The song is an elegy for a lost love, framed in the landmarks of the south side of Buenos Aires, lamenting both the end of a love story and the changes in the
barrio (neighborhood). The male narrator addresses the girl in the second person; it is mentioned that the girl was 20 at the time. Among the landmarks mentioned are: the corner of San Juan and Boedo at the center of the
Boedo neighborhood,
Pompeya (the
barrio located directly to the south of Boedo), the railway crossing and the swampland at the (southern) edge of Pompeya, and the enigmatic "blacksmith's corner, mud and
pampa", which could refer to the corner of Centenera and Tabaré, already named in Manzi's earlier "Manoblanca" or to a blacksmith shop in the corner of Inclán and Loria, in
Parque Patricios neighbourhood. The chorus in its first four words is famously considered to capture the fabled
pathos of existential
angst of the Southern districts of Buenos Aires, with
"Sur, paredón, y después..:" ("South, a [crumbling, old] wall, and beyond it.. ") the unfinished sentence evoking the desolate open spaces of the flat Pampas that seemed to crouch behind the (long gone at the time of writing) last dividing houses and vacant lots on the
barrios' farthest empty cobblestone streets. This air of solitude and/or abandonment can be still partially felt at the southernmost reaches of
Boedo and other formerly industrial and working class
barrios del Sur such as the mentioned
Parque Patricios,
Pompeya,
Barracas (named so for its former
barracks) or
La Boca, the last three bordering the
Riachuelo, the demarcation line (never in plain sight, as always hidden beyond houses, factories, elevated tracks or
paredones) that seemed to bring the city to an abrupt end, behind which lay nothingness. In the early 1800s the Riachuelo still marked the transition to the
barbarous empty Pampas, at risk still of occasional aboriginal raids or
malones, the geographical area associated with the endless preserve of the
gaucho. Later since the late 1800s with its railways, factories and warehouses with the working classes, and since the second half ot the1900s with suburban industrial decay - always a seeming frontier-like remoteness long present in the collective imagination of the
porteños (see for example
Jorge Luis Borges' story
"El Sur", or
Fernando Solanas' film
"Sur"). Rivero himself made two small changes to the lyrics, with Manzi's blessing: "florando" became "flotando" ("flowering" to "floating", as the original verb is uncommon and was not understood by audiences), and "y mi amor y tu ventana" became "y mi amor en tu ventana" ("and my love and your window" became "and my love in your window"). The first of these changes was universally adopted. Manzi himself was actually born in
Añatuya,
Santiago del Estero, and moved into Buenos Aires at the age of nine, living close to the landmarks mentioned in the tango. ==Recognition==