Living on Borges Street

I spent most of 2005 in Buenos Aires working on a book, and that’s all I had to do that year. I was on a sabbatical after selling my first novel. I rented an apartment in Palermo Soho, right off Borges Ave and around the corner from Julio Cortázar plaza, where I could buy pot from the hippies that sold their jewelry on blankets. I wrote, took walks in the city, went to Cafés at night and drank good wine and ate fat steaks. This was before smart phones, before wireless internet was widely available, so there were few digital distractions. I didn’t even have a portable phone or a phone in the apartment. I would check Email once a day at an Internet place.

Everyday I was able to put intense focus on the book, so even when I was in the city, my brain ignored a lot of detail and highlighted the images that correlated with the book. Although I didn’t plan it this way, whatever grabbed my attention was rooted in or connected to my novel, as if the city wanted to help me write it.

The story was about a father and his daughter, him a Chicano artist-scholar, her a precocious teenager, and one day I found myself writing a scene wherein he takes her to a city park in Paris, where he had gone to study art and where he met her mother, an Arabic woman who worked in an art supply store and died when the girl turned two. In the scene I was writing that morning, the girl is five-years old and the father is pushing 40. I wanted some image of them that showed their relationship and how every moment of their lives was haunted by the mother’s absence (her name was Sonya-Assis), but nothing was working.

Then one day I was walking down Calle Borges toward Plaza Italia, and I saw a man and his daughter on a bicycle. She must’ve been about five-years old, like the girl in the novel. She was riding on the handlebars as he swerved in and out of the cars, up and down the sidewalk and into the circle of traffic around the plaza with its statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi on a horse.

I was stunned by the look on the girl’s face– so calm and at peace, like everything was OK. She was safe with her daddy. If a fearful child were on those handlebars, someone who didn’t trust her father, she would be hanging on for dear life. But not this little girl. She was so secure.

That’s the relationship I wanted my fictional father to have with his daughter.

I got some food near the plaza and made my way to the Botanical Gardens across the street. I went to my regular bench, ate, read a bit, fed the cats that gathered around my legs. This was before the city started to regulate the number of cats in the gardens, as there used to be hundreds of them, and it was said that people would just drop them off as kittens and they would all survive together in the gardens. There were so many of them, and I knew every time I went there, I would have to share my lunch, pull off pieces of meat in my sandwich and feed them and they swirled around my legs like blurs of fur. The bench was facing a fountain, in the middle of which was a statue, a woman standing naked on a pedestal.

But today some workers had drained the fountain and were cleaning the moss off the white stone. One of the men pointed a high-pressure water hose to get the moss off the feet of the lady, but he sprayed her entire body as well, which hit her with such force it almost looked violent. He aimed at her legs, her midriff, her breasts, her face, and the other man, working on the floor of the pool where most of the moss had gathered, picked up his hose and pointed it at her too, and they were getting her from all sides. They were laughing and talking about things that had nothing to do with the statue, a futbol game maybe, or what plans they might have for the weekend. They were just doing their job, but the water hit her so hard it exploded in splashes.

I wondered what the daughter in my novel would think if she and her father were sitting together watching the workers spray the statue.

Daddy! They’re hurting her!

No, honey. She’s a statue.

But they’re hurting her!

I went back to my apartment and I wrote a scene of how they got to the park on a bicycle, the girl on the handlebars so happy and safe, but when they get to the fountain and she sees what the men are doing to the statue, she remembers her mother.

I plagiarized that scene from the city.