2 Jul,2026 By Fake Travel News
There is a piano in Buenos Aires that should not be touched. I know this now. I didn’t know it on Tuesday afternoon, when I walked into the Museo Xul Solar as a normal tourist.
My name is Dave. I’m from Columbus, Ohio, and I’m a normal person. I did a Rick Steves tour of Western Europe in 2019, I carry a money belt, and I always read the signs in museums. That last part will become important. In short, I am exactly the kind of tourist who does not get into trouble.
I am writing this from what I believe to be a jail cell in a parallel version of Buenos Aires, and I need you to understand what happened so that you don’t do the same thing.
It started at the Museo Xul Solar.
Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari was born in Buenos Aires in 1887, later renamed himself Xul Solar — roughly “solar light” — and then spent the next 76 years redesigning reality from a house on Laprida Street. His father ran the city’s main political prison, and young Oscar spent his afternoons there doing homework with whichever erudite political prisoners were available.
As an adult, Xul Solar became a painter, a mystic, an astrologer, a linguist, a game designer, and a close friend of Jorge Luis Borges — the writer who filled entire stories with infinite libraries and impossible maps, which tells you exactly the kind of company Xul Solar kept. He also invented two languages. Most people do not invent any. He felt this was insufficient.
The museum is tucked behind a preserved façade that gives almost no indication of what’s inside. There is a sign. There is a glass door. You go in. The lighting shifts. Ambient, strange music fills the air. The rooms feel like the inside of someone’s extremely vivid dream — which, given what I now know about dimensional thresholds, may have been literal.
The paintings cover the walls in small, dense, intricate panels. Every one of them shows a universe operating on rules I don’t have access to. Mystic landscapes. Arcane symbols. Beings that are almost human but not quite. An overwhelming sense that you have stumbled into someone else’s cosmology and are being assessed.
The paintings are not the only things in the room. In one case sits his chess set — a 13×13 board he called Panajedrez, the pieces marked with letters, the rules pulled from astrology and mathematics rather than anything resembling ordinary chess.
In another case, his tarot: a deck he redesigned in the 1950s, each card stamped with a zodiac sign, a number in his own base-12 system, and a name in a language he invented. I looked at the tarot for a long time. I want to be clear that at this stage I still considered myself a rational person.
Here is what I knew going in: Xul Solar modified a piano by adding a third row of keys. The result — brightly painted, slightly alarming — sits in its own dedicated space in the museum. There is a clear and obvious social contract around objects in museums: you look, you appreciate, you do not touch. I have always honored this contract. There was almost certainly a sign. I did not read the sign.
I don’t know what happened. Feeling like a passenger in my own body, I watched my hand move. One key. One single key from the third row — the row that should not exist on any piano — pressed down for maybe a quarter of a second before I caught myself and looked around to see if anyone had noticed.
No alarm went off. A museum worker in the next room did not react. Everything appeared completely normal.
Then I heard it.
It started as what I can only describe as the sound of language that is almost Spanish but with the geometry slightly wrong. Not louder than a whisper. Not from any particular direction. Just present, the way tinnitus is present, except tinnitus does not appear to be saying something.
Then a breeze. Indoors. Not from a vent — I checked. A slow, sourceless movement of air, the kind that should not exist inside a sealed room in a Buenos Aires afternoon.
I stood very still.
The whispering continued.
I finished the tour quickly, bought nothing in the gift shop, and left.
The neighborhood looked the same. Palermo, the trees, the café tables, the general pleasant chaos of the city — all present. But something was off, the way a room feels different when someone has moved one piece of furniture while you were asleep.
The café signs looked like Spanish the way a photocopy looks like an original — most letters right, a few subtly wrong, as if the alphabet had been revised by someone who felt certain letters were carrying too much weight. The spoken language had the same problem. It wasn’t Argentine Spanish. It was Neo-Criollo — the language Xul Solar invented, used in real life, and which I had not, until this moment, considered might be in active use somewhere.
I looked up. There were things in the sky that should not have been in the sky — winged, half-mechanical, moving with intent. I had seen them before, that morning, in one of Xul Solar’s paintings.
I sat on a bench for a while.
Then I started walking fast.
My reasoning was simple and, I maintain, logical: I had touched a key on a modified piano built by a mystic who invented languages and painted alternate dimensions, and reality had shifted. The fix was to go back and touch it again. Like restarting a router. Basic troubleshooting.
The museum was still there. Same address, same façade, same glass door. I went in and joined the ticket queue with great purpose.
The entry fee in the regular version of Buenos Aires is a few hundred pesos — practically nothing. I handed over a 1,000 peso note.
The woman at the desk looked at it the way you look at something a child has drawn and presented as real money. She turned it over. She held it up. Then she called a colleague, who also looked at it. They had a conversation I could not follow.
I tried to explain that the money was genuine, in the Spanish I actually speak, and something about my accent or my vocabulary or possibly the entire premise of what I was saying caused the colleague to pick up a phone.
By any reasonable measure, I should have left at that point. I did not leave.
The police arrived in minutes. They were not the Buenos Aires police I had seen directing traffic and looking mildly bored near the Obelisco. These officers had a different quality about them. A uniformed seriousness. Their vehicle, visible through the glass door, had markings I didn’t recognize from anywhere in the city I thought I knew.
I was escorted out, placed in the vehicle, and brought here.
The cell is not uncomfortable. There is a window. The WiFi, as I mentioned, works fine, though the browser occasionally renders pages in what appears to be Pan-Lengua, Xul Solar’s second invented language, which used a base-12 number system and an invented script. I have been here long enough to start recognizing some of the characters.
Everyone says travel opens doors. Nobody warns you that some of them don’t open back.
The museum is at Laprida 1212, open Tuesday through Saturday, noon to eight on weekdays, noon to seven on Saturdays. The admission is very affordable. There are guided tours on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and Saturday around 3:30pm.
Do not touch the piano. I want to be completely clear about this.
I’m serious. I’m still here.
Rating: ★★★★★ for the museum / ★☆☆☆☆ for the legal consequences
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We have fun creating and exaggerating travel stories from around the world, but we also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For non-fake information on the Xul Solar Museum, visit the following link, and don’t touch the piano!: Xul Solar Museum.
