Cthulhu Buenos Aires (tentative code CBA) is a short, unfinished campaign set in Buenos Aires in April 1922, in which investigators from a workers’ lodge pursue a shared vision of Carcosa, a Necronomicon and a sect of false blind men. It is the deliberate prelude to Malvinas (1966).
| Type | Campaign |
| Spanish entry | Cthulhu Buenos Aires |
Setting
The Buenos Aires of the Centenary is wealthy and credulous, the self-styled Paris of the South. Halley’s comet (1910), about ten years earlier, left a wake of suicides and fervor. Tunnels of an older city run below.
The investigators’ base is the Sons of Labor lodge (Barracas, San Antonio 814), an anarchist-socialist mutual society by day and a Center of Esoteric Studies by night, with the motto Conocimiento y Salvación (“Knowledge and Salvation”). Other scenery: the Hospicio de las Mercedes (the future Borda), the Zwi Migdal, the Ocampo circle, and the Palermo lakes.
Three patrons
- Sábato. The enemy is the Holy Sect of the Blind: false blind men with empty sockets who perceive without seeing, move at supernatural speed and steal sleeping bodies; the Informe sobre ciegos is signed by Fernando Vidal Olmos. Their victim is hidden as Rosaura, the invented girlfriend of Camilo Canegato.
- Borges. A young Jorge Luis Borges, ultraist of Prisma and Crítica, and Xul Solar, a follower of Crowley, obtain the University’s Necronomicon; only Borges, a Latinist, can read it. Macedonio Fernández, Nora Lange, Ricardo Rojas and Victoria Ocampo surround them.
- Lovecraft. The governing myth is Chambers’ King in Yellow: Hastur, Carcosa, Taurus and Aldebaran, the Byakhee. The vision’s city of two spiral towers and two red suns is Carcosa.
Investigators
- Leila Weinstein — Polish-French Jew from Warsaw, kidnapped at sixteen by the Zwi Migdal, escaped in a knife fight, sheltered by Vivian Santelmo; now cleans the lodge. Speaks French; charms Borges.
- Pascual Nacarati — psychiatrist, disciple of Dr. Borda, cryptographer and numerologist. His reliquary rite at Santa Felicitas leaves him with stigmata and dented sanity.
- Patricio Díaz Vélez — anthropologist-occultist from Tandil, nephew of Eugenio Díaz Vélez (whose castle has “something underneath”); studies the chief Painé.
Story
Origin. On the night of 20 April 1922, Borges and Xul Solar perform a rite to Hastur at Villa Ocampo with six artist-occultists, among them Beatriz Guerrero and Victoria Ocampo. All share a vision of Carcosa in which the King in Yellow removes his mask, shows no face beneath, and tears Beatriz’s arm. Beatriz is left scarred and later pregnant. The vision also reaches the Sect of the Blind, which thus locates her.
Investigation. The lodge’s director, Dr. David Cherney, sends the investigators after the vision. Beatriz, hiding in the convent of Santa Catalina de Siena, is taken asleep with Black Lotus and kept as “Rosaura” in the La Madrileña boarding house in Once. The ghost of Felicitas Guerrero guides the search with riddles (“a dozen is one egg short” = Once). The one-eyed leader Norberto Buscaglia, summons Byakhee with an enchanted whistle. Commissioner Elpidio Gutiérrez, paid by Ezequiel Álzaga of the Hermetic Order, cordons off the supernatural.
Course of events. The plot shifted to the kidnapping of the artist Alejandro Lindman and a hunt for the Necronomicon. Borges keeps the book, since returned it would disappear; Baltasar Gómez, Afro-porteño butler-sorcerer of the Ocampo line, uses the investigators to reach it. A book-for-hostage exchange is set for night on a Palermo lake island. The story stops on the eve of the exchange; the climax never took place.
Link to Malvinas
- Same lodge: base in 1922 and in 1966, when Malnati keeps the Blue Stone there.
- Same master: Cherney leads the lodge in the 1920s; a generation later he “is no longer a man: he is a clue”. The 1922 thread survives in a “lost file”, copied by one 1966 investigator.
- Same city: Carcosa has two doors — entered by reading in 1922, by dreaming (the Blue Stone in the Claromecó lighthouse) in 1966.
- Same sides: Álzaga’s Hermetic Order (1922) prefigures Anael / Silver Dawn, tied to Gelli’s P2 (1966).
A continuation, Malvinas son de Tulú, has not yet been run.
Other threads: the Pleiades / “Daughters of the Plata”; Laban Shrewsbury and the library of Celaeno.
Conflicting accounts
- In the prepared opening scenario (La visión de Beatriz y el Rey), Beatriz Guerrero is the one kidnapped and Xul Solar holds the Necronomicon.
- In the course of events, Alejandro Lindman is kidnapped, Borges holds the book and Baltasar Gómez is intermediary.