authors might have been: Albert Camus, Bruce Chatwin, Naipaul, Madonna? They were each shown a Buenos Aires that doesn’t exist, or maybe they could only see the one
they’d already imagined before their arrival. There are also tours of the meat processing plants, El Tucumano went on, and another one for twenty pesos of the famous cafés. At around
seven in the evening they take the tourists for a walk down the Avenida de Mayo, through San Telmo and Barracas, to see the cafés. In the Café Tortoni they set up a show for them with
dice players who flourish their shakers and threaten each other with daggers. They listen to tango singers in El Querandí, and in El Progreso on Montes de Oca Avenue they chat with novelists
working away on their laptops. It’s all a front, all a set-up, as you can imagine.
    What I didn’t know then was that there was also a municipal excursion devoted to Borges’ Buenos Aires, until I saw the tourists pull up at the boarding house on Garay Street, one
November day at noon, in a bus with the lurid McDonald’s monogram on each side. Almost all of them were from Iceland or Denmark and they were on their way to the southern lakes, where the
landscapes might surprise them less than the endless solitude. They spoke in a guttural English, which permitted intermittent conversations, as if the distance might leave the words hanging in
mid-air. I understood they’d paid thirty dollars for a walk that began at nine in the morning and ended just before one. The pamphlet they’d been given to help find their way was a
sheet of newsprint folded in four with lots of ads for masseurs who did home visits, rest clinics and euphoria-producing pills freely for sale. In the midst of this typographical jungle, one could
just make out the points of the itinerary, explained in a peculiar English twisted by Spanish syntax.
    The first stop on the route was Borges’ birthplace, the house at 840 Tucumán Street, at a time when the Saturday morning