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Part One: The Macuto Yarn On a journey I recently had cause to make to Venezuela, I had the opportunity to admire the famous "Macuto Yarn," one of the Wonders of the New World. It is the legacy of nameless pirates, a tourist attraction, and an enigma without answer. It constitutes a strange moment of naivete that traversed the impenetrable centuries and in the process became one with a Nature that in these latitudes is as rich as every new growth it engenders. Macuto is one of those...

This story was inspired by a bizarre episode in Argentinean history. After the overthrow of Juan Perón in 1955, the embalmed corpse of his wife, the immensely popular "Evita," was stolen by the military in an attempt to prevent the opposition from using it as a political rallying point. The body was moved from place to place until it was finally buried secretly in Milan. "That Woman" is based on an actual interview the author conducted with the military official who was responsible...

When I first moved to Buenos Aires I rented a room in the Hotel Almagro, on Av. Rivadavia and Castro Barros. I was finishing the stories for my first book and Jorge Álvarez offered me a contract to publish it and gave me a job in his publishing house. I prepared an anthology of North American prose for him, from Poe to Purdy, and with what he paid me and with what I was making at the university I had enough to get set up and live in Buenos Aires. At that time I was working under...

There are no heroes in the city. Nor in the country. This is the problem that modern women face. Our men don't go to war, and if they did it would be out of stupidity or irresponsibility. Even so, we need our heroes, just as we have at all times in history; but we are no longer sure of what the word means. Felipe, though, was sure. He had two heroes: Superman, who could fly, and who punished the enemies of the Earth and was in love with Lois Lane; and Martín—his father,...

The President Has Mystical Visions." This was the headline in the Heraldo. Mr. Camargo had been convinced that the Heraldo, his newspaper's rival, would not publish a single word about the scandalous bank deposits made by the president's son in Sao Paulo. Even if they had any information, they would conceal it. In the last couple of years, the president had granted the Heraldo all sorts of favors, bestowing it with radio broadcasting licenses and the concession to a luxury game...

1 As simple as a drop of water, as clear as a splinter of birch, Because the foal falls patiently, cautiously out of the horse and is able to stand, And the fish unfolds like a metal tear and is able to fly, and people quand m'me Are slow to learn silence and absence amidst their armoured scree, It isn't as simple, as clear what I'm left with when I have put down my pen. From Springvossen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2000). By arrangement...

I have emigrated three times in my life. In 1978, I emigrated from Argentina to come to France, because a military dictatorship had taken hold in my country. In 1999, I emigrated from France, where I'd lived for twenty years, in order to return to Argentina, because I missed it so much. And in 2002, I emigrated from Argentina to return to France, because a financial dictatorship had taken hold in my country. This triple experience of emigration from one side of the planet to the other...

Xul said of himself: "I am maestro of a writing no one reads yet" and "I am world champion of a game no one knows." But Jorge Luis Borges, who was influenced by him, said: "Xul took on the task of reforming the universe, of proposing on this earth a different order. For that, among other things, he changed the current numerical system of mathematics to use a duodecimal system, with which he painted his watercolors." But Xul remained a secret. I remember hearing about him in the 1960s, but...

The narrator is visiting London, sent by a Buenos Aires newspaper, to interview the famous British author Davies. She is haunted by a profound early friendship with Ana, and equally by a relationship from fifteen years before, with the artist Bruno. Here, two of the protagonists' lives come together again, while Ana persists in memory between them. The newspaper gave the story a splash. It was the first time that Davies had agreed to be interviewed for the Argentine press, and they...

There was a woman who never did anything without first consulting the I Ching. She imagined a game of roulette in which the bets were paid with the events of the player's life. The monk climbs the hill leaning on his cane. The storm approaches. His disciple has refused to follow him. The enigmatic character of the prophecies allowed her a certain margin for personal decisions. There were several possible futures. She understood that the key to building herself a future was to...

One spring evening in 1890, from his vantage point up on the Primorsky Boulevard, a young man was watching the movement of ships in the port of Odessa. Decked out in his Sunday finest, he contrasted as much with the everyday casualness of most of the passersby as with the exoticism of others. The fact is, the young man was dressed to set out on a great adventure: his mother had given him his varnished leather shoes; his uncle, a tailor by trade, had completed his made-to-measure suit...

1 I walk along the Avenida Costanera Sur,1 contemplating the portentous river, traversed just over a century ago by thousands of Spaniards, Italians, Jews, Poles, Albanians, Russians, and Germans, driven from their own countries by hunger and poverty. The great visionaries who governed the country at the time offered the Pampas, this metaphor of nothingness, to "all those men who are willing and able," all those who needed a home, a ground in which to lay their roots. After all, it is...

“Literary fanaticism, in any of its forms, whether from the point of view of master or disciple, has always been incompatible with the intelligence and free spirit of Saer.”—José Saramago Two or three friends are waiting at the airport when I arrive, and after the formalities of customs and greetings, we undertake the car ride from the airport into the city. My trips home almost always take place around the same time of year, and so the same clear spring morning,...

Irreversible is the river on whose back dead leaves swirl. Irreversible are words- the dust of roads mingled with breath, warm breath that sticks to our trembling lips like fog to a boat.Irreversible is this cup of tea, irreversible the restrained aura of melancholy after a superficial conversation about books and cemeteries. Perhaps even Routine- the eggcup that keeps half of our round selves in balance- is irreversible.Irreversible are all moments of love even when...

living on an island far from cities with traffic lights and people.Outside we hear the rustlings of a bed of reeds where the wind with its toothless mouth blows luring in tides.A boat is moored on the shore a forlorn boat rotting in the rain.It seems we'll never be able to use it to sail home.

Large, gray, sprawled like an old elephant. Winter is ending. Low, sloping roofs are overturned boats slumbering along the shores of drowsiness.Twenty years of an oak tree's life is burned instantly in a stove. And eyes meet only by accident like suburban roads that intersect in grassy meadows, like streams that swell their banks, like hairs on a pillow after a long illness.The old elephant's hoof tramples the ground sowing poisonous yellow flowers in its path...

He comes to me every day with a cruel bounce in his step with eyes darting like little green flames- the town postman in a heavy, damp coat jovially announcing he has nothing for me. I see his blue uniform broaden into form metal buttons flickering in the sunlight as he approaches my desperate shape. How those skillful hands-like the hands of a gynecologist!- maneuver through his bag, revealing nothing.I imagine a great pile of sealed white envelopes lying somewhere: birth...

Without fail Sundays at the cinema were always rainy days big black umbrellas clashing against the ticket booth. The doorman among the torn stubs looked like a watercolor hung crookedly on a kitchen wall. We waited anxiously in the front row until the horizontal beam lit a band of white dust and settled on the screen.Always the same old films soundtrack crackling like handfuls of rice thrown at the newlyweds' white car. Beautiful actors kissed as if for the first...

It's not time for a change. As long as I can remember it's never been time for a change. Like cars that screech to a halt houses stand poised in their old breeding ground of rotten acacia leaves.From ribs that bulge like knots on a bundle of wet ropes a faint voice arises, crying, "choose!" Choose between memory and that peculiar stench. . . . Choose between clouds and earth. I tremble like a tree in a winter storm. I wait. I don't understand but I...

Alif You're not beginning . . . It's an eternity, you know . . . I mean, the ever-after, you know No matter, then. Raise your cavalry But do not leave behind the horizon, Or the sea . . . or the soil lines for beginnings, finish me off on a wire. You are not beginning now, watch out . . . anyone who begins is deceived Ba We haven't yet finished the elegy for the century, We haven't exposed blood, flowing from poetry, or a tear from prose,...

Set first in the village of Saint-Martin in southeast France, then in the refugee camp of Nour Chams, Étoile Errante (Wandering Star) tells the story of two teenage girls on the threshold and in the aftermath of World War II: Esther, a French Jew who flees for Jerusalem with her mother, Elizabeth, just before the German occupation; and Nejma, a young Arab orphaned and unable to return to the ancient city of her birth, Akka, after the Israeli declaration of statehood. The following...

1 Here I am you alone In this mad, gaping Hell Here I am you alone and death altogether With its predators and its seers and the informers Perhaps I am arriving at The limit of my possibilities For you to arrive at the last Dream Flare up until you see me and Become complete until I see you My rose between two fires Inflaming me Hopefully I am inciting wisdom In this ruin I have tried To the end of the flower and the fire, Then, how have they isolated my...

In our garden there was an apple tree whose mouth-watering fruits could be seen from the upstairs window of the house next door. Our neighbors, Rade and Jela, used to go to the market to buy apples for their two young daughters--but it was no use. However delicious, other apples were never as tempting as the ones that were visible from the family's window. Each morning, as soon as Rade and Jela left for work, the girls would jump over the garden fence in order to pick the overripe...

Everybody knows you can't choose your place of birth, any more than you can select your parents. My birthplace is located on a body of water; human hands have altered and straightened the banks so many times that these waters are no longer referred to as a river, but rather a canal. This canal empties into the Tisza, and the Tisza flows into the Danube. My memories of the Danube begin in the summer of 1941. My parents, who had been so inept as to be Jews, were already under arrest...

1 The television room had never been so full and so silent, except for the announcer's voice booming for more than an hour. Nobody added a whisper to his commentary. Nobody made a move to leave. It was the first time that the entire group of political prisoners at Spaç, including the mine workers and the reserves, had assembled in that hut hammered together out of planks and rusty sheet iron. Sitting more closely crammed than ever before on the rows of stools, we were...