HE’S BEEN WEARING THE SAME SUIT FOR FOUR WEEKS. HE has no money to buy himself a new one, and no friends to lend him one. He shares a rathole with two Argentinians who are kind enough to let him sleep on the floor. His suitcase might have come long ago, but without his freight note he can’t get it. He goes to the post office every day. Still no letter from Carl. Meanwhile, he has already written five, with the increasingly urgent request to send the freight note at all costs, or at least to find out the number from the shipping company.

It’s hot; there’s no wind. His face is covered in a film of sweat. At the laundry he has his suit ironed for the third time this week, which hardly helps—the sweat and the dust eat their way into it. While he waits in underwear and socks behind a crooked curtain, the girl runs the iron over the suit, her face blank.

Gracias—that’s one thing he can say. Hasta luego is another. He has a Spanish–English dictionary; he opted for it over the Spanish–German one. His stomach is making problems for him too. He often sits in a filthy food stall and spoons up soup with bits of meat in it. The milk usually curdles when he pours it in his coffee.

Buenos Aires also has massive buildings and geometry, like New York, but the buildings aren’t as tall and there’s more space in between them. On the grand boulevards he hears European languages. Near the post office is a large square with an obelisk, a neatly scrubbed park with a statue of a man on horseback, with pools of water and hysterical fountains. Hotels with white, curved awnings like seashells over every window. Every city has these little spots that act like they know nothing of the other little spots.

His spot: he has to ride half an hour on the bus to a neighborhood of low buildings, unfinished or already stripped. There’s always something missing on each of them—a windowpane, a doorbell, a wall. Chickens in the unpaved streets. At night the electricity goes out. Villa miseria, his new friends call it. There’s no need to translate.

It doesn’t matter, he doesn’t plan to stay here long. It’s just a city like any other. He will keep moving, back to America.

He nears the harbor. The siesta is over, the Porteños are slowly rising from sleep. “Down there,” someone tells him when he asks for the aduana principal, the customs office for parcel post. The ships bear names like Rotterdam, London, Bilbao, Genoa. He walks among shipping containers and sleeping people. The Rio de la Plata is mud-brown as usual.