In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Aleph,” the narrator walks with a pompous poet down the Calle Bernardo de Irigoyen, in Buenos Aires. Later, he follows the man, whose wife he has fallen in love with, down to his basement, and experiences a single point in which all the mysteries of the “inconceivable universe” are perceptible. On a scalding day in December, I met the Argentine composer Oscar Edelstein at a café near the opera house in Buenos Aires, the Teatro Colón: not far from the reference points of Borges’s story. Our conversation started with the city and its writers. We drank cortados, Edelstein smoked his pipe, and buses whipped around the corner as we turned to music. Deborah Claire Procter, a Welsh artist who works with Edelstein, provided occasional translation and clarification as we talked.
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