Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the setting of Bella Baxter’s reported search for her parents’ grave and former home, a search that gives her supposed childhood a physical geography without recovering her memories. The city’s importance lies in that contradiction: Bella can be taken to places said to belong to her past, but she cannot recognize them as her own.

A City in Bella’s Account

Bella recalls that she and Godwin Baxter tried to visit her parents’ grave in Buenos Aires. According to the explanation she gives, the railway company that had paid for the burial placed her parents in a cemetery on the edge of a deep canyon. She says eruptions of Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, or Popocatapetl caused the cemetery to collapse into an avalanche, reducing headstones, coffins, and bones to dust. The grave is therefore described as inaccessible not through distance but through the destruction of the ground that held it.

The Former Home

Instead, Godwin Baxter took Bella to a house where he said she had lived with her parents. She describes a dusty courtyard, a cracked water tank with a vine growing from its side, and scrawny chickens. An elderly caretaker called her Bella Señorita, suggesting that he remembered her, though she could not remember him. Godwin questioned him in Spanish, and Bella learned that she had not lived there long: her parents had been migrants, travelling as the markets for the commodities her father sold fluctuated.

Place, Story, and Missing Memory

The account of Buenos Aires sits beside Godwin Baxter’s invented explanation of Bella’s origins: he has told others that she is a niece whose parents died in a South American railway accident, leaving her with amnesia. The burial story and the account of the former home give that identity landmarks and family details, but Bella’s own experience of the visit offers no confirming recollection. She stares at the courtyard’s objects and strives to remember, without success. Buenos Aires thus serves both as the setting of an attempted family history and as evidence of its limits: a place can be described, visited, and populated with traces of the past, while remaining emotionally and personally unfamiliar.