The Absent City

1

Following the turns of the channels and the tributaries of the major waterways of the Delta that borders the city, with its islands and streams and waterlogged lands, was like looking at the chart of a lost continent. Junior had a map, and when he arrived at the Tigre he asked around and was shown the route at one of the terminals of the Inter-Islander. He hired a pilot from the station and rented a motor launch at the Rowing Club. If his calculations were correct, the Russian’s colony should be off of one of the bends of the Pajarito, before reaching the open river. They had to navigate up the Carapachay and come out along the stronger currents of the northern waterways. The further he went up the Paraná de las Palmas, the more and more secure Junior felt, as if he were crossing a border that was taking him back to the past — and somehow, strangely, bringing him closer to his daughter. After traveling for two hours, the vegetation became denser, and they passed the remains of a laboratory, indicating that they were approaching the Russian’s plant. They skirted an islet full of rushes, then a sandbank, and came out again into open waters. Up ahead, hazily in the fog, he could see higher ground, with jagged ravines and cement foundations. In the middle, elevated on stone pillars and surrounded by an iron railing, was a fortified building with broad circular windows facing the gardens and the river. A man on the dock waved his hat at them, motioning for them to moor there. He was one of the Russian’s assistants. He welcomed Junior and helped him off the motor launch, holding his arm firmly, and showed him the path up to the house. The building was in the middle of a clearing. A pebbled path crossed through a small forest of willow trees and led right up to the wire fence surrounding the house.

“Santa Marta Island, and on this side is the Biguá creek. This area has always been occupied by foreigners,” the man explained to him. He seemed friendly and obliging, and spoke with a slight accent that sounded like a speech defect. They went through the gate and climbed toward the gardens. At that moment, a tall, thin man was seen walking across the gardens toward them with his hand extended.

“I am the Russian. You are the journalist, and I must ask you to be discreet and not take any photographs. Come, sit here,” he showed him a wicker chair on the veranda that surrounded the house. “They think,” he said, “that they have disactivated her, but that is not possible, she is alive, she is a body that expands and retreats and captures what is going on. Look,” he said, “there is a faucet out there in the garden, almost at ground level, and very cool, clean, crisp water comes out of it, even in the middle of summer. It is at the foot of those hedges over there. Sometimes I imagine that I go over and lie face up on the grass, to drink. But I never go, so I keep a certain possible action alive. Do you see what I mean? An open option, that is the logic of experience, always what is possible, what is to come, a street in the future, a door in a boardinghouse by Tribunales, near the courthouse, and the strumming of a guitar. There is no such thing as an imperfection, in reality it has to do with stages, the third stage or the third area, as was foreseen. There has been a retreat, a strategic withdrawal.” “We,” the Engineer said, “have reached a point in which we are able to conceive of life as a mechanism whose most important functions are easily understood and reproduced, a mechanism that we can make run at faster or slower rhythms, and thus at a higher or lower intensity. A story is nothing more than a reproduction of the order of the world on a purely verbal scale. A replica of life, if life consisted just of words. But life does not consist just of words. Unfortunately, it is also made up of bodies or, in other words, of disease, pain, and death, as Macedonio would say.

“Physics develops so quickly,” he said all of a sudden, “that within six months all knowledge is outdated. They become hallucinations, forms that spring forth from memory. The moment you remember them, they are already lost.”

He had had a serious illness and had stopped pretending he was European, and from the moment he became a naturalized citizen everyone started thinking that he was an Austrian, Hungarian, or German who pretended he was from Argentina, and they made him out to be a Nazi physicist hiding in the Tigre, an assistant of Von Braun, a disciple of Heidelberg. “You should not try to be one thing so that people will think that you are something else, if you know what I mean. If you are an anarchist, then be an anarchist, and they will assume that you are an undercover policeman and you will never get caught. If you are who you truly are, then everyone believes you are somebody else.” He even knew quite well that it was now being said that he was really Richter, the atomic physicist who had tricked General Perón by selling him the secret to make an atom bomb in Argentina. “But no,” he said, “I am the Russian.” He had studied Richter’s personality because he was amused by the deception he had been able to pull off, “a true virtuoso job,” but he was the Russian, an Argentine inventor who made a living selling small practical devices, cheap patents of simple machines that helped improve demand in hardware and general grocery stores in small towns.

“Look at this, for example,” he said, and showed him a pocket watch. Then he opened it, wound it up, and the face became a magnetic chessboard with microscopic pieces that were reflected and amplified by a magnifying mirror on the concave glass top. “It is the first chess-playing machine designed in Argentina,” the Russian said. “In La Plata, to be precise. It uses the gears and the small clock wheels to program its moves. The hours are its memory. It has twelve options per move, and it was with this very apparatus that I defeated Larse the time he came to play in the Masters Tournament in Mar del Plata, in 1959.” He pressed a button on one of the wheels, and the clock became a clock again. “Inventing a machine is easy, as long as you can modify the parts of a previous mechanism. The possibilities of converting what already exists into something else are infinite. But I would not be able to make something out of nothing. In that respect, I am not like Richter. You cannot compare my discovery with Richter’s invention, he built an atomic plant for Perón using only words, just with the reality of his German accent. He told him he was an atomic scientist and that he had the secret to make the bomb, and Perón believed him and fell like a fool, and had underground buildings and useless labs with pipes and turbines built for him that were never used. Perón would stroll through the marvelously decorated facilities while Richter, with a strong German accent, explained his wild plans of how he would produce nuclear fission in a cold environment. He won him over with his story, he was just a poor high school physics teacher, and he was not even German, he was actually Swiss, and Perón, who spent his life surpassing everyone, who spent his time nudging and winking and saying things with double meanings, believed Richter’s fantastic story and defended it to the end. After all, though, it is the same thing, I mean, for Macedonio that was the basic principle to building the machine. The fiction of a German accent. Everything is possible, all you have to do is find the right words. When he found me, he immediately convinced me that we should start working together.

“Look,” he said, “politicians believe scientists (Perón-Richter), and scientists believe novelists (the Russian-Macedonio Fernández). Scientists are big readers of novels, the last representatives of a nineteenth-century public, the only ones who really consider the uncertainty of reality and the form of a story. Physicists, Macedonio would say, added the quarks to the basic particle of the universe, in homage to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The only friend Einstein had at Princeton, his only confidant, was the novelist Hermann Broch, whose books, especially The Death of Virgil, he could quote from memory. The rest of the world spends its time believing superstitions on television. The criteria of reality,” the Russian said, “has crystallized and become concentrated, and that is why they want to deactivate the machine. I am sure you know the story of the Japanese soldier who stayed in the jungle fighting the American army for thirty years without surrendering. He was convinced that the war was eternal, that he had to avoid getting ambushed and keep moving constantly through the island until he made contact with his own forces. He grew old as he roamed around, eating lizards and weeds, sleeping in a straw hut, climbing up a tree during the typhoon season and tying himself to the branches. The fact of the matter is that that is how war is, and the soldier was only doing his duty, and, except for a nearly microscopic detail (the signatures on a piece of paper declaring peace), his entire universe was real. When they found him he did not know how to speak anymore, he just repeated the oath of the Imperial Army in which he swore to fight to the end. Now he is a ninety-year-old man, exhibited in the Museum of the Second World War, in Hiroshima, dressed in his threadbare officer’s uniform of the emperor’s army, holding a rifle with a bayonet at waist level, in fighting stance.

“Macedonio captured very clearly the direction of the new situation. If politicians believe scientists, and scientists believe novelists, then the conclusion was simple. It was necessary to effect reality and use scientific methods to invent a world in which it is not possible to have a soldier who spends thirty years in a jungle following orders, or at least a world in which the soldier no longer serves as an example of conviction and a sense of duty that is reproduced by Japanese executives and workers and technicians who are living the same fiction today, on a different scale, and who are always presented as the representatives of modern man. Macedonio’s main enemy was the Japanese model of feudal suicide, with its paranoid politeness and its Zen conformity. They build electronic devices and electronic personalities and electronic fictions and in every State of the world there is a Japanese brain giving orders. The State intelligence is essentially a technical mechanism designed to alter the criteria of reality. We have to resist. We are trying to build a microscopic replica, a female defense machine, against the experiences and the experiments and the lies of the State.

“Look,” he said, and raised his hand in a gesture that encompassed the trees and the nearby islands, “there are microphones and cameras and policemen hidden everywhere, they watch and record us around the clock. I do not even know if you yourself are a journalist or a spy, or both things at once. It does not matter, I have nothing to hide, they know where I am, and if they do not come it is because I am already outside the law. The State knows all the stories of all the citizens, and retranslates them into new stories that are then told by the president of the republic and his ministers. Torture is the culmination of that desire to know, the maximum degree of institutional intelligence. That is how the State thinks, and why the police mainly torture the poor, only the poor or the workers or the dispossessed, who you can see are darker-skinned or mestizos, they are tortured by the police and by the military. Only in very exceptional cases have they tortured people belonging to other social classes, and these cases have always become major scandals, like when Bravo, the student, was tortured by Amoresano and Lombilla in the time of General Perón. Because when they decide to torture people of slightly higher social standing, it always leads to a scandal, and in the last few years, in which the Army has acted with a homicidal and paranoid rancor, and men, women, and children belonging to distinguished spheres of society have been tortured and brutalized, everything has been denounced and has become known. And even if, of course, the largest number of those killed were workers and peasants, they have also executed priests, landowners, industrialists, students, and at the end they had to retreat before international pressure, which accepts as a given that the humble from the fields, the wretched and feverish from the ghettos and the poorest neighborhoods of the city will be massacred and tortured, but reacts when intellectuals and politicians and the children of well-to-do families are treated this way. Because, in general, the latter already collaborate of their own accord and serve as an example and adapt their lives to the criteria of reality established by the State, without there being any need to torture them. The others would do the same, but they cannot because they have been leveled and cornered, and even if they wanted to and took great pains to that end, they can no longer act like the model Japanese citizen who works fifteen hours per day and always greets the general manager of his company with the slightest of nods. They control everything, they have founded the mental State,” the Russian said, “which is a new stage in the history of institutions. The mental State, the imagined reality, we all think like they do and imagine what they want us to imagine.

“That is why I like how Richter infiltrated the Argentine State, he infiltrated his own paranoid imagination into Perón’s paranoid imagination by selling him the secret of the atom bomb. Only the secret, because the bomb never existed — only the secret, which, since it was a secret, could not be revealed. Of course, now, after years and years of systematic torture, of concentration camps designed to make those who have repented perform informational duties, they have won everywhere and can no longer be infiltrated, and the only thing that can be done is to create a white node and start over again. There is nothing left, nothing at all, just us, to resist — my mother and I, on this island — and Macedonio’s machine. It has been fifteen years since the Berlin Wall fell, and the only thing left is the machine, and the machine’s memory. There is nothing else, do you understand what I am saying, young man?” the Russian asked. “Nothing, just the stubble, the dry plains, the marks from the frost. That is why they want to deactivate her.

“At first, when they realized they could not just ignore her, when it became known that even Borges’s stories came from Macedonio’s machine, and that there were new versions going around about what had happened with the Islas Malvinas, they decided to take her to the Museum, to invent a Museum for her. They bought the building from the RCO and placed her there, on exhibit, in a special gallery, to see if they could negate her, convert her into what is known as a museum piece, a dead world, but the stories were reproduced everywhere, they could not stop her, there were stories and stories and more stories. Do you know how it all began? I will tell you. It always begins the same way, the narrator is sitting down, like I am, on a wicker chair, he rocks back and forth, looking out at the flowing river, it has always been like this, from the beginning, there is someone on the other side waiting, someone who wants to know what happens next. I had a small workshop in Azul around that time, I had lost my position at the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata for political reasons and had installed a workshop to repair radio and television sets. I was already carrying out my investigations, at night, I had begun to combine certain formulas together, to do some calculations, nothing too specific, around the time when Gödel’s and Tarski’s hypotheses first began to be disseminated. I applied them to a radio receiver, I was unable to build a transmitter, not at that point, just a recorder, my closet was full of tapes, recorded voices, lyrics, I was not able to transmit, only to capture, from the ether, waves, memories. I insist that at this point Gödel’s work had just appeared, around the same time as Tauski’s essay, I was in contact with the Rodríguez Bookstore in Buenos Aires, and I would get the latest scientific and philosophical books and journals every two months, in German, in English. I would work on my investigations at night and open up the electrical repair shop in the morning, until one day this man appears, a poet and a philosopher, I should say, he came to speak with me because everyone knows everything in small towns and he had been told that there was a European mathematician, he had come to spend some time at the small Arteaga farm, which was nearby, and was told that there was a German, because everyone always thought that I was German or Russian, and he wanted to meet me. That is how everything began. He had started before, actually, with other kinds of experiments, but along the same line.

“I remember a friend of mine, Gabriel del Mazo, who knew him from when they were young. I remember hearing him say that one day he was in the living room in Macedonio’s house, at 2120 Piedad Alley, parallel to Av. Bartolomé Mitre. It was a big house that is still there, with a patio and a yard with grapevines. They used to meet there with Juan B. Justo and Cosme Mariño, the founders of the Socialist Party and the Anarchist Movement in Argentina, and Gabriel del Mazo remembered that Macedonio was still single and that, one day, he heard the strumming of chords on a guitar ceaselessly from the room next door, the strumming of the chords, Del Mazo said, keeping rhythm in long intervals with other chords, and others, and others and with nothing else. I was intrigued, he says, so I go and ask him what he’s doing. And he told me something that I fear I won’t be able to recount exactly because my memory is not that great, Macedonio does, Del Mazo says, but it went something like this:

“ ‘That it is very interesting to look for the fundamental chords in music from which, perhaps, the entire universe is derived.’

“As if he were searching for a kind of primordial cell, the white node, the origin of forms and words, in the strumming of a guitar, in the melody that is repeated and repeated and repeated and never ends. A nucleus that is the origin of all voices and of all stories, a common language, as if it were recorded in the flight of birds, on the shells of tortoises, a unique form. You might say that, metaphysically, he did not distinguish dreams from reality. His theory consisted of not differentiating between being awake and dreaming. Despite the objective appearance of reality, he opposed it with dreams. He did not believe that dreams were an interruption of the real, but rather an entranceway. You awake from one dream and into another life. The intersection is always unexpected, life is a woven tapestry that interweaves one dream with another. He thought that the self, when it dreams, lives with so much intensity that it experiences as much as, if not more than, when it is awake and its eyes are wide open. All his work revolved around this node. He has written on the subject. That which is not defines the universe as much as that which is. Macedonio placed the possible within the realm of the real. That is why we started discussing Gödel’s hypotheses. A formal system cannot attest to its own cohesion. That was our point of departure, virtual reality, worlds of possibility. Gödel’s theorem and Alfred Tarski’s treatise on the borders of the universe, the outer limits. Macedonio had a very clear awareness of the intersection, the shore beyond which something else begins. That is why when his wife died, it also became necessary for him to leave his life behind, that he too abandon his life, as she had abandoned hers, as if he had gone to find her and she was on the other shore, on what Macedonio called the other shore. He became a shipwrecked man carrying a box with what he had managed to save from the water. He lived in an imaginary island, in complete loneliness, for years and years, like Robinson Crusoe.

“When his wife died he abandoned everything, his children, his legal title, even his writings on medicine and philosophy, and began to live without anything, almost like a vagrant on the road, with other anarchists who were hopping freight trains around that time, out in the country, under bridges, eating only soup, broth made from thistles, sparrow bones. Because he was an extremely ascetic person, no matter how much he had of something it was always more than what he needed, even if he did not have something it was still more than what he needed. He walked alone, played his guitar in small bars in the Province of Buenos Aires, carrying Elena’s soul, as he would say, in a small container usually used to carry mate. In other words, it contained the letters and the one photograph he had of her wrapped up in strips of cloth. He had discovered the existence of the verbal nuclei that keep remembrances alive, words they had used that brought all the pain back into his memory. He was removing them from his vocabulary, trying to suppress them, and establish a private language without any memories attached to it. A personal language, without memories, he wrote and spoke English and German, so he would mix the languages, in order to avoid even grazing the skin of the words he had used with Elena. Toward the end he spent hours sitting by himself, in the patio of a house that his friends had lent him, in the district of Azul, just thinking, drinking mate and looking out over the plains.

“He had met her in that very same place. After traveling around and around the Province of Buenos Aires, he ended up right back where he had started. Macedonio fell in love with Elena before he met her, as he used to say, because they had told him so much about her that it was as if a spirit had come to visit him. Even many of the things he had done earlier in life were to impress her at a distance and to try to get her to fall in love with him, he would say. He always thought that his passion is what made her ill, he always thought it was his fault that she died. Macedonio saw her for the first time at a cousin’s house the day she turned eighteen, and again by coincidence one afternoon on a street in Azul. This second meeting proved to be definitive. He had gotten off the train because he was doing an experiment having to do with measuring the length of thoughts. He got off there without knowing where he was because he had already traveled the number of leagues needed for his thoughts, and had decided to send a telegram from there saying he would be coming back late. When he left the post office he sat down at a bar to have a brandy, and then walked around the corner and ran into Elena, who was looking at the window of a shoe store, as if she had been placed there just so Macedonio would find her. She started to laugh because she thought it was funny to see that man dressed in a white shirt and a dark suit at siesta time, as if he were sleepwalking in a lost town in the middle of the Pampas. He looked like a seminarist going out to ask for alms for the poor of the parish. And I was asking for alms, Macedonio would say, because she gave me the grace of her beauty and of her intelligence, bright as the morning sun. He invited her to have tea with him at the café in the train station, and from that afternoon on, they were together until the day she died.”

“Elena saw her death coming. Even though no one was able to find a single symptom of any known illness, even though Macedonio Fernández was really the one who was perpetually ill, and who tried extravagant systems of gaucho medicine, such as drinking fermented milk and soup, and never took any chemical medicines, and even though he was the one who experimented with medical knowledge, she was the one for whom death was imminent. That is why her illness and Elena’s end and Macedonio’s attempts at curing her with his medical knowledge were such a tragedy. Macedonio thought Elena’s death was an experiment that included his life in the future. A scientist does not personally participate in his experiments, that is what makes him different from a mystic. But Macedonio participated until the very last moment in Elena’s illness, trying to cure her. To give you an idea, it would have been as if Einstein had gone personally to Hiroshima to test his theoretical hypotheses on the structure of the atom. When Macedonio finally realized he had been defeated, that life was a horrible erosion destined to kill everyone off one by one, and that he was unable to stop the illness, and that it was even useless for him to try to get sick in her place, he agreed to have her taken to the hospital. He circled about the pavilions and looked through the windows of her room, from the outside, not daring to go in. He went around the gardens and waved at her through the glass, not daring to go in and see her die. From then on he hated all doctors and scorned medicine, which he considered to be a hopeless science, incapable of fulfilling its mission of preventing human beings from dying. Doctors are always failures, it is only a matter of giving them enough time. They have never been able to save anyone from death. They are arrogant imbeciles, precisely because they have never succeeded and have never been able to save anyone. She was lying in a bed in a hospital and Macedonio looked in through the window, and waved at her from the other side, and she smiled back without any strength left.

“And that is how Elena died, frail and delicate as happiness itself.

“The end was so horrible and so interminable that Macedonio remembered everything — the cretonne couches in the waiting room, the physical impossibility of going to the bed where Elena’s body lay in pain — with the distinct feeling of being in a dream and being unable to wake up from it. In the waiting room there were other men waiting at sunrise for other agonies to end. They smoked and stared into space in a time without time, where what one waits for is what people who are distanced from the pain refer to in resignation as ‘the inevitable.’ Until one afternoon her brother Alfredo came down the corridor toward the waiting room, and Macedonio saw his face, which had been his father’s face, and gestured for him to stop, and Alfredo leaned against the white tiles of the wall and watched him walk away. He would not be back, let his dear kids grow up as bastards, he wanted to negate everything that would remind him that she had left this world. Elena’s death (she was twenty-six years old) was an unexplainable event, it belonged to a parallel universe, it had occurred in a dream. (He dreamt that she was killed in a field of straw by a group of tigers.) As if he had paid a man who was coming down a dirt path in the dark with a lantern and handed him her body for him to hold. In exchange for what? It was a deal. He thought that sacrifices were actions that maintained the order of the universe. They were not public (they had ceased being public), but they still had to be performed, and instead of arrogant theatrical ceremonies they were now being performed on innocent and beautiful victims in white hospital rooms. If this was the case, then there was still hope. The sacrifice had already been consummated and he decided to place himself at the center of an experiment. I was married around that time, and my wife became very good friends with Macedonio — he was polite and courteous with women, a seductive man, friendly, incredibly intelligent, anyone who knew him will tell you that. A first-class intelligence, he would discern paradoxes instantly, tautologies, I remember that one of the first things he said to me was that he was interested in William James because James studied beliefs. Philosophers, he says to me, are generally interested in tautologies (in other words, in mathematics and formal logic), or in proofs (events and verifications), but not in absent reality. I can still hear him, that soft firm voice of his.

“ ‘Absence is a material reality, like a hole in the middle of the grass.’

“After Elena’s death, he could not go on living, and yet he did go on living. (Io non mori e non rimasi vivo, is how Dante cried.) He told me that he remembered a Russian student who had had a bomb blow up on his body because he had not wanted to kill an innocent family that was crossing the street (the mother, the children, the French governess) when he was about to carry out an assassination attempt on the chief of police in Odessa. He met him in Adrogué, years later, old and completely disfigured by the explosion. He was like a ghost. When a man loses the woman he loves he is like the man who has a bomb blow up on his body and does not die. That is why Macedonio thought that the impetuous Rajzarov was like his brother, that Russian who was made more of metal than life. His steel teeth sparkled when he spoke, he had a silver plate in his head, a gold lattice interwoven like a three-dimensional tattoo held together the few strands of cartilage and bone that were left in his right knee — a man-made badge of pain that he would always recall simultaneously as a painful memory and as a circle of liberating fire, as a medal of honor that he carried about with the utmost pride. For it was invisible, recorded inside his body. An operation in the dark that lasted four hours, on the Eastern front, in a basement of the organization in Crimea, they did not have any sulphamide, or any anesthesia, no wonder he was so proud. That is how Macedonio had ended up, metallic, impaired, held together by operations and prostheses, the same pain and the same body artificially reconstructed, because Elena was suddenly absent. Frozen, made out of aluminum, walking as if his arms and legs did not belong to his body, like a metal doll, he was unable to smile, he could not raise his voice. ‘There is nothing left that does not hurt.’ ”

“His friend Rajzarov was with him when Elena died, he spent the entire day with him, walking about with the heavy melancholic movements of a robot, the weight of iron in his soul, the absence stamped on his chest. Macedonio was lying on a couch and the dauntless Rajzarov tried to cheer him up a bit. Macedonio listened very attentively to his anarchist exploits, without saying a word. But once, after a pause, when Rajzarov was taking a break, drinking a brandy, Macedonio said in a voice that seemed weightless from not having spoken in hours:

“ ‘An Austrian general once said to my father: “I will think of you after I am dead.” For me to think about her is normal, but for her to think about me, now that she is dead, is something that saddens me deeply.’

“He could not handle the idea that she, dead, might remember him and feel sad because he was alone. He was thinking about the memories that survive after the body is gone, about the white nodes that stay alive even when the flesh disintegrates. Engraved on the bones of the skull, the invisible forms of the language of love stay alive. And perhaps it was possible to reconstruct them, to bring those memories back to life, like someone plucking music written in the air by a guitar. That afternoon he came up with the idea of entering those remembrances and staying there, in her memory. Because the machine is Elena’s memory, it is the story that always returns, eternally, like the river. She was his Beatrice, his universe, the spheres of hell and the epiphanies of heaven. There is a heretical version of the Divine Comedy in which Virgil builds a live replica of Beatrice for Dante. An artificial woman that he finds at the end of the poem. Dante believes the invention and destroys the cantos he has written. He looks for Virgil to help him, but Virgil is no longer at his side. The work therefore becomes the automaton that allows him to recuperate the eternal woman. In that sense, I have been his Virgil. Months and months locked up in the workshop, reconstructing the voice of memory, the stories of the past, seeking to restore the frail form of a lost language. Now they say that they have deactivated her, but I know that is not possible. She is eternal and will always be eternal and in the present. To deactivate her they would have to destroy the world, negate this conversation and the conversations of those who want to destroy her. She is like the river, flowing slowly and calmly in the afternoon. Even if you are not in it, the river still flows. They will not be able to stop something that began before they understood what was happening.

“I am Emil Russian,” he said. “They think that I have a replica, but I am not the one who has a replica, there are other replicas, she produces stories, indefinitely, stories that become invisible memories that everyone believes are their own — those are the replicas. This conversation, for example. Your visit to the Majestic, the woman who drinks indefinitely from a bottle of perfume, the young woman in jail. You do not have to leave the island, this story can end right here. Reality is endless, it is transformed and becomes an eternal story, where everything always starts again. She is the only one who remains still, always herself, motionless in the present, lost in memory. If there is a crime, then that is it. She has no images left, there are only words in her memory, the peaceful flapping of the birds, the voices at night. I will show you the Archives, you will be able to see for yourself that the story is infinite. Look,” he said, and turned on a screen on the wall. An old super-8 film came on. At first a few numbers appeared on top of some moving lines, then the picture began with an old man, with white hair, wearing an overcoat, coming out of a wooden house, walking across a garden and sitting on a wicker chair and smiling.

“That man, the one you see right there, was a poet, a philosopher, and an inventor.”

Sitting on the wicker chair, Macedonio looked at the camera and lifted the lapels of his overcoat, as if trying to stay warm, while he said hello with a slight nod of his head.

2

They have closed down the Museum, so it is necessary to get past the iron fence that separates it from the street to get in. If one goes across the gardens, one can see a small light glowing in a window on the ground floor. To get there you must go up a ramp and through the circular rooms, until you reach the central gallery. The machine is at the end of a white pavilion, held up by a metallic frame. Her octagonal shape is somewhat flattened, her small legs resting on the floor. A blue eye pulsates in the dim room, its light breaking the stillness of the afternoon. Outside, on the other side of the windows, it is possible to hear the low rumbling of the cars heading west down Av. Rivadavia. The motionless machine blinks repeatedly in an irregular rhythm. At night, the eye glows, all alone, and its reflection shines on the window.

Are you Richter? Is somebody there? Of course it can’t be Richter. I just said that because I was afraid. As long as you’re there, I don’t care who it is. And if there is no one there? And if I were alone? No one comes anymore. It’s been days and days since anyone has come. An empty, circular place with windows facing the gardens and a stone ledge, on a platform, where I have been abandoned. Does anybody care what I say? Mental loneliness. Loneliness is a mental illness. They have locked up, no one can come here anymore, no one has ever come. Sometimes I have hallucinations, I go back over the archives and look for words, everything is so slow that I can barely see the light in the window, across the hall, I picture Fuyita in the lower level, sitting in his rocking chair, keeping watch, I can’t quite understand it, could they have left me alone? To disappear? I know there is a camera recording me, the eye of a camera in the corner of the ceiling, I can picture Fuyita in the small room below, his multiple vision of the entire Museum on the small closed-circuit screens, we are all going to end up like that, one machine keeping watch over another, the small video cameras on the corners of the ceilings, held up by mechanical arms, turning like glass eyes, sweeping and recording the rooms and the galleries. Sometimes they also record Fuyita’s memories, leaning on his walking stick, making his rounds through the Museum, wearing his municipal guard uniform and carrying a flashlight to see the corners and the stairwells. His small image, distorted in the empty space, and then Fuyita sitting on the rocking chair, again in the level below, rewinding the tape to see himself walking through the galleries. This Museum has become the biggest of its kind in the country, dedicated to the art of surveillance, just machines keeping watch and a guard going over the rooms. I know the Police Museum, with the wax reproductions of the criminals. Punk Head, Madman Gaitán, Ángel the Bad Boy, Agatha Galifi, Ranko Kozu, life-size, wearing the clothes they had on when they were arrested or killed (the shirt with the bullet hole in back), and the cells where they were locked up by the Argentine justice system, and the instruments used by the police for centuries to hold the murderers. He used to say to me that narrative is an art that belongs to the police, that they are always trying to get people to tell their secrets, to narc on other suspects, to tell on their friends, their brothers. That is why the police and the so-called justice have done more for the progress of narrative, he used to say, than any writer in history. And I? I am the one who narrates. For hours on end my image is the only thing that can be seen in the level below, it is actually recorded by two cameras, one in that corner over there and the other in that other corner on the ceiling. They only see my body, no one can get inside me, the brain’s loneliness is immune to electronic surveillance, television screens only reflect the thoughts of those watching them. You can only film and transmit the thoughts of people who voluntarily agree to watch what they think. That is what they call daily television programming, a general map of the mental state. The interior monologue, he would say, is now the daily programming on the TV screens, fragmented time, streams of consciousness, verbal images. But they have not yet been able to devise a machine that is sensitive enough to have telepathic television. They are researching it in Osaka, in Japan, Fuyita says, in the secret facilities of Sony-Hitachi, where they run experiments using the brains of dolphins, they want to design a machine capable of reading people’s minds and projecting it on a screen. I am an anachronism, so much of an anachronism that they have buried me in this white basement. That is why they want to keep me isolated, under control, under the exclusive surveillance of Fuyita, the Korean guard, like an embalmed corpse. I am picturing the corridors now, the ramp, the inner galleries of the Archives, if I try to remember and the purity of memory does not blind me, then I can see the door of a room, partially ajar, a crack in the darkness, a silhouette in the window. Just the door, partially ajar, of a room in a boardinghouse, was is it fifteen, or sixteen years ago? There is never a first time in memory, it is only in life that the future is uncertain, in memory the pain always returns in precisely the same manner, rushing to the present, you have to avoid certain places as you go over the past with the eye of the camera, whoever looks at himself on such a screen loses all hope. I can see the small lake under the low fog, the gray sky of morning, that is where my father killed himself, I saw the white marsh with the frost around the edges, between the rushes, right next to the mud with the tracks of the feet of the tero-birds. Every story is a detective story, he used to say. Murderers are the only ones who have something to tell, personal stories always turn out to be the story of a crime. Raskolnikov, he would say, Erdosain, Scharlach the Dandy. My father killed a man as he was coming out of a party. I am sure I will not be able to sleep now, I dream of a Hungarian engineer hidden in a house out in the country, in the skeletal frame of what is left of a ranch where a mechanical bird nests. The party had gone on until dawn and on the way out there was some kind of altercation on the veranda behind the house. I was unconscious for nearly two hours, according to the Hitachi watch that belonged to Fuyita’s mother. Then I saw the bright dial again and felt something heavy on my thigh. The Sony plays nighttime music on the radio station, if only I could make contact, transmit. Once a friend’s son hung himself so he would not have to serve in the military. He was twenty years old, he was to go to Campo de Mayo, he spent the night before he was supposed to report for service with a woman, then he went back home and killed himself in the tool shed behind their house. Didn’t want anything to do with the Argentine Army. Once a friend’s daughter received a letter that she herself had written to her ex-husband, who lived in Barcelona. The address had changed, or she had written it down wrong, in any case the letter was returned to sender and she read what she had written six months before. It was as if a stranger had written her a letter telling her the secrets of her life in Buenos Aires. Not at all as she remembered. In the Police Museum there was a room dedicated to the life of Lugones, the chief of police, whose name was the same as his father’s, Leopoldo Lugones. He founded the Special Division and introduced a substantial improvement to the torture techniques utilized in Argentina: he took the electric prod, which was traditionally used with cows to direct the cattle up the short ramps and into the English trains, and used it on the naked bodies of the shackled anarchists from whom he wanted to get information. Chief of police Lugones, the son of the poet, was the director of State intelligence, and it was he who carried out his father’s work to its full culmination, he was his executor and in charge of writing introductions for all of the poet’s poetic and literary compositions. When he used a tool from our cattle industry to improve State control over rebels and foreigners, he advanced and deepened the national spirit in the same manner as his father had when he wrote his “Ode to the Cattle and the Grain.” The retired chief of police ended up locked up in his own house in the neighborhood of Flores, with Parkinson’s disease, unable to sleep, with insomnia, terrified by possible terrorist attacks, by the possible vengeance of the children of the tortured anarchists, locked up in his own house, with doors and windows barred and an incredible and complex system of mirrors that allowed him to keep watch on all the rooms in the house simultaneously. They were reflected on the slanted mirrors mounted on the ceilings and the doors so he could see the entire house, as well as the garden and the front door, in a single view from a wheelchair on which he wheeled himself through the rooms of the house. This is historically accurate, absolutely historically accurate, it is all in the Police Museum and was also told to me by his daughter, who remembered her father with hatred and sarcasm, locked up in successive padded rooms, keeping watch over the corners of the house with angled mirrors, always armed in case of a possible attack, while he dedicated what was left of his life to protecting and publishing the work of his father, the poet Leopoldo Lugones. And, to assure the accuracy of his father’s work, he initiated lawsuits against anyone who alluded to his father’s writings without citing the appropriate detective interpretations of his son and executor, who looked over each and every one of the editions of Lugones’s complete works, which were read in schools and prisons. At the end, he finally killed himself, Lugones, the ex-chief of police, shot himself with a shotgun, the trigger, and this is known for certain, pulled with his toe, as is the tradition in these kinds of suicides, in these suicide stories the person committing suicide with a shotgun always pulls the trigger tortuously with the big toe, barefoot, while he holds the barrel of the gun aimed at his face. But in the case of Leopoldo Lugones (Jr.), the Parkinson’s disease complicated the maneuver to such an extent that the shot went slightly astray and the bullet went through his throat, and it took ten hours for him to bleed to death. In the gallery of the Police Museum dedicated to his memory, on Calle Defensa in Buenos Aires, you can see photographs and other belongings of his, and even his incredible and complex surveillance system, which he designed to protect his life from terrorist attacks, have been reproduced. Macedonio considered him a son worthy of his father, the most worthy son of his main enemy, since the chief of police, following the poet Lugones’s strict orders, had Macedonio Fernández followed and watched by the police for all those years, purely out of literary jealousy, envious of the respect that Macedonio’s sober attitude elicited among the younger generation, who scorned Lugones for exemplifying the writer who always allows himself to be used by government and those in power. So Macedonio was accused, and with good reason, of being anti-Argentine and an anarchist, and they started following him, which was a worthless infamy, because he was a peaceful man, he wouldn’t even kill a fly. At the end even Lugones was being watched by his son’s police force, driving him to commit suicide, because the son had threatened the father with denouncing him publicly when his investigations revealed to him that the poet was in an adulterous relationship with a teacher to whom he sent mystical and pornographic letters, with semen and blood splattered on the paper, and when the chief of police, Macedonio used to say, ordered him to leave his clandestine lover and threatened him with making the affair a public scandal, which would destroy his reputation of being a moral Argentine citizen and a representative of the extreme right of Argentina, the poet, with a final gesture of dignity, took a motor launch up the Tigre to a resort and committed suicide in 1938, exactly thirty years before his son would do the same. All of this is in the Police Museum, even the letters written by Lugones’s lover, the mirrors of the chief of police, Leopoldo Lugones Jr., and his father’s complete works edited and introduced by him with his detective-fiction interpretations, all of that can be found in the Museum on Calle Defensa. Macedonio used to get melancholy when he told the story, but also sarcastic, because he thought that it was a good example of detective fiction on the part of his private enemy, the poet Leopoldo Lugones. That is the first case of a poet whose son was a policeman, it’s common to find examples of policemen whose sons are poets, Macedonio used to say, but the other way around is very rare. Was it he who used to say it to me? Did he say it to me just now? Sometimes I get confused and think that I’m in the hospital. I think and I think and I see a corridor, in my memory, and then another, they were rolling me away and I could see the lights on the ceiling and the white-tiled walls. He never thought that he would leave and that I would remain behind here, lost, a woman on a hospital bed, tied down with rubber belts to the back of the bed, my wrists above my head, tied up like that. You’re crazy, he said to me, lost, that’s the murmuring of love, the voice of the woman who narrates what she has seen, the screen white as a sheet, if I stop then life too will stop, I see what I say, now he’s there, right there, he tells me what I want to hear. I am and have been what I am, a crazy Argentine woman who has been left alone, now, abandoned forever, he is how many years old now? They say that his hair turned white overnight when I left, he was always beautiful, he looked like Paul Valéry, more distinguished than Valéry, a real Argentine native, his body smooth, and that way of leaning against me, still talking, whispering on my neck. Once, on the low wall behind my sister’s house, during siesta time, he held me like this, with his arm, just like this, he lifted one of my legs and took it out, the buttoned fly, he had been playing paddleball and had that smell and looked straight at me as he put it in me like this, yes, right there, yes, almost sitting on the wall, I wasn’t wearing anything underneath, I never wore anything underneath, I felt the skirt against my buttocks, the crease, I was always hot, first he put his open hand right there, as if he were going to sit me in the air, he lifted me up, I was lifted up, there was always a flame burning in the room on Calle Olazábal, against the full-body mirror, you could really see yourself in that one, he had me turn around, my elbows against the wall, until my face touched the mirror, like a cat. We spent a winter in Mar del Plata because he was running away, he’d been found out and was being followed, and they lent us that apartment in an empty building, on Calle Olazábal, you could see the ocean from the small window in the kitchen, and the stove on, above the oven, was the only light at dusk. I am Amalia, if you hurry me I will say that I am Molly, I am her, locked up in the big house, desperate, pursued by Rosas’s mazorca, I am Irish, I will say then, I am her and I am also the others, I was the others, I am Hipólita, the gimp, the little cripple, I tottered slightly when I walked, Hipólita, I say to him, and he smiles, Hipólita, with “the gloves on her small hands,” she ran away with the psychopath, the big castrated psychopath who could tell the future on Tarot cards, he had a scar in his groin from here to here, Fuyita has a slash between his legs, below his torso, like the edge of his hand, a scar, red, an impotent director, the great seducer was all tongue, he carried a stalk of corn covered in Vaseline in his small suitcase, I am Temple Drake and then, oh you despicable creatures, you made me live with a justice of the peace. These and other stories, I have told them already, it does not matter who is talking. I remember, when Richter was around and Perón fell in the German trap and poured everything into trying to build an atom bomb in Argentina and achieving economic independence, during those months of waiting and denial, Evita slapping the ministers around, yes, she would slap the Minister of the Interior on the face the moment he uttered even the slightest derogatory comment about the working classes, about those poor dregs, slap, slap, across one cheek and the other, with her strong little hand, thin and fierce, sometimes she had to just about get up on the toes of her feet because those political bosses were tall, some were dark, but all were psychopaths, they stole everything, even the small lightbulbs from the bathrooms in the government buildings, their fingers yellowed from nicotine, wearing horseshoe tiepins or sometimes the Peronist emblem in diamonds, Eva saw the social injustice cropping up in the ministers themselves and defended herself by slapping their faces, she would call the ministers over and stand up on the toes of her feet and slap them across the face, slap, slap, that is how the Peronist Resistance began. Those stories have circulated from the beginning, from mouth to mouth, when they emptied out her body and embalmed her, that is how she ended up the same, a doll with a small watch on her wrist, so thin that the band was too big and could not be closed, locked up in a box, on top of a wardrobe in the offices of the General Labor Confederation, covered with a blanket, because the marines wanted to throw her into the river, sink her to the bottom. A woman who was not allowed to die in peace, she’s also in a museum, God only knows what she was dreaming about when she died. I remember the room in the hospital, all the poor who came to see me, they would stand at the foot of the bed, holding their caps in their hands, they have come to give me their condolences, none of my old acquaintances have recognized me, the Russian is here, Rajzarov came at the last moment, with his metal body, rebuilt, politics is the art of dying, a cold politics of pride, Rajzarov says, of the kind that goes around at night to vindicate the humble and the sad, it is the art of death. The women knitted sweaters for the soldiers in the Plaza de la República. To be anonymous politics must be clandestine, there is a slight breeze coming from the galleries, I’m in a glass room, exhibited like a doll, I’m the queen bee, mounted on the velvet cushion, the tiepin has a pearl and pierces the butterfly’s body, you have to pierce them onto the cushion when they are alive, he says, this way they won’t end up rigid and they’ll preserve their elegance, if you pierce them onto the cushion when they are dead the colors of the wings fade. That’s me, the cat strolling through the hallways, alone in this empty room, then left to the inner patio and the window facing the vacant lot. A Korean man, Tank Fuyita, has been the keeper and the guard for years, he came with the second generation of immigrants, smugglers of cheap watches on the free market, they wore the watches on their arms, ten or twelve Japanese watches, and spoke in their Oriental whispers, in the Once neighborhood, in Ciudadela, but liberalism ruined the business, free trade was the end of our smuggling operations, Fuyita would say, the end of Argentine history. That was a river novel, it started in 1776, on both shores of the Río de la Plata, the boat with the English goods, and now it has ended, so many deaths for nothing, so much pain. And now who’s there? Fuyita? The Russian? No, who would come around here at this time of day, you’re crazy, what are you waiting for, you’re dying of cancer, you’re just another crazy woman, a crazy nobody waiting at the edge of death. Now I feel like there’s a current blowing, the soft flash of lightning in my vertebrae, the electric shock that used to make my sister María turn white with fear. A fine sheer net of incredible exhaustion falls with the edge of night, a fatigue that won’t let me think, that’s how she used to speak. They kept her in Santa Isabel for almost ten years, they would partially erase from her memory the voices that she tended to hear at dawn, the cadence of the water from the faucet in the bathroom, Sister María used to speak with Satan, she and he had been lovers, she left everything and entered a convent in Córdoba, the Discalced Carmelites, she had sung tango in the Chantecler Cabaret, Sister Ada Eva María Phalcon, they called her The Egyptian, she had been kept by faros and by Argentine gentlemen of the oldest stock who, at the end, when she entered the convent, would travel all night, those men, to hear her sing in the choir of a church. She used to say: “We see the ashes of the days that have gone, floating in the past, as we see the dust of our journeys at the end of the road.” That’s how she used to speak. She had a daughter with aphasia and educated her with music, a plaintive love song by Esnaola, this is how you strum the guitar, see, you’re left-handed so we’ll have to change the strings around. She would go out dressed like a country girl, flowered skirt and braids, with her silly old guitar and sing the tango “Sin palabras.” Without words, this music is going to hurt you, the girl thinks, doesn’t speak, a verbal music, the story of Venus’s ring, the daughter sitting in the garden out back. At first it was the sad and small country hotels, the dresser with the mirror above it, and up above, on the shelf, between the hangers, the bottle of perfume, a room facing Av. de Mayo in the Hotel Majestic. They spent two years running from the police, she never knew exactly why, something having to do with morphine, they had rented a coupé, they were singing artistes, on tour, until she decided to stay in Córdoba and enter the convent. She went to the church one afternoon and laid face down on the freezing tiles in front of the altar and opened her arms to form a cross. Sister Superior, she said, I am Ada Eva María Phalcon. Could I join this congregation? I have been evil, I have sinned, the lower I sank the purer my voice became, the more men I slept with the purer my voice was, Sister Superior. I have brought, she said opening her jewelry case, these jewels are for the Lord to use, for Christian charity, for the forsaken children, and she cut her long hair with a pair of shearing scissors and said that at night, sometimes, in the middle of the night, on tour, in the small country hotels, she had heard the voice of Satan, his song, he murmurs music to me vocally, I can’t hear him, I have never heard him, I only listen to him, Mother Superior, Sister Clara, Sister. She left her jewelry case at the altar and laid face down until they allowed her to enter the convent (because she was a sinner), and now she sings in the choir with the other nuns, and the men who used to hear her sing in the Chantecler Cabaret now come on Sundays, they travel to Córdoba just knowing, they say, that Ada Phalcon is singing there, lost and anonymous in that choir of nuns. That is a story, in the Archives, that is the story of the singer, there are others, I close my eyes and see, a street, oh, how real, the light on me, the light of day, the pure physicality of experience, the level of the river going down in that house out in the Tigre. I know I have been abandoned here, deaf and blind and half immortal, if I could only die or see him one more time or really go insane, sometimes I imagine that he is going to come back, and sometimes I imagine that I will be able to get him out of me, stop being this foreign memory. Endless, I create memories, but nothing else, I am full of stories, I cannot stop, the patrol cars control the city and the locales below Av. Nueve de Julio have been abandoned, we have to get out, go across, find Grete Müller, who is looking at the enlarged photographs of the shapes etched on the shells of the turtles, I have seen them and now they emanate from me, I pull events out of live memories, the light of the real quivers, weakly, I am the singer, the one who sings, I am on the sand, near the bay, I can still remember the old lost voices where the water laps ashore, I am alone in the sun, no one comes near me, no one comes, but I will go on, the desert is before me, the stones calcined by the sun, sometimes I have to drag myself, but I will go on, to the edge of the water, I will, yes.