The Absent City

1

Junior always said that he liked to live in hotels because his parents were English. When he said English, he meant the nineteenth-century English travelers, the merchants and smugglers who abandoned their families to explore lands that had not yet been reached by the industrial revolution. Solitary and nearly invisible, they invented modern journalism by leaving behind their personal lives and stories. They lived in hotels and wrote their chronicles; they maintained sarcastic relationships with the local governors. That is why when his wife left him and moved to Barcelona with his daughter, Junior sold everything that was left in the house and dedicated himself to traveling. His daughter was four years old, and Junior missed her so much that he dreamt of her every night. He loved her much more than he might have imagined, and thought that his daughter was a version of himself. She was what he had been, but living as a female. To escape this image he traveled twice throughout the entire country — by train, in rented cars, in provincial buses. He stayed in boarding-houses, in buildings owned by the Rotary Club, in the houses of English consuls, and tried to look at everything through the eyes of a nineteenth-century traveler. When the money from what he had sold began to run out, he returned to Buenos Aires and went to El Mundo to look for work. He got a position at the newspaper and showed up one afternoon with his normal expression of astonishment on his face. Emilio Renzi took him around the offices and introduced him to his new coworkers, stuck there like prisoners. Within two months he was the editor’s right-hand man, and was in charge of special investigations. By the time they realized it, he controlled all the news about the machine.

At first they thought that he worked for the police because he would publish articles before the events occurred. All he had to do was lift up the telephone and he would get the stories two hours before they happened. He was not yet thirty years old but he looked like a man of sixty: his head was shaved and he had an obsessive, typically English gaze, with small crossed eyes focused on some distant point, as if he were looking out to sea. His father, according to Renzi, had been one of those failed engineers sent from London to oversee the loading of the cattle into trains from the winter pastures of the large cattle ranches. They had lived for ten years in Zapala, at the end of the railroad lines of the Ferrocarril del Sur. Beyond that was the desert, the dust from the bones left behind in the wind from the slaughtering of the Indians. Mr. MacKensey, Junior’s father, was the station master; he had a chalet with red roof tiles built just like the one where he had lived in England. The mother was a Chilean woman who left with her youngest daughter and went to live in Barcelona. Renzi learned the story when a cousin of Junior’s came to look for him at the newspaper once, but for some reason the lunatic did not want to see her. The young woman was a fun-loving redhead. Renzi took her to a bar and then to a hotel that charged by the hour; at midnight he escorted her to Retiro Station and left her on the platform in front of the train. She lived in Martínez, was married to a naval engineer, and thought that her cousin was a misunderstood genius obsessed with their family’s past.

Junior’s father had been just like Junior: a delirious and disturbed individual who would stay up all night in Patagonia listening to shortwave transmissions of the BBC from London. He wanted to erase the traces of his personal life and live like a wild man in an unknown world hooked into the voices that reached him from his country. According to Renzi, his father’s passion explained the speed with which Junior had picked up on the first defective transmissions from Macedonio’s machine. “A typically British reaction,” Renzi would say, “to teach a son with the example of a father who spends his life with his ear stuck to a shortwave radio.” “It reminds me,” Renzi said, “of the times of the Resistance, when my old man would stay up all night listening to the tapes of Perón that a contact from the Movement clandestinely brought him. They were first-generation tapes that used to slip and come unwound; they were brown and you had to put them on heads this big and then close the lid of the tape player. I remember the silence and the buzz of the tape before the recording would come in with Perón’s exiled voice; he always began his speeches with ‘Compañeros,’ followed by a pause, as if he were leaving room for the applause. We sat around the kitchen table at midnight, engrossed like Junior’s father, believing in that voice that came out of nowhere, always slower than normal, distorted somehow. It should have occurred to Perón to speak through shortwave radio. Don’t you think?” Renzi asked and looked at Junior, smiling. “From Spain, in nighttime transmissions with the electrical discharges and interference, because that way his words would have arrived at the same time that he spoke them. Don’t you think? Because we heard the tapes when the events had already changed and everything seemed late and out of place. I remember that every time someone talks to me about the machine’s recordings,” Renzi said. “It would be better if the story came straight out, the narrator should always be present. Of course I also like the idea of stories that seem to be outside time and start again every time you want them to.”

They had gone down to the bar to get a sandwich after the dead-lines were in. While Renzi talked about Perón’s voice and the Peronist Resistance and began to tell the story of a friend of his father’s, Little Monkey showed up to let Junior know that he had a telephone call. It was three in the afternoon on a Tuesday and the street lights were still on. Through the window one could see the electric lights glowing in the sun. “It looks like a movie,” Little Monkey thought, “like the screen in a theater before the movie starts.” He could hear what they were saying at the table as he approached, as if someone were turning up the volume on a radio.

“He was crazy — totally, totally crazy,” Renzi was saying. “He’d yell ‘Viva Perón!’ and take on whatever came along. ‘To be a Peronist, above all,’ he would say, ‘you have to have balls.’ He could build a pipe bomb in half a minute, anywhere — in a bar, in a plaza, he’d move his little fingers like this, like a blind man. His family had a cache of arms on the corner of Martín García and Montes de Oca, so he was born playing with rods and pieces. In the Peronist Movement the guys called him Friar Luis Beltrán, and by the end everyone called him The Friar, except for a few who knew him from the beginning, from the very beginning of the mess, around ’55 or ’56, who called him Billy the Kid, which was the name that he had been given by Fat-Man Cooke, because just by looking at him you knew he was a young Turk, thin and delicate, you’d guess he was about fifteen or sixteen years old and already everyone and their brother was after him.” Several people had gathered around Renzi at the table of the bar Los 36 billares. Little Monkey became distracted for a moment and stopped to listen to the story; then he made a dialing gesture in the air and Junior realized that the woman must be calling him on the telephone again. “It’s her,” Junior thought. “For sure.” Some unknown woman had been calling him on the telephone and giving him instructions as if they were lifelong friends. The woman must have been familiar with the articles he had been publishing in the newspaper. Ever since the rumors of certain imperfections of the machine had been confirmed, a series of maniacs had begun to relay confidential information to him.

“Listen,” the woman said to him. “You have to go to the Majestic Hotel, on Piedras and Av. de Mayo. Did you get that? Fuyita, a Korean, lives there. Are you going to go or not?”

“I’m going,” Junior said.

“Tell him that it’s me. That you spoke with me.”

“Done.”

“Are you Uruguayan?”

“English,” Junior said.

“Come on,” she said. “Don’t joke around, this is serious.”

The woman knew everything. She had the facts. But she mistook Junior for a friend of her husband’s. Sometimes, at night, she would wake him up to tell him that she could not sleep. “It’s very windy here,” she would say, “they leave the window open, it feels like Siberia.”

She spoke in code, with the allusive and slightly idiotic tone used by those who believe in magic and predestination. Everything meant something else; the woman lived in a kind of paranoid mystical state. Junior wrote down the name of the hotel and the information about Fuyita. “There’s a woman living in a room that’s an absolute dump; she’s Fat-Man Saurio’s girlfriend. Are you getting all this down?” she asked him. “They’re going to close the Museum, so hurry. Fuyita is a gangster, they hired him as a security guard.” Suddenly, it occurred to him that the woman was in an insane asylum. A madwoman who called him from Vieytes Clinic to tell him a bizarre story about a Korean gangster who was a guard at the Museum. He imagined a pay phone at the hospital. That apparatus — on the dilapidated wall, in an open passageway, in front of the bare trees in the park — was the saddest thing in the world. The woman talked constantly about the machine. She relayed information to him, told him stories. “She’s connected, but she doesn’t even know it. She can’t free herself, she knows she has to talk to me, but she’s not aware of what’s happening to her.” Still, he confirmed all the facts and arranged to go to the Majestic. He had to use the informants he had. He did not have too many options. He was moving in the dark. The information was very well controlled. Nobody said anything. The fact that the street lights were always on was the only thing that revealed that there was a threat. Everybody seemed to be living in parallel worlds, unconnected. “I’m the only connection,” Junior thought. Everyone pretended to be a different person. Shortly before dying, Junior’s father had remembered a program he had heard on a BBC transmission about psychiatry called “Science for Everyone.” A doctor explained on the radio that you had to be careful when you came across a delirium of simulation; for example, that of a raving madman capable of docility, or of an idiot capable of feigning great intelligence. And his father laughed; his lungs hissed, he had difficulty breathing, but there he was, laughing. You never know if a person is intelligent or if they are an imbecile pretending to be intelligent. Junior hung up the telephone and returned to the bar. Renzi was already telling another episode from the story of his life.

“When I was a student and lived in La Plata, I earned a living teaching Spanish to right-wing Czechs, Poles, and Croats who had been expelled from their countries by the advance of history. Most of them lived in an old neighborhood in Berisso called ‘The Austro-Hungarian Empire’ where immigrants from Central Europe had settled since the end of the nineteenth century. They rented a room in the wood and tin tenement houses and worked in the cold-storage plants while they looked for something better. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, a support organization for Eastern European anti-Communists, protected them and did what it could to help them out. They had an agreement with the University of La Plata to hire literature students to teach them Spanish grammar. I met many pathetic cases during those years, but none as sad as Lazlo Malamüd. He had been a famous critic and professor of literature at the University of Budapest; he was the leading Central European authority on the work of José Hernández. His translation of Martín Fierro into Hungarian had received the annual prize of the International Association of Translators (Paris, 1949). He was a Marxist, he had belonged to the Petöfi Circle, and had survived the Nazis, but he fled in 1956 when the Russian tanks entered Hungary because he could not handle being slaughtered by those whom he had placed his hopes on. And then here, he was surrounded by the right-wing immigrants. To get away from this group he sought out intellectual circles and made himself known to them as a translator of Hernández. He could read Spanish properly, but he couldn’t speak it. He had memorized all of the Martín Fierro and that was his basic vocabulary. He had come here in the hope of obtaining a position in the university; to get it, all he had to do was be able to teach in Spanish. They had asked him to give a lecture in the College of the Humanities, where Héctor Azeves was working; his future depended on that lecture. The date was approaching and he was paralyzed with fear. We met for the first time in mid-December; the lecture was scheduled for the fifteenth of March. I remember that I took cable car number twelve and traveled to Lazlo’s dingy room in the lower part of Berisso, behind the cold-storage plant. We sat on his bed, placed a chair in front of us as a table, and began to work with the Lacau-Rosetti grammar book. The university paid me ten pesos per month, and I had to keep a kind of record with Malamüd’s signature to confirm the attendance. I would see him three times a week. He talked to me in an imaginary language, full of guttural r’s and gaucho-like interjections. He tried to explain to me in a gabble the desperate feeling of being condemned to expressing himself like a three-year-old child. The imminence of the lecture had him plunged into such a panic that he could not go beyond the first-conjugation verbs. He was so dejected that one afternoon, after a very long silence, I offered to read whatever he wanted to say in his place; then poor Lazlo Malamüd let out a screeching laugh to let me know that in spite of the desperate situation he had not lost his sense of the ridiculous. How was I to read his lecture if he was the one who had to teach?

“ ‘I no worrk then die of this estrra-orrdinary suffer-ring,’ he said.

“It was funny, it’s funny to see someone who doesn’t know how to speak your language try to express himself with words. One afternoon, I found him sitting down, facing the window, without any strength left, ready to give up.

“ ‘No more, no,’ he said. ‘An infamy my life. I don’t deserrve all this a-humiliation. First I becoming angr-ry then the melancholy. Eyes sprring tearrs that don’t alleviate their suffer-ring.’

“I always thought that that man, trying to express himself in a language of which he only knew its greatest poem, was a perfect metaphor for Macedonio’s machine. Telling everyone’s story with lost words, narrating in a foreign tongue. See? They gave me this,” he said to Junior and showed him a cassette tape. “A very strange account. The story of a man who does not have words to name the horror. Some say that it’s fake, others say it’s the pure truth. The inflections of speech, a harsh document, directly from reality. There are many copies throughout the city. They make them in Avellaneda, in clandestine labs out in the province, in the cellars of the Mercado del Plata, in the subway at Nueve de Julio. They say that they’re fake, but that’s not going to stop it.” Renzi was laughing. “If the Argentine novel, the patriotic verse, started with Cambaceres, then that’s what you have to write about, Junior — what are you waiting for?”

“There’s a woman,” Junior said. “She calls me on the telephone, passes information on to me. Now she says I should go to a hotel, the Majestic on Piedras and Av. de Mayo. There’s a guy there, a certain Fuyita, a Korean who works in the Museum, a security guard, the night watchman. I don’t know, maybe she works for the police.”

“In this country, everyone who’s not in jail works for the police,” Renzi said, “including the thieves.”

Junior stood up. He was leaving.

“Did I give you the recording?” Renzi asked. “Here,” he said, and handed him a cassette tape. “Listen to it, then you can fill me in.”

“Perfect.”

“I’ll meet you here, tomorrow.”

“At six,” Junior said.

“Be careful.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s full of Japanese out there,” Renzi said.

Outside, the cars were coming and going. “They are always watching, even if there is no point to it,” Junior thought. The sky was gray; at 3:50 P.M. the president’s helicopter flew over the avenue toward the river. Junior checked the time and entered the subway. Toward Plaza de Mayo. He leaned back against the window, half asleep, letting the swaying train move him around. They look at each other, the dumbshits, they travel underground just for that. An old woman traveled standing up, her face swollen from so much crying. Simple people, proletariats dressed to go out, modern clothes from Taiwan. Couples holding hands, checking out their reflections in the window. The dark ones with black hair, the Peronios, as Renzi called them. “In the middle of everyone they shaved me clean like a nobody,” Junior sang to himself. “I’m mute. I sing with my thoughts. The barber, an Italian immigrant on Av. Constitución, didn’t want to do it at first. ‘What are you trying to do, kid?’ I don’t want lice,” Junior had answered. He shined his white bowl with brilliantine (“I don’t want lice”). Miguel MacKensey (Junior), an English traveler. The lighted subway sped through the tunnel at eighty kilometers per hour.

2

The Majestic Hotel, with its marble entrance and dilapidated walls, was right on the corner of Piedras and Av. de Mayo. In the mezzanine at the top of the stairs there was a desk, and behind it an old man petting a roan cat, his face next to its nose. Junior saw a carpeted hallway, several closed doors, and the entrance to a basement. He stopped warily and lit a cigarette.

“This animal that you see right here,” the old man said without looking up, “is fifteen years old. Do you know how old that is for a cat?” He dragged his words as he spoke, with an intonation somewhere between respectful and cunning, his thin neck buried in the lustring lapels of a corduroy jacket. He was standing between the key rack and a glass door, and held the cat on the counter. The bow-legged animal began to move slowly, arching its back. “This animal is a miracle of nature. He understands as if he was a person. I brought him from out in the country and he has stayed here ever since. A gaucho cat.” When he smiled his small eyes became smaller. “From Entre Ríos.”

Junior leaned over the cat, who breathed with a kind of quivering, and petted it on the back.

“He’s nervous, see? He understands everything, he doesn’t like the smell of tobacco. Can you feel how he breathes?”

“My name is Junior,” he said. “I need to see Fuyita.”

“And?” the old man asked with his little suspicious smile.

“Do you know if he is in?”

“Mr. Fuyita? I couldn’t say. You’ll have to speak with the manager.”

“Nice cat,” Junior said and grabbed the cat by its nape with a quick move. He pressed him against the counter. The cat shrieked, terrified.

“What are you doing?” the old man asked, covering his face with his hand to protect himself.

“Give me the number,” Junior said. “I work in the circus.”

The old man had fallen back against the wall and was looking at Junior as if he wanted to hypnotize him. His eyes were two small quail eggs in his wrinkled face.

“That animal is the only thing I have in the world,” the old man begged, “don’t hurt him.”

Junior released the cat, who jumped and left, meowing like a baby; then he took out a 1,000 pesos bill folded in half.

“I need the room number.”

The old man tried to smile, but he was so nervous that he just stuck the tip of his tongue out. “An iguana,” Junior thought. He reached for the bill and put it in the small front pocket of his jacket with a furtive move.

“Two twenty-three. Room two twenty-three. Fuyita is Christ,” he said. “They call him Christ, get my drift?” He stuck his tongue out twice and turned around toward the key rack. “Go on up,” he said. “I’m not here, you didn’t see me.” He was sticking his tongue out and in, facing the wall so that no one would see him.

The elevator was a cage, its ceiling full of inscriptions and graffiti. “Language kills,” Junior read. “Viva Lucia Joyce.” He looked at his face in the mirror; it looked as if he were trapped in a spider web — the shadow from the wall’s gratings covering his shaved cranium, his melancholic skull. The hallway on the second floor was empty. The yellow walls and the carpets drowned out the harsh rumblings from the street. Junior rang room two twenty-three. The buzzer seemed to ring somewhere else, outside the hotel, outside the city even.

“What is it?” a woman’s voice said after a while.

“Fuyita,” he said.

The woman opened the door just a crack. Junior thought that maybe Fuyita was not a man. “Fuyita Coke, the Japanese Dame.”

“You’re Fuyita,” he said.

The woman laughed.

“Language kills,” he quoted blindly. The woman was a pale outline in the room’s semi-darkness.

“Who are you? Did the Deaf Girl send you?” she murmured. Then she raised her voice: “Say, why don’t you go to hell? Who in the world are you?” There was a brief hesitation, a deep breath. “He’s not here.”

“Calm down,” Junior said. “My name is Junior.”

“Who?” she said.

“Junior,” Junior said, pushing at the door. It opened gently, without any resistance from the woman.

“Asshole,” she said. “Get out of here, you son of a bitch.”

She spoke in a low voice, as if she were shouting in a dream.

The room was dimly lit and the air smelled of camphor and alcohol and cheap perfume. The woman headed back toward the bed. Junior followed her slowly, trying not to lose track of her in the thick shadows cast by the furniture.

“You better not touch me or I’ll scream,” she said. “If you touch me I’ll scream.”

He finally became accustomed to the greenish light in the room and was able to see her face. She had been a blond, she had been hit, her lips were swollen, her mouth cracked, her skin full of welts. She wore a shirt that barely covered her breasts and a man’s pair of shoes without shoelaces.

“Why did he hit you?” he asked.

The woman dragged her feet as she walked. She sat down on the bed and rested her elbows on her knees absentmindedly.

“And who are you?” she asked.

“I’m going to help you.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said. “Did Fuyita send you? Are you Japanese? Come here, let me see.”

She lit a cigarette lighter. The flame illuminated the mirror on the dresser.

“I came to see him,” Junior said. “He told me to meet him here.”

“He left. He’s not coming back. Poor guy.” She started crying without making any noise. Then she leaned down and looked around for her bottle of gin. She was not wearing anything other than the shirt and you could see her breasts, she did not try to cover herself up. “Shit,” she said, tilting the empty bottle. “He can die for all I care.” She made an effort to smile. “Be good and go buy me some more.”

“In a moment. First we’ll talk, then I’ll go and get you some gin. Turn on a light—”

“No,” she cut him short. “What for? Keep it as it is. Give me a cigarette.”

Junior handed her the pack. She opened it avidly and started smoking.

“Tell me if he isn’t rotten? He took my clothes so I wouldn’t go out. What did he think? That I was going to run after him?”

“He left,” Junior said. “He put your clothes in a suitcase and left. Fuyita Coke. Do you want some?”

“I don’t do coke,” she said. “It’s been years. Do you come from La Plata? Are you a narc? It’s Deaf Girl’s fault, she’s a mare, a drug addict. I’m sure he’s with her.” She leaned forward to speak to him in a low voice. Up close her face looked as if it were made of glass. “He wants to leave me for that shrew. Leave me for that bitch.” She stood up and started moving around the room. “After I. . do you know what I did for him, what I did for that man?” She stopped to one side, in front of the chair where he had sat down. “If you could see what’s become of me,” she said, and lifted her shirt to show him her legs, and brought her feet — in the rubber-soled shoes — together. “Don’t you see? I danced in the Club Maipo, I did. I’d come down completely naked, wearing feathers. Ms. Joyce. It means happiness. I sang in English. What does she think, that nobody? I’ve been lead dancer since I was sixteen and now that bitch comes and takes him from me.” Junior figured that the woman was going to start crying. “He decided to send me to Entre Ríos, can you understand that? He says that I’m too stifled here. But do you understand what he wants to do to me, that he wants to bury me alive?” Desperation made her move in place and breathe heavily. “What would I do if he sent me to Entre Ríos? What would I do there, answer me that?”

“The countryside is pretty,” Junior said. “You could raise animals, live near nature. Ninety percent of the gauchos just fuck the sheep.”

“What are you saying, you degenerate? Are you sick? Why did they shave your head? Are you Russian? I saw a movie once with a Russian whose head looked like a bowl, just like yours. Did you have ringworm? Are you from the country?”

“Yes,” Junior said. “From the town of Gualeguay. My old man is the foreman at the Larrea cattle ranch. He was, that is. A drunk worker killed him, betrayed him, stabbed him with a knife when he was getting out of a sulky.”

“And then?” the woman asked. “Go on.”

“That’s all,” Junior said. “He had it in for him because my father had called him a bum at a dance once. He waited for his chance and finally paid him back. They’re all drug addicts, out in the country. Always hallucinating.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I’m saying. I can’t sleep out in the country. Wherever you look there are drugs and trash.”

She walked toward an old armoire with a crescent-shaped mirror in the rear of the room. Junior managed to see the reflection from the mirror that broke the semi-darkness when she opened the armoire, then a mattress that was rolled up and tied with wire, and an empty hanger. The woman stood on her toes and searched the upper shelves. From behind she seemed very young, almost a girl. When she turned around she had a bottle of perfume in her hand. English Cologne La Franco. She opened it and took a drink, raising her face toward the ceiling. She wiped her mouth and looked at him again.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Another thing about the country,” Junior said, “are the locusts. Short-horned grasshoppers. You have to make noise so they won’t land, horns, shots, my father would even blow the siren on the boat. Or else with smoke, burn the cane thickets, the dry grass. That’s why I like the city — no locusts. Just mosquitoes and cats.”

The woman left the armoire open and walked toward the center of the room with the bottle of perfume pressed against her stomach. She moved slowly and looked at Junior with a suspicious expression on her face.

“And why was it that you wanted to see him?”

“I have something to ask him.”

“He told you to meet him here? If you want to see him, why don’t you go look for him at the Museum? Tell me, you wouldn’t be a friend of Fat-Man Saurio’s?”

“Calm down, shhh. .,” Junior said. “Silence in the night. Fuyita asked me to come here. Now. . if you say that he’s in the Museum.”

“Me?” The woman started to laugh nervously. “What did I say, kid?” She lifted the bottle of perfume and took another drink. Then she put a few drops on her fingertips and patted herself behind the ears. Junior could smell the perfume’s mild fragrance mixed with the closed-in smell of the room.

“Maybe he’s in the Museum, maybe he’s not. If you’re such good friends with Fat-Man Saurio, you must know something. Why don’t you have him tell you about Deaf Girl.” She started to laugh again, as if she were coughing. “Tell me the truth, is he with her or not?”

She had started to cry and could not stop. She pressed her closed fists against her eyes. Junior felt sorry for the woman and asked her not to cry.

“How can you ask me not to cry, do you want to tell me that? With what he’s done to me!”

“Here, take this,” he said, and handed her a handkerchief. “Calm down, don’t cry. Where are you from?”

“From here, I’ve always lived in the hotel, I’m the girl from the Majestic. But I come from far away, from the interior of the country, from the south. From Río Negro. Look, I stained it all,” she said, and tried to fold the handkerchief, smiling. “Do you think it’ll show?” She was touching her bruises with her fingertips.

“No,” he said. “No. But why don’t you clean yourself up a little. Come here, let me see.”

He moistened the handkerchief with the eau de cologne and cleaned her bruised face, which she allowed him to do with her eyes closed.

“That’s enough,” she said. “That’s enough. Hold on, let me turn on a light.” She went up to a lamp with a pleated ruffle lampshade. It gave off a bluish light when she switched it on. Then she looked at herself in the mirror. “Mother of God, I look like a monster.” She began to fix her hair. She looked at one of her legs. “Anyway, I’m full of wounds and it doesn’t hurt, I don’t feel much, see?” She lifted her shirt and showed him the scars. “This was done by a motorcycle, this by a dog that bit me, here I sort of ran into a wall, I didn’t see it. But it doesn’t hurt. Most complain about every little bruise. I’ve been knocked around by that brute. People are afraid of pain, but not me, right now I don’t feel it at all. It has to do with endorphins.”

“With what?” Junior asked.

“Endorphins. It’s scientific, kid, they explained it to me at the clinic. It’s a natural sedative made by the body. If you do heroin, the body quits making endorphins. Just stops. That’s why when you quit everything hurts, because you don’t have enough endorphins. In my case, I think it made too much and things don’t hurt like they should. That’s why I drink, anyway. Alcohol. Out in the province there’s a lot of heroin, in the country, in the valley, everyone can get it, they carry it on the sulkies, the Italian farmers hide it in their boots.”

“Do you have any now?”

“Never. I don’t buy it, I left that shit behind. When you’re on horse you don’t feel anything. Anyway, your body changes — you don’t shower for a week but you don’t stink because you don’t secrete anything. You don’t cry, you don’t pee, you don’t feel cold or hot, you barely eat. You can be a heroin addict your whole life, they know that you don’t die from it, unless it’s of very poor quality, the worst of the worst, which would poison you. But you have to be a millionaire to afford pure heroin. And one thing’s for sure: the day you skip a dose, the withdrawal symptoms kill you.”

“You can’t quit.”

“What do you mean you can’t quit? You’re crazy. You have to go somewhere where there isn’t any, where you can’t get it even if you’re dying. I left the small town, where they sell it even in kiosks, and came to the capital, and locked myself in a bathroom for three days. When you quit heroin everything is reversed. You sweat a lot, I was always all sweaty, they’d lift me from the tiles and I’d be totally wet. It’s terrible, because you’re supernervous and lethargic at the same time. Besides, you cry over anything. I’d look at an ashtray and cry. I started drinking then. At first, I remember, I drank Ocho Hermanos Anisette.”

“It’s better.”

“It’s the same shit. In order not to be an alcoholic you have to avoid drinking by yourself. Now I wake up in the middle of the night, drink a little bit of gin and go back to sleep.”

Junior looked at the woman, who was touching up her face. Her skin was taut and shiny as if it were made out of metal.

“Come here,” he said. “I want you to look at this picture.”

It was a snapshot of a young woman wearing a plaid skirt and a black turtleneck sweater.

“And who is this?” she said, grabbing the picture with both hands.

“Have you ever seen her?”

The woman shook her head no.

“Did they take her away?”

“She died,” he said.

“Who did her in? Fuyita?”

“Do you think he did it?”

“Me? Are you crazy, kid? I don’t know anything.” She leaned over on the bed and started filing her nails. “Don’t pay any attention to me. You better watch out, too, because I’m half-crazy. And who knows this little cutie, anyway?” She raised her face. “Deaf Girl is always running around with women. Have you been to the Museum yet? There’s a machine, do you know or not? There’s something very strange in all of that.”

“Nyet.”

“Everything is scientific. Nothing evil. I met a Russian guy once who had invented a metal bird that could predict rain. This is the same. Pure science, no religion.”

“No,” Junior said. “Is the machine a woman?”

“She used to be a woman.”

“They locked her up.”

“She was in a clinic for a year. Don’t tell him I told you because he’ll kill you, Fuyita will. Don’t let him know you came here. He’s jealous as a snake.”

“In the country I used to kill them with a pitchfork. Like this,” Junior said, and made the motion of stabbing something on the floor. “The small snakes. Is your name Elena?”

“Not mine, hers. I’m Lucia. I used to live in Uruguay, I sang in the Club Sodre, that should tell you everything. That’s where I first saw her, they used to display her in a dance hall behind glass. She was full of tubes and cables. All white.”

“Is she in the Museum?”

“Yes. Fuyita fell in love with the machine, and I’ve lost him, I know it. She lives in the Museum. He thinks that in Entre Ríos I’m not going to find out, but they know about her everywhere in the country. He always loved me, he did. He gets angry because he’s desperate.”

Through the window could be heard the soft echo of a song that was lost in the rumble of the city.

“You and I, who loved each other so much,” Lucia sang. “We must go our separate ways. . you and I.”

She looked like a girl, she must have been thirty years old but it seemed as if she had never aged.

“You sing well,” he said, and stood up. “You should take care of yourself.”

“What?” she asked. “Are you leaving already?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Aren’t you going to bring me the gin?”

“Yes.”

The woman shook her head as if to wake up and tried to smile.

“Gin, and if you can, some bread.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Bread, some salami, anything.”

“Okay, gin and something to eat,” Junior said. He walked to the door followed by the woman, limping behind him.

“I’ll be right back.”

He opened the door and went out to the hallway. It was still empty, illuminated by a pair of bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

“Listen,” she said.

Junior turned around. The woman was standing behind him, grabbing the door and holding her shirt closed across her chest with one hand to cover herself from the cold.

“Bring whatever you can find, a little can of pâté, whatever they have.”

“Okay,” he said. “Yes.”

Outside, night had fallen. Junior hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the Museum. It was more than an hour away. The ride was smooth. It was growing dark and the whole city was illuminated. He put on his headphones. Crime and the City Solution was playing. Somewhere from the rooftops searchlights swept across the sky with blue beams. He had the recording that Renzi had given him. It was the machine’s latest known narration. A testimony, the voice of a witness recounting what he had seen. The events occurred in the present, on the edge of the world, the signs of horror marked on the earth. The story circulated in the form of copies and reproductions from hand to hand. It was available in the bookstores on Av. Corrientes and in the bars of the Bajo, the neighborhood near the port. Junior put in the cassette tape and let himself be carried away by the inflections of the person who began to narrate. Beside him, the city dissolved in the fog of autumn while the taxi turned down Av. Leandro Alem, heading south.

THE RECORDING

The first Argentine anarchist was a gaucho from Entre Ríos. He met Enrico Malatesta once in some fields near the town of Bragado when a great flood brought them together. They spent three days sheltered on the roof of a church, covered by the Italian man’s raincoat, watching the water rise and the floating branches and dead animals brought in by the Paraguay River. Curled up beneath the spread-out coat, they ate wet crackers and drank gin until the rain subsided. During those days, speaking in a kind of pidgin Spanish mixed with Italian, aided by small drawings and signs, Malatesta convinced the gaucho of the truths of anarchism. Aha, the peasant would say, aha. And he’d agree by nodding his head. That gaucho was Juan Arias. He traveled around to the large cattle ranches preaching the Idea he had learned from Malatesta until he was killed by a group of murderers from the Nationalist Autonomist Party. They pressed him up against the atrium of a church on an election day, on a Sunday, and stabbed him to death because he claimed that the oral vote was unfair to the poor and humble in the countryside. Out in the province they called him The Other Fíerro because when he didn’t know how to convince people and he ran out of words he’d start reciting Hernández’s poem. The gauchos speak in verse and the workers stutter. The Stutterer, everyone knows him, thin, jumpy eyes, evasive gaze. In the world of labor, in the factories, people don’t speak like this, suddenly, all at once. The worker’s words, the worker’s words sound like babble, a stuttering that struggles to express itself. This can be seen clearly on television when people from the work-world are asked to say something in an interview, for example. You have to give them at least five or six minutes more than others, because their words are broken up with silences, except in the case of the union representatives who speak like radio announcers and can come up with phrases right on the spot. It’s a manner of speech that I know very well. Say your line, say your line, tell your story, and the man has difficulties telling his story and saying his line, it’s a tragedy. Even my mother, before she died, told me of a peasant who was executed in a plaza, tied to a pole. She was never able to forget that man, a short foreigner, because the town’s loudspeakers kept playing music and advertisements while they shot him, as if nothing was happening. I’ve seen things that make me want to start life over again, without any memories. I’ve been on the verge of leaving my wife and children, of taking a train, of going to Lomas, to my sister’s house in Bernal, to Chivilcoy, to Bolívar. But it’s no use, if you leave, your memories still go with you. They killed them like sparrows, running, hooded, what can a person do, their hands tied, they would shoot them from only two meters away and throw them in the pits, then they would come with bulldozers and cover the graves, sometimes they even made the wretches shovel the ditch themselves before killing them. You would see them as if in a dream, the naked Christians digging the hole. Around those times I found myself working with a gentleman named Maradey, Maneco Maradey. The field is located on the other side of the forest, I always called it “Las Lomitas,” a field of two, three thousand hectares, that stretched as far as La Calera, El Diquecito, La Mezquita. I took care of the animals, we planted a few things, I’d get a certain percentage from the animals when they were sold instead of a fixed salary. I worked there with that gentleman the entire month of April, and there were some abnormalities in those fields, at the very, very back of it all, armed men, beyond the gate, some barracks, a large shed rather, located on the double highway to Carlos Paz, the highway wasn’t open then, there was a road called El Camino Viejo a La Calera that was intersected by a paved road, south of Malagüeño, no, north of Malagüeño, I’m sorry, I had a dairy farm some five hundred meters from that shack, my wife and I were cleaning the jars when the incident with the calf took place. It turns out that in the cornfield, right out there, there was a pit, and my calf fell into it, you see, a pit, exactly eighteen meters long. I’ll explain to you why it was exactly eighteen meters long, because the calf falls into the pit, it was arched like this, from higher to lower, you couldn’t see anything from outside, the calf was bleating inside and outside a cow was scraping at the ground, like this, with its hoof, it was mooing, calling the calf. And so I go and ask this friend, Maradey, who was just about to leave in his truck, to lend me some boards because one of my calves has fallen into a pit, into a pit from a mill I thought at first, no? Then I go with two workers to bring some large horses, some percherons, and I go to Malagüeño and ask for exactly forty meters of rope, and they give me just about forty meters of rope. Okay, so we put the boards like this until we start shining some light down with some mirrors to try to find the calf, and we see, how can I tell you? This man, Maradey, he didn’t care, nothing bothered him, that image, no one can imagine it, what was in that pit, those corpses, and the man and I put together a harness with that rope, and then, lighting my way with the mirrors, I bend the rope in half and grabbed it in the middle, I make a lasso on one end and I send it down. The small calf was standing, it was a black calf, kind of thin, tall, its legs sticking straight down, and as I was lowering the rope — looking through the mirror — there were all sorts of terrible things in there, bodies piled up, remains, even a woman all rolled up, sitting like this, her arms across her legs, hunched over, you could tell she was young, that woman, her head sunk into her chest, her hair hanging down, barefoot, her pants rolled up, and above her there seemed to be another person, I thought it was also a woman, fallen with her hair forward, her arms twisted backward like this, it seemed, I don’t know, it was like a dug-up graveyard, the effect of what was in there, in the mirror, the light it gave off, like a circle, I would move it and see the pit, in that mirror, the shimmering remains, the light would reflect inside and I saw the bodies, I saw the earth, the corpses. Then, in the mirror, I saw the light and the woman sitting and in the middle, the calf, there it was, its four legs stuck in the mud, stiff with fear, and when we started pulling it out we noticed that it had broken its right leg up almost near its back, above the shoulder blade, and we pulled it out, poor little guy, its eyes looked almost human. I remember that I hosed it off and that I was getting my face wet with the water so that Maradey wouldn’t notice that I was crying, and I could barely breathe and I ask him what are we going to do, and he says, nothing, leave everything and not say anything. And I never went back, I don’t think, I sort of left my house to live with Old-Man Monti because I didn’t want my daughters to do any of those things that young people do, I didn’t want them to dance, nor have a good time, I couldn’t listen to the radio, so since I was so bothersome to everyone I left, I made myself a bed at the cattle station, at the edge of the field, and I was more comfortable there, with Don Monti, I could think, he had seen everything, he had been jailed by the conservatives before. There has never been anything like this, he tells me. He once saw a man killed by the police in Puente Barracas just to teach people a lesson, they put him up against a back wall, a large man, they held him by his hair like this and killed him, you see, Don Monti says. But this, he said. This is like Dante’s Inferno, he says. I remember that Old-man Monti was having a smoke when I told him, he was a man who could handle anything, he had worked in the capital and then moved to the interior when his wife and kids died in a fire. He was the first one to tell me what was going on with the frost. Because we were just above it, on this side of the fence, the small dairy, on this side of the large prairie, the only area with grass, because El Torito Hill, what is known as El Torito Hill, is all natural fields with rocks and prairies full of grazing pastures, the ruminants really seek it out, and that area isn’t cultivated, nothing was done there in those days. I could see the whole field from up there, the entire prairie, the only one with green grass and soft earth that could be cultivated, you see, and below, the pits, I never put a cross out there, nothing. Sometimes you’d see the carrion hawks flying over, they couldn’t cover everything up. They were digging and digging, as the winter approached you’d see more. They did everything at night and in the morning, with the frost, the squares, the white horror. On some pits you could tell they had thrown in slaked lime, the lime always rose to the surface, the grass doesn’t grow quickly enough and then with the frost, the field gets frost burn when it freezes, it gets frost burn. I mean, you can see the whole wide plains with those white rectangles, one almost right next to the other, sometimes they left five or six meters in between, you could see rocks that they couldn’t dig out, sometimes they would start a pit and sixty centimeters down they’d hit a large stone, so they’d dig right next to it, sometimes they’d make the pits a little thinner, sometimes a little larger, the pits were two by three meters in size, or something like that, and the earth, when they covered them up there was a lot of earth left over, the pits never ended up even, some were parallel to each other, but they were almost everywhere, the pits, because sometimes they would come to dig them on one side, then on another, and there was always so much earth left over, always so much left over, they would dig at night, even when it rained, they didn’t know what to do with the remains. It was an unmeasurable map of crowded pits in that large prairie, that’s what I say. I couldn’t tell you how many, but I figure easily over seven hundred, seven hundred and fifty, I figure, because that area had possibly sixteen hectares, fifteen or sixteen, it’s hard to tell, and it was almost completely covered, a cemetery without crosses, nothing, completely wild. There were even some pits that would go unused for six or seven days. During the day, I climbed down into several of these pits, before anyone had been buried in them, during the day all you can see is the field and the pits, the field and the pits, I even rescued some small dogs once, and a few hares that used to fall in, too. Those pits came up above my head, maybe they were more than two meters deep, and sometimes, by the following evening, they were no longer there, sometimes you could hear everything through the window, you’d see lights, movement, lanterns, armed men. And sitting with Monti on the small low chairs in the patio facing the plains, thinking I have to get out of here, but how could I have left, where to, in those times? I thought I’d go to the Chaco area where I had a buddy, but it would be worse wherever I went, I wouldn’t have been able to say anything, at least there I was with Don Monti, we’re the last ones, I thought, we took care of the dairy farm, of the animals, we waited for the winter to pass sitting at the door of the ranch, Don Monti would raise his hand, like this, I remember, and he’d say they come from there and from there, they would back the truck in and kill what they had brought, everything that they brought, the people with their hands tied, in hoods, right there, what could they do? Without even turning the car radio off, a car without a license plate, with music and commercials, huh, Don Monti, sitting at the door of the ranch, at the cattle station. That’s how it is, the old man would say to me, worse than animals, the worst of the worst. Then he’d stop talking, take a drag from his cigarette, raise his hand, show me the prairies, below.

“You know,” he says to me, “this is the map of hell.” The ground was a map, what I’m telling you here, it’s true, it was a map, I mean, of unmarked graves, with frost-burned sections like slabs of stone and then earth or grass. It can only be covered over so much because in the long run the frost burn, the dug-up earth, can be seen, but of course the harm has already been done by then. Because at times when they knew that there was a mound of rocks underneath they would try to joist them out, there were even some long trenches out there, they would dig until they hit some stones and then they would just stop, see? That’s what you’d see, in the winter, out in the large prairie of Las Lomitas. The grass had been burned by the frost and you could see all the pits, especially the ones with slaked lime, you could see them everywhere, ones of this shape, others lengthwise, you could see very large numbers of them, let me tell you. A map of graves like we see in these mosaics, like this, that was the map, it looked like a map, after the frost, the earth, black and white, a map of hell.