Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is both the setting of Elena’s search for Isabel and a geography she must piece together from fading memory, other people’s directions, and the effort of moving through the city in a deteriorating body. The journey toward Belgrano makes urban navigation part of the novel’s central action: Elena is trying to reach a particular house, but each avenue, station, and landmark also leads back toward the history connecting her daughter Rita and Isabel.

Urban Setting and Remembered Geography

The city is rendered through practical landmarks rather than a detached panorama. Elena remembers that Isabel lives in an old house in Belgrano, beside doctors’ offices, behind a heavy wooden door with bronze fittings. She cannot recall the street name, but remembers the house, Isabel, and fragments of the visit she made there with Rita nearly twenty years earlier. The address is therefore less a piece of information than a collection of sensory and relational clues that Elena must assemble into a route.

One remembered clue is a question Rita asked about a street called Soldado de la Independencia. Elena cannot bring the name back to mind, though she recalls that the house was one or two blocks from an avenue running along the edge of Buenos Aires from Retiro Station to the General Paz Highway. A small plaza beside the train tracks fixes the location more firmly in her memory. On the earlier visit, Elena and Rita did not see the train, but heard it pass; Rita asked which line it was, while Isabel, crying too hard, did not answer. The city’s geography thus holds an emotional scene in fragments: a railway sound, a question, and the silence of a woman in distress.

Routes, Stations, and Landmarks

When Elena seeks directions, a private car service occupies the corner where a bakery once stood. She had bought bread there every day after moving into the neighborhood as a new bride; eventually the bread disappeared and the cars arrived. The replacement gives the scene a small history of urban change, while also placing Elena’s present need beside an everyday place from her earlier life. The drivers help her identify the avenue as Libertador and the destination area as near Olleros, but these names do not restore the street address she has lost.

Elena refuses the offer of a ride, despite the owner’s willingness to give her a good price and let her pay later. She says she will take the train because she dislikes debts. The drivers warn that the nearest subway station, Carranza, would leave her with a long walk, and offer a taxi route as an alternative. Their directions are complicated: one describes continuing along Libertador, while another explains that it becomes Figueroa Alcorta and must be left near the Planetarium, toward the Spanish Monument, before Libertador can be taken again toward Olleros. Elena leaves without further discussion, unwilling to repeat an answer she has already given.

Later, she does take a taxi. The driver follows the route she recites: along 9 de Julio to Libertador, onward until the road turns into Figueroa Alcorta, then toward the Planetarium and the Spanish Monument before returning to Libertador and continuing to Olleros. The street names serve as a verbal map when Elena cannot supply an exact address. They also become a sequence she can hold onto while her body delays the journey: arriving at the destination depends on both the driver’s knowledge of the city and her ability to direct him through remembered landmarks.

The City as a Physical Obstacle

Buenos Aires is not merely traversed; it has to be negotiated step by step. At the taxi, Elena cannot move one leg into the car without using both hands. She braces the leg already inside, rotates the other at an angle, presses down on her thigh until her foot reaches the floor, and then pulls the door shut by its handle. The familiar urban trip becomes a bodily task whose small stages interrupt the onward route. Even after she is seated and ready to leave, the next dose of medication is not yet available to her: her movement has stopped, and she must wait for the time measured by her pills to begin again.

The rail journey offers no easier command of the city. Elena strains to read the blurred, slanted name of a station and counts on her fingers, guessing that it is Avellaneda. The uncertainty places her inside a transit system she cannot fully see or reliably interpret. At another point, the inspector who will speak with her off duty is sitting on the curved, twisting root of an ombú tree in a square. Such details give the city a route of stations and meeting places, but each is encountered through Elena’s impaired vision, limited mobility, or need to ask someone else for help.

Narrative Significance

The novel’s present action unfolds over a single arduous day as Elena travels to see Isabel, while memories return to the events of twenty years earlier. Buenos Aires joins those time layers without making them identical: the old house and the train tracks belong to the remembered visit with Rita, while the taxi, station, and uncertain directions belong to Elena’s present search. Locations recur as practical coordinates, but also as prompts through which the past becomes accessible in partial, often painful images.

The city’s routes reveal the gap between knowing where someone is and being able to reach them. Elena knows the neighborhood and recognizes the avenue once it is named, yet cannot recover the exact street or make the journey without assistance. The route to Isabel is consequently more than a passage across Buenos Aires. It is the spatial form of Elena’s effort to investigate Rita’s death, a journey propelled by what she remembers and hindered by what her body, vision, and memory can no longer reliably do.