Variaciones Borges 12 (2001) BORGES AND BUENOS AIRES THE BARRIO, MEMORY AND THE OTHER  Rebecca N. Stephanis Solo en un vasto, artıstico y accesible parque, el pueblo sera pueblo; so- lo aquı no habra extranjeros, ni nacionales ni plebeyos. (Domingo F. Sarmiento) The spaces in which we live close about us and disappear like the wa- ters of the sea after a ship passes through. To look for the essence of life in space is like trying to look for the path of the ship in the water: it only exists as a memory of the flow of its uninterrupted movement in time. The places where we happen to be are ephemeral and fortuitous settings for our life in time, and to try to recapture them is impossible. (Kern 50) he excerpt from Sarmiento―s speech, cited above, is telling of the nation-building project, which had dominated Argentina in the late nineteenth-century, and would continue to play a significant role in the formation of the Argentine metropolis through the first third of the twentieth century. This speech alludes to a pub- lic space within the borders of a newly demarcated Buenos Aires, in which the barbaric tradition of the past had been symbolically dis- T