By LARA ATALLAH
From Buenos Aires, Argentina
For Eduardo Rios Pulgar,
San Telmo rings through me, like an unlived memory from a distant past. All colors, linden trees, worn down buildings, from the last century and the one before it, next to towering cement. The Argentinian Peso crumbles like the Lebanese Lira. We collect its ruins at the casa de cambio, our American dollars grotesque in the face of this country’s protracted collapse. The city is angry with love. Its sidewalks echo Beirut, and a life there, long-forgotten, languishing in the rearview mirror. Everywhere I look, an almost-déjà-vu skims the walls of my mind. Buenos Aires is Beirut, is Paris, is an aubade to the lost and never found. Down by Recoleta, Haussmann buildings dot the avenues. Dregs of a time where French architects flooded the city and left their prints along its urban landscape.
At the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina’s Guerra Sucia and the Lebanese civil war blend the same decade. Women, much like in Beirut’s Riad el Solh Square, demand to know the fate of their disappeared loved ones. Aged by a suspended present, they’ve spent years descending on the presidential palace in search of closure. That is what love does, it buries entire lifespans in deferred hope. It wraps itself around devotion and sinks stubborn teeth in endless waiting. Love keeps going and going and going. I see it, at the Plaza Dorego, where a couple tangos by me, heels clicking against the pavement, like comets tracing a clear sky.
The city of good air is a red sun. We walk its streets and circle each other, astronauts in a fugue state tethered to a world in disrepair. Pablo makes Maté in the park. The late summer light tints us gold in a city where anything can happen. Over coffee and medialunas at Poesia, Eduardo walks me through their past. Seven years, and the rest is dust. We sneak into an old building with a sprawling lobby, checkered tiles, and wrought iron staircase. Our evenings fill with steak, wine, and tango. At around midnight, after failing to find an ATM that will accept our cards, we stumble into a milonga. Couples of all ages swirl across the dancefloor. The lights are muted purples, blues, a timid yellow. The night belongs to lovers and thieves. It is alive, inebriated, in love, and I ride its high till dawn. By the end of the night, I will have lost my phone, snatched out of my hands by a man on a scooter.
On Sunday, Día de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia, people descend on Avenida Independencia, chanting La patria no se vende. I think of Beirut’s Independence Street / شارع الاستقلال sliced by a civil war that severed the city into east and west. In Buenos Aires, like in Beirut, freedom claims to be ever arriving. For ten days, I stretch my hand out hoping to touch my own buried memories in this surrogate capital. All around us, history swells with foreboding. Broken mirrors staring at each other on opposite hemispheres.
Lara Atallah is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her practice explores the political dimensions of landscape, probing both the futility and fluidity of borders as manmade constructs. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Artforum, Mizna, Acacia, Rusted Radishes, Icon MENA, Kinfolk, Camera Austria, among others. She is the author of the artist book Edge of Elysium, Vol.1 (Open Projects Press, 2019) and the poetry collection Exit signs on a seaside highway (Everybody Press, 2023).
