Buenos Aires appears in a story told at a Frisian tavern, first as a spectacular port of meat exports and then as the setting of a ranch episode whose concealed arrangement unsettles a wealthy widow. The city’s vivid abundance and the riddle that travels away from it make it more than a distant place in her recollection: it is where spectacle, power, and an unexplained confession converge.

The port in the widow’s memory

At dinner after Benno von Archimboldi’s reading, a widow who preferred music or painting to literature takes charge of the conversation. She recalls crossing the ocean to Buenos Aires in 1927 or 1928, when the city was, in her phrase, a meat emporium. Ships arrived empty and left loaded with meat for destinations around the world. At night, from the deck, she watched immigrants load the holds with the flesh of thousands of cattle and calves. The port’s red glow recalled barely cooked steak and grilled ribs; the sight startled her awake and overcame her seasickness.

That first night was followed by a more comfortable visit ashore. The widow and her husband stayed at one of the city’s most expensive hotels, attended the opera, and then went to a ranch. The remembered city thus contains two sharply contrasted registers: the immense labor and bloody cargo of its harbor, and the wealth, leisure, and social access represented by the hotel and opera.

The ranch and its concealed arrangement

At the ranch, the widow’s husband, an expert horseman and former cavalry captain, raced first against the rancher’s son and then against a gaucho, winning both contests. He also beat the gaucho’s sixteen-year-old son. The boy rode with striking intensity, clinging to his horse’s neck and whipping it onward, but lost to the more experienced German. The adults applauded the husband’s skill; the boy, left alone with his horse, looked angry and humiliated.

The widow approached him to console him, though they had no shared language. He led her to a wrought-iron pergola amid unfamiliar flowers and trees, where they paused beside a black-marble fountain. Its dancing cherub seemed at once European and cannibal, an image that gives the garden an uncanny character within the otherwise polished ranch gathering. When a relative of the rancher came to fetch the widow, the boy called after her. Through the relative’s translation, she learned that the rancher had arranged for her husband to win the last two races.

The riddle carried out to sea

The disclosure did not immediately make sense to the widow. She continued thinking about the boy’s words through the rest of the party, lay awake that night, and remained distracted during the next day’s horseback ride and barbecue. The riddle followed her back to Buenos Aires, through hotel life and receptions at the German, English, and Ecuadorian embassies, and then onto her ship bound for Europe.

Only days after sailing did its meaning come to her. At four in the morning, on deck, she stood surrounded by the sound and unseen expanse of the ocean; the narration leaves the content of her realization unstated. When the Swabian reaches this point in the tale, the widow falls silent, and the postwar tavern grows uncomfortable. The listeners finish their sausage, potatoes, and beer as though bracing for a cold journey home. Buenos Aires remains behind as the place from which the unresolved story departed, while the narrative preserves the revelation itself as a silence rather than an explanation.