FROM THE ARCHIVES: City lights

"When you come right down to it," Gregorovius said, "Paris is one big metaphor."

Martini Bar

I'll start simply enough. With the date and the time. It is early May in Buenos Aires, and the autumn air is strange and satisfactorily alien. I am in a filthy, neon-lit alley in the Once, and here it looks to me, momentarily, like Paris — only a suffocating Paris where the stone buildings collapse and gasp for air as the black iron street lamps tilt and screech; the whizzing, puffing cars vanish in clouds of dust, the cobble stone alley ways keel over like sinking Titantics. You are struck, paralyzed, as you perceive some invisible god tightening a massive belt around the entire stone built city, which any second now is going to give. But the well dressed people, smelling like perfume, seem to breath amid all this shrinking, and head to the theatre, or are leaving, and going to drink coffee in crowded, midnight cafes. All these druplets, all the city, materialize through brown-grey oil slashes of some mad painter's sure hand, perhaps.

I'm heading to see a friend's play, and I have one hour until the curtains are drawn. As I cross busy streets, I'm in a mad search for the right place to get tight. With only a few days left in this city, I should squeeze out all the glory-filled moments, real story-worthy stuff, that fills the books of all the men who have made cities dissapear, replacing them in twinkling lights and — now I see it — mystic shadows.

There's a green-lit neon sign which says Martini bar, in curvy '50s font, and reading the menu posted on the glass and bronze door, it seems just cheap enough to sit in. I sit down and take a seat facing the window, waving the menu away as the waiter approaches, "un martini, por favor, con hielo," I say. He walks off and shouts out to the bar man the drink order. I get up and head to the back of the house and use the toilet. By the time I get back, the drink is there, and the waiter is plopping two ice cubes into the tall glass they made it in. He sets down a bottle of seltzer next to the glass and steps back as I take my seat.

Already, I am feeling a hell of a lot better. A kind of wonder washes over me. With a displaced nostalgia for golden days, I watch my waiter as he walks about to another table taking an order. The most striking thing about him — and the two other waiters in the place — is what they are wearing. They wear black bow ties over these perfect old tuxedo shirts, faded and yellow, impossible to call white, yet still, undeniably white, somehow. Advertizements aged in storefront windows — or, wait— the exact colour of sun bleached newspaper.

With great, inexplicably deep enjoyment I observe my man wipe counters with a dirty, navy blue rag. When he's not busy he stands next to me, straight up glowing with pride, about one metre away, hapilly looking towards the front of the house. He whistles, maybe, a little tiny bit. I scan his clothes. As I play with the seltzer bottle and stir the ice, the night begins to glow and I see hundreds of beautiful twinkling lights forming in my mind.

I order one more, this time with olives. I slam it down and enter the air again, wide open this time and full of warmth. I stroll to the theatre and I am 20 minutes early, damn. I order a beer and sit on the patio, smoke and speak to the theatre owner's wife.