ALBERTO MANGUEL
Argentina: A Private Elegy
Argentina! In my dreams, with half-shut eyes,
I search for her once again within myself-with all my strength.
Argentina! It is strange and all I want to know is this:
why did I never feel such passion for Argentina in Argentina?
Why does it assault me now, when I am far away?
-Witold Gombrowicz,
1963
O
NE OF THE COMMONPLACES
of baroque literature declares that
nothing is as it was: the traveler seeks Rome in Rome and all he
sees are its ruins. The great Francisco de Quevedo concluded:
"That which is solid has vanished! Only the transient remains and
lasts." The ruins of the sacked cities of Argentina-the looted super–
markets, the burnt cars, the shattered windows, the broken remains of
trends and fashions-are hastily patched-up in the oppressive present;
in the past lies a country we once agreed to call Argentina.
I was born in Argentina, but did not actually live there until the age
of seven, when my family moved back in
1
955, shortly before the fall of
Peron, whom my father had served as ambassador to Israel. I left again,
for good, in
1968,
just before the beginning of the horrors of the mili–
tary dictatorship. I remember those thirteen years with astonishment. In
spite of the insidious economic degradation, in spite of the regular mil–
itary coups which brought the lumbering tanks into the streets by our
school, in spite of a gradua l sale of all the national industries, Argentina
was in those years an extraordinary place in which to grow up, and
Buenos Aires a metropolis of immense intellectual richness and inven–
tion. There was a style of thought unique to this society, capable of
broaching (in the same idea) the great metaphysical questions and the
realities of grassroot politics, discussed around dinner tables, on park
benches, in cafes.
In Buenos Aires, the cafe was the neighborhood
agora.
Different from
the quiet, bourgeois cafes of Mittel-Europa, grittier, noisier, filled with a
Alberto Manguel is author of
A History of Reading, Reading Pictures, Into
the Looking-Glass Wood,
and others.
