The Absent City

1

Junior woke up, startled. Once again the phone was ringing at midnight. It was the same woman who mistook him for someone else and told him her ex-husband’s sad story. A man she called Mike had gone to Mar del Plata to work as a night watchman in a hotel that was closed down for the winter. He was found dead one morning. They followed the music from the radio from one empty room to another until they finally discovered his body in a dark room with the blinds drawn. The woman said that at first they thought it was a suicide. Then they thought he had been killed by one of the State’s secret services. Her ex-husband was on the run, his group was withdrawing in complete disorder, he belonged to the People’s Revolutionary Army, a Trotsky-Peronist organization. He was a Trotsky-Peronizt, the woman said, and immediately lowered her voice and began to tell him about the Clinic. She had just spent two months there, she said, in the jail, in the colony. She was rehabilitated, now her name was Julia Gandini. He imagined the woman submerged in a false reality, stuck in someone else’s memory, forced to live as if she were another woman. These kinds of stories were circulating throughout the city, the machine had begun to incorporate material from reality. Julia told him that she was not being followed, that she was eighteen years old, that she wanted to see him.

“Even with just half the information I have,” she said, “you could run an entire special edition of the newspaper.”

She spoke informally to him, as if they were friends, and laughed with a clean, carefree laughter.

They set a time to meet at a bar, at Retiro Station.

“And how will I know you?” she asked.

“I look Russian,” Junior told her. “Like Michael Jordan, but white.”

“Michael Jordan?” she said.

“The guy who plays for the Chicago Bulls,” Junior said. “My face looks just like his.”

“I never watch TV,” the girl said.

Junior thought that she had been hospitalized and that that was why she did not get the references, as if she lived in a different reality. But he wanted to see her, he did not have too many other alternatives. He had walked through the cellars underneath the Mercado del Plata. He had looked for information in the news cemetery, in the old newspaper archives. He had had dealings in the bars of the Bajo where they sold fake documents, false stories, first editions of the first stories. His room was full of papers, notes, texts pinned up on the walls, diagrams. Recordings. He was trying to find his bearings in the broken plot, to understand why they wanted to disactivate her. Something was out of control. A series of unexpected facts had filtered through, as if the archives were open. She was not revealing secrets, and possibly she did not even know any, but she gave signs of wanting to say something different than what everyone expected. Facts about the Museum and its construction had begun to appear. She was saying something about her own condition. She was not telling her own story, but she was making it possible for it to be reconstructed. That is why they were going to take her out of circulation. She was filtering through real facts. The key was the story of Richter, the Engineer, as Fuyita called him. Junior wanted to make contact, he was certain that the story of the Clinic was a transposition. Maybe the girl could help him make some headway along these lines. Or maybe it was an insignificant fact in a plot with a different meaning. But it was possible she could help him process the information and bring the past up to date. He had spent two nights without sleeping hardly at all since he left the Museum. He was going in and out of the stories, traveling through the city, trying to find his bearings in that plot full of waiting and postponements from which he could no longer escape. It was difficult to believe what he saw, but he was finding the effects in reality, after all. It was like a network, like a subway map. He traveled from one place to the other, crossing stories, moving in several registers at once. And now he was in a bar at Retiro Station, eating a hot dog and drinking beer and waiting for the girl from the phone call to show up. An old man mopped the empty platform. The day’s activity was just beginning. Retiro Station was hardly used anymore. The trains to the Tigre Delta ran inconsistently. A woman approached him to ask if the lines were still running. It was six in the morning and the city was just starting to get going, he had to pay attention to all the activity around him without seeming overly anxious. He was watching the subway exit and the main hall. His eyes, like small clandestine cameras, captured the motion of the car that had just stopped to drop off the morning papers at the entrance to one of the platforms. It was the second edition of the day. They did not know what to say. The news continued to accumulate. The patrol cars controlled the city and you had to be very careful to make sure you stayed connected and could follow the events. The control was perpetual. The police always had the last word, they could withdraw his permit to move about the city, they could deny him access to press conferences, they could even withdraw his work permit. It was forbidden to seek out clandestine information. He was counting on Julia, he was waiting for her to show up. Maybe she was telling the truth. Or maybe she would come with a patrol car. There was a strange disparity of consciousness in what was occurring. Everything was normal and yet the danger could be felt in the air, a low alarming murmur, as if the city were about to be bombarded. Everyday life goes on in the middle of the horror, that is what keeps many people sane. The signs of death and terror can be perceived, but there is no clear evidence of behavior being altered. The buses stop at the street corners, the stores are open, couples get married and celebrate, nothing serious can possibly be happening. Heraclitus’s sentence has been inverted, Junior thought. He felt as if everyone were dreaming the same dream, but living in separate realities. Certain comments and a certain version of the events made him recall the days of the war over the Islas Malvinas. The Argentine military had lost the war and no one knew it. Women continued to knit jackets and blankets for the draftees in improvised booths in the square by the Obelisk. All certainties are uncertain, Junior ironicized, they have to be lived secretly, like a private religion. It was difficult to make decisions and separate facts from false hopes. He had sat down at a hot-dog stand, under the eaves that face the Plaza de los Ingleses. He was eating a hot dog and drinking a beer and reading the newspaper distractedly. The TV was playing a special program about the Museum. Political trash. The greasy smoke drifted in the air, and yet the place was pleasant. The presence of the drivers at the counter and the cashier in the black coat, who was getting change out of the register just then, cheered Junior up. A man talked to him as if he had known him his whole life. Something had happened with people’s sense of reality. The guy was talking with his brother, but there was no brother there.

“The president is an addict and he doesn’t even care if people know. Addicts are never embarrassed, because you can’t be embarrassed if you don’t have any sexual libido,” he said.

“Of course,” another man said, also sitting at the counter. “Once my wife didn’t leave the house for a week because she had a wart this big.” He showed everyone the end of his pinkie finger. “A whole week. She didn’t want to go out because she said she was disfigured.”

“She had tons of sexual libido,” the cashier said.

“A whole week without going out.”

“And Perón, with all those spots and blotches on his face, to the point where they were calling him ‘stain-face.’ And he was seen everywhere, he would have himself photographed up close, out in the open, with his leather face.”

“When a man has power, if he has it, he wants to be seen.”

“Because politics is a mirror,” the other man said. “Faces and faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again and are substituted by new faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again.”

“It swallows up faces,” said the man who had first spoken.

“But the mirror is always there,” the other man said, and dropped his head on his arms resting on the counter. “Give me another beer. Do you want another one too, pal?” he asked Junior.

“No, I’m set,” Junior said, and at that moment he saw the girl and immediately recognized her. She was coming from the end of the platform and smiled at him at once.

“Now, the truth is,” the cashier said, “that television is a mirror.”

“Exactly,” the other man said. “A mirror that holds onto the faces.”

“It has all of them inside and when you look at it you see the other’s face.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” the cashier said, growing pensive.

“I’m leaving,” Junior said, and set some money down on the counter. “Another round for everyone on me.”

There were thank-yous and good-byes as he got up from the stool and walked toward the girl.

They left the train station and walked across to Plaza San Martín. The girl was very attractive, but distant, and she gave off an air of passivity, almost of indifference. As if nothing in the world had any importance. Apathetic. Or maybe afraid, Junior thought. Strange and very beautiful, with a tight Mickey Mouse T-shirt and faded jeans. Right away she began to recite her story. Mike had been wrong and had died because violence only leads to more violence. He lived clandestinely, he commanded several armed operations, he retreated from military activity, moving from one house to another twice a day, until they finally caught him. “In’73 the way I interpreted reality was much more driven by emotions than by political rationale. Today my view of the past is completely different. We were living in the midst of ideological fanaticism. I think the revision needs to be based not only on these last few years, but that it must go back much further. We grew up in a political culture and with a civil conscience both of which were totally wrong. We had to live through this catastrophe in order to learn the value of life and how to respect democracy.” She repeated her story like a parrot, in a tone of voice so neutral that it sounded ironic. She had repented. She had attended self-help groups. It was impossible to tell if she was being sincere or if she was schizophrenic. She walked distractedly, every once in a while looking up at Junior.

“Do you find me attractive?” she asked suddenly. She pressed up against him without any warning, and right away moved away, and then walked on, near the wall. The story of her life was the way she had of getting people to love her, immediately she became submissive and started in with her confessions. You could tell she was naive and gullible, but she was not dumb. Frail and pliable, she could have been his daughter.

“Of course,” Junior said, and felt a strange emotion stir within him. He had thought about his daughter because it could have been his daughter who had come back, like many others, ten years later. Fourteen years later. But it was not his daughter, and that is why Junior had that strange sensation. It was like an emotion, and yet it had a cold quality, so perhaps it was not an emotion at all. He simply liked to be seen walking with the girl and have people think he was sleeping with her. He was amazed at himself, at how simple everything was. “You escaped from the Clinic,” he said to her.

“No one escapes from there,” she said. “You go there because you want to, when you can’t get off the stuff, then you have to go. There’s no such thing as willpower, if you get into it you’re lost, it’s this stupid thing they’ve invented to make you kill yourself.”

She was not dumb, Junior thought again, only inexperienced. She wanted to help him and told him so right away. She had read Junior’s reports, he did not know the whole truth, she had just come from there.

“From where?” Junior asked her.

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she said. They had no references in common, everything was simultaneously the same and yet different, as if they spoke two different languages.

Junior had to move slowly, let her take the initiative.

“I like it around here,” she said after they sat on a bench facing the Círculo Militar. “Enemy territory. See the kinds of places they have, always out of sight, they lock themselves inside those galleries and spend their lives training. I’ve seen them,” she said. “My father was in the military. They practice fencing their whole lives and then shoot you down with real bullets. Do you know how much I’m risking by being here with you?”

“Of course I know,” Junior said.

He decided to keep quiet, to let her develop her strategy.

“I’m going to confide in you,” she told him. “That’s why I called you. Do you know the Engineer?”

“Yes. I mean, they’ve told me, I’ve never seen him.”

“Do you want to see him?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Here,” she said to him. “This is for you.”

It was an airmail envelope folded in half.

“Don’t open it here,” she told him. “Put it away, you can open it later.”

“I’ll put it away,” Junior said, and put the envelope in a coat pocket.

“Where do you know him from?” she asked him.

“Everyone talks about him. But I saw the night watchman at the Museum, a Korean guy, Fuyita.”

After Junior told her what he knew, she confirmed that the Engineer lived in what was practically a subterranean fortress, that he lived locked up in there, that he was an affable man and very intelligent. He was trapped because the authorities accused him of being irresponsible and criminally insane. They wanted to put him in prison.

“The Engineer never sleeps,” she said. “He lives for his experiments. And that’s why they say that he’s crazy.”

Junior wanted to know what the experiments were.

“Verbal,” she said. “Proofs of stories about life, versions and documents that people take to him so that he can read and study them.”

The Engineer received many letters and phone calls, everyone wanted to interview him. Junior had to hope he would have good luck, and count on the contacts that Julia could get. They were going to enter through a clandestine network while all the foreign correspondents and the official newspapers waited their turn. They had to find a place to hide and wait until tomorrow. She spoke so clearly, in such an indifferent tone, that he ended up believing she was telling the truth. They slept together in a hotel on Tres Sargentos, after eating at the Dorá. Julia seemed simultaneously removed and experienced. She took off all her clothes and hugged him before Junior had finished checking out the room. There was something distant yet real about the girl. Her body was full of scars and she moved skillfully in bed, like a professional pretending to be scared. Junior had to wait for her in the hotel, she told him as she smoked a cigarette, she was going out to get a contact. It was dangerous, but he had to take a risk if he was going to make any progress, and he took the risk. He had let himself get hooked, but he did not regret it. In the morning he was awoken by loud knocks on the door. They said it was a routine inspection. Julia, who came in with the policemen and who had perhaps turned him in, looked at him as if she did not recognize him. He saw her smoking at the window again, as if she had never left. The guys from Narcotics had brought her back. They accused her of dealing and thoroughly searched the room and Junior’s clothes.

“You’re English,” the policeman said.

“My parents were English,” Junior responded.

“You worked on the Museum series, for El Mundo.”

“I still work there. I can make my sources available to you. Call the newspaper if you want.”

“A routine question,” the officer said. “Who won the war?”

“Us.”

The officer smiled. They wanted to control the principle of reality.

“That’s funny. Us who?”

“The Kelpers,” Junior said.

The officer enjoyed the answer. Amused, he turned around to one of his assistants. Then he lowered his head and looked at Junior.

“Do you know that this girl is Article 22?”

“Article 22?”

“Street prostitution.”

“That’s why she was with me,” Junior said. “A hundred dollars a night.”

“I’d rather not be touched,” the girl said when the officer approached her, keeping an absent air about her the whole time. “I make a living my own way, and that’s all I care about.”

“I won’t touch you. Her problem is not political. It’s her hallucinations.”

A woman cop joined the others now. She was fat and had a face that made her look like an evil character in a TV series, not even a Nazi, something worse, more mechanical, smoother.

“You’re ill, child,” she said. “You have to go to the hospital. They’ll cure you there.”

“To which hospital?” the girl asked.

“The neuropsychiatry clinic in Avellaneda.”

“Bastards,” the girl said. “Let me call a lawyer.”

Now that she knew what awaited her, she was in shock. She stood still, withdrawn. Then she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She had learned to save her strength and was getting ready to face what she knew she would soon be up against without any illusions.

“She believes in the Engineer, but it’s really an illusion. The Engineer died years ago, there is no factory, she can’t accept reality. She’s psychotic,” the officer said. “She’s been hospitalized in Santa Lucía since she was seven years old, she’s schizo-anarchoid. That man doesn’t exist, there’s a doctor who she calls the Engineer, there’s nothing else to it, it’s a clinic. She dreams that she moves around in that marginal world, like a messenger, when in reality she’s a prostitute who passes information on to the police.”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” Julia sang out. “He’s there, I know it,” she said. “When I get out I’ll take you.”

“See? She has been able to adjust to living out in the real world completely, except for that one fixed idea. It will never disappear, it’s indispensable in the balance of her life. But she has to learn to relate to reality, not to a fantasy. And that’s what we’re here for. To think that there’s an internationally renowned physicist hidden in our country. It’s an innocuous idea and it helps her survive. But it’s false and cannot be propagated. She lives in an imaginary reality,” the officer said. “She’s at the external phase of the fantasy, an addict running away from herself. She interjects her hallucinations and must be watched.” This was the kind of crazy lingo that the police were using now, psychiatric and military at the same time. This was how they intended to counteract the illusory effects created by the machine. Junior remembered his father’s ideas about deliriums associated with simulations, and thought that the officer had a removed quality, perverse, as if he thought that simply by being there, alone in his office, he was capable of excluding himself from the world.

“The police,” he said, “are completely removed from all the fantasies. We are reality. We are constantly obtaining true confessions and revelations. We care only about real events. We are servants of the truth.”

Junior looked at him, but did not say anything.

“We need to verify a few facts,” the officer said, “and then we’ll let you go.”

“And the girl?”

“The girl stays, you go. There always has to be some kind of exchange.”

“I don’t like it,” Junior said.

“I didn’t ask you if you liked it, I asked you to tell me your sources.”

They made a phone call to the newspaper and immediately released him. He was unable to see Julia. They only allowed him to leave cigarettes and some money for her, although he knew for certain that the same guard who took them would steal them as soon as he left. Junior went out to the street. The buses were heading out toward the city suburbs full of men and women just getting off work. He was at the corner of Paraguay and Maipú. The girl had not turned him in, they had gotten her because of the drugs. The police had not bothered to requisition the papers that she had given him, they had not even opened the envelope. It looked like a blue filing card, with a few facts typed on it. There were a few references to Richter, the Engineer, a German physicist. Then numbers and quotations from several stories, especially from “Stephen Stevensen.” That was the point of departure.

2

He spent the next two days alone in his room. He went over the entire series of stories again. There was an implicit message that linked them all together, a message that was being repeated. There was a factory, an island, a German physicist. Allusions to the Museum and to the history of its construction. As if the machine had built its own memory. That was the logic being applied. The events were being directly incorporated, it was no longer a closed system, it was weaving in real facts. She was influenced by other forces — external ones — that entered into the program. Not just situations in the present, Junior thought. It narrates what it knows, it never anticipates. He went back to “Stevensen.” It was all there already. The first text demonstrates the process. He had to continue searching along these lines. Investigate what was being repeated. It builds microscopic replicas, virtual doubles, William Wilson, Stephen Stevensen. Once again this same point of departure, a ring at the center of the story. The Museum was circular, like time in the plains. He went back to the story, to the beginning, to the first phrase of the series. “My name is Stephen Stevensen. I am the grandson and great-grandson and great-great-grandson of sailors. My father was the only deserter, and that is why he lived his entire life with the same woman and died a miserable man in a hospital in Dublin. (Stevensen’s father had refused to go into the British navy, breaking the very ancient family tradition, and had become an Irish nationalist. His mother’s ancestors were Polish. A sarcastic and elegant woman who spent the summers in Málaga, or in the British Museum.) Stevensen was born in Oxford and every language was his mother tongue. Maybe that is why I believed the story he told me, and why I am here, in this lost cattle ranch. But if the story he told me is not true, then Stephen Stevensen is a philosopher and a magician, a clandestine inventor of worlds, like Fourier, or Macedonio Fernández.”

Junior was starting to understand. At first the machine would get it wrong. Errors are the first beginning. The machine “spontaneously” breaks up the elements of Poe’s story and transforms them into potential fictional nuclei. That is how the initial plot had emerged. The myth of origin. All the stories came from there. The future meaning of what was occurring depended on that story about the other and what is to come. Reality was defined by the possible (and not by what was). The true-false opposition had to be substituted by the possible-impossible opposition. The original manuscript was coiled in a tin cylinder. He was having a hard time reading with his glasses. I am getting more and more myopic every day, Junior thought, moving his face closer to the glass box. It looked like a strip of teletype. “I first arrived here on Wednesday May 4 at three in the afternoon, on a train that was continuing on to Pergamino. I had been invited by the Academia Pampeana and the Jockey Club to spend three months in the large ranch and study the projects of the Scientific Society. I am a doctor (and a writer), I have been in this town for months. I want to meet Doctor Stevensen. He is one of the major English naturalists of the century, Argentine by choice, a descendent of European travelers and researchers who came to these plains to study the habits of the natives. I admired his books, I had read his marvelous Mechanical Birds, as well as his biological essays, and his extraordinary White Voyage. It has been so long that everything seems unreal to me. But perhaps instead of talking about unreality, I should talk about inexactness. Truth is exact, like the circumference of the crystal glass that measures the time of the stars. The slightest distortion and everything is lost. Lying is no longer an ethical alteration, but rather the failure of a steam engine the size of this fingernail. What I mean to say (Stevensen used to say), is that truth is a microscopic artifact that serves to measure the order of the world with millimetric precision. An optical device, like the porcelain cones that watchmakers adjust on their left eye when taking apart the invisible gears of the very complex instruments that control the artificial rhythms of time. Stephen Stevensen has dedicated his existence to building a miniature replica of the order of the world. As if he wanted to study life in a dry aquarium, the fish opening and closing their mouths in the transparent air for hours on end. He actually decided (I think) that I was part of his experiments and that he would study my reactions. Now I understand that he has been watching me, that he has been observing me ever since I arrived. Or maybe from before, since I took the train in La Plata, and maybe even from the moment I left my house. He lived in the old buildings of the La Blanqueada ranch immediately before me. The morning I arrived he left me the house and moved to the Hotel Colón, with all his papers and machines. He did not return to Buenos Aires, he extended his stay in the town with some sort of trivial excuse (having to do with his sister). Stevensen’s invisible presence accompanied me from the very moment I first entered the large house. I felt like someone who enters surreptitiously into the soul of a stranger and rummages in the night trying to discover the stranger’s secrets. At first I thought that Stevensen, out of an aristocratic carelessness, had left traces of himself throughout the house. Now I know that it was not out of carelessness. This is a provisional list of the objects I found when I searched the house on the first day.”

The story exhibited Stevensen’s marks. Junior found the black coat with the leather elbow patches hanging in a closet out in the country. He found a magnifying glass, a train schedule, a monogrammed ring and a bar of sealing wax. On the desk was the draft of the second page of a letter by Stevensen, written in blue ink on a piece of notebook paper: “I like this place, because it has managed to stay just as it was at the precise moment in which it was rebuilt. I feel as if I were living in another time, as if it were the landscape of childhood, but also the abstract and anonymous landscape that old people see in their dreams. The town was completely destroyed in the war.” Impressions formed a part of the building of history. It was not possible to adjust to a set time, space was at once uncertain and detailed with minute precision. There was a map of the countryside and a photograph of the station in Necochea. The town was near Quequén, the borders of the large cattle ranch stretched out as far as the sea. On the back wall he saw the photograph of the building, with the covered porch and the water tank. On a counter covered with sand was a replica of the establishment built to scale, with the wire fences and the front gate, the long house, the quarters for the workers, the corrals facing the railroad tracks. If he lifted the wooden roof he could see the layout of the rooms inside the house. A corridor, the adjoining rooms that faced the patio, the kitchen, the long foldout table. On the other wall there was a map of the town, with numbered streets that ended at the port. To the left he saw the dock and the lighthouse, and to the right the wooded road that led to the Hotel Colón. To a side were Stevensen’s record player, along with a tape recorder and a radio.

Junior thought about his father, another Englishman lost in the Pampas who collected radio devices and built high-power receivers so he could follow the broadcasts of the BBC. English inventors, railroad engineers, European scientists exiled after the war. Junior went back to the story about Richter, the German physicist who had been invited to come to Argentina by Perón. He was not the only one to whom the story might refer. Many scientists had been working in Argentina since the turn of the century. In the third volume of the Dictionary of Scientific Biographies he found the German track he was looking for: “The National University of La Plata, sixty kilometers south of Buenos Aires, has received a large number of European researchers of the highest level since the first decades of the century. Among them, Emil Bosse, the old editor in chief of the journal Physikalische Zeitschrift; Bosse’s wife, Margrete Heiberg, who undertook her graduate studies at Gotinga; Konrad Simons, a physicist who worked with Planck and Richard Gans, at that time an authority in the field of terrestrial magnetism.” He was sure one of them had been Stevensen, he was sure that was the secret name of the Engineer who had worked with Macedonio in the programming of the machine. Junior walked to the window and opened the blinds. Outside, the city. The empty streets, the lights, the subway entrance across the way. He could talk to Hannah. She would help him. When her father had died she had decided to leave behind the academic world — she had once taught philosophy — and transform the bookstore that her grandfather had founded in 1940 into the main center of documentation and reproductions of the Museum of the Novel in Buenos Aires. She had all the series, all the variations, the different editions, and she sold tapes and original stories.

A few suspected that Hannah herself had secret connections with the machine. That she distributed apocryphal stories and false versions, that she was part of the counterinformation groups who sold replicas, copies made in labs mounted in clandestine suburban garages. They had never been able to pin anything on her, but they kept a watch over her and occasionally closed down her business. They wanted to intimidate her, but she continued to fight, because she was proud and rebellious, a queen in the secret court of the city. Junior knew her from before. She was the kind of woman he had always liked, incredibly intelligent and up-front. To see her meant that they would open a file on you, but they already had a file on Junior, and he could not count on receiving legal protection from the newspaper anyway. Better not to let them know he was going to see her, he preferred to move freely as long as he could.

He got out at the Nueve de Julio exit. The corridors were filled with stands and kiosks that sold miniatures and war magazines. Young draftees stopped at the porno shops and the micromovies, the shooting galleries, the cheap bars with pictures of half-naked blondes, the lottery booths. Toward the back there were rickety sheds and locales bunched up along the corridors that took advantage of the continuous traffic of the many people who traveled by subway. With their spiked hair and their torn Levi’s, their knives sheathed inside their boots, the youth had invaded the bars. Dressed in tight black city jackets, they made them play heavy metal over the loudspeakers. One of the lateral passages led to a hall that connected directly to an exit. It was like a cone of silence, with a cloudy glare coming down from the street. To one side there was a watchmaker’s shop and, across from it, Hannah Lidia’s shop. He knocked on the glass door and shortly afterward a light came on inside, in the back. She opened the door in her usual state of relaxed fatalism. She was wearing velvet pants, a man’s vest, anticancer bracelets. This time she had her hair up like Prince Valiant, everything was very New Age, total snob mask. She cultivated a slightly psychotic look and was never surprised to see him, even if he had not come by in months. The place had a very tall ceiling and was connected to the subway. It was cold inside. The books were piled up in no particular order whatsoever, and the place gave him an instantaneous feeling of well being. A large photograph of Macedonio Fernández covered the back wall. The room was on the other side of a beaded curtain. A TV on the night table, piles of dirty dishes in a circle around the bed. Two bottles of Black & White on a footstool. She sat on the floor and kept watching TV. She never seemed to grow older. She wore blue contact lenses and had a Museum tattoo on her arm. Junior was glad that she went on living her life without pretending to be interested in him. That she did not ask him what he had been doing, nor how he was, nor where he had been. The last time they saw each other they had kissed next to the stairs, but Hannah had suddenly told him to let go. You’re sinking, Junior, she had said to him. He worked at the newspaper, he wrote trash, he was getting cynical. She had not wanted to see him anymore. He had laughed. Who do you think I am? The Titanic? he had answered. We’re all sinking, kid. He remembered the woman in the Majestic. It was the same thing. Hannah never left her haunt, either. She went on eating from her plate of ravioli and watching the Mexican channel on TV.

“I read your reports,” she said to him. “You’re blind.”

“Why? It’s bait,” Junior said. “I print everything. They want to make a little bit of noise at the paper to see if they react.”

“They won’t react,” she said. “They want to take her out of circulation. They are going to close down the Museum.” She raised her face from the plate and looked at him with her blue eyes. “Do you know what they are about to do?”

Junior slid his finger across his throat.

“Zip,” she said. “They want to stow her away, send her to the museum in Luján. Anything, to get people to forget.”

“And they will forget.”

“Don’t believe it. I’ve seen several xeroxes of stories from the fifties, versions from the war, science fiction stories. Pure realism.”

“Many are apocryphal.”

“You’re starting to believe what you write,” Hannah said.

She was drinking whisky from a small plastic cup. It was three in the afternoon.

“I’ve been receiving some pretty strange phone calls,” Junior said. “I met with a woman at the Hotel Majestic, the other day. Fuyita, you know him? He works in the Museum. A kind of head of security. I went to see him,” Junior said. “He passed some material on to me.”

“Aha,” Hannah said. “You’re going to publish it?”

“I don’t know,” Junior said. “Someone is selling false copies in a shop in Avellaneda. It’s a garage on Av. Mitre, they fix TV’s, but they’re working on the political series.”

“I know it,” she said.

“Peronists. Ex-Peronists, guys from the Resistance. I’m trying to follow the track that leads to the Engineer.”

“Is it true that you’re from Bolívar?” she asked suddenly.

“No, I’m not,” Junior said. “I lived there for a while, when I was little. Near there, in Del Valle, there was a convent and a school there.”

“Aha,” Hannah said. “Many are running away to the countryside now. No longer to the south, to the valley, but to the Pampas itself. They put up a shack and plant something, hook up by radio. They move from one place to another. They go around in those shabby old cars and use shortwave receivers. It’s hard to find a guy hiding out in the middle of the barren plains. The old vagrants used to do that. Anarchists, philosophers, mystics, when the going got tough and they tried to come down on them, they’d jump a freight car. Vagrants,” she continued. “Macedonio was also out in those plains. He carried around a little notebook and was always jotting things down.”

She paused and walked to the window. The inside of the bookstore was in the shadows, the bookshelves stood out in the semi-darkness like rusted excavations.

“They want to disactivate her,” Hannah said. “They say that they are going to call in the Japanese.”

“Japanese technicians, just what we need,” Junior said. He imagined them going into the Museum, cutting off the lines of communication, isolating the white hall. They had published a few pictures taken with photoelectric cells. All the tissues were okay. But still, something was dying.

“She has started talking about herself. That is why they want to stop her. We are not dealing with a machine, but with a more complex organism. A system of pure energy. In one of the last stories there is an island, at the end of the world, a kind of linguistic utopia about life in the future. It’s a myth,” Hannah said, “a fantastic story circulating from hand to hand. A man is shipwrecked and survives and builds an artificial woman with parts that the river washes up on shore. And she stays on the island after he dies, waiting on the shore, mad with loneliness, like a new Robinson Crusoe.”

On the screen of the muted TV there was a street with glass buildings, in a city that looked like Tokyo, or perhaps São Paulo. Junior saw billboards written in Spanish and a newspaper stand on a corner. It was Mexico City. Apparently it was a documentary on earthquakes on the west coast.

“Do you know what Macedonio did when Elena died?” Hannah asked after a pause.

“He retired,” Junior said.

“Yes, he retired,” she said. She would not have told him if he had not said it first.

“I have been following this story for two months, I came here because I want you to help me,” Junior said.

“When she got sick, Macedonio decided that he would save her. There are several unaccounted days where no one knows where he was. Apparently he went to a large cattle ranch, in Bolívar. There was an Engineer around there, Russian. You have to follow that track,” Hannah told him. “A Hungarian Engineer who had worked with Moholy-Nagy and was one of the major collectors of automatons in Europe. He came here to get away from the Nazis and to look for a mechanical bird. They start pursuing him when Perón falls. That’s one track. Look,” she said to him, and turned on the projector. Junior saw the portrait of a man with an honest face and small round glasses working in a lab.

“That’s him,” Hannah said. “The story begins in 1956, in a small town in the province of Buenos Aires.”

They say he was seen arriving in town one afternoon in a cart, and that right away they called him the Russian, although he was apparently Hungarian or Czechoslovakian, and when he was drunk he swore that he was born in Montevideo. To make things simpler and not have any problems, people from the countryside call anyone who speaks unusually Russian. He was Russian and his son was named the Russian when he was born. But we are not there yet. First they saw this stranger arrive in the cart and cross the railroad tracks. It was July and the frost was beginning to lift, but he walked around in short sleeves as if it were spring. Around here the Basque Usandivaras used to go out barefoot to milk the cows, winter or summer, but the Russian was unequaled, he never wore winter clothes, he was made for the polar cold, and the frosts of the Province of Buenos Aires did not affect him at all. He was always hot and everyone felt sorry for him, because a man who clashes with the weather looks like he is mad. He had a letter for the intendant, and a long time went by before we learned that he had stolen the letter and the cart from a dead man. The intendant around that time was Ángel Obarrio. He had been appointed by the so-called Liberating Revolution of 1955, and had placed half of the Peronists in Bolívar under arrest, but a week later he had to let them go because there was nobody to look after the animals. It was the winter of ’56, the worst one ever. The white air, the puddles in the street like glass. Around then is when the Russian’s cart showed up. “Come on. You stupid ass. Shit,” he said, but in his language, and shook the reigns, one in each hand, like a gringo. They gave him work at the Federal Shooting Range, and he lived there in a small room out back, near the tub where they cooked up the paste to put up the targets. He mowed the lawn and opened up on weekends when the idiots went down to shoot at the targets. Hardly anybody went during the week, except for the draftees, who came sometimes from Azul, and Doctor Ríos, who had been an Olympic champion in Helsinki and came to train on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Russian would wait for him, and open the cat-holes of the hall just for him, and watch him prepare his weapons and then raise his left arm and take aim.

They became friends, if you can call it that. Ríos explained to him what the town was like and what he needed to do in order to survive. “Practice target shooting,” Ríos would laugh. He did not know that the Russian had killed a man by crushing his skull against the train rails. They had locked him up in the insane asylum because he was unable to make himself understood. He said he had killed the man because of the heat, because it was siesta time and the glare from the sun had blinded him along the railroad tracks. He spent five years at Melchor Romero. Every once in a while he would escape and take off for the hills around Gonnet, but sooner or later he returned to the asylum, thin as a corpse and sick from eating raw birds. Finally he came to this part of the province, following the crops. He was very good with his hands, he was always inventing little devices and taking clocks apart. Ríos was the first one who realized that the Russian was an extraordinary man. Then he wanted to know. He went to the intendant’s office and asked to see the letter that the Russian had brought with him. It was a handwritten note from Videla Balaguer, guaranteeing that the man carrying the letter had rendered invaluable services toward the cause of the Liberating Revolution in the glorious days of September 1955. He must have been in the paramilitary units, and that is why Obarrio had assigned him to the Federal Shooting Range. He assumed that he was a man of action and knew his way around weapons. He made a few inquiries. All the facts checked out.

No one told him that the Russian was not Russian, but Hungarian, that he was an engineer who had studied with Moholy-Nagy, that he had come to get away from the Nazis, that he had killed a man, that he had stolen the letter and the cart from a dead man. Ríos had investigated the wrong life. All the facts were true, but it was the wrong man. Ríos laughed, afterward, when he saw all the noise he had stirred up. You can’t be a shooting champion and put the bullet right where you put your eye if you don’t have the absolute certainty that you are going to hit the bull’s-eye every time. Sometimes he missed. But if he missed he would tell himself he had missed on purpose. When events had proved him wrong, and it was already too late, he simply altered the angle of his shot and concentrated on the museum and on Carola Lugo.

“This is a small town,” Ríos said. “You always see the same people going around the same places, and yet the hardest thing to understand is precisely what everyone knows. The secret is out in the light and that is why we don’t see it. It’s like target shooting. It has to do with extreme visibility.”

There was a mechanical bird in the town museum. They brought it with the railroads in 1870. It worked to anticipate storms. It would go around in the air, flying out in wider and wider circles, and then head straight toward the water. Even now, when the rain is approaching, it begins to move its wings and jump slightly up and down in the glass cabinet where it is chained up. They have come from Germany to look at it, and they claimed that it was German (that it could not be anything other than a German bird). There is a very old tradition of automatons in the Black Forest, Ríos said. They wanted to buy it, but the bird is a historical piece that belongs to the province, and it is not for sale. The chief of the station, the Englishman McKinley, had lived in the large house where it is kept. His wife abandoned him a week after they got there, and he lived alone ever since. When she saw the Argentine plains, the low weeds, the gauchos with their Japanese faces, the woman went back to Lomas de Zamora, disillusioned. It was McKinley, as strange as it may sound, who became interested in the history of the area, and started gathering mementos. He had belonged to the Royal Geographic Academy in London, and was an honorary member of the British Museum, and would occasionally send them reports about the region. He bought the bird for two hundred pesos from Paul Veterinary’s representative. It had been kept for decoration purposes in a cage between the fox terrier puppies and the house parrots. It was invented by a French engineer and used in Argentina to measure the plains when they laid out the tracks of the Ferrocarril del Sur. They would set it free and the animal would fly off, flapping its wings, and disappear into the horizon. When it returned, all they had to do was open a hinge in its chest and take out the clock with the measurements. The Englishman was crazy, he came to build a Museum in this lost little town, in the middle of everybody’s indifference. No one was interested in the past here, we all live in the present. If everything has always been the same, forever, what is the use of saving things from a time that has not changed. But McKinley left everything arranged in his will. The municipality took over the house, put a flag above the door, and sometimes, on June 13, which was the anniversary of its foundation, they took the children from the elementary school and performed a ceremony on the sidewalk in front of the building. The Lugos were appointed caretakers, and Carola grew up in that house, playing with all the replicas of the Indian tents and the manes of the embalmed horses when she was a little girl. Sometimes, when some foreign visitor would appear (which occurred every two or three years), they would take the bird out and have it fly and head out toward the rains. One afternoon Ríos took the Russian to visit the museum. The Russian went crazy over the animal. Carola Lugo opened the door for them. She was blond and small and fragile, with a harelip. She showed them the house and the galleries. A different era was represented in each room. There were skeletons and drawings. “The professor was a photographer and could also draw. He made several explorations of the region. In this field that we see over here, near Quequén, he found a cattle ranch in which the gates and the tie beams of the house were made out of whalebone. They probably found the animal on the beach, dead, and thought it would look luxurious to use the skeleton to decorate the countryside. One can just about imagine a country-man, who has never seen a whale in his entire life, go as far as the sea on his horse and find that large mass lying on the sand and think that it is a fish from Hell.” The afternoon was freezing and overcast. “Here we see a typical tent. The Indians used this kind of leather to protect themselves against the southern winds.” Finally they went through a hallway with photographs and paintings from the laying of the railroad tracks. The bird was displayed in the center room, inside a glass cabinet. It looked like a vulture and had a fierce gaze and its wings moved as if it were breathing. It was attached by a small chain. Carola opened the glass case and handed it to him. The Russian held it in his two hands, amazed at how little it weighed. Light as the air, he said, and Carola smiled. They went outside to the back patio among the trees. There was nothing but plains and the sky extending endlessly in every direction. The Russian lifted the bird and gently let it go. At first it flew low to the ground, in circles, with a heavy flapping of its wings. Then, suddenly, it faced the storm and took off. It returned after a while, flying back to the patio, moving slowly, and perched itself on Carola’s shoulder. The Russian opened its chest and started to explain the clock mechanism that made it work. From that day on the Russian began to go to the museum after he got off work at the Federal Shooting Range. He would stroll through the Indian tents and always end up in the room with the bird. Carola went with him, quietly, peacefully. One night he stayed there, and after that they began living together. He set up a small workshop and started working on a replica of the bird. One morning she was sitting by the door when she saw someone pull up in a Buick. He was looking for the Russian, who had escaped from the insane asylum. He did not resist, he let himself get taken away by the man in the brown suit. The replica of the bird was only halfdone. Now it is on display in a smaller glass cabinet. Its chest is open and the gears and the little clock wheels look like the drawings of a soul. Sometimes it opens its beak, as if it needed more air, and turns its head toward the window. What it has not found is its form, Ríos says, it is suffering from a lack of truth.

3

Junior traveled all night. When he got there he recognized the house as if he had seen it in a dream. The white facade, the tall entranceway, the endless succession of transparent windows. He called at the front door with the bear-claw knocker. The town was empty, the only person he saw was a girl who raised an embroidered curtain and spied out to look at him from behind a window. The old woman who opened the door was Carola Lugo. She looked fragile, and her eyes were hesitant, as if she were blind. She stood to the side, without opening the door all the way. Through the crack Junior saw the long hallway that led to the back of the house. “I have been waiting for you,” she said, “Hannah told me you’d be coming.” As he entered the thought crossed Junior’s mind that he would never be able to leave there, that he would become lost in that woman’s story. They walked down a long hallway and into the first room. The tall ceiling and the thin windows gave the house a remote feel to it. Carola gestured as a way of showing him the place, and asked him to take a seat. Junior settled into a long divan while she sat with her back to the window and to an old grandfather’s clock.

“The Russian used to live here,” she said. “But that is not his name anymore, now he is somebody else, he uses a European name. You have to protect yourself in this country. They come after you because of your past here. I will show you the house now,” she said then. “So you can see it.”

An empty lot and a wire fence could be seen on the other side of the window. Junior realized that the architecture of the place was strange, as if all the rooms faced a single spot, or as if they were circular. The afternoon was freezing and overcast. At the far end of the room, in a glass cage, there was a monstrous reconstruction of what could be assumed had once been a bird. It was nearly one meter tall and it moved its neck with slow movements. “The bird’s madness will stake us out and that will be the last of us,” Carola said. The animal was moving around, fluttering, bumping into the bars of the cage. “It’s blind,” she said. To a side a doll was moving its arms and trying to smile. Junior had the impression that he had seen it before and that it was far too sinister to be artificial. “The Russian was the most important expert in automatons in all of Europe. Look,” she said, and opened a wardrobe. They looked like wire insects. “He made them for me, they are the fruits of love. I have spent hours at the train station hoping to see him go by,” she said, and smiled. “Me, a seventy-year-old woman.”

It was moving to hear her talk. She seemed to be in love with a shadow, with a man who had entered her life for an instant and left her in the past. There was a telescope at one of the windows. Through it you could see the endless plains and the reflection of the small Carhué lake. “The young one moved to Buenos Aires,” Carola said, “and I have lived here, alone, in this house, ever since. My brother comes to visit every once in a while, but he is very upset because of everything that has happened.” She spoke to him calmly, in a friendly tone, as if Junior were her confidant, the first one who had finally gone there to hear the truth. “They keep me in here by myself because I know the Russian’s story. He married me and now I am paying the consequences. They came to get him and he escaped. They wanted him for no reason at all. But he is not dead,” Carola said, “he is just hiding on an island in the Tigre Delta. Now he has another name. He is no longer the Russian, or perhaps he is the Russian now and he used a different name before. In any case, the man who came to get him in the Buick was an undercover police agent. In plainclothes, dressed in brown. We have everything recorded. The past lives on. Look, see this map, if you follow this branch of the river here, you will find the island. Do not tell him that you have seen me. You must find him. Macedonio Fernández was always interested in the story of the automatons. That is how they met, when his wife died.”

Junior saw the bird in the glass cage again and imagined it flying with a stiff flapping of its wings in the distance. She lived in the middle of all those replicas. A world of madness and mechanical images. “Underneath this room, several hundred feet down, I have discovered two large subterranean caves, old cemeteries of the Indian tribes that lived in this part of the Pampas last century. Those kinds of burial grounds are not that rare in this province, especially in Bolívar. There were large massacres around here. A few old men out in the country still remember.” To a side there was a stairwell that led to a basement, illuminated by a dim light. It was a hole reflected in a kaleidoscope, and from there you could see the plains and all the items in the house and the small Carhué lake again. “See that ray of sunlight,” Carola said. “It is the eye of the machine. Look,” she said to him. In the circle of light he saw the Museum, and in the Museum he saw the machine on the black platform. “Do you know what is going on?”

“Yes,” Junior said, “they’re replicas.”

“They were replicas,” she said, “but they have destroyed them.” The bird was moving its wings and rubbing its beak. It sounded like dry leaves crackling.

“So then nothing is for certain,” Junior said.

She smiled. “Macedonio came to this house, running from the pain of the loss of his wife. Elena died and Macedonio abandoned everything. He joined the Russian and spent some time here. The Russian had a lot of difficulties with the language, his dream was to return to Europe. Macedonio was the only person who understood and spoke to him. They spent many days in this house because Macedonio wanted to be convinced. They walked down a hallway and into a room full of small beveled windows that blocked the outside view. He thought that if he went out to the plains at night, and looked in through the lighted windows, he would see scenes that would help him recover his lost wife. The Russian wanted to build him a world at the level of that illusion, so that he could slowly return to the past. To build him a reality as if it were a house, so that Macedonio could live there. He was so desperate that he had abandoned everything, even his dear little kids, and had come out to the country. He jumped the freight trains heading south with the other vagrants. He lived for a time in the Carril cattle ranch, in the town of 25 de Mayo, and finally came down to Bolívar. He drove a hired car out to the house. They finished the machine out there,” she said, and shook her hand toward a shack in the patio.

“At first it was about automatons. The automaton outlasts time, the worst of plagues, the water that wears down stones. Then they discovered the white nodes, the live matter where words were recorded. In the bones the language does not die, it persists through all transformations. I will show you the place where the white nodes have been opened, it is on an island, on a branch of the river, it is inhabited by English and Irish and Russians and other people who have gone there from everywhere in the world, pursued by the authorities, political exiles, their lives threatened. They have been hiding there for years and years, they have built cities and roads along the shores of the island, they have explored the world following the course of the river, and now all the languages of the world have mixed together there, every voice can be heard, no one ever arrives, and if someone does, they do not ever want to leave. Because the dead have taken refuge there. Only one person has come back alive, Boas. He came to report what he had seen in that lost kingdom. Here,” she said to him. “Listen, now you will see. Perhaps this story is the road that will take you to the Russian.”

THE ISLAND