The history of the city is entrancing and overwhelming. From the waves of Italian and Spanish immigrants that flooded in throughout the nineteenth century to the artists and anarchists who organized in Buenos Aires’s innumerable cafés, it was a place where people came to remake themselves, refashion the world itself. Tango. Borges. It’s also brutal: the Polish Jewish slave trade that brought in thousands of young women and forced them into the brothels, the rise of fascism, the military junta that “disappeared” thousands of Argentine citizens, including many college students. I’d been vaguely aware of some of this history before I came but am shocked to learn that the junta only fell in 1984, during my lifetime. All of the reading had the opposite effect I was hoping for; I feel less prepared than ever to explain this city to anyone.

I make my way home from the café where I’ve spent hours over wine with my books, and find the streets of San Telmo have morphed. As I turn onto the side street off Defensa that leads to my doorstep, I feel I’m seeing this place for the first time as it truly is: choked with ghosts. As I look at the pools of light cast on the sidewalk by the streetlamps, I see not illuminated spaces but the depths of the darkness between and beyond them. It seems, walking these streets, you could pass through a patch of shadows and emerge on the other side an entirely different person. Or perhaps, never emerge at all.

Penny’s Back Hurts

THE SUMMER before I moved to Sun Valley to live with the Duncans seemed to drag on forever. I worked as a counselor at a local camp, taking ten-year-olds on hikes and nature walks, green with envy that Luke and Blair were at a training camp in South America that my parents hadn’t been able to afford. I was packing up the last of my things in my bedroom and beginning, for the first time, to feel nervous about leaving home.

Penny came in just as I was taking down my Picabo Street poster.