The Absent City

~ ~ ~

The Museum was in a remote part of the city, near the park and behind the Congress Building. To get to the round hall where the machine was exhibited you had to go up a ramp and along a corridor with acrylic walls. You could see her at the end of the hall, standing on a black platform. Diagrams, photographs, and copies of the texts were mounted along the walls. Junior jotted down a few items in his notepad as he walked through the gallery following the history displayed in the glass cases.

At first they had tried to make a machine that could translate texts. This was a fairly simple system; it looked like a phonograph with all sorts of cables and magnets inside a glass box. One afternoon they fed it Poe’s “William Wilson” and asked it to translate it. Three hours later the teletype began to print the final version. The story was stretched out and modified to such a degree that it was unrecognizable. It was now called “Stephen Stevensen.” That was the first story. In spite of its imperfections, everything that followed was already synthesized in that first story. The first work, Macedonio had said, anticipates all those that come after it. We had wanted a machine that could translate; we got a machine that transforms stories. It took the theme of the double and translated it. It makes due as well as it can. It takes what is available and transforms what appears to be lost into something else. That is life. Macedonio was fifty years old at this point. He did not want to sell the patent because there was nothing to sell. He had intended to perfect the apparatus (as he called it) with the intention of entertaining people in small towns out in the country. I think it is an invention that will be more entertaining than radio, he used to say, but it is still too early to call it a success. He admonished prudence and refused to accept any form of support from the government. He was going to give a lecture at the university to explain the scope of the invention. (“It’s part of ‘The Ohno?’ series,” Macedonio said. “What are ‘The Ohno?’? They are devices that no one ever believes will work until they are seen in full operation.”) Everything had gone very well. Better than expected. The machine had grasped the form of Poe’s narration and proceeded to change the anecdote. The next thing they had to do, therefore, was program it with a variable set of narrative nuclei, and let it go to work. The key, Macedonio said, is that it learns as it narrates. Learning means that it remembers what it has already done, it accumulates experience as it goes along. It will not necessarily make better stories each time, but it will know the stories it has already made, and perhaps give them a plot to tie them all together at the end. He thought it would be an extremely useful invention because there were very few old men left to tell ghost stories in the countryside at night. The last one I knew lived in Coronel Vidal; the guy who told the story about the invisible gaucho, Macedonio said. He came up with it all by himself, out of nowhere, perfecting it with time, drinking mate out in the country, the strong winds of the prairie blowing in his face. A cousin of mine once wrote to tell me that someone had told him the very same story in Spain. And the same story also appeared among a group of sailors in the Canary Islands, on Tenerife Isle. But the person who lived it was Don Sosa, a cattle herder who ended up paralyzed from jumping in the water so many times to rescue lost calves when he worked in the Echegoyen cattle ranches near Quequén. Here is the story.

THE INVISIBLE GAUCHO

Burgos was a short cattle herder of Indian descent who was hired in Chacabuco to help drive a herd of cattle to Entre Ríos. They left at dawn, but were hit by a storm when they were only a few leagues out. Burgos worked with the others to keep the cattle from running off. Toward the end, he saved a lost calf that had gotten stuck in the mud, its legs spread out in the wind and rain. He hoisted it up without getting off his horse and placed it across his saddle. The animal struggled. Burgos held it with just one hand and rode over to release it with the rest of the herd. He did it to show off his skills, as if he thought the move would earn him the respect of his companions. But he regretted it at once because none of the other men looked at him, nor did anyone make the least comment. He put the incident out of his mind, but he began to get the strange feeling that the others had something against him. They only spoke to him when they were giving orders, and they never included him in their conversations. At night he was the first to go to sleep, and he would see them from under his blankets laughing and telling jokes near the fire. He felt he was living a nightmare. He had never been in a situation like this in the sixteen years of his life. He had been mistreated, but never forgotten and ignored. The first stop was in Azul, where they arrived late on a Saturday afternoon. The leader said they would spend the night in town and leave the next day at noon. They put the cattle in a small yard, which everyone called the church corral, close to where the town ended and the plains began. It was said that a chapel once stood there that had been destroyed by the Indians in the Great Indian Raid of 1867. There were a few low walls left that served to keep the cattle inside the corral. Burgos thought he saw the shape of a cross formed by the bricks where some weeds grew. It was a hole of light in the wall, drawn by the sunlight. Enthusiastic, he showed it to the others, but they walked right on past as if they had not heard him. The cross could be seen clearly in the air as the sun set. Burgos kissed his fingers and crossed himself. There was dancing in the general store. Burgos sat at a table apart from everyone else. He saw the men laughing together and getting drunk. He saw them head to the back room with the women who were sitting in a line at the counter, and would have liked to pick one out for himself as well, but he was afraid of being ignored, so he stayed where he was. Still, he imagined picking out the attractive blond in front of him. She was tall and seemed to be the oldest of the group. He would take her to the room, and when they were lying in bed, he would explain what was happening to him. The woman wore a silver cross that hung between her breasts and spun it around while Burgos told her the story. Men like to see others suffer, the woman said, they looked at Christ because they were drawn by his suffering. She spoke with a foreign accent. If the story of the Passion weren’t so horrendous, the woman said, no one would have bothered to look after the Son of God. Burgos heard the woman saying this to him and got up to ask her to dance, but he thought that she would not see him, so he pretended he had gotten up to order a gin. That night the men did not go to sleep until dawn, and everyone slept well into the morning. Around noon they started to herd the cattle out of the corral toward the road. The sky was dark and Burgos did not see the cross in the church wall. They galloped in the direction of the storm, where the low clouds blended into the broad fields. A little later raindrops as heavy as twenty-cent pieces began to fall. Burgos covered himself with his watertight poncho and rode in front of the herd. He knew how to do his job, and they knew that he knew how to do his job. This was the only bit of pride left in him, now that he was less than nothing. The storm grew worse. They drove the cattle to the edge of a ravine and held them there the entire afternoon while the rain continued to fall. When the weather cleared up, the men went out to retrieve the animals that had gotten away. Burgos saw a calf that was drowning in a lagoon that had formed in a hollow. It must have had a broken leg, because every time it tried to climb out, it slid back in. He lassoed it from above and held it up by its neck. The animal twisted around and kicked the air in desperation. It got away from him and fell back into the water. The calf’s head floated in the lagoon. Burgos lassoed it again. The calf was kicking its legs and gasping for air. The other men gathered around the edge of the deep hollow. This time Burgos held it up for a while, and then let it drop. The calf sank and took a while to resurface. The men started making comments to each other. Burgos lassoed it and raised it up, and when the calf was near the top, he dropped it again. The men reacted with shouts and loud laughter. Burgos repeated the operation several times. The animal would try to avoid the lasso and would sink back into the water. When it tried to swim away, the men urged Burgos to fish it out again. The game went on for a while, amid jokes and jests, until Burgos finally lassoed the calf out, after it had nearly drowned, and lifted it up slowly to the feet of his horse. The animal was lying in the mud, gasping for air, its eyes white with fright. Then one of the men jumped off his horse and cut its throat with one quick slash.

“It’s done, kid,” he said to Burgos; “tonight we’re having barbecued fish for dinner.” Everyone broke out in loud laughter, and for the first time in a long time Burgos felt the respect and the comradeship of the men.

Macedonio was always gathering strange stories. Even when he was a treasurer in the Province of Misiones, he was already compiling anecdotes and stories. “Stories have simple hearts, just like women. Or men. But I prefer to say women,” Macedonio would say, “because it makes me think of Scheherazade.” It was not until much later, Junior thought, that they understood what he was trying to say. Around that time Macedonio had lost his wife, Elena Obieta, and everything that Macedonio did since then (and especially the machine) was meant to make her seem present. She was the Eternal One, the river of stories, the endless voice that kept memory alive. He never accepted the fact that he had lost her. In this he was like Dante. And, like Dante, he built a world in which he could live with her. The machine was that world, it was his masterpiece. He got her out of nowhere and kept her covered with a blanket on the floor of a closet in the room of a boardinghouse around Tribunales, near the courthouse. The system was simple, he had hit on it by accident. When it transformed “William Wilson” into the story of Stephen Stevensen, Macedonio realized that he had the basic elements from which he could build a virtual reality. So he began working with series and variables. First he thought about the English railroads and the reading of novels. The genre grew in the nineteenth century, it was tied in with the mode of transportation. That is why so many stories take place on trains. People liked to read stories about a train while they rode aboard a train. In Argentina, the first train ride in a novel is clearly found in the work of Cambaceres.

In one of the rooms of the Museum Junior saw the train car in which Erdosain had killed himself. It was dark green, bloodstains could be seen on one of the leather seats, the windows were open. In the other room he saw the photograph of a train car that belonged to the old Ferrocarril Central Argentino. That was the car in which the woman who fled at dawn traveled. Junior imagined her nodding off in her seat, the train cutting through the darkness of the country, all its windows lit up. That was one of the first stories.

A WOMAN

She had a two-year-old son but decided to abandon him. She tied him with a long belt to a hoop on the ceiling and left him crawling around in the room on a waterproof rug. She took the precaution of moving the furniture and piling it up against the walls, far from the child’s reach, so it would be like an empty room. She wrote a note to the cleaning woman, telling her she had gone out to run an errand. It was seven in the morning. The moment her husband drove off to work in his car, she called a taxi and took the first long-distance train out of Retiro Station. The next day she was in a small town on the border of the Province of San Luis. In the hotel she signed in under her mother’s name (Lía Matra). She spent the day sleeping and at night went down to gamble in the casino. The roulette was like the face of fortune. The men and women in the hall went there looking for answers, each in an isolated microscopic universe. (Those funereal croupiers, she thought, she would have liked to take one of them to bed with her.) It was a poor casino, with light-blue carpeting. She imagined that Hell must have the same decor. A half empty and poorly lit room, with an “electric” blue moquette. The men wore jackets, the women looked like retired bar girls. A cloud of insects buzzing around an artificial replica of passion and life. The woman thought of days or months and played them in progression and always won. When the casino closed they gave her the money she had won in a paper bag. She had to cross a plaza in order to get back to the hotel. There was a statue, benches, a garbage can chained to a tree. She was going to call home and let them know she had left. The woman hides the bag with the money in the bushes. The town is empty, a light shines in the distance where the old train station used to be. The woman crosses the street, goes up to her room, and only then decides to unpack her suitcase. She hangs her clothes up in the closet, arranges her bottles and creams in the cabinet in the restroom, closes the windows so the daylight will not come in. Calls down to the front desk, asks not to be disturbed, then kills herself.

The room in which the woman committed suicide was reproduced in the Museum. Junior saw the picture of the son against the lamp on the night table. He did not remember this detail from the story. The series of hotel rooms was reproduced in successive halls. The boardinghouse in which an old man sat on a wicker chair and plucked at a guitar through the night. The washbasin on the iron base in which a German soldier’s lover had washed her hair. Junior saw the hotel room from Cuernavaca, the bed surrounded by a mosquito netting and a bottle of tequila. In another hall to the side was the room from the Majestic and the armoire in which the woman had looked for the bottle of perfume. He was astonished by the precision of the reconstruction. It seemed like a dream. But dreams were false stories. And these were true stories. Each one isolated in a corner of the Museum, building the story of their lives. Everything was as it should be. Military uniforms in tall glass cases, Moreira’s long dagger on a black velvet pillow, the photograph of a laboratory in one of the islands of the Tigre Delta. The stories were developed from these objects. They were crisp and clear as memories. The last room contained the mirror, and in the mirror was the first love story.

FIRST LOVE

I fell in love for the first time when I was twelve years old. A redhead showed up in the middle of the school year. The teacher introduced her as the new student. She was standing next to the blackboard, her name was (or is) Clara Schultz. I do not remember anything from the weeks that followed, but I do know that we fell in love, and that we tried to hide it because we knew we were too young and that what we wanted was impossible. Some of the memories still hurt now. The others would look at us when we stood in line together, and she would turn even redder, and I learned what it meant to suffer the complicity of those fools. I got into fights after school in the small soccer field on Amenedo with guys from the fifth and sixth grades who used to follow her around and throw thistles in her hair — just because she wore it loose and it came down to her waist. One afternoon, I came home so beat up that my mother thought that I must have been crazy, or that I had contracted some kind of suicidal fever. I could not tell anyone what I was feeling. I looked surly and sullen, as if I were always tired. We wrote each other letters, although we barely knew how to write. I remember living through an unstable succession of feelings that alternated between ecstasy and desperation. I remember that she was serious and passionate and that she never smiled, perhaps because she knew what the future held in store for us. I do not have any photographs of her, only my memories, but Clara has been present in every woman I have ever loved. She left just as she had arrived, unexpectedly, before the end of the year. One afternoon she did something heroic. Breaking all the rules, she came running into the boys patio, which was forbidden to girls, to tell me that they were taking her away. I can still see the two of us standing on the red bricks of the patio, the others in a circle around us, looking on sarcastically. Her father was a municipal inspector or a manager in a bank and was being transferred to Sierra de la Ventana. I remember the horror that the image of a sierra that was also a jail produced in me. That is why she had arrived in the middle of the school year, and perhaps also why she had loved me. My pain was more than I could stand, but I managed to remember that my mother used to say that if you loved someone you should put a mirror under your pillow, and that if you saw that person reflected in your dreams, it meant you would get married. At night, when everyone at home had gone to sleep, I would walk barefoot to the back patio and take the mirror in which my father shaved every morning off the hook. It was a square mirror, with a brown wooden frame, and a small chain in the back from where it hung on a nail in the wall. I would sleep and wake up frequently at night, trying to see her reflection when I dreamt. At times I imagined that I saw her beginning to appear in the corner of the mirror. One night, many years later, I dreamt that I was dreaming with her in the mirror. I saw her just as she was when she was a girl, with her red hair and her serious eyes. I was completely different, but she was the same, and she was walking toward me, as if she were my daughter.

The mirror’s wooden frame was marked with gray notches, as if someone had chiseled it with a letter opener. Junior looked at his own face and saw the gallery reflected behind him. The guard had been following him silently at a distance. But now he walked up to him, one hand behind his back and the specter of the other in his pocket, and swallowed, or so Junior thought from the movement of his Adam’s apple.

“What’s that?” Junior asked, pointing to a glass box.

“Science has not yet been able to determine its nature,” he answered with an obviously memorized phrase. “A vulture, or perhaps a chimango. It was found in 1895 in the area outside Tapalqué by Doctor Roger Fontaine, a French scientist,” he said as his shaking finger pointed at the bronze placard.

Inside the case there was a metal bird perched on a branch, pecking at one of its wings.

“Strange,” Junior said.

“And now look at this skull,” the guard said. “It’s from the same region.”

It looked like a glass cranium. The Argentine countryside is inexhaustible. In small towns people hold onto the remnants of the oldest of stories.

Next to it there was a series of objects lined up inside a low glass cabinet, all made out of bone. They looked like dice, or small knuckle-bones with which boys might play, or heretical rosary beads. Junior stopped to look at a Japanese vase, probably donated by some navy officer. He had seen a replica at the market in Plaza Francia, they could make reproductions so precise that they were better than the original. They could even get the copy to look older and more pure. The guard had disappeared quietly out a side stairwell. Junior walked through a gallery containing drawings and photographs from the police archives, and entered another hall. It was a room in a family’s house, the blinds drawn and a lamplight on, without any furniture. A little further down, almost at floor level, in the middle of the room, as if it were in a cradle, was the doll.

THE GIRL

The matrimony’s first two children were able to lead a normal life, especially considering the difficulties associated with having a sister like her in a small town. The girl (Laura) was born healthy. It was only with time that they began to notice certain strange signs. Her system of hallucinations was the topic of a complicated report that appeared in a scientific journal, but her father had deciphered it long before that. Yves Fonagy called it “extravagant references.” In these highly unusual cases the patient imagines that everything that occurs around him is a projection of his personality. The patient excludes real people from his experience, because he considers himself much more intelligent than anyone else. The world was an extension of herself; her body spread outward and reproduced itself. She was constantly preoccupied by mechanical objects, especially electric lightbulbs. She saw them as words, every time one was turned on it was like someone had begun to speak. Thus she considered darkness to be a form of silent thinking. One summer afternoon (when she was five years old) she looked at an electric fan spinning on a dresser. She thought it was a living being, a female living being. The girl of the air, her soul trapped in a cage. Laura said that she lived “there,” and raised her hand to indicate the ceiling. There, she said, moving her head from left to right. Her mother turned off the fan. That is when she began having difficulties with language. She lost the capacity to use personal pronouns. With time she stopped using them altogether, then hid all the words she knew in her memory. She would only utter a little clucking sound as she opened and closed her eyes. The mother separated the boys from their sister because she was afraid that it was contagious. One of those small town beliefs. But madness is not contagious and the girl was not crazy. In any case, they sent the two brothers to a Catholic boarding school in Del Valle, and the family went into seclusion in their large house in Bolívar. The father was a frustrated musician who taught mathematics in the public high school. The mother was a teacher and had become principal, but she decided to retire in order to take care of her daughter. They did not want to have her committed. So they took her twice a week to an institute in La Plata and followed the orders given by Doctor Arana, who treated her with electric shock therapy. He explained that the girl lived in an extreme emotional void. That is why Laura’s language was slowly becoming more and more abstract and unpersonalized. At first she still used the correct names for food. She would say “butter,” “sugar,” “water,” but later began to refer to different food items in groups that were disconnected from their nutritive nature. Sugar became “white sand,” butter, “soft mud,” water, “wet air.” It was clear that by disarranging the names and abandoning personal pronouns she was creating a language that better corresponded to her personal emotional experiences. Far from not knowing how to use words correctly, what could be seen was a spontaneous decision to create a language that matched her experience of the world. Doctor Arana did not agree, but this was the father’s hypothesis, and he decided to enter his daughter’s verbal world. She was a logic machine connected to the incorrect interface. The girl functioned according to the model of a fan — a fixed rotational axis served as her syntactic schema, and she moved her head as she spoke to feel the wind of her unarticulated thoughts. The decision to teach her how to use language implied also having to explain to her how to compartmentalize words. But she would lose them like molecules in warm air. Her memory was a breeze blowing in the white curtains of a room in an empty house. It was necessary to try to take that sailboat out in still air. The father stopped going to Doctor Arana’s clinic and began treating the girl with a singing teacher. He had to give her a temporal sequence, and he believed that music was an abstract model of the order of things in the world. She sang Mozart arias in German with Madame Silenzky, a Polish pianist who directed the chorus in the Lutheran Church in Carhué. The girl, sitting on the bench, howled to the rhythm. Madame Silenzky was frightened to death because she thought the child was a monster. She was twelve years old, fat and beautiful like a madonna, but her eyes looked as if they were made out of glass and she clucked before singing. Madame Silenzky thought the girl was a hybrid, a doll made out of foam, a human machine, without feelings, without hope. She screamed more than she sang, always out of tune, but eventually she was able to follow the line of a melody. Her father was trying to get her to incorporate a temporal memory, an empty form, composed of rhythmic sequences and modulations. The girl did not have any syntax (she lacked the very notion of syntax). She lived in a wet universe, time for her was a hand-washed sheet that you wring out in the middle to get the water out. She has staked out her own territory, her father would say, from which she wishes to exclude all experiences. Anything new, any event that she has not yet experienced and which is still to be lived, seems like something painful, like something threatening and terrifying to her. The petrified present, the monstrous and viscous and solid stoppage of time, the chronological void, can only be altered with music. Music is not an experience, it is the pure form of life, it has no content, it cannot frighten her, her father would say, and Madame Silenzky (terrified) would shake her gray head and relax her hands on the piano keys by playing a Haydn cantata before they began. When he finally got the girl to enter a temporal sequence, the mother fell ill and had to be hospitalized. The girl associated her mother’s disappearance (she died two months later) with a Schubert lied. She sang the melody as if she were crying over someone’s death and remembering a lost past. Then, using his daughter’s musical syntax as a base, the father began working on her lexicon. The girl did not have any form from which to construct references, it was like teaching a foreign language to a dead person. (Like teaching a dead language to a foreigner.) He decided to begin by telling her short stories. The girl stood still, near the light, in the hall facing the patio. The father would sit in an armchair and narrate a story to her as if he were singing. He hoped the sentences would enter his daughter’s memory like blocks of meaning. That is why he chose to tell her the same story, only varying the version each time. The plot would become the sole model of the world and the sentences modulations of possible experiences. The story was a simple one. In his Chronicle of the Kings of England (twelfth century), William of Malmesbury tells the story of a young, sovereign Roman noble who has just gotten married. After the feasts and the celebrations, the young man and his friends go out to play bocci balls in the garden. In the course of the game, the young man puts his wedding ring, to avoid losing it, on the barely extended finger of the hand of a bronze statue. When he goes to retrieve it, he finds that the statue’s hand is now a tight fist, and he cannot get his ring back. Without telling anyone, he comes back at night with torches and servants and discovers that the statue has disappeared. He keeps the truth from his bride, but when he gets into bed that night, he feels that there is something between them, something dense and hazy that prevents them from embracing. Terrified, he hears a voice that murmurs in his ear:

“Kiss me, today you and I were united in matrimony. I am Venus, and you have given me the ring of love.”

The first time he told the story, the girl seemed to fall asleep. There was a breeze from the garden at the end of the patio. There were no visible changes, at night she dragged herself into her room and curled up in the darkness with her normal clucking. The next day, at the same time, her father sat her in the same place and told her another version of the story. The first important variation had appeared about twenty years later, in a German compilation from the mid-twelfth century titled Kaiserchronik. In this version, the statue on whose finger the young man places the ring is not Venus, but the Virgin Mary. When he tries to unite with his bride, the Mother of God comes between the couple to chastise him, which incites a mystical passion in the young man. After leaving his wife, the young man becomes a priest and devotes the rest of his life to the service of Our Lady. An anonymous twelfth-century painting depicts the Virgin Mary with a ring on her left ring finger and an enigmatic smile on her lips.

Every day, in the early evening, the father would tell her the same story in its multiple variations. The clucking girl was an anti-Scheherazade, she heard the story of the ring told a thousand and one times at night by her father. Within a year the girl is already smiling, because she knows how the story ends. Sometimes she looks down at her hands and moves her fingers, as if she were the statue. She looks up at the garden and, for the first time, gives her version of the events in a soft whisper. “Mouvo looked at the night. Where his face had been another appeared, Kenya’s. Again the strange laugh. All of a sudden Mouvo was in a corner of the house and Kenya in the garden and the sensorial circles of the ring were very sad,” she said. From that point on, with the repertory of words she had learned and with the circular structure of the story, she began to build a language, an uninterrupted series of phrases that allowed her to communicate with her father. In the following months she was the one who told the story, every evening, in the hall facing the patio in the back of the house. She reached a point where she was able to tell, word for word, the version by Henry James — perhaps because his story, “The Last of the Valerii,” was the last in the series. (The action has shifted to Rome in the time of the Risorgimento, where a young woman, who has inherited a fortune, in one of those typically Jamesian moves, marries an Italian noble from a distinguished, but impoverished, lineage. One afternoon, a group of laborers working at a dig in the gardens of the villa discover a statue of Juno. Signor Conte begins to feel a strange fascination with that masterpiece from the best period of Greek sculpture. He moves the statue to an abandoned greenhouse and hides it mistrustfully from anyone’s view. In the days that follow, he transfers a large part of the passion he feels for his beautiful wife to the marble statue, and spends more and more of his time in the glass structure. At the end, the Contessa, in order to free her husband from the spell, tears the ring off of the goddess’s ring finger and buries it at the far end of the gardens. Her life becomes happy once again.) A gentle drizzle was falling in the patio and the father was rocking in his chair. That afternoon the girl left the story for the first time, she left the closed circle of the story like someone walking through a door, and asked her father to buy her a gold ring (anello). There she was, singing softly, clucking, a sad music machine. She was sixteen years old, a pale dreamer, like a Greek statue. As steadfast as an angel.

Junior saw the ring and the succession of the different versions of the story of the ring. An engraving by Dürer (“Melancholy,” 1497- 98) hung on the wall to the left. Passion, symbolized by the figure of Venus, with a ring in her left hand and a stone sphere at her feet. The story was the tale of the power of stories, the song of the girl looking for life, the music of words repeated to form a closed circle of gold. Off to a side there was a copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy, with notes and drawings written inside. Burton had also told the story of the ring in order to illustrate the power of love. The girl lives again thanks to her father’s stories. To narrate was to give life to a statue, to give life to someone who was afraid of living. One of the glass cabinets contained an original copy of the first myth. “He who has lost his wife works relentlessly to build a statue, thinking about her all the time. To live alone or to build the lost woman for oneself. Passion allows the man in love to opt for the latter dream. The Gesta Romanorum (the most popular storybook of the Middle Ages) tells us that Virgil, who considered himself a magician (Story LVII), used to sculpt magic statues to preserve the souls of his dead friends. The ability to give life to an inanimate object is a faculty associated with the idea of the thaumaturge and the powers of a sorcerer. In Egyptian, the word ‘sculptor’ literally means ‘he who keeps life.’ In the ancient burial rites it was believed that the soul of the deceased traveled to a statue of his body, and a ceremony was held to celebrate the transition from body to statue.” Junior recalled the photograph of Elena, the young woman with the turtleneck sweater and the plaid skirt, smiling at the invisible light. A photograph was also a mirror in which to dream a lost woman. There was an enlarged reproduction of the same picture of Elena on the wall at the far end of the room. He saw Macedonio’s manuscripts behind several glass panels. “To escape toward the indefinite spaces of future forms. The possible is what spreads forth into existence. That which can be imagined occurs and goes on to become a part of reality.” Macedonio was not trying to build a replica of man, but rather a machine that could produce replicas. His goal was to nullify death and construct a virtual world. “The country-city, with a million small farms and ten thousand factories,” Junior read, “completely exempt from the horror of the word ‘rent,’ would have the advantages presented in the following list: Military unattackability. Unattackability via siege or blockade. No firemen. No policemen. A despairing scarcity of diseases. A reduction of more than 40 percent of all speculative, unproductive, barren and aleatory commercial exchanges.” Junior looked at the end of the letter. “The war is coming to an end. All that will be left for us is the dark overbearing plans of the United States, which wants to strike Spain and seize power from her to more easily capture Spanish America. The islands have been occupied, the lab must be saved. Very truly yours, Macedonio.” He looked at the signature, at that frail and immortal handwriting, and then walked around the hall, keeping his distance from the machine. It was smooth and slender and seemed to have a pulsing intermittent light. It is only reading me, Junior thought. There are others, in other isolated galleries, reliving their own memories. There was no one else in the room. He thought he saw a flashlight shining on the tiles of the floor, coming toward him from the end of the hallway. As if someone had gotten off a train in a lost station in the middle of the night, Junior thought, and was now slicing through a field, the flashlight shining on the grass. Far off, in what seemed to be the haze of dawn, the Korean appeared, walking in a dream. He was climbing down the ramp that led to the basement and the lower rooms of the Museum with difficulty, dragging his left leg. He looked like a jockey with frightened eyes. It’s Fuyita, Junior thought. He was wearing a black tie and a strip of black silk on the sleeve of his coat indicating he was in mourning. Junior thought of the woman locked in the room of the Majestic Hotel. The men barely acknowledged each other, then Fuyita walked down the corridor and Junior followed him.

“I have some material that I would like you to analyze, Mr. Junior. The newspaper must hold off, though, until we let you know that it is okay to publish the information. You get my drift?” he asked Junior once they had sat at a table in the café on the first floor, near the window facing the greenhouses. “Don’t pay any attention to what those women may have said about me. Madness takes over the heart and the truth gets lost. I’m a spy, a foreigner, I’d like to return to my native home. Now, I want you to know that I’m working for Richter, the Engineer. It is imperative that you talk to him, he is perfectly aware of the situation. He has collaborated with Macedonio from the beginning, he has the proofs and the documents. They want to nullify us, but we will resist. We,” the jockey said to Junior, “led by the Engineer, have many drafts and multiple stories. We have gotten a hold of an absolutely secret text, for example, one of the machine’s last stories, or perhaps the last, because there was a series of six unpublished stories, and one that was released, and then a series of three, and finally two more, published before she was declared out of commission.”

He spoke in a frozen whisper, his small catfish-eyes fixed on Junior’s face. He began to tell him the story of Richter, the Engineer, a German physicist who came to get away from the Nazis at the start of the war, and worked on the plans and the programming of the machine, and then became a businessman, and mounted an agricultural-industrial complex in a small town in the province of Buenos Aires that went bankrupt. “After Macedonio’s death, the Engineer withdrew to his abandoned, bankrupt factory. The installations were all held up. He prepared to wage another battle while his mother roamed around in the upper floors, because by this time,” the jockey told him, “the Engineer spoke only to his mother, who is crazy but he does not want to have her hospitalized — dedicated as he is to planning an Institute of Agro-Industrial Development and to not think about the machine. Because the Engineer always tried to keep his family problems — in other words, his mother — separate from problems that arose from his dreams — in other words, the machine.” This guy is crazy, Junior thought, he is trying to confuse me.

“How much money do you need?” Junior asked, suddenly cutting him off.

Fuyita smiled at him with his thin mustache and his fish-face, and started talking with a Korean accent.

“No, don’t need money, no, no money, your paper want information, yes, we give you facts, because we don’t want machine disactivated,” he said. “Understand?”

“Yes,” Junior said. “Okay.”

“Maybe you want I tell you how the Engineer he meet Macedonio, and how they start working together, but there is plenty time and anyway you must go to island and visit him in his factory and speak to him. Look,” he said, and showed him the documents. He placed special emphasis on a folder that contained the story that he had had delivered to the Engineer, and that the jockey had had photocopied to give to Junior with the idea, if it was at all possible, of making the first move in a counteroffensive.

“Political power is always criminal,” Fuyita said. “The president is crazy and his ministers are all psychopaths. The Argentine State is telepathic, its intelligence services can read minds from a distance. It can infiltrate the thoughts of the bases. But telepathic faculties have a serious drawback. They are unable to select and filter, they receive all kinds of information, they are too sensitive to people’s marginal thoughts, to what the old-school psychologists used to call the unconscious. Faced with an excess of facts, they expand the radius of repression. The machine has been able to infiltrate their networks, they are no longer able to distinguish between true stories and false versions. There is a certain relationship between telepathic faculties and television,” he said all of a sudden, “the technical-myopic lens of the camera records and transmits the repressed, hostile thoughts of the masses and converts them into images. To watch TV is to read the thoughts of a million people. Are you following me here?”

He was a gangster and a philosopher. Oriental traditions, Junior thought, martial arts and Zen Buddhism. He is in mourning over the emperor’s death and leaves the girl locked up in the hotel as if she were a cat. On the other side of the glass, in the greenhouse, a man was strolling through the flowers with a lantern in his hand.

“Have you seen the blue roses?” the jockey asked. “They make them in Temperley, there are three in the Museum, they are very difficult to preserve. You have to use liquid ice and silver nitrate. First came the bronze rose, but you cannot get them anymore, that site has been closed down several times by the police. They use a different excuse every time. If it were up to them, they would show up with a new search warrant each time just to stroll through the nurseries with the carnivorous plants and the poppy plants.”

They went down together in the pneumatic elevator, the jockey balancing on his right leg. In this manner he avoided setting his left one down, which he had injured in a straight-line race in Isidro Casanove. He had been riding a horse named Small Wolf, with a white spot on its forehead, in a historic meet with the undefeated horse of the widow of an Englishman who had been the director of the Argentine Central Railroad before it was nationalized. He had driven the horse as hard as he could, because the widow bet like a gypsy, and as soon as they started Small Wolf began to pant in a bloody whine, but he kept him going straight and stayed in the lead for nearly a mile, until the horse collapsed, its heart failed, and it rolled over its rider. Fuyita’s left leg was crushed by the horse’s body and there was no way to repair the tiny broken bones in his ankle.

“I don’t use a walking stick,” the jockey said affectedly as he crossed the circular room where the machine was displayed, “because I believe that medicine will be able to cure me, and I don’t want to get used to being an invalid.” Junior thought the jockey had a smooth gracefulness that was accentuated by his limp. When they stopped at the ramp that led to the exit he tried to clear his mind and not think of anything.

“A woman sent me to see you,” he said then.

“She calls you, too?” Fuyita asked. “At night? And talks to you about her son?”

“Her husband,” Junior said.

“It’s the same thing,” Fuyita said.

“You know her?” Junior asked, showing him the photograph of the young woman.

“That’s Elena,” Fuyita said. “She was the girl of his dreams. These women,” he said, “we follow them around and chase after them as if we were dumbstruck cops.” He turned toward the Museum entrance. All the lights were on, people were waiting in line to get in. “Take this,” he said, “be careful.” He handed him a manila envelope, then smiled and flagged a taxi. Junior got into the car, but after he had settled in he thought Fuyita had wanted to say something else to him, because he saw him gesturing with his arms and his lips moving. He stuck his head out the window, but the jockey waved him off because the roar of the city drowned out his voice. Besides, the cab took off down the avenue just then, and disappeared along the park heading west.

Junior laid down in the backseat. The Museum clock read three P.M. He opened the envelope. The story was called “The White Nodes.” An explosive story, the paranoid ramifications of life in the city. That’s why there’s so much control, Junior thought, they’re trying to erase what’s recorded in the streets. A light bright as a flash on the ashen faces of innocent people in the photographs of police dossiers.

THE WHITE NODES

She knew the Clinic was a sinister place. When Doctor Arana came in, he confirmed her worst fears. He seemed to be there just to make every single paranoid delirium come true. A glass skull, the red windows facing out, white bones shining in the artificial light. Elena thought the man was a magnet that attracted and drew the iron shavings of the soul to itself. She was already thinking like a madwoman. She felt her skin release a metal dust. That is why her body was completely covered, including gloves and a long-sleeved blouse. The only part exposed was her face, the rusted skin of her external gears. It made her sick to think about the metal container from which they would put the drops of oil on her. She closed her eyes so she would not see anything, and began to go over what she knew about the doctor. Arana, Raúl, Ph.D. in Psychiatry. Disciple of Carl Jung. Studies undertaken in Germany and Switzerland. The treatment consisted in converting psychotics into addicts. The drugs were administered every three hours. The only way to normalize a delirium was to create an extreme dependency. He had just returned from giving a seminar at MIT on “Hypochondria and the Fantasies of Pregnancy.” Elena had herself committed with the double purpose of carrying out an investigation and of controlling her hallucinations. She was sure that she had died and that someone had transferred her brain (sometimes she said her soul) into a machine. She felt she was completely alone in a white room full of tubes and cables. It was not a nightmare, it was the certainty that the man who loved her had saved her from death and had incorporated her into an apparatus that transmitted her thoughts. She was eternal and cursed. (You cannot have one without the other.) That is why the judge had chosen her to infiltrate the Clinic. A male nurse met her at the entrance. As soon as she walked through the bars she decided she would tell them the truth. She was a madwoman who believed she was a policewoman who was forced to be hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic; and she was a policewoman trained to pretend that she was in a machine exhibited in a room of a Museum. (The only thing she had to do was not reveal the name of a certain man, whom she would call Mac from now on. Anything else, including the truth, would be an invention in which to hide and keep him safe.)

“That is why you say that you never lie,” Doctor Arana said, smiling.

“I did not say that,” Elena said, “do not play dumb. I have been asked to investigate you, doctor, that is why I am here.”

He turned around and smiled again.

“Very well,” he said, “come with me.”

The hallway led to the operating rooms. The rubber carpets prevented all electrical contact and negated the friction from the aluminum wheels. The trees in the garden could be seen through the tall windows.

“And who gave you this assignment?”

“A judge,” she answered.

There were bars in front of the windows, and a portrait of Doctor Arana on the wall. Many of his patients were painters who paid him with their own work.

“They are going to flatten this pigsty.”

“What does it mean to be a machine?” Doctor Arana asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “A machine does not exist, a machine functions.”

“Very ingenious,” Arana replied.

The Clinic was a large rectangular construction, divided into zones and pavilions, like a jail.

“In this first room you have the catatonics. They are completely gone,” Arana explained; “technically, they have gone over to the other side and cannot return.”

The beds looked as if they held embalmed bodies, a series of white mummies wrapped in sheets and blankets. A woman sitting in a metal chair was staring at the light in the window. Elena tried to take note of the layout of the alarms and the side doors. She was going to escape as soon as she managed to see Mac, she thought they had him locked up in one of the wings by the end of the garden. She had drawn up a map in her memory and was completing the diagram as they went along. She worked with a scale of 100 to 2, to make the information easier to transmit. Each zone had its own control unit and surveillance system. The small cameras were mounted on the ceilings. Elena imagined the closed-circuit and the control room. She had once seen the intelligence center for Penn Station in New York. All the passengers were recorded in the hallways and the platforms, and a policewoman (a real policewoman) — fat, with makeup, black glasses, and dressed in blue — sat on a rotating chair, alone in a white basement, surrounded by TV screens, watching the images that covered the walls. She had a microphone attached to her blouse that captured her voice and her breathing. In the bathrooms, men addicted to vices pursued those vices. She spied on them and relayed the information to the patrols working on the surface. Three policemen were kicking a junkie on the floor of the hallway that led to platform number six (the exit toward Jamaica Station, in Long Island). They were in the section of the Clinic that contained the Carson Café. A bar that looked as if it were from the fifties, with dim lights and tables against the walls. A place where expatriates, spies, foreign journalists, and married women looking to hook up spent their time.

“They call it the Bar of the Lost Souls,” Arana explained.

Elena found a place at the bar. She wanted a beer. The bartender smiled. Perhaps they had already given her the injection. Imaginary landscapes had been fully explored by Doctor Arana. Reality was made up of personal visions. The Clinic was the inner city and each person saw what they wanted to. No one seemed to have their own personal memories. The bartender treated her as if she were a friend of his. In the mirror, Elena saw her mother’s face in her house in Olavarría. Everyone was an addict, submerged in their own deliriums and ghettos, using their own personal hermetic metaphors. The guy next to her at the bar introduced himself by raising his glass.

“My name is Luca Lombardo,” he said. “I’m from Rosario, they call me the Tano, they locked me up here for my own protection. What took place in the province of Santa Fe is a tragedy, they killed children, women, the men had to show the palms of their hands and if they saw that they were laborers they’d shoot them right there on the spot. The only thing left is the desert and the river. Many escaped to the islands and are living in the middle of the tall bamboo plants. They live like Indians, in the Lechiguanas Islands, wherever they can, they heat water in little pans to make mate. They’re waiting for the soldiers to leave.”

The Tano stared at the bottles behind the counter as he spoke. The bar was packed. A disc jockey put on an album by The Hunger. Mobs of people were roaming through the place. They all looked alike, sallow and dressed in fringed shirts and leather. Lumpen from the surrounding hotels and tense solitary tourists in search of pleasures not indicated in Michelin Guides. Very old or very young men walked in discontinuous waves in opposite directions. The attractive women, on the other hand, with their prostheses and their melancholy eyes, stood to the side, in the corners, or sat at the bar, like Elena. At that time of day the halls with the games of logic were already open. In the place across the way Elena saw a very young super-D with eight-diopter glasses solving syllogisms at supersonic speeds. He caught them in the air and ran up points with the elegance of a bird. His opponent was a shy and smiling youth with a dark complexion who spoke with a sing-songy Paraguayan accent and was the best Frege semanticist in the city. He read a comic book calmly as he waited his turn, sneaking glances out the side of his magazine at the rising scores of the super-D youngster.

“So you are willing to collaborate with us,” Doctor Arana asked her.

“In exchange for what?” Elena asked.

She was trying to buy time and put together a line of defense. She was afraid of betraying herself and being forced to inform. She knew about the ones who went out into the streets and sold out everyone they knew. They wore masks made of synthetic skins and rode for hours in patrol cars through the center of the city.

“In exchange for curing you,” Arana said.

“I am not interested in being cured, I just want to change hallucinations. Is that possible?”

Arana served himself some mineral water in a plastic cup.

“We could disconnect you,” he said, “but that is very expensive.”

“Money is not an issue with me,” she said.

“It will be necessary to work on your memory,” Arana said. “There are areas of condensation, white nodes, which can be untied, opened up. They are like myths,” he said; “they define the grammar of experience. Everything the linguists have taught us about language also applies to the core of living matter. The genetic code and the verbal code present us with the same characteristics. That is what we call the white nodes. The clinic neurologists can attempt an intervention. It will be necessary to work on your brain.”

They were going to operate on her. She felt sluggish and empty, she was afraid they had disconnected her.

She thought about the Tano, running away from Rosario, saying he belonged to the PRA, the People’s Revolutionary Army, but the PRA no longer existed. She pictured him going in and out of detox clinics, lost in a virtual reality, hidden in clandestine houses and getting caught again, evading the controls, living in subways. He was a rebel and she was the heroine, a Mata Hari, a double agent, a confidant for anyone in dire straits. She had to get out, return to the streets. She saw the Tano’s room in the Bajo, near the port. She was going to contact him, he was the only one who could plan an escape for her. But she had to forget, she could not compromise the plans. She destroyed the meeting on the platform at Retiro Station, the bums toasting stale bread over a small fire, the Tano and her getting on the train. She knew how to erase her thoughts, like someone forgetting a word they were about to say. They would not be able to make her talk about what she did not know. A navy officer appeared, and she thought she saw armed men in the hallway behind him.

“See, captain,” Arana said, “this woman says that she is a machine.”

“Very beautiful,” said the man dressed in white.

Elena looked at him with scorn and hatred.

“You’re an ex, there are only patients here.”

Arana smiled as the light slid down his skin. He had aluminum teeth, a very expensive ultralight crown of the kind only made by Gucci, the artist, in the clinics in Belgrano R neighborhood.

“Take it easy,” he said. “If you want to be cured, you have to collaborate with us. The captain will help you remember. He is a specialist in artificial memory.”

“Madam,” the officer said, “we would like to know who Mac is.”

They knew everything. She had to escape. She had fallen asleep, but now she was awake and made an effort to keep going. It was getting dark, the light from the large billboards was starting to fill the air with bright faces and images. The Tano came out of the subway and up an escalator at Diagonal Station. The pleasant spring breeze and the smell of the lime trees in the avenue produced a sudden happiness in her. Elena leaned against the window of the Trust Jeweler shop. Multiple clocks read 3 P.M. They had merged the time zones everywhere in the world so they could coordinate the eight o’clock news. They had to live at night while the sun rose in Tokyo. It was better this way, the endless darkness worked to their benefit, they had nearly fifteen hours to get across the city and out to the open country. She pictured the still Pampas, the last towns like hills in the distance. They had already decided they would go live with the Irish, the Tano knew how to get into the Delta and meet up with the rebel ghettos. She had heard about Finnegans Isle, far up the Paraná River, on the other side of the Liffey, perhaps they could make it that far. It was populated by anarchists, the children and grandchildren of British settlers from Santa Cruz and Chubut Provinces. The Tano walked toward her among the crowd of workers and policemen and Bolivian immigrants heading south on Cerrito, downtown. She could make out his set, massive figure in the sea of anonymous faces. All of them, and perhaps she as well, in a hospital bed.

“Then,” Arana said, “where did you meet him?”

“In a boardinghouse in Tribunales, near the courthouse,” she said.

She was afraid. They were getting closer to the truth, as if they could follow the road of the memories of her life on a map. They seemed to know more about her than she did. She was lying on an iron bed, she had the sensation of being opened up and felt the freezing air from the fan on her bones. The amphetamines were making her hallucinate, her thoughts were racing much faster than she could articulate them, ideas transformed into real images. She could not stop, she would awake from one dream and into another reality, she would find herself in a different room, in another life, she did not want to fall asleep again. If she could only live in an eternal state of insomnia. He never slept. He would rest, but he did not sleep, he watched over her while she was in the hospital, not daring to enter her room, he looked in from the outside, through the windows that faced the patio. He stayed awake through the nights, sitting on the cretonne couches in the waiting room. He was afraid that the doctors would inject her with anesthesia and take her to the operating rooms. Then they would be able to process her memory and unrecord the information. As long as she was in the machine, she could overcome matter and resist. “A body,” Mac said, “does not mean anything, the soul is the only thing that is alive, and it takes the shape of the word.” She knew that the anarchs had infiltrated several men into the Clinic. They had given her the name of a contact to use in case of a desperate situation. Reyes. A woman in the Majestic. For the time being she did not want to think about him. But it seemed to her that everywhere around her there were letters forming the word “Reyes.” Mr. Reyes, a dealer and a gangster and a professor of English literature. The crowd was getting thicker, making it more and more difficult for her to move forward. The Tano stood there, pale, taciturn, more melancholy than usual. He had run out of money, had spent the last of what he had on a taxi. He was the best explosives technician that they had ever had, and he did not want to have any problems with the police. Elena went up to him when they stopped at a red light. The cars headed down Av. Corrientes in discontinuous waves.

“We have to get to the island,” she said without looking at him. “I have a contact, but I am being watched.”

“Everyone is being watched,” he answered. And smiled at her. When he smiled he looked like a madman. Then he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “The first thing is to get into the Museum,” he said to her. “There’s nothing there anymore, it’s been abandoned, there are only a few remnants left.”

They were in the Carabelas alleyway, behind the enormous concrete building that housed the Mercado del Plata. The site had been used as barracks during the war, and old faded photographs of Perón still covered the walls. A multitude of refugees and vagrants proliferated through the galleries. The police did not dare enter the building, but the place was infected with government agents. She had the feeling of being lost, of having lost her sense of reality.

“You have lost your sense of reality,” Arana said to her, as if he were reading her mind. Maybe she was thinking out loud.

“This is a place without memories,” she said. “Everyone pretends to be somebody else. The spies are trained to disown their own identities and use somebody else’s memory.”

She thought about Grete, who had become an English refugee who sold pictures in a locale down on the second sublevel. She had been infiltrated, so she buried her past and adopted a fictitious one. She was never again able to recall who she had been. Sometimes, in dreams, she made love to a man she did not know. Her true identity had been converted into unconscious material, episodes in the life of a forgotten woman. She was the best photographer in the Museum. She looked at the world through eyes that were not her own, and this distance showed in her photographs. They had to find her, she could take them to Reyes. The Tano wanted to know who Reyes was.

“He is an ex-professor of English literature who deals in methadone,” Elena explained to him. “He is in charge of the clandestine hospitals and the detoxification shelters.”

Grete believed that she used to be his wife, a young Englishwoman from Lomas de Zamora who had fallen in love with the young professor who taught courses in E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. The story was her alibi, she was a disillusioned woman secretly in love with a man on whom she wanted to take revenge. They had to find her. The cellars of the Mercado del Plata connected to the underground streets that crossed beneath Av. Nueve de Julio and the subway passageways of Carlos Pellegrini Station, where all the subway lines of the city converged. That was a point of escape, a nucleus for refugees and rebels, hippies, gauchos, spies, all sorts of ex’s, smugglers, anarchs. To get to the building they had to cross an abandoned parking lot, a no-man’s-land between the shelters and the city. They must surely have already seen them in the alleyway and were now watching them on the closed-circuit screens. She saw herself in the Clinic, the white eye of a camera on the ceiling. She thought Arana was speaking with a nurse behind her. She felt she was falling asleep. She was too tired. The Tano took her by the arm and forced her to keep going, almost running between the abandoned parking meters. It was like crossing a forest. The Irish band The Hunger could be heard through the loudspeakers. It was their new anthem, “The Reptile Enclosure.” They were the children of the children of the nationalist rebels. At seventeen years of age, Molly Malone was the leader of the band, and she had become a superstar singer with her glassy throat. Her brother Giorgio sang backups with his warm tenor voice, but he would go crazy and change the lyrics, sing rap improvisations over the anthems of the Republican Army. The crowds went mad over Molly Malone’s live performances. The concert lasted two hours. The observance personnel had in all likelihood connected their monitors to the broadcasts of channel 9. The Tano thought that luck was on their side and that they might be able to escape. They had one chance in thirty-six. It was always the same. He liked to play roulette because it was a replica of life.

“I’m from Rosario,” he said to the Korean guard at the door. “We have to get through. She’s a patient of Arana’s.”

He might be a policeman. Everyone works for the secret services, they all become spies and confidants and legal assassins and policemen who shoot up as part of their undercover work. (In New York half the addicts are detectives.) The more criminal activity found among Asian refugees, the more Asian refugees that the police must recruit as informants. Insanity of resemblance is the law, the Tano thought. To look alike in order to survive. If he was a government agent, he chose not to disclose it. He let them in and guided them to a stairway, and then to a door, and again to a stairway. The white walls and the lighted stained-glass windows created a strange stillness. The music had ceased.

“This is the Museum,” the Tano said.

The pavilions extended for kilometers on end, with glass cabinets displaying material from the past. Elena saw a room from a boardinghouse in Tribunales, and a man on a low stool strumming a guitar. She saw two gauchos on horseback riding across a line of small fortresses, she saw a man committing suicide on a train seat. She saw a replica of Arana’s consulting room, and again her mother’s face in the mirror. The Tano hugged her. And this she had also seen. The Tano hugging her in a room of the Museum. She saw the replica of the lighted stage with Molly Malone singing the chorus of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” in a feline voice.

“Let’s go,” he said, “we have to get out of here.”

They came out into a television repair workshop. An old man with white hair and a white beard raised his head from a microprocessor. It was Mac. Elena felt that she was about to cry. The Tano opened the back of a microscopic television set and put it down on the glass counter.

“This apparatus is a family relic,” he said, “and I want to keep it running.”

“And what is the problem?” asked the man, who spoke with a German accent.

“It only gets channels from the past.”

The old man raised his head.

“Everyone wants to be a comedian,” he said, and went on connecting the cables of a video recorder that he had to adapt to a closed-circuit.

“She’s Elena,” the Tano said.

The old man was adjusting the three bands of images, his myopic eyes moving astutely across the microscopic circuits that he himself had designed. He looked at her, but did not recognize her.

“We want to get into the factory,” the Tano said.

There was a soft light in the locale, and the rumbling from the subway trains made the ceiling vibrate.

“It’s here,” the old man said.

A group of scientists had deserted the institutes dedicated to atomic investigation that had been built in the mid-1940s. They started with a small repair shop in an abandoned garage. The factory kept growing quietly, scattered across the desert and the provincial towns.

“We keep in contact,” he said. “We are waiting for the right moment to move. There are forty-three of us and we are going to participate in the rebellion.” He opened and closed his left hand, as if he were counting the scientists five at a time. “I cannot say anything else. I do not know anyone.” He looked at Elena and smiled. Then he spoke to the Tano.

“You can take that apparatus away now, it is fixed. Turn it on.”

The tiny images flashed on the screen, and immediately they could see a series of small workshops disseminated across all the towns and small cities of the country. They could see men with white overalls taking apart old radios and rebuilding unused motors.

“What are we going to do?” Elena asked, surprised.

“Nothing,” the old man said. “Get out of here.”

It was Mac, but he did not know her. She did not go near him, she did not want to touch him, she did not want him to touch her. The world of the dead, Dante’s map of the Inferno. Circles and circles and circles.

“So then,” Arana said, “you are dead and in the Inferno. Isn’t that smart.”

“I used to be smart,” Elena said. “Now I’m a machine that repeats stories.”

“The one fixed idea,” Arana said. He gestured for his assistant. A young doctor wearing a white coat and surgical gloves leaned over Elena and smiled at her with a childlike expression.

“We have to operate,” he said. “We have to disactivate her neurologically.”

“He repairs television sets,” Elena said.

“I know,” Arana said. “I want names and addresses.”

There was a pause. The white glass of the cabinet in the consulting room reflected the spinning fan.

“There’s this telepath,” Elena said. “He follows me around and reads my thoughts. His name is Luca Lombardo, he’s from Rosario, everyone calls him the Tano. If I tell you what you are asking me for, he is going to blow up the microspheres implanted in my heart.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Arana said. “You have become psychotic and are in the middle of a paranoid delirium. We are in a Clinic in the neighborhood of Belgrano, this is an extended drug session, you are Elena Fernández.” He stopped and read her chart. “You work in the National Archives, you have two children.”

“I am dead, he moved me here, I am a machine.”

“We are going to have to use electric shock treatment on her,” Arana said to the doctor with the baby face.

“Listen,” Elena said. “In the cellars of the Mercado del Plata, in the Korean sector, the one everyone calls Seoul, there is an English photographer, Grete Müller. She works for the rebels.” She had to give her up in order to save Mac. Maybe she could warn her before the police showed up. The information had become public. Investigating virtual images, she had found the way to draw pictures of people and things she had never seen.

“We know,” Arana said. “I want names and addresses.”

Everything was starting over again. The sun rising in the city, the lights of the Mercado del Plata still on. There as well everything was starting over again. In the cellars of the Mercado del Plata, in a lab illuminated with a red light, Grete Müller was developing the photographs that she had taken in the aquarium that night. The patterns on the shells of the turtles were the symbols of a lost language. Originally, the white nodes had been marks on bones. The map of a blind language shared by all living beings. The only traces left of that original language were the patterns on the shells of the sea turtles. Prehistoric shadows and shapes recorded on bone plates. Grete enlarged the photographs and projected them on the wall. The series of patterns were the base of a pictographic language. All the languages of the world had evolved through the centuries from those primitive nuclei. Grete wanted to get to the island, because with this map it would be possible to establish a common language. In the past we all understood the meaning of every word, the white nodes were recorded in the body like a collective memory. She went over to the window high on the wall and looked out over Av. Nueve de Julio. The number of cars declined at that time of the morning, all the activity in the city was nocturnal. Perhaps she would finally be able to sleep and stop dreaming about the Museum and the machine and the proliferation of languages jumbled together to the point of incomprehensibility. They are forgotten worlds, she thought, no one keeps the memory of life anymore. We see the future as if it were the memory of a house from our childhood. She had to get to the island, find the legend of the woman who was going to come and save them. Perhaps, Grete thought, she is lying peacefully on the sand, lost on an empty beach, like a rebellious replica of a future Eve.