Retiro Train Station photographed with a panoramic Widelux

Buenos Aires was my home from 1942 (when I was born) until 1952 when my grandmother, my mother and I moved to Mexico City. I returned to Buenos Aires in 1965 to serve as a conscript in the Argentine Navy. In spite of such few years in my Native Argentina (I am now 83) my life there was ruled by trains and subways, mostly built by the English. My neighbourhood of Coghlan (we were 7 blocks from the station of that name) was named after an English railway engineer. 

My friend poet Rubén Derlis at the Coghlan train station

In my quite a few trips back to Buenos Aires in this century I can attest at the efficiency of the system. The main downtown train stations (replicas of the large ones in London) of Retiro an Constitución have connections within them to the most efficient subway system called “el subte”

During my stint in the Argentine Navy because of the usefulness of my English I was placed in the office of the US Naval Advisory Group. Because of my lofty job as translator I was allowed to live in a pension and I did not have to be in a military barracks where I would have been at the mercy of nasty corporals.

Retiro

This meant that I went daily to my office in the train line called Bartolomé Mitre. My train stopped in Coghlan and then it stopped in two more stations before I arrived in the huge Retiro Station. From there I took the subte and I only had to walk a couple of blocks to my office which was next to Navy Secretary. As a penniless conscript (our military pay was one dollar a month (they had not modified the payment since 1902, I did not have to pay the train or the subte. Sometimes the guarda (the ticket guy would demand my ticket) and I would get off and take another train.

Retiro

Now at my ripe old age I have been thinking how that train defines my present life. I get on my train as if I were a boy. In the next two stations people get off and by the time I arrive at Retiro I am the only passenger on the train. This idea reflects that most of my contemporaries and family are all dead. I get off in Retiro and there my dream idea stops.

Lavalle Subte station - Photograph by Rosemary

Of late I have found another way of looking at it. I get off the empty train at Retiro. But that empty train boards new passengers, all alive, to the trip back to Coghlan and beyond. Is my entry into Retiro signify that I am dead?

I cannot finish here how once in that train when I was in the navy I had my sailor cap under my arm. I thought it was polite to take it off in the train. A well-dressed man came up to me and said, “Conscript put on your cap.” I answered, “I don’t want to.” The gentleman then pulled an ID that said he was a general and a member of SIDE (Servicio de Inteligencia del Estado). He demanded my name and conscript identification number. When I got to my office a friendly Argentine Marine Corps corporal asked me. “Alex what have you done? An arrest order has arrived and you are going to the clink after work every day for a week.” When I finally finished that arrest I can attest here that I was full of lice.

Left Cristophe Gauthier - Right Maximilien Brisson - 28 February 2026

For anybody reading this blog', which is about my attendance to a EMV concert at St. Anselm’s Anglican Church, yesterday 28 February, 2026, be advised that I am not a music critic. I am an amateur. And because my photographs no longer appear in magazines,where I was paid handsomely, I play around taking photographs with a slow shutter.

trombón s. (1808-) RAE (the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy)

trombón, trombon, tromboncito

Etimología. Voz tomada del italiano trombone, palabra atestiguada en esta lengua desde antes del 1400 como 'instrumento musical de viento parecido a la trompa pero de dimensiones mayores y de registro más grave' (DECH, s. v. trompa; véase DELI, s. v. trómba).

The above is the etymology of the trombón. I am Argentine so I speak Spanish and this dictionary of the Real Academia Española is one of the best.

I had a chat with the youngish (in his 30s) trombonist, Maximilien Brisson before the concert. He told me he was not going to mention that his instrument was a sackbut (the name given in Germany in the 15th to the 18th century) because as he was going to play only Italian compositions (one was French and one other a composition of his) he preferred the Italian name trombone. Because of my Spanish we talked about the fact that buche means means to rinse your mouth (as in after you brush your teeth) and that is the connection with the German name. I then asked him (in jest) who was the most famous buche musician and told him it was Dizzy Gillespie who blew his cheeks very large when he played his trumpet.

The tall harpsichordist, Christophe Gauthier, explained in detail the great elaborate procedure to tune his instrument with Brisson’s trombone. It went over my head so I will not approach here any kind of explanation. Brisson was very good at explaining the details of the composers and their compositions.  These two were serious musicians who could indeed smile.

I was pleased to find out that there were two women composers in the program, Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini. It seems that in the pre-baroque era there were some talented feminists!

Barbara Strozzi

The Strozzi compositions were ably sung by soprano Bahareh Poureslami whom I have heard many times before at St. Anselms. What was particularly interesting to me is that The Strozzi compositions had very sad lyrics and Poureslami could make her face look exactly like the lyrics. 

I cannot resist in placing here a photograph of my youngest daughter (now 54) crying. This was a sad concert. But this photograph of Hilary always makes me smile. 

Hilary Stewart

Mexico City circa 1969

 

Prolific would be an understatement to describe my photography. Just of my ,I have thousands and thousands of negatives and slides. Most are filed under year-date. Some of the earlier ones that I took of my Rosemary with our first daughter Alexandra, are in a separate ring binder that contains most of the photographs that I started taking in Austin, Texas in 1958. It was then that I bought a Pentacon-F single lens reflex made in what was then called Russian occupied Germany.

These days of idle living with my two cats, Niño and Niña I am attempting to put order into my photo files. I am not in the least concerned about a legacy, once I meet with my oblivion. It is really no different that vacuuming my house or feeding the cats.

But no matter how plain this task is I do run into photographs (in this case b+w negatives attached to a contact sheet) that have startled me as they are beautiful.

I do know that these pictures of Rosemary and Alexandra were taken at the time when the Mexican Olympics had happened. Rosemary called Alexandra “our Olympic Baby”.

Once I had started my career in Vancouver around 1977, as a magazine photographer, I learned the trick of seeing a contact sheet and immediately being able to identify the keepers.

The four pictures here have pen x-marks on the negative sleeve. This means I may have noticed them years ago. I have no memory of having done that nor if I ever printed them.

Looking at these today, 28 February, 2026 means that I am seeing them for the first time. As I obsessively read Jorge Luís Borges, I keep stating here that he wrote that every first time is followed by the exact first time.

Rosemary is now gone. She died on December 9, 2020 and Alexandra is now 58. This sentence is a first time and it will be followed by the same sentence, over and over.

When I took these photographs we lived in an extremely small and narrow house in the yet to be discovered Zona Rosa of Mexico City. My guess is that I shot these photographs at a nearby park. I do not know if I used that Pentacon-F or a “newer” Asahi Pentax S-3 that I bought used at Foto Rudiger in 1962.

I do know that I can pick up both cameras, they work beautifully today, and if I look through the viewfinder, my variation of the Julian Barnes’s AIM (autobiographical involuntary memory)  a voluntary one will immediately transport me to that first time that Rosemary and Ale faced my camera.