I’m back to Buenos Aires, but not physically.
My return happens by my pedaling along the cycle paths on the border lands of reality.
The truth is that Buenos Aires is most definitely an exercise of memory and of imagination, and also of oblivion, of life and death.
Its obsession to relive the past and to resist its own disappearance is a permanent challenge to the present.
One dives into Buenos Aires as into an abyssal world. The doubt concerning this dive is not only if you will come out of it alive, but also if you are alive when you launch yourself into this venture.
Regardless, even Buenos Aires, attached to this obsession and disposition to be timeless, cannot prevent its face from being worn out by age or by the savage actions of men, as well as from showing transformations here and there.
I leave, then, for a walk around the city and, like an explorer, I’m gradually faced with these facts.
I had already planned an incursion beforehand.
Early in the morning I head to the Bicicleteria. The image I have of it in the picture above, by Alexander Jung, is amazing. In fact, it is a true artistic creation that resembles a canvas painting, a picture worth being kept there, preserved, intact, as if in an open air gallery.
But what I find is its countenance, already changed, covered by ads.
Of its original form, what is saved from this commercial vandalism is the name printed on the top part of the facade.
Before this scene, I lean against the wall of the building across the street and let myself stay there, catching my breath, astonished by the mutilation of the façade, and take the pictures above. I still investigate around a bit, and learn from the man in charge of a newsstand nearby that the Bicicleteria had been closed recently, a matter of just a few months.
Without anything else to do, I walk away through the old streets of San Telmo, afraid of losing myself in their gloomy lines and maybe, as in the terrible days of the military dictatorship, of disappearing forever into thin air.
