Hotel Almagro

Ricardo Piglia

When I came to live in Buenos Aires I rented a room in Hotel Almagro, situated between

Rivadavia and Castro Barros. I was about to finish my first book and Jorge Álvarez offered me a

contract to publish and work at the publishing house. I was to prepare an anthology of North

American prose from Poe to Purdy. With this salary and what I had earned in the university, I

was able to settle and live in Buenos Aires. During this period, it was at the department of

Introduction-History in the Faculty of Humanity, and I had to travel every fortnight to La Plata. I

rented a room at the pension close to the bus station and stay three days of the week in La Plata

teaching classes. I had a life divided, living two lives in two cities as if I was two different person,

with different circles of friends in each place.

What was the same, however, was the life in the hotel room. The empty corridors, the lobbies,

the anonymous atmosphere of those places where one is always passing. Living in a hotel is the

best way to avoid the illusion of 'having' a personal life, and of not having anything personal to

tell, except the traces left by others. The lodging in La Plata was an endless house converted into

a kind of hotel managed by a 'long-term' student who sublets the rooms. The landlady was

hospitalised and every month the chap dropped some money into the mailbox of the hospital at

Las Mercedes.

The room I rented was comfortable, with a balcony facing the street and a high ceiling. The

room at Hotel Almagro had a high ceiling too, and the window opens to the view of the back of

the Boxing Federation. The two rooms have similar closets, the kind with two doors and shelves

lined with newspapers. One afternoon, in La Plata, I discovered, at a corner of the closet, letters

by a woman. I always find traces left by the previous occupants of a hotel room. The letters were

hidden in a gap as if someone was concealing a pack of drugs. The nervous handwriting was

illegible. I almost understood nothing - as always when I read the letters of a stranger, the

allusions, and to really understand clearly to decipher the words but not the meanings or the

passing emotions. The woman is called Angelita, she wasn't willing to come to live in Tranque-

Lauquen. She had ran away from home and sounded desperate, giving me the feeling of

someone rejected. On the last page, with another letter attached, someone had written a

telephone number. When I tried to call it was the guard of a hospital in City Bell who answered.

Nobody there knew Angelita.

Naturally I forgot the matter, but after some time, in Buenos Aires, lying on the bed of the hotel

room, I happened to get up and inspect the closet. On one side, between a gap, there were two

letters of the woman from La Plata.

I have no explanation. The only possible explanation is to think that I was placed in a parallel

world, and there were other two, also placed in a parallel world, passed from one side to

another like me, and by these strange coincidences that chance produces, the letters had

coincided with me. It is not rare for one to meet a stranger twice in two cities, but it seems rarer

to find in two different places letters of the two person that were communicating, and which

one does not know.

The pension in La Plata still exist, and the 'long-term' student is still there. Now he is a calm old

man who sublets the rooms to students and business travellers passing La Plata on their way to

the south of the Buenos Aires province. Hotel Amalgro is still the same, and when passing by

Avenida Rivadavia, towards the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at Calle Puan, I always walk

past the door and remember those days. Opposite is the confectionary Las Violetas. Of course

there is a quiet bar, and with good lighting as if one is living in a hotel room.

Translated by Justin Loke (2013)

From Formas Breves, pp. 9-12