Scouting Buenos Aires

i was on the balcony with a girl smoking a cigarette -i don’t smoke but if i were 20, when iwas 20 i smoked my cigarette the same way, clumsy, talking about elevator run-ins and sneaking out of class for  abeer, glancing up at a whitewashed and windowless building the edges of which i couldn’t make out, obscured by an old sycamore with camouflage bark that arched huge over the invisible frame, so that staring beyond it i tried to make sense of the soft gradations and unclear objects like a rothko up close, assigning names to things blurry in the distance; the girl noticed and stopped somewhat insulted as if i were waiting for someone more interesting to appear, and now realizing what i had seen, only shadows against the wall, i explained to her i thought they might be exhausts or chimneys surrounded in fog like a scene from mary poppins; crazy,she said, olivia was standing right where you are and said the exact same thing.

she posted this on her blog, by borges

We’ll hunt for a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.

[Un tercer tigre buscaremos. Éste
Será como los otros una forma
De mi sueño, un sistema de palabras
Humanas y no el tigre vertebrado
Que, más allá de las mitologías,
Pisa la tierra. Bien lo sé, pero algo
Me impone esta aventura indefinida,
Insensata y antigua, y persevero
En buscar por el tiempo de la tarde
El otro tigre, el que no está en el verso.]