You need to come in to discuss such matters, sir, he said (I realized his voice was nothing like Sanchis Mira’s, nothing at all) and began without preamble to read a list of dates and times. I missed the first three and asked him to repeat them. He answered: Do you want to resolve the issue or should I just report you to our administrators? The earliest time we have, in any case, is the day after tomorrow, is that soon enough? I told him no and apologized (for what crime I did not know). The operator said nothing. Hello, I said, hello? One moment, sir, said the operator, I want to make sure I am getting this down correctly. You are declining to come in for an interview. I assured him that there was no need for me to come in, I merely needed an address. Coming in for an interview is in my experience the best way to handle matters of this kind, sir, said the operator. His voice was clotted. As if with hidden laughter. I replied that I did not have the time at the moment, though I regretted this fact. It is regrettable, sir, said the operator, and asked me how to spell my last name. I did; I waited for him to ask if I was related to the famous Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago. But he did not. He coughed, or grunted, or choked back another laugh, and said that he was now seeing an address entered in the record for Dr. Mariategui: Avenida Julio Zenz 4300. I thanked him. The saliva filling my mouth blurred the word; droplets spurted out onto the octagonal table, and a few, to my disgust, even hit the lilac. If you should decide to come in, sir, he went on, as I highly recommend, please remember to bring an ID and proof of travel. A plane ticket, anything like that. Otherwise we would have no idea whether you actually came to Buenos Aires.
The city atlas I’d brought with me (my memory for maps is tremendous but not infallible) did not depict Avenida Zenz. No mention in the index and none in the brief, dead biographies of famous sites the atlas offered as ancillary entertainment. I peered and peered through a magnifying glass framed in frail puce plastic and attached with a nylon cord to the book itself, but I saw no Zenz; in the lowest desk drawer I found a telephone directory and was leafing through it in the hopes of discovering a dweller on Zenz at random — a desperate, frivolous hope, I admit — when Violeta called to me from the parlor threshold. She was flushed from the housecleaning. She carried a blue-and-white checked rag and a plastic spray bottle full of pinkish liquid (like blood and rendered fat, mingling). Sweat beads decorated her hairline, and through the loose armholes of her shirt I saw the dark tufts in her deep axillae flaring. She asked me if something was wrong. I assured her that no, everything was fine, that I was fine. She told me I looked exhausted, though my exhaustion had long since left me, it had drained away on my journey home, or during the rooftop events, or at another point in the ichorous flow. I explained my predicament. She knew exactly where Avenida Julio Zenz was. I was ashamed. After all, so far I had conducted my (external) affairs with perfect alacrity and poise, and the Zenz affair represented a defeat, that I could not deny. She said Zenz was a new street, or a new name for an old street in La Boca; it used to be Parker. The writer it was renamed to honor just died, she said, in the epidemic. There’s no way they could have updated the maps. So don’t blame yourself, Mr. Pasternak.
La Boca, The Mouth. Every tourist knows the name of that barrio, Pasternak. It’s famous throughout the world. I ordinarily would never have visited such a place. On my travels I preferred to find the truly anonymous, truly empty zones of a city. I was never perfectly successful, and this trip had occasioned many hindrances. La Boca was home to the Boca Juniors, a soccer team. Soccer is another prison, in which the wardens and guards outnumber the inmates by a thousand or ten thousand to one. And while Caminito was crowded, and while the houses as I walked south displayed colors (red, orange, yellow, pink) corrupted by the endless viewing. This complexion did not last. The Riachuelo, dull and metallic, visually impure, flowed alongside me as I crossed Alfredo Palacios, a street named after an Argentine senator. The first socialist, if memory serves, in the Chamber of Deputies. A man with an imitative mustache meant to suggest some Russian exploder. His name repeated now by blue, silent plaques among sheds with corrugated aluminum sides that filled most of the street lots here, among the shrill metallic cries of saws or drill presses. The smell of the river poured lazily through the silent air between the sheds. I looked into the few stores that I passed. One sold only hubcaps, another orthotic shoes, the walls of a third glittered telegraphically with key blanks. The Dog Symphony trembled and trilled from a radio in the orthotic shoe store. All three, of course, had meat bowls set out. All six bowls were empty. The key-store owners had housed theirs under a wooden roof cut from a lemon crate (you could see the painted, ruined lemons) and shingled with oxidized keys.
I found Parker quite quickly, or Avenida Zenz, as it was now known. Its new nameplate was smaller than the old one, and a whitish penumbra surrounded it against the dirtied brick wall. The city had shown Zenz a great dishonor in naming this street after him. I didn’t know the man’s work, of course; I’ve never had time for contemporary literature. But even so: Parker (or Zenz) was one block long. This was why, I assumed, it had been chosen. So that minimal damage would be done to existent atlases. Atlases, census records, subway maps — all these the great city values more than a dead or dying writer. Notwithstanding the shit-flecked fan dances porteños perform if Borges or Cortázar enters the conversation. Zenz (or Parker) ran from Coronel Salvadores to California; I was standing at the California end, staring along the street into a barren triangular field on Salvadores. The little street was silent, sentried by one lone leafless poplar. The Riachuelo’s hard glints fired whenever I looked east and south, beyond the thrumming sheds that separated Zenz from the concrete shingle and the water. Above me a vapid sky in which geese honked as they flapped.
I had trouble locating 4300. A building that occupied an entire city block filled the northeast side of Zenz corner to corner. The largest shed I’d yet seen. A monstrous building clad in curd-colored aluminum siding. It looked as I had always imagined the exterior of the Labyrinth to look, but buildings that recall the Labyrinth have become sadly common in all cities. Near its roofline, a blue scrawl of graffiti said: YOUR MOTHER FUCKS NIGHT DOGS. The hand neat and sure, like the hand of a copyist, an eighteenth-century expert flowing on and on through the constellations. I circumnavigated the building, all four sides, thinking it might be 4300. I saw no entry door, no windows, just the blank siding through which came a mild, mechanical hum. Eight bowls, two to a side. Nothing exceptional there. I rested my forehead against the metal — the absence of other pedestrians stripped me of shame — and the vibrations soothed me. My eyelids began to fall. But this strange building was obviously not 4300, so I had to abandon my soothing, subterranean phenomenon.
On Zenz’s southwest side spread a low, dark structure: an octagonal one-story building with a hooked annex encircling its parking lot. This lay behind a massive, rusted fence. A row of blue vans gleamed in the lot, more or less like blue molars. Or the late-afternoon light itself might have possessed this dental quality. I don’t know, our lives are governed to a certain extent by dental mysteries far more than religious mysteries. But in any case I crossed and surveyed. I was sure that this barracks-like structure would also fail to be what I wanted, that the departmental operator had played an easy, cruel prank on me, but as I approached I saw that the low building was indeed 4300 Zenz. The name spelled out in umber letters beneath the ragged awning was OJEA MEAT DISTRIBUTORS. I saw no sign of life within. The side windows were small and high up like portholes, filthy and covered with metal netting. An empty desk was visible through the dead window in the steel front door; a toy Argentine flag dangled stiffly from its black dowel planted in a pot clearly meant to hold silk flowers. I pressed the button next to this steel door. The buzzer shrilled within, but nothing else happened. The meat and water bowls left here seemed to be hammered from the same dead, crude metal as the door. The blue vans in the lot, parked obliquely, displayed the words MAN’S BEST FRIEND SOCIETY in a dizzying array. Orthodontic. Or heterodontic. My blood thudded at my temples. The silence of the street magnified this drumbeat. Another wedge of geese bumbled east above me. The sun and moon occupied the sky at the same time. The pitted fence abraded my fingers as I laced them through its links. All the preconditions for a “literary” occurrence manifested themselves, and a sick, viscous elation was curdling in my bowels.