I still have that folder.
For a long time, I thought it contained the project for a restaurant, although today I know that what it really held was something far more difficult to organise. Among its pages were photographs taken in different cities, sheets torn from a notebook, drawings made while I waited for a flight, magazine cuttings and brief notes hurriedly written at the foot of a staircase, on an airport table or during a business dinner. Many of them contained little more than a single word: a bar, a lamp, a wooden moulding, the way a bookcase divided a room or the way the light fell across a table at the end of the afternoon. Seen separately, they seemed like observations of little importance. Only many years later did I understand that, without knowing it, they were all describing the same place.
For a long time, I believed the folder had begun to fill when I first imagined that project. The years eventually taught me that exactly the opposite was true. The project had begun much earlier, although at the time I was not yet able to recognise it.
Whenever I try to find its true origin, my memory never returns to a hotel or a business meeting. It goes back, with almost the same clarity as those years themselves, to a school in Belgrano R and to those lunchtimes when, between classes, I would walk just a few blocks to have lunch at a small Irish restaurant called Down Town Matías.
At the time, it was simply a place where I liked to be.
I was drawn to the warmth of the wood, the bar, the music that accompanied the conversations without imposing itself on them, and that atmosphere, so difficult to describe, found in certain places that somehow make you stay a little longer than you intended.
Over the years, I came to understand that, in truth, I had never really left that restaurant.
It remained with me for a long time, almost imperceptibly, and every journey began, without my looking for it, to become an opportunity to find it again in other forms. I would walk into a restaurant for lunch or dinner and end up noticing a lamp whose light completely transformed the atmosphere, a bar built to different proportions, a moulding, a bookcase, the texture of a wall or the exact distance between the tables. Sometimes a photograph was enough; at other times, a word hurriedly written on whatever piece of paper I had at hand.
I never tried to copy any of those places.
What I wanted to preserve was the feeling they gave me, with the still undefined hope of understanding why certain places manage to remain alive in our memory long after we have left them.
And so, almost without my noticing, the folder became something very different from a project. It was the place where memories from different cities, apparently unrelated to one another, began to meet. Every time I opened it again, I discovered that those scattered images were slowly beginning to recognise one another, as though they had been waiting for that moment for years.
Long before I found the building where Munster would one day be born, I had already begun building it in my memory.