The taxi advanced up Avenida Garay and came to a stop a couple of blocks short of the Plaza Constitución. The corner seemed familiar though I knew I had never been there before, and when I saw the sign for Calle Tacuarí, it came to me: in his story "The Aleph," Jorge Luis Borges had chosen a cellar in one of the anonymous buildings on this anonymous street as the location of the mystical "point in space that contains all other points" in the universe.

For any admirer of Borges, to wander about Buenos Aires is to collide with the products of his fervid imagination. His birthplace beguiled him, and he especially loved to walk its streets aimlessly, but he also complained that it had "no ghosts" and decided it was his task to populate the fast-expanding immigrant boomtown with his own phantasms. "In my dreams, I never leave Buenos Aires," he once wrote, though his dreams often were anguished ones, as expressed in one of several poems called "Buenos Aires":

"And the city, now, is like a map
Of my humiliations and failures;
From this door, I have seen the twilights
And at this marble pillar I have waited in vain."

The 20th anniversary of Borges's death is coming in June, and between then and his birthday in August, the city plans readings, round tables, exhibitions, a concert and other homages. Most of the time, though, seeking overt traces of Borges in Buenos Aires is, to use a Borgesian image, like trying to read a palimpsest: you have to look past the top layer to sense his underlying presence.

Take the street in the Palermo area where Borges grew up, known then as Serrano but now renamed in his honor. Today the neighborhood is perhaps the most chic in Buenos Aires, full of trendy bars, restaurants and boutiques patronized by young writers, artists and filmmakers more likely to cite Paul Auster or Martin Amis than Borges as influences.

In Borges's youth, though, Palermo was "on the shabby northern outskirts of town," as he put it, a semirural place frequented by gauchos and criminals who drank hard and fought hard at the pulperías, or taverns, that dotted the neighborhood. Their tales of derring-do and the sudden eruptions of violence to which they were prone impressed the bookish lad known as Georgie, and left him with a fascination with knives that would later infiltrate stories and poems like "The Dagger":

It is more than a structure of metal; men
Conceived it and shaped it with a single end in mind.; it
Is in some way eternal, the dagger that last night killed
A man in Tacuarembó and the daggers that rained on
Caesar are in some eternal way the same
dagger. The dagger wants to kill, it
wants to shed sudden blood.

The Borges family's Palermo homestead still exists, at Serrano 2135, but it is not open to the public and there is nothing to mark Borges's passage there save for a small plaque. Just up the block, however, at the corner of Guatemala and Serrano, is the site that, in the poem "Buenos Aires," Borges imagined as that of "the mythical foundation of Buenos Aires," a city "I judge to be as eternal as water and air."

At first glance, the corner does not seem very promising: a hamburger joint, a design store and a bar called Mundo Bizarro, whose motto is "in alcohol we trust," capture the current character of Palermo. But the fourth occupant of the corner is a tavern called the "Almacén el Preferido," in a building that dates to 1885 and that Borges describes as the redoubt of toughs:

"A pink shop, like the back of a deck of cards/Iit shone and in the back room they talked of tricks ..."

Even more than taverns, however, Buenos Aires is a city of cafes, and Borges and his friends were habitués of several. Most of those have either disappeared or, like La Perla in the Jewish neighborhood known as Once, been transformed into pizza parlors and the like or, like the Gran Café Tortoni, near the corner of Suipacha and Avenida de Mayo, become tourist traps in which a wax figure of Borges is seated at a table with Carlos Gardel, the tango's greatest singer.

But the Richmond, at Florida 468, still preserves some of the atmosphere of the 1920's, when Borges was editing an avant-garde literary magazine, Martin Fierro, just around the corner and spent a lot of time there with fellow writers. As the name suggests, the feeling is that of an English club, with wood paneling and prints of fox hunting scenes and country estates on the walls. That would have appealed to Borges, who prided himself on his English ancestry on his mother's side of the family.

Borges's circle of associates included the younger writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, with whom he wrote a series of detective stories set in Buenos Aires, and Bioy's wife, the poet Silvina Ocampo. But perhaps the most fascinating and influential of his friends was the painter and poet Alejandro Schulz Solari, whom Borges once called "our William Blake." The painter, who took the artistic name Xul Solar, was a dozen years older than Borges and shared his fondness for inventing imaginary universes and languages and exploring the esoterica of this world. In the 1950's, Borges would regularly flee the stifling atmosphere of the apartment he shared with his mother and head for Xul Solar's home at Laprida 1212, where the two men would often spend the day conversing about the kabbalah or Norse sagas.

Xul Solar's residence is today a museum devoted to his work, containing more than 100 of his paintings as well as the fanciful objects that he created and called "heirlooms of another cosmos." Looking at the paintings makes clear the intellectual affinities between the two artists: Xul Solar's watercolors are full of utopias, cities floating in the sky, creatures that are half man and half machine, alternate universes and other touches that we have come to think of as typical of Borges.

Visiting these and other sites where Borges lived or worked helps one to appreciate what a potent imagination he had. In 1937, for example, his once promising literary career seemed to be stagnating, and he was forced to take a job cataloging books at the Miguel Cane municipal library, where he remained until 1945. There was little for him to do there, so he spent much of his time in a small, windowless room at the rear of the second floor, where he wrote many of the pieces in the collection eventually published as "Ficciones," including the story "The Library of Babel."

"Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatic volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god," he wrote.

Borges later wrote that "the innumerable books and shelves that appear in the story are literally those I had beneath my elbow." But like the room in which the story was written, which can be visited, the library itself is small with a limited collection of books, and hardly seems worthy of the immortality Borges bestowed on it. It is at Carlos Calvo 4321, in the working-class Boedo section; Borges used to ride the No. 7 tram to work there, reading Dante as he stood, and while the tram no longer exists, a bus line with the same number still runs the same route.

For a man whose personal life was often unhappy, libraries provided a kind of consolation: "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library," he wrote in a poem. After the dictator Juan Perón was overthrown in 1955, Borges was appointed director of the National Library. This was the kind of place that seems a candidate for his Babel tale - a four-story octagonal structure whose columns are engraved with the names of great writers and thinkers like Shakespeare, Goethe and Plato.

The library, at Mexico 564 in the San Telmo neighborhood, is now the national conservatory of music and is open to visitors. Next door is the headquarters of the Argentine Society of Writers, where Borges sometimes offered public readings. The society currently shares the space with a restaurant, Legendaria Buenos Aires, whose main dining room is adorned with portraits of famous opera singers. There is, though, one reminder of Borges on a wall of the restaurant: a metal plaque listing the society's board of directors during 1942-44, including one Jorge Luis Borges.

Other than knives, perhaps the favorite motif in Borges' work is the feline, evoked in such works as "The Other Tiger," in which he meditates on the difference between the real beast and those that populate his imagination. From childhood on, the beasts fascinated him, and he would often go to the Buenos Aires zoo, on Avenida Las Heras on the edge of Palermo, to observe the big cats. Sometimes, well into his 60's, he would even be accompanied by a woman he was hoping to impress, and recite poetry as they stood in front of the cages:

It came and went, delicate and fatal, charged with infinite energy,

On the other side of the firm bars and we all watched it ...

The feline collection is still there, and it includes a solitary white Bengal tiger, which seems to spend most of its time sleeping under a tree As an adult, Borges lived in various apartments in the Recoleta area, on Calle Presidente Quintana and Avenida Pueyrrydón, also dutifully marked with brass plaques. But he lived the longest, nearly 40 years on and off, in apartment 6B at Maipú 994, just off Plaza San Martín, which he came to think of as his true home.

When I was a young Newsweek correspondent in the early 1980's, I twice interviewed Borges there. I remember the apartment as being small and austere, with no television, no radio and, most surprising of all for a man who by then was blind, no record player. Borges insisted the interviews be done in English, which he spoke with what he called a Northumberland accent, inherited from the English grandmother from whom he had learned the language, and he showed a fondness for antiquated words like "thrice."

Though the apartment is not open to the public, La Ciudad, the bookstore in the shopping gallery just across the street, where Borges would spend many of his afternoons, is still in business. First editions of many of Borges's works are in the window, along with photographs of him sitting in a chair that still occupies a spot of honor in the store, as if awaiting his return. If the octogenarian proprietor, Elizabeth Alonso, is in a good mood, she might even be persuaded to reminisce a bit about her friend and most famous client.

But perhaps the most vivid reminder that Borges was not just a literary personage but a real flesh-and-blood inhabitant of Buenos Aires is at Paraguay 521, a photographers' studio where residents still go to have their pictures taken for passports and identity cards. Look carefully at the collection of some three dozen portraits in the front window, and there, fourth from the right in the top row, is Borges, still peering out quizzically at a world that seemed so alien to him that he had to invent his own.

Visitor Information

The municipal government of Buenos Aires offers free guided walking tours to sites associated with Borges. Most of those tours are in Spanish, but some are available in English. Call 54-11-4114-5791 (the 54 is the country code for Argentina, and the 11 is the code for Buenos Aires) for information, or check the municipal Web site at bue.gov.ar/reccoridos/index, where a Spanish-language audio guide can also be downloaded.

An alternative, for about $90, is a three-hour Borges literary tour in a car and conducted in English by a literature professor at the University of Buenos Aires, which can be arranged through the Eternautas travel agency; 4384-7874.

There is also a Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation, run by Borges's widow, Maria Kodama, at Anchorena 1660, but I've never found it to be very helpful. The foundation, open daily 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., has numerous first editions of Borges works in several languages, but they can be viewed only by appointment. Call 4822-8340 to make reservations or to find out about upcoming events marking the 20th anniversary of Borges' death.

Note: The exchange rate is about 3 pesos to the dollar, but foreign visitors are often quoted prices in U.S. dollars.

WHERE TO STAY

The elegant boutique BoBo Hotel (Guatemala 4882; 4774-0505), in Palermo, is just around the corner from the Borges family home. The seven rooms start at $90 a night, with breakfast included.

The Marriott Plaza Hotel (Florida 1005; 5239-1377; marriott.com/property/propertypage/buear), on Plaza San Martín, is just a couple of blocks away from some of Borges's favorite haunts, including his apartment on Calle Maipú and his preferred bookstore and cafe. Rooms at this doyenne of the city's hotels, founded in 1909, start at $185 a day.

WHERE TO EAT

One especially fashionable restaurant in Palermo is Cluny (El Salvador 4622; 4831-7176), a short walk from Borges's childhood home. The menu is French-influenced, though Patagonian crab and lamb are also available. Dinner for two with wine about $75.

Borges was fascinated by all things Norse, so why not pay a visit to Olsen (Gorriti 5870; 4776-7677). Scandinavian smoked fish and vodkas are on the menu in a space whose cool, sleek architecture recalls Oslo. Lunch for two runs less than $20.