Alberto Fuguet: Buenos Aires revives me

"How do you return to a city you've never been to? Have I been here? Why does everything seem so familiar?" These are the questions Chilean novelist, chronicler, and filmmaker Alberto Fuguet asks in his documentary about Tulsa, the city where his beloved Rumble Fish is set, which describe his latest visit to Buenos Aires. Although he has visited the city several times, he never tires of rediscovering streets, sidewalks, and bistros that are creating a secret canon.

“I don't consider myself an intellectual writer. I think I could go out for drinks with you and all we'd do would be pop. Especially when we talk badly about people. Or about Mirtha Legrand. But it's hard for me to put it together,” he says as we begin this tour of the Retiro area. A quadrant that inspires him and compels him to settle into a hotel for a few more days than the Malba Residency that brought him to the country to finish his most recent fiction. In November, he'll be back as one of the jurors—just like last year—for the Clarín Novela Prize .

We're at the intersection of Paraguay and Reconquista streets. Fuguet , dressed entirely in black, contrasts with the pastel green tones of Balabú, a charming café offering Russian cuisine that will be the first stop on our itinerary. "I like this place," he says. "I feel like this is the new Argentina, much more so than Tortoni. Because there are more tourists there. The culture becomes kitsch. I don't want to be surrounded by tourists; that's why I go to Epcot," he says.

He tells a little more about his time here: “They gave me a very nice apartment, but I admit that in the end, you feel like you have your own Buenos Aires, or your own neighborhood that's similar in every city. It was in a nice neighborhood, but I felt like I was having trouble writing. It seemed far from everything,” he says, shaking the ice cubes in the espresso and tonic he just ordered. He adds some chocolate candies that are like small circles with white dots. He describes them as: “They look like chorizos.”

The trip to Buenos Aires helped him rediscover a city that fascinated him since his first visit back in the 1980s. He yearns for that feeling, which he captured in his book, *Certain Boys* , with a very personal perspective: “Democracy seemed cool to me. Buenos Aires attracts me because it's not Chile,” he says. His current trip also helped him rediscover himself: “I admit I'm more of a hotel guest when I'm abroad. I learned a lot,” he confesses. He traveled to San Luis, the place where he set his latest novel, and, he admits, “it was in my imagination. I didn't know anything about it before. I felt like I was in Nebraska. It helped me realize that Lucrecia Martel's films were more realistic than I thought,” he reveals with a laugh.

His latest book, published in Argentina by Mansalva, is Todo no es suficiente (Everything Is Not Enough), a profile of a “cursed” writer, the Uruguayan Gustavo Escanlar . He considers it a kind of “guideline not to follow for a young writer. Don't work in television. Don't get married. What do you do with your money? If you don't follow it to the letter, you can be saved.”

The conversation turns to Manuel Puig , a writer of whom he is a self-confessed fan: "I think if Argentina created Puig, it must have done something right." Although he admits that he sees him more as a writer of the world. He asks about his heirs. He has trouble finding them. "I'm interested in his writing because it resembles my mind." With Puig's help, he recalls the talk at Malba entitled "Pop in Literature: The Hard Drive That Feeds Us." Has the world become pop?

He thinks about it for a few seconds. “I never thought a publishing house like Mansalva would exist. And I always thought I'd be afraid of going into a bookstore, that journalists like you would always scare me.” And he points out that he also sees these other shifts as positive: “Now everyone knows about cinema. That attitude is celebratory. It's uniting music, cinema, television, now the internet, clothing, I suppose, food, all together. Literature is another artifact, perhaps one of the most powerful, but it is another artifact. I feel like readers are much more like us.”

She finishes her last sweets and we walk a few meters to the Menéndez bookstore, on Paraguay Street, 400. She takes pictures. She looks for her books. She finds the latest one. She says this bookstore seems nice; it reminds her of Eterna Cadencia. When she came for the Clarín Prize last year, she found the previous winner's book here, Quiebra el álamo , by Roberto Chuit.

As he rummages, literary memories surface. Names, furtive quotes. The first is CE Feiling, a classmate of his at the University of Iowa. “My book McOndo came a little from Feiling,” he reveals about his legendary anthology of magical anti-realism. He recalls how, at a newsstand on Florida and Paraguay Streets, he met a young journalist who turned out to be Rodrigo Fresán. He also evokes Juan Forn, someone who was instrumental in publishing Mala onda in Buenos Aires.

Almost next door is another bookstore. This time, a used one. Los Siete Pilares. “This is a film-worthy place,” Fuguet warns as his memories of the film surface: “We once filmed in a bookstore. There are usually beautiful people there. You have the fantasy of picking someone up there. In real life, it doesn't happen, and it happens even less in big bookstores,” he concludes.

As he rummages through and is dazzled by an English translation of Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair— "I was turned on by the cover"—which he ends up buying, he recalls his visits to BAFICI: "There I made the decision to be a filmmaker, to stop being a critic." Another character comes to mind: the bizarre film critic Diego Curubeto: "He was an expert on the worst Argentine cinema. He had that very Argentine contradiction of being someone so interested in something that interests no one."

The bookseller approaches and, upon hearing Fuguet's fanaticism for the author of Painted Mouths , tells Fuguet that he sells a book with a dedication from him. This unlocks another memory: "In Mexico, I bought one with a dedication that said something like 'don't hate me for all the long-distance calls I used.' It cost me very little, something like a dollar. They didn't know what they were selling." This time, he decides not to buy it. The dedication was for a certain Sally. Fuguet, in fan mode, ventures a hypothesis: he dedicated many books to movie actresses and he really liked Liza Minelli's Sally Bowles.

She poses for a photo in front of the ruins of Harrods, that legendary store that graced downtown Buenos Aires when, as Beatriz Sarlo recalls in Scenes from Postmodern Life , it was the longed-for stroll for any fervent young person during the 1960s, a time of cultural fervor. The sun is beginning to set. The sidewalks, now empty of office workers, are resting. It's the perfect time to take refuge in a local bar in search of a drink to lead the way to the end of the night.

Fuguet suggests a spot, Dada, located at 941 San Martín Street, a charming bistro that looks like something out of a Francis Ford Coppola film. The director of The Godfather himself hung around there, as did other celebrities. Dim lighting, bebop jazz in the background, and paintings hanging from the walls. A bar with colorful mosaic tiles and a few tables outline this cozy refuge that seems frozen in time. It's a conjunction of the refined and the borderline, the underground and the cool. It perfectly represents what Enrique Symns described when he defined bars as "eternity's last offering. The forest that remains for the city." It's an invitation to the unexpected that dazzles and seduces Fuguet, like so many other artists.

He orders two "really dirty" martinis and a portion of fried polenta. While he explains that he's meeting with Ignacio Rogers because he'll be adapting his novel "Nonfiction," produced by Santiago Mitre, he outlines a theory based on the films of Wong Kar-wai: "Suddenly, he arrives in Buenos Aires and films something else. Constitución, San Telmo as never before seen, pushing colors to the limit. That's the Buenos Aires that interests me most. A city is also color," he theorizes as he finishes his martini and lets out one last sentence: "This country has become trashy. I'm not going to talk about politics."

As we leave the bistro, it's already completely dark. We head toward the final stop of this journey shaped by the Chilean writer's whimsical eye. We stop a few meters from the Kavanagh, that Art Deco gem built from the fury of Corina Kavanagh, for decades the tallest building in the city. "This is their Empire State Building. With the Kavanagh behind them, everyone looks good," Fuguet remarks, posing seriously for the camera lens and wondering what those apartments must look like inside.

“The other day, the algorithm showed me a song by Antonio Birabent that said, 'I'm going out for a walk, through Buenos Aires.'” Following the Chilean writer for a handful of hours is like listening to memories woven with pop references, sharp reflections, and fleeting anecdotes.

Like the one he tells, almost before saying goodbye, about the Uruguayan sailor who would stop by a bar in downtown Buenos Aires for a drink whenever he could, saying, "Here, away from home, I can be myself." Something similar could be said of the author himself. Alberto Fuguet in Buenos Aires is, perhaps, more Alberto Fuguet than anywhere else.

Everything Is Not Enough. The Short, Intense, and Overexposed Life of Gustavo Escanlar , by Alberto Fuguet. Mansalva, 110 pages.