The One Before

A Layman’s Thoughts on Painting

I think more about frames than paintings. My preference: altarpieces and images of the Way of the Cross. Between each station on the Way of the Cross is the empty wall. It goes unrecognized as the true frame holding in the pathetic magic of feeling without allowing it to spill from its borders toward the ocean of oil that is indeterminacy. The frame shows that Christ was crucified; it preserves his sacrifice for us and saves us from the confusion of his hesitations, his stubbornness, and his fear. We owe the frame perspective, perfect profiles, and the most surprising accomplishment of painting: concrete abstraction.

The docent of the municipal museum thinks I’m crazy because he’s seen me looking at the empty wall. It looks white in the sense of white-hot; the red, symbol of heat and passion, becomes invisible through abundance and excess. So much of the same feeling neutralizes itself and blinds the rest and then we feel unworthy to keep looking. How can I explain such a thing to my friends who are painters? Each picture looks to me like a white wall that has been diminished, attenuated. Perhaps the word “cut” would serve, as when we say to cut wine with water. Thus, the art of painting is for me the art of reduction. Let us honor the frame, because from uniformity it creates the variety of the passion. Rainbows reign in the sky for a moment and then fade, in the afternoon, into the arms of a night darker and more indistinguishable than fire.

Regarding a Literary Argument

We began nice and early in the morning. When, seven hours later, we were still arguing after having eaten lunch, something in the room was different, and I’m not talking about the light that had changed over time, or about the cigarette smoke, or about the notes or abstract doodles which now sullied papers that once were white. Arguments at the height of summer! I know what I’m talking about, but the more I try, the less able I am to say it. It’s a state of the world so uncertain and banal that no one has ever invented a term to adequately describe it. Perhaps nothing really is happening and I, purely out of vertigo, have set about trying to pin down some unnamable thing in the very center of nothingness. But let’s just say that something happened: not the smoke, nor the papers, nor the light, nor the tables, nor the people, nor the themes up for discussion were the same as they had been at nine in the morning. Baroque variants: there was never any morning, or rather, this moment stands alone, the word “was” is only real when it is said (you might say it’s nothing more than a sound), and now there is nothing more than the great wide space where everything is clear, as I see it now, freshly sprouted and swarming, what we call the present.

Well directed, a single example can serve to suggest diversity, even infinity. We, members of a cultural commission, discussed the possibility of updating and disseminating, for the public benefit of the city, a classic work — Cervantes, let’s say. We split up the basic ideas of Don Quijote, a product of fundamental facts. First, to order it historically, is the great envelope into which we were born and which we call the world, one of whose parts is the general opinion that Don Quijote is a masterpiece. (Another of its parts is Don Quijote, naturally.) The second fact is our reading of Don Quijote. I like to compare this reading to the times I spent hours playing with a mirror, making the sunlight bounce off of its smooth surface, filling up the room with mobile stains of light and dazzling glimmers. Seven hours after we began, the two suppositions have gotten so far away from our immediate experience that, without suggesting that they have been erased, I would venture to say that their relation to our debate is the same as the foundation of a house to its architectural style and the arrangement of its rooms; it sustains them, but no one sees it, and no one has ever seen it besides the engineers who constructed it. At the mouth of the tunnel of warm weather that has passed since this morning, what the world knows about Cervantes and Don Quijote is now filled in, densely, opaquely, no less arid than the arid walls our voices echoed against, nor less compact than the words that fall continually from our brains to our mouths and raise continually from the air to our minds. And once again I begin to feel that something is changing, without knowing what, without knowing how to express it, or knowing if it is even really changing, without knowing if I am able or if it would be worthwhile to say so, if it is true that it has really changed. With just one step one could pass from this state of strangeness into horror. From here the possibility of writing a new classic is almost nil: that’s why I said an argument on the edge of summer.

The Biography of Higinio Gomez

Higinio Gomez was born in a house within view of the Parana River, in 1915. It was a weekend cottage, because at that time wealthy people sought out the river. He was an only child. His mother died in childbirth and, when Higinio was ten, his father, who wanted to teach him to ride a horse, to “make a man out of him,” drunkenly mounted one and got himself killed. Higinio’s tutor sold the weekend house and packed Higinio off to an English school in Buenos Aires. Every three months he got a visit from his aunts. When he turned eighteen he left school and went to Europe. He wandered around, had a fling with an English girl, and met Andre Breton and the men he hung around with. Once in a while he attended poetry classes given by Paul Valery at the Collège de France. One night in April he participated in a literary discussion that turned into a fistfight and produced another, more serious schism in the Surrealist movement, and then, tired, he took a steamer back to Buenos Aires, just before World War II. He told some friends that being abroad made him dizzy, like wine, and by the time he found his tutor, who by then was blind, he realized he didn’t have a cent left. Botana’s wife got him a job at Critica, which was already on the decline. He argued with the other journalists over the impossibility of loving anyone after twenty-five — he thought about the English girl as he spoke, without his interlocutors ever realizing — but really he knew that, for his part, there was little or nothing left to do. “My penis,” he used to say to those closest to him, “is like a deflated balloon.” And other times, “No insurance company would give me a policy that could secure my genitals.” He wrote narrative poems, extremely long ones. Tomatis, who later compiled and wrote an introduction to a compilation of Higinio’s poems—“The Beach” and “Regions”—said there were a mountain of aphorisms among his papers, all written, funnily enough, in pencil. Tomatis had a hard time deciphering them because they were already half erased. One of them said that it would be easier to fall off of a horse and die than to find someone worth loving, even for someone who lived in a world without horses. Another aphorism, according to Tomatis, said that women die in childbirth from remorse, and a third that poetry is not a majestic and fertile river, but a rock standing firm in the current, polished by the water.

Carlos Tomatis had the privilege of getting to know his manuscripts because one afternoon in February an old actress who had been Higinio’s friend in Buenos Aires turned up at the office of the newspaper La Region and practically put a gun to his head to get him take on the project. She was accompanied by an old man dressed in a brick-colored polo shirt, jeans, and sandals. Thanks to the actress, since the old man didn’t deign to open his mouth, Tomatis devoted himself to the project and saw to the publication of the compilation. Higinio had returned to the city around 1960 and was somewhat involved in the literary scene, but two years later he rented a hotel room and poisoned himself. He left behind the aphorisms and a mountain of narrative poems in which he spoke of a yellow river and mocked the transparency of the ocean.

The Interpreter

Now I am walking along the shore of the ocean, upon sand that is smoother and more yellow than fire. When I stop and look behind me, I see the border of my crisscrossing footprints intricately traversing the beach and coming to rest just beneath my toes. The white, intermittent border of foam separates the yellow expanse of the beach from the sky-blue of the water. If I look at the horizon, I feel that I will begin to see, again, the butchering boats advancing from the ocean toward the coast, black dots at first, then strained filigrees, and finally pot-bellied casks supporting the sails, and a forest of masts and cables slipping taught out front, gradually revealing a throng of active men. When I saw them, I closed my eyes against the shine of their stony breastplates, and the sound of metal and of harsh voices deafened me for a moment. I was ashamed of our rough and humble cities and I understood that they counted for nothing, nor did Ataliba’s gold and emeralds (which they pulverized with hammers searching for the meat, as one does with a nut), nor the huge paved corridors walled with silver, nor our immense stone calendars, nor the imperial guard that reappears, time and again, on our façades, in the garments of the court and on our earthenware. I saw an open stream of abundance and glory flow forth from the sea. With a cross, the butchers touched the forehead of the child I used to be, gave me a new name, Filipillo, and then, slowly, they taught me their language. I made it out, gradually, and the words advanced toward me, Filipillo, from the horizon where they filled in, layered upon each other to become, again, like the boats, black dots, black iron filigrees, and finally a forest of crosses, symbols, masts, and cables pouring out from a boiling mound like terrified ants from an anthill. Then I was no longer the naked child whose eyes sparkled with the metal of armor and whose ears echoed, for the first time, with the roar of the sails, and I began to be Filipillo, the man endowed with a double tongue, like a snake’s. From my mouth came the blessing, the poison, the ancient word my mother used to call me in the afternoon, from among the bonfires and the smoke and the smell of food wafting along the streets of the brick-colored city, and those sounds that echo in me like in a bottomless, empty well. My life is always swinging between the words my voice rips from my blood, and the learned words my mouth devours greedily at another’s table, tracing a parabola that sometimes erases the line of demarcation. I feel as if I am passing through a region of alternately nocturnal and diurnal zones, like a rooster crowing at an unearthly hour, like the jester who improvises for Ataliba, before the laughter of the court, a song not of words, but simply of sound.

When the butchers judged Ataliba, I was the interpreter. Words passed through me like the words of God pass through a priest before reaching the populace. I was the white line, unstable, agitated, that separated two formidable armies, like the border of foam separating the yellow sand from the ocean; and my body was the feverish loom where destiny was woven from a throng with the double needle of my tongue. Words flew like arrows and pierced me, reverberating. Had I understood the same thing they told me? Had I given the same thing I received? When my eyes, during the judgment, fell upon the blue breasts of Ataliba’s wife, breasts that might permit, perhaps, in the absence of Ataliba’s hand, a visit from my greedy fingers, had this disturbance disfigured the meaning of the words that resounded in the immobile enclosure? I’m sure of one thing: that my tongue was like a double tray upon whose elastic plates conspiracy and lies sat in comfort. I felt the roar of the two armies, like two oceans joining, an ocean of blood and a foreign ocean of black water, and now, in the afternoon, I walk along the beach, an old man bent under the vault of enemy voices that extend interminably over my ruins, consumed by the jungle. Like one sucked into a stream of water, only to be gargled and spit back out again, I didn’t die with those who died when I handed down the sentence, but nor do I live the fierce life of the butchers whose voices are carried to me on the wind at night, when I go to sleep in the jungle.

When the butchers began to build their city, they made a thick wall of adobe and painted it white. But one part of it crumbled and they abandoned it. That white wall remained in the middle of a bare field, and at noon the light shines on its white surface pockmarked by the open air. Sometimes I sit on the ground and look at it, for hours. I think that the butcher’s language, for me, is like this wall, compact, useless, meaningless, and I am blinded when the light reflects against its corrupt and arid face. A wall to scratch until my fingers bleed, or to crash against, but with no house behind where I could go in and enjoy the shade. I am nothing but an old Indian wandering the jungle in silence, among the ruins, and I can no longer hear, in the afternoon, my mother’s voice calling me home from among the bonfires and the smoke and the smell of food wafting along the streets of a brick-colored city that extended to the sky.

Scent Memory

In the interior, these days, you can’t be an empiricist, even if you have reached the age of sixty-six and teach philosophy classes at the University. I say that you can’t be an empiricist for this reason especially, most especially if you have three children (the eldest also a professor of philosophy, but in Canada), eight grandchildren, and a wife who follows you around the whole blessed day with wool socks, because she knows that at this point catching cold can be deadly. And nevertheless, it is old age, I think, that has made me an empiricist, because I prefer a world that is reborn every moment, whole, to a past that resembles an abandoned factory where minutes sprout like weeds among the debris and the machines. I corresponded with Francisco Romero for years but I never dared to tell him that his humanism seemed crazy to me — the writing hand advances now from one side to the other and will keep going and is filling this great white space with signs — that everything existence assumes about the past is nothing but a delusion, beneficial in certain cases, I’ll admit, but in the end a delusion. To me — oh how the boys would laugh if I said this in class — nothing exists but the present (not today, because “today” is too “broad” a concept for the idea I have of the present): my hand lifted in the air, now, that hangs at the height of the lamp (hanging, lamp, and height are three separate presents, each absolute, and only laziness makes me pull them together into a single sentence), and the room to one side, the bookcase that is behind me is nothing more than a delusion. It is my philosophy. It would be dishonest to explain it systematically. What’s more, for me there is no relationship of cause and effect (there is nothing more than a whole universe that plunges, whole, into nothingness and then reappears, plunges, whole again, and reappears infinitely), and it is the cause and effect relationship that serves as the skeleton for all philosophic discourse, including those who propose to negate the relationship of cause and effect. Cicero, Saint Thomas, Kant, and Hegel, that pretentious Frenchman who went to Holland to look for the “cogito,” are nothing more to me than sparkling specters whom I consider so little that they can’t scare me. Sometimes I sense in a smell unfurling before me the phantasmagoria of a past so vivid that for a moment it makes me waver. But then I reflect that I have done nothing more than sense a new smell, of such a particular type that it awakens sensations that evoke memories, but that are not memories themselves, simply because there is nothing to remember. The philosophy students know me for my love of grilled fish and white wine, for my affability and some rough and poorly made socks that my wife makes me wear all year round to stave off the cold.

A Historian’s Insomnia

A small silver cup of mate comes and goes from my worktable. Sometimes the last one goes cold on the pedestal. My study is a knot of cool semidarkness, fortified by books against the summer that sparkles behind the orange curtains. My greedy eye incessantly retraces daguerreotypes of full-grown men and oil paintings representing soundless, immobile battles. The life of those multitudes, has it been richer or more raucous than this life of mine, which fades away as my body atrophies within these four walls? Sometimes, a perfect, unexpected fragment unfurls and expands beneath my eyes, a report from San Martín, a letter, happy diamonds from an epoch of sun and blood. Mostly, however, there is nothing to do but copy documents from the archives and cobble together evidence that will exchange one glory for another on the overcrowded horizon of death. And most of all, the tension of ensuring that this nightmare that has fanned out behind me — and why do I say behind? — doesn’t evaporate and isn’t erased.

I work deep into the night before heading to bed. Whatever pretext serves to delay each night a little more. But at last there are no more excuses and I am undressing slowly, I am putting on my pajamas, and I am laying myself out next to the bulk of breathing heat that is the sleeping body of my wife. The procession begins immediately, the mute creaking of insomnia, interwoven with changing forms that assault me and never leave until daybreak. Almost always, it ends with increasingly wild disintegration, whose final phases I forget most of the time, or perhaps I’m already asleep, or perhaps I believe that I’m already asleep, or perhaps I’m absorbed in a thought of which I’m not conscious, but that nevertheless I believe I understand. Yet, despite everything, none of these is the worst. Some nights it’s not dreams that follow insomnia, but blind lucidity, an incandescent vigil, that is no sort of lucidity at all and a vigil for nothing. Having reached that point, I feel emptied of memories — I, for whom memory is the masculine arm that parts the waters and, at the same time, the turbulent river whose bottom keeps receding, even as one plunges deeper — and with nothing to think about. Then, in the lilac sky, the white pinpoint of the moon begins to rise slowly and sparkle against the metallic curtains.

The Septuagenarian Poet

I ate the foods of the world. My hand touched the stones of famous cities and my body, shriveled now but fit and feral, walked streets more numerous than the ripples in a river. What man have I not known? What book have I not read? What might there be in the warehouse of visible and invisible things that could still be sold to me as a novelty? In the mornings of the month of October, full of sunlight and pigeons, I contemplate the slow explosion of peach blossoms and I stroll leisurely along, enjoying good digestion and good respiration, the taste of coffee on my tongue and a lit cigarette between my fingers. I had to go through all of that, the long night of desire and possession, to get here.

My mind hammers strange iron verses. They echo in me as if for the first time. Beauty, which for Plato is reminiscence, for me, defenseless and free, is nothing but immediate reality. The same alliterative music makes me shudder again, each time, with resplendent delight. Coffee: a shadow compared to its aftertaste, with its perfumed heaviness now subtly radiating from the tip of my tongue. What saves us now, we old people, is to see the world burning behind us, seated on a blazing bed of ash. Upon that mattress I sit and contemplate my own shadow as the morning makes it slowly shrink away.

Today I hope that others enjoy the miracle of birth and the flavor of their first perfumed presentation to the world, or of the throngs of people at a party at night. To a blind man the sun is blacker than night, and the ideal birth is death. My light is unique. I cannot change it. And the smoke from my cigarette is bluer and more solid than a cluster of cities.

The Lookalike

A friend of mine, a writer, having discovered his wife was cheating on him with a bank employee (when usually it’s the wives of bank employees who cheat on their spouses with writers), left his house one day and after wandering in the mountains for a while, working at a newspaper in Mendoza, The Andes, I think, and living off the beneficence of a wine merchant who supported poets and painters, disappeared completely, without dropping the smallest hint to me or to any of his friends about where he might be, until one morning in March when I was obliged to get up early (I live on the outskirts of the city, in the Colastiné Norte), when I opened the front door and suddenly found myself facing a man on horseback, who told me he was passing through the local post office and, when he mentioned he was headed in the direction of my house, had collected a letter for me that had been gathering dust at the post office for more than two months — it was airmail, because the fine paper envelope was bordered by red and blue stripes, and when I opened it I found that it held a postcard — Hans Memling’s Sybilla Sambetha—on the back of which my friend, from Bruges, Belgium, had written to tell me that he was very well, that he felt 10 years younger, and that he lived with a tiny Japanese woman who never spoke a word and who had learned to brew mate.

People who don’t live here can’t imagine how hot it is, even in March, so that the sun at eight in the morning had already sucked the dew off the leaves hours ago, and its light now roasted my scalp as I waited for the bus, looking at the portrait of the Sybil Sambetha, so familiar to me, though it was the first time I had ever seen it, that the face it reminded me of, even though I couldn’t recall exactly whose it was, grew within me from the wide and rigid stain of pink marbling, stretched even further because of her taught locks disappearing behind, gathered into a conical bun and covered by tulle falling in geometric pleats onto her shoulders, and because her dress, painted in a color I would call “oil,” opened at her throat into a circular collar. The revelation of that memory, the identity of that face, was on the tip of my tongue, if you could call it that, and with ever more effort I tried to figure out who it was, I tried to force that memory from the black backdrop into the great spotlight of my mind, so that it would change from the type of memory that didn’t need to be remembered into something palpable and real. I was still consumed with remembering when the bus arrived, half empty, slow, chromed, alone on the blue strip of asphalt, sparkling in the sun and full of the noise of metal and motors. I took out my ticket and was about to sit when suddenly I saw the Sybil, tranquil and alone, looking at me with her pensive little eyes from the back seat. The porous diagonal light of the sun fell on her face, so that the rosy, marble skin turned a resplendent gold. Her whole face was peppered with blackheads and pimples, some of them crowned with white jewels of pus. But the wide forehead was the same, and her neck rose, free, from the round collar of a cotton dress printed with red and green flowers. I had seen her many times, the disfigured face, the black hair pulled back, taught, her gaze more placid and pensive than one hand hitting the other with a wet wisteria vine — seated on the bench, looking at the river from the door of her father’s ranch, a fisherman whom I went to see from time to time to order a certain fish or a covey of wild ducks. I was about to show her the portrait, but I am a timid man, almost weak of character, and after all, what did it matter?

I’ve seen twins who look very much alike, but never as alike as Sybilla Sambetha and the girl from the coast. And yet, could there be two more different people? Nothing made me consider them so different as to see them looking so alike. For several days this likeness disquieted me and made me feel, by contrast, the reality of difference more than of similarity, because the reality of difference evidences the reality of uniqueness, what Marx mocked, and, melancholically, I thought much about the infinity of trees and of rocks, of faces, of birds, of excrements, of roots, each one unrepeatable and alone, unique; I experienced the clichéd impression of the ocean’s infinite waves and the uncountable sands, of the past, the present, and the future which flow, depending on how you view them, in different directions and crash into each other, forming knots and collisions that we think we can decipher, and suddenly (it was noon and I was lying naked in the sun so that its light would scorch me, my eyes closed and my pores slowly opening with a secret creaking), euphorically, I longed to be a special type of minstrel, the minstrel of the visible world, the minstrel of all things, considering them one after the other, the minstrel of the two Sybils, to give each thing its place with an impartial voice that would equalize and reclaim them, to display in the middle of the day an entire world in which every paradise, every leaf of every paradise, every vein of every leaf of every paradise would be present, so that the entire world could contemplate itself in every part by the light of day and nothing would remain anonymous.

Argument over the Term “Zone”

Place: A restaurant called El Dorado, on the other side of the suspension bridge, over the costal road — more precisely, in a rough-edged tin cubicle, split in two by a wooden partition, with a wooden balcony overhanging the road and a back patio full of trees, separated from the river by a log railing. Beyond the railing the ground slopes into a ravine, and then the river. On the opposite bank, houses raised on wooden stilts expose their fragile façades to the water.

Time: One day in February of 1967, two in the afternoon.

Temperature: 99 degrees in the shade.

Protagonists: Lalo Lescano and Pigeon Garay. They were born on the same day in the same year, 1940, but while the members of the Garay family can claim to be descendants of the town’s founder, Juan de Garay, the day that Lalo Lescano was born some local women had to take up a collection just to send his mother to the hospital as his father, a waiter in a restaurant, was several hours late getting home, and one can only suppose he spent them at the racetrack.

Setting: A farewell feast, because Garay is leaving in a few months for Europe, where he will be living for several years.

The argument begins when Garay says that he will miss this place and that a man should always be loyal to one region, one zone. Garay says this looking toward the water — they are seated at a table shaded from the sun by the trees — while, with his thumb and forefinger, he kneads a piece of newspaper that came wrapped around his grilled fish. Neither Lescano nor Garay are epicures by nature, but they go to this restaurant (though neither would admit it) because they know years ago it was a haunt for Higinio Gomez, Cesar Rey, Marcos Rosemberg, Jorge Washington Noriega, and others who passed for the literary vanguard of the city. When the piece of paper has been kneaded to death, Garay throws it in the direction of the river without bothering to see where it lands. Lescano follows the trajectory of the gray little ball with his eyes, and then says that there are no regions, or, at least, it’s difficult to pin down the limits of a region. He explains: Where does the coast begin? Nowhere in particular. There is no precise point where you can say the coast begins. Let’s take two regions, for example: the Pampa Gringa and the coast. They are imaginary regions. Is there a border between them, a real border besides the one that geography manuals have invented to manage things more easily? None. He, Lescano, is inclined to admit certain facts, that the earth is different, a different color, and that they grow wheat, flax, and alfalfa in the Pampa Gringa while, on the coast, it seems that the soil is better suited to rice, cotton, and tobacco. But, then, which is the exact point where people stop planting wheat and start planting cotton? Ethnically, the Pampa Gringa is made up primarily of foreigners, those being primarily Italians, while the coast is predominantly native-born families. But would you really say that there are no Italians on the coast and no natives in the Pampa Gringa? The Pampa Gringa is stronger economically, and we know, with precision, that the part of the coast closer to Cordoba is bordered by Entre Ríos and Corrientes. All of this suggests a principle of differentiation, I admit. But isn’t it also possible to define the Pampa Gringa as the part of the coast that lies beyond Entre Ríos (the part of the coast farther from Entre Ríos, let’s say), a part of the coast where, because of characteristics in the soil, they plant more wheat than cotton? I would admit that they belonged to different regions if there were a way of marking the borders with precision, but that possibility does not exist. Proximity to the river isn’t a good argument, because there are parts of the coast that are nowhere near the river, and those are still called the coast. There is no precise limit: the final rice paddy is already inside the wheat fields, and vice versa. I’ll give another example if you like: the city. Where does the city center end and the suburbs begin? The dividing line is conventional. Galvez Boulevard, let’s say. But any one of us knows full well, because we were born here and we live here and we know the city by heart, that there are many things north of Galvez Boulevard that could easily be in the center: multi-story houses, apartment buildings, businesses, respectable families. And the city itself, where does it end? Not at the checkpoint, because the people who live beyond the checkpoint say, when you ask them where they live, that they live in the city. So there can’t be zones. I don’t understand, Lescano concludes, how you can be loyal to a region, when regions don’t exist.

I disagree, says Garay.

Anonymous Biography

Sometimes we think about nuclear explosions or this used-up planet dangling in the black expanse because God is great, and a shudder runs over our entire body and makes us want to scream, but in a moment we forget and we go back to imagining all the things we could do if one day we received a laconic letter from California informing us that an unknown relative had just bequeathed us a million dollars. In winter we impatiently await the summer, but when we find ourselves at last beneath the January sun, bronzing slowly, doing nothing, we begin to feel as if our mind were circling around a retracted pinhole, a tiny whirlpool winding inward and downward, an implacable spiral. Then come the unchanging days: work, school for the kids, the possibility of a promotion or a subtle change of direction in our life that we discuss cautiously with our wife in bed, before we fall asleep, or maybe a new house, a memory, some party where the first few cups of alcohol excited us and made us say crazy things that puffed us up because everyone else thought they were funny. Our body changes. Nothing happens if we bathe in the morning, because we have to go immediately to the office and what’s more we’re still half asleep, but sometimes, later, home from work, having plunged into the bath because we will be going out to the movies with our wife or going for dinner at a friend’s place, we remain awhile under the tepid water and then look attentively at our naked body in the bathroom mirror or in the one in the closet, as we dry off. All things considered, we keep ourselves up. One day when there was a protest we decided not to go to work and followed the bulletins on a transistor radio, arguing over them. We remember distinctly how we would get worked up, especially over a new guy, a young man whom we didn’t much like because his yellow teeth had half rotted away, and how one day, all of a sudden, he disappeared without giving the least notice or saying goodbye to any of his friends. Now we don’t even remember his name. Next year, if all goes well, we’ll go to Brazil or to Punta del Este in Uruguay. When we are melancholy we take the car and drive alone in circles around the city — if we can, we even like to go out past the checkpoint and get into the countryside, and once we got all the way to Esperanza. It was a summer night and people were sitting on the sidewalks drinking beer in the bars spread out around the plaza. Coming home we saw how the moon bleached the endless, motionless fields of wheat so that they looked almost metallic. We sleep well and never dream. In another time, before we got married, we used to suffer bouts of insomnia and we would watch the green and red lines of a neon sign slip through the intermittent cracks in the blinds and project onto the white bedroom walls. Other than that, we’ve never had problems with our health, thank God, either because we don’t smoke or just by chance, and we’ve managed to keep ourselves safe from the terrible things that happen to other people. When our wife is pregnant, we entertain ourselves, in the last month, by putting our ear against her belly to hear what is moving inside, the movement of the child that is beginning to prepare to break away and fall into this multiple marvel, the world. Instinctively we close our eyes, throbbing, terrified, because it seems that from one moment to the next we can hear, clearly, the roar of that terrible crash.

Hands and Planets

Barco’s familiar and skillful fingers unscrewed the chrome top of the saltshaker, dumped the salt onto the tablecloth and then, under Tomatis’ tranquil but astonished gaze, began to scatter it, his fingertips pressing onto the grains and turning slowly to fully spread out that little white mountain on the blue cloth. Barco’s fingertips had an extraordinarily peculiar shape: they were oval and tapered — they looked like the classical representation of a teardrop. In the whole world there couldn’t have been another pair of hands with fingertips like that, and Tomatis would have recognized them immediately from anywhere.

“Probably,” said Barco, “in many of these grains of salt there are Ancient Greeces where Heraclitus is thinking that the events of the world are the product of a game of dice played by children.”

“Probably,” said Tomatis.

“Last night on television I saw the latest mission to the moon,” said Barco. “No one cares about those missions to the moon anymore. The whole world is convinced that the moon is already a thing of the past, and that science fiction is becoming an anachronism. Fiction can’t keep up with science anymore. Probably, in fifty years everyone will be a scientist, the way that nowadays everybody drives a car.”

“Probably,” said Tomatis, without taking his eyes off of Barco’s fingers, which were now resting on the scattered salt and remained motionless.

“Something strange happened,” Barco said. “Everything was going fine when they were showing the inside of the spaceship and the crew working on the screen. But suddenly they began showing pictures of the Earth as it got farther and farther away, getting smaller every minute, and then everyone watching the television in the bar stopped what they were doing, or started to sit up slowly in their chairs, or to strain their necks, all this trying to keep the Earth closer, contorting themselves to help the Earth stop in its tracks, like when you’re bowling and you twist yourself around so that the ball will follow the imaginary path you’ve laid out for it, you know? We all tried to get this obscene distancing to stop, so that the Earth wouldn’t be erased and disappear forever. I was frozen stiff. And when the voice of the narrator announced that the astronauts could still make out Mexico, we all felt a moment of relief and for a moment we all felt as if we were Mexican: Mexico was the final crest, the highest, mounted by the wave of nothingness that pushed up from behind, the wave of nothingness that, when we could no longer make out Mexico, flooded everything and left it smoother and more uniform than this wall here. Then we all felt sad and confused, a bit frightened, and I don’t think we felt any better when the program about the mission to the moon ended and they cut to the live game at Chacarita Stadium. I’m convinced that last night we broke the identity barrier. Breaking the speed of light or the sound barrier is nothing compared to breaking the barrier of identity. We kept on being erased, until we totally disappeared. We thought that things would stop at some point before they got out of hand, at some point from which we could still make out Mexico, for example, but no, nothing like that, we totally disappeared. And I felt something even more vertiginous: sitting in the chair at the bar, the screen showed me how the Earth had been shrinking, that is, I, the chair, the bar, the screen and the earth on the screen, shrinking, how we were being squeezed by the fist of the cosmos that closed upon us, vertiginously, macerating our bodies and turning them into hardened lava. And I felt it so intensely that I closed my eyes and waited for the walls of the bar to start closing in, subtly, molding the four into a single wall with us inside, in an inconceivable contraction, until the whole Earth had shrunken to the size of little dice with which little children would play out the destiny of the world. Probably, these grilled fish the waiter is bringing are ours.”

“Probably,” said Tomatis, seeing Barco’s familiar fingertips press into the salt and then lift to his thick lips, fingertips that, like no others in the world — and now also because of their flavor — made him think of the solid form of tears.

The Mourner

One rainy morning in November I slept in until after it was light. The murmur of the water was audible, both complex and monotonous — that’s been said so many times of water! Greenish light came into the room through the blinds. I lay in bed with my eyes open, staring at the semidarkness that was growing ever weaker, but that gathered against the ceiling. The dream I’d just had remained in my mind, persistent, a dream in which I had seen my uncle Pedro, my mother’s brother, who worked for a long time in the factory and then afterward struck out on his own and opened a bakery. My uncle had died the month before. In the dream he seemed to be mourning his own death.

Dreams scare me, and sleep even more so. Am I afraid of what I dream or am I simply afraid of dreaming? I was sad that morning, thinking about my uncle Pedro who ended up dying just as his bakery was starting to do all right, but then, fortunately, curiosity overcame my sadness and I began to meditate on the meaning of the dream until almost nine. All this time it rained without stopping, and the noise of the rain lulled me almost to sleep, so that now I’m not sure whether at times I didn’t dream up the meaning of what I had dreamed. A female friend of mine, a school teacher who later married a professor of mathematics and moved to Peru, told me that she had always dreamed of mourning over her own coffin. That she saw herself dead and mourned. Do we always mourn for ourselves when we mourn in dreams? Only the mourner knows that. Looking into this fount of tears is a difficult task, and curiosity’s quiet gaze cannot see so deep. To see that pain, we have to be inside it. But what is even more surprising is that he who mourns himself, the one who sees his cadaver or offers condolences to himself over his own death, stands at such a singular point in the great plain of pain that his cry is at the same time a memory and an anticipation. In the great plains the horizon is always a circle, identical, empty and monotonous.

Regarding Autumn Siestas

The sun in April doesn’t sink, it slims. We go out walking after dinner, avoiding the cold shade and stopping every once in a while to look at a yellowing frond, the ornamentation on a façade. We argue over sex and politics. For me, they are siestas full of statues and delicate sun; after several blocks, my temples begin to throb. We pass through the Plaza de las Palomas, head to the promenade, lean over the rail, and look at the river. As I see it, it is at that hour that cities flatten and stretch out. It has seemed to me, at times, that I know everything about statues, about the urine that disfigures and stains them, about the old houses that bear witness to more perfect lives.

Even finer, the dusty sunlight — at a certain hour — is smooth and omnipresent. We sit on a wooden bench, on powdered brick paths, to warm our heads. Suddenly we are silent. What we call the murmur, the soft sound of years of life, the sound of what we remember, is passing by, bit by bit, until it falls utterly silent. Then we begin to hear sounds outside: a car, far off, the shouts of two boys calling to one another beyond the park and the rotunda of the promenade, even the clicks of women’s heels as they tap against the powdered brick. I know of nothing more real. Within my heart — could you call it that? — the empty echo of those whispers resounds. I’ve surprised myself in those moments, asking with a sudden dread “Who am I and what am I doing here?”

Afterward, when we are walking again and we go into the first bar, the feeling disappears, I have worked out a theory that the April sun flowing slowly downward onto the city is unhealthy, and that its effects are like those of marijuana, but more diffuse.

Friends

Angel Leto, an old friend of Barco and Tomatis’s whom they hadn’t heard from in years, was alone in a house waiting for the appointed moment to kill a man. It was a winter morning, green and rainy, and Leto, who had just gotten up, came from the kitchen through the semidarkness of the hallway into the light of the living room, carrying with him a cup of coffee. If he followed through with the plan, by the next day at half past eight in the morning the man would already be dead and Leto would be back in the house where Tomatis’s books were carefully lined up on the bookshelf, gathering dust while their owner spent the summer in Europe.

It was, in fact, Tomatis’s apartment, to which Barco had given him the keys two days earlier. Barco had found Leto in his kitchen, on another rainy morning, and had given him the keys, neither put out nor surprised even though it had been nearly eight years since the last time he had seen him. And, as Leto thought that very night, in bed, as he flipped through Tomatis’s originals with pleasure and credulity, smoking a cigarette by lamplight against the monotonous background of the June rain that enveloped the night like a cocoon, if Barco didn’t yet know exactly what he was up to in the city, within two or three days, if he read the papers, he would be sure to figure it out.

And now Leto, in his second morning at Tomatis’s place, walked to the living room from the kitchen, through the dark hall, with the white cup on the white saucer balanced on the palm of his hand. He sat down, placing the cup carefully on the table, and set about reading one of Tomatis’s manuscripts held in a green folder upon which Tomatis had printed, in red ink, a word Leto didn’t know: PARANATELLON. On the first page inside the folder there were three words printed all in capital letters, one after the other, separated by several spaces, in the following order:

PARANATELLON

PARANATELLERS

OR

PARNASUS

And farther down an inscription in lowercase:

An annotated anthology of the coast

A bit later, when the last sip of coffee at the bottom of the cup had gone cold, Leto lifted his eyes from the typed pages, and, leaning the nape of his neck on the backrest of the chair and contemplating the ceiling, he began to think of the man he was going to kill. The man who had been the object of his every action these past several months could not hold his attention for long, because his thoughts soon wandered to considering death in general. His first thought was that, for all that he might riddle this man’s body with bullets, as he fully intended to do, he would never manage to completely rid the world of him. The man deserved to die: he was a union leader who had betrayed his class and whom Leto’s group held responsible for several assassinations. But, thought Leto, as if his ideas emanated from the grayish emptiness that extended between the lamp and the ceiling, killing him would only take him out of immediate action, not out of reality.

And Leto remembered when he was eighteen and a friend of his age had died after an operation. Now that he was thirty-three, it seemed that, after fifteen years, time had lost its fearsome character and his dead friend remained as present in the world as he himself, independent from his memories and authority. What comes into the world, Leto thought, can never go out again. The infinitude of stars would remain, whether they liked it or not, wandering around with us inside them. And, like a bird that eats its own eggs, time went on erasing events as they unfolded, leaving nothing to human life but its indeterminate presence, a kind of clot of solidarity that kept reducing and encrusting itself in some imprecise point in the infinite, and from which every individual, as a just consequence of his mortal condition, formed a part. This clot, thought Leto, was of a singular quality: it could never be erased. Its presence had produced an irreversible alteration, redeeming the universe from pure ostentation; after its appearance, nothing would continue as before, and death — the death of his friend, the death of the man he was going to kill, his own death — was an insignificant accident.

No one can be killed, Leto thought, except one’s friends, but one cannot even kill them, because it is impossible to kill what is immortal.

Beaches

The riverbanks sparkle, slowly, like signals: they ripple. The ocean is one and the same, always. Only its borders move, in place, and when one edge advances, it is the entire ocean advancing. We stand before the sea so that it can contemplate us. But we are always on one side of the river as it passes us without regard, disdainful. Its beaches are an immobile caravan of umbrellas — red ones, blue, orange with white stripes, green, spotted. The yellow sand splays out before the caramel-colored water in a weak semicircle. Burned bodies pass by, running along the border of the water, and on the shore they form the tri-colored fringe of a most unusual rainbow: the yellow border of the sand, the tawny water, and the transparent strip, between the two, of water kicked up by the constant drum of feet that convulse the shore. Gazing after the running feet, not considering their prior upheavals that have already been erased, always keeping your eyes locked on the feet hitting the water, you can perceive the transparent, whitish fringe, like an imaginary dotted line, between the sand and the river. If this description seems overwrought, just remember that more stable fringes, so to speak, like the white and red fringes of umbrellas are also, if you will, in essence, imaginary and interrupted borders.

Now we have returned from the beach and it is two-thirty in the afternoon. We are sprawled out on the bed, in a cool white room protected by dark curtains; there is another body, also naked, next to our own. To that empty cavern comes no more than the memory, and that only for a moment, of overlapping shores, of immobile paths, white and deserted. Now we see trees with leaves covered in a white powder that resembles volcanic ash. Now we see nothing. We feel that the other body is hot, thick, and burnt. We imagine that our own must be, too. We weave together in an intermittent struggle, interspersed with moments of complete immobility, in which we see our shaggy hair, our knees, our genitals, which fit together, which complement each other, our feet which lie placid, gnarled, isolated at the far end of the bed; we compare the burnt parts of our bodies with the white ones, in the places where we usually wear our bathing suits. Afterward we tangle ourselves into the final battle. We had touched the furthest point, the muddy bottom of the river, passed the riverbed and arrived in a translucent zone beyond the convulsed, blinding bottom, a point full of light like the very center of a diamond. That light was so intense that nothing could be seen, not even the light itself. In that struggle we came back up, dense and spinning, like the body of a drowned man, toward the confused darkness of the bottom where we engaged in combat. Further up the surface of the world remains, with the beaches, the pathways, the crowds, the city, the dark room where our bodies, now, are sprawled out immobile on the bed, looking at the ceiling. At noon we had stopped on the shore, trying to hear the multiple murmurs of the water, the polyrhythm and polyphony at the heart of it’s enduring monotony. We could make out nothing in that murmur except that it sounded a bit unsettling to us because we could make out nothing in it. At the same moment, on the other side of the border, a stingray, clotted with nerves and cartilage, stretching out to enjoy the heat of the shallower water close to shore, believes all of a sudden it feels, in the great confusion of its subcutaneous sensations, a monotonous murmur emanating from the beach, a murmur which it does not realize is composed of many voices: the song of the world.

Gandia’s Bar

Don’t be fooled: the news that came out in the paper last week, in the police blotter, which says very clearly that the owner of a bar, named Gandia, was arrested, gives a false impression of the person in question. It’s true that, as it appears, he played cards for money behind the bar, and that in the rooms out back a girl from the neighborhood, one of the poorest in the city, received her clientele, from which Gandia made a small commission. But don’t be fooled, don’t be put off: It’s not Gandia that news is about, it’s someone else, someone I’ve met.

That they would have put him in jail makes me smile. What’s more, it’s not the first time this has happened. In this slum, Gandia’s bar is the hub of perdition, the vicinity of vice. It is an obligatory stop for any backsliding prole. And its owner, Gandia, son of a laborer or a farmer — I don’t really know — has rough, callused hands, weighs over 200 pounds and is always dirty and poorly shaven. He is one of those men whose sullenness is too childish to be offensive, frightening, or even convincing. One can see from afar that Gandia is tangled up in himself, perpetually absorbed in internal discord, for reasons surely even he doesn’t know, and what appears to others is the harshness radiating from that derangement, like that man whom one sometimes encounters fruitlessly trying to screw in, for hours, the same microscopic little screw, and who greets one in a huff.

Gandia is a great card player. He’s a special card player, though: he cheats. Everyone in the world has discovered this trait, and yet no one has stopped playing cards with him. This is because Gandia, unlike other card players, whether they are cheaters or not, cheats and still manages to lose. He loses: an incontestable fact that all his patrons know. What’s more, they have seen players who, in the midst of a hand, have had the wisdom to consider Gandia’s tricks as a rational part of the game, which gives an idea of regularity and defined and cognoscible character to his cheating. Rarely has Gandia won a hand. With a new player when he’s at his best, the first time, because the second time the new player will have already adapted himself to the rules of the game as it is played at Gandia’s bar.

I don’t think that it makes any sense to form a moral judgment in Gandia’s case. There’s a more pertinent explanation and I think I can supply it: Gandia cheats out of courtesy. Destined to lose, Gandia diminishes the effect of his deep-seated inclination by cheating. It’s a courtesy to himself in the first place, since cheating gives his existence, otherwise purely linear, like a pebble falling from a vacuum into an abyss, the illusion of decline; for the other players, too, ridding them, through his tricks, of their scruples; and lastly, a sublime courtesy for the world outside, so mute and so fine, to supply it with, at his expense, a dramatic depth.

But the news that they had taken him into custody last week makes me smile. Don’t get worked up about it.

White Hot

In this family, my brother would say whenever there was some kind of argument, the sane ones are traitors. He died last week in the mental hospital. He had spent the last twenty years of his life in there: I remember when I was little, we went to see him every Sunday with a package of sponge cake and oranges, and that sometimes he wouldn’t deign to receive us. Sometimes a male nurse would come to let us know that my brother was in no mood for visitors, and then we would head out along the dirt road toward the streetcar stop, more confused or humiliated than saddened, in the sunny hours of the Sunday siesta.

As I found out later from my mother, my brother’s illness had begun one very dry summer: the city, the surrounding countryside and the rivers were all baking slowly in the white January sun. You could barely step out onto the street or look in the direction of the sun. The city was practically empty; you could walk the streets for hours and not bump into anyone. The branches of the trees were gray and scorched, and the light beat down, bright, somewhat ashen, upon the patios.

One day that summer, my brother, who was eighteen then and about to go to work on the railway like my father, refused to come out of his room for two days, claiming that just outside there was a huge diamond burning out his sight. Quite affably, as if he were speaking with a child, he explained to my father from the far side of the bolted door how, on the street the day before, on Western Avenue, in front of the General Store, he had seen a long diagonal line that stretched from a man’s eyes to one of the facets of the diamond, his sight-line, burn in a instant from one end to the other like a fuse going off. He said that he had seen the man run off with his eyelashes singed. On the second day when my father and other family members decided at last to force the door open, they found my brother sitting calmly in bed, one leg bent and the other crossed over the knee of the first — a detail which, for whatever reason, made my mother smile every time she told me the story.

When they found him on the bed, my brother’s eyes were shut tight, and he never really opened them again. We had to bring him to doctors, to treatments, and eventually to a psychiatrist as if he were a blind man, guiding him through that darkness of his own making with which he protected the integrity of his sight. And when, after months, after years of being shut up in the insane asylum, he opened his eyes one day, he had the courtesy to explain to a doctor, who, in turn, explained to us, smirking ironically beneath his neatly trimmed mustache, that he would open his eyes metaphorically, in appearance only, that, during the years he had spent with his eyes closed, he had been constructing, just behind the eyes themselves, a fixed gaze, inalterable even in the face of fire, to confront that terrible light. In highly complex and scientific terminology, the doctor told us, my brother had explained his methods. The terms I emphasize here belong to his scientific lexicon: with his eyes closed he had been absorbing particles of light from the outside whose explosive shock would be diminished as they penetrated through the filter of his eyelids, and which accumulated behind his eyes and fortified his new visual apparatus. My brother had followed, according to his own expression, the laws of that rigorous science, homeopathy.

I leave it to the specialists among my readers to form their own opinion about my brother’s scientific and technological wherewithal. All I can say is that last week, hours after having passed on to the next world, his eyes were still open — he remained in that condition until one of my uncles, bothered perhaps by the scientific triumph that had overcome sight, decided to place a one peso coin on each eyelid to keep them shut.

A Change of Residence

A couple years ago I changed my residence and I changed my name. Politics had a hand in it — in Buenos Aires the police noticed me during a rally and since, despite my advanced ideas, I couldn’t muster any compelling evidence to prove I wasn’t part of some clandestine organization, I felt it was best to make a change of residence and disappear for a while. So I got on the bus and came to this city where everything bakes in the summer on the banks of the great river.

There’s nothing like travel to encourage introspection. In the bus’s mobile, noisy night, the traveler’s eye stays open, insomniac, or alert, more accurately, to the music of the world. It was on the bus, really, where the idea to supplant my simple act of self-defense with a radical change of identity first, unexpectedly, feverishly, occurred to me. I would start another life with another name, another profession, another appearance, another destiny. I would emerge, with five or six vigorous strokes, from the sea of my past onto a virgin shore. With no family, with no friends, with no job, with no Piccolo mondo antico whose womb I could pickle in, the future seemed smooth and luminous, and tender above all, like a newborn babe. I set up in a guesthouse, forged my documents, transformed myself physically and took a job as a door-to-door book salesman. The newspapers gave me up for dead. It was said that the secret police were after me. But the reigning terror let nothing appear on the surface except in the form of ambiguous allusions.

All of this happened about two years back. In the second or third month of my new existence, realizing that my habits hadn’t changed much, I decided to modify my tastes and customs systematically. I stopped smoking. I had always hated kidney beans and fatty meat, so I started eating them every day until they became my favorite foods. I decided to write with my left hand, and introduced major changes into my most deeply held convictions. In this way I utterly changed my personality within a year. I seemed to be, you might say, a different man.

I say “I seemed to be,” as you can see, and not “I was.” In retrospect I now realize that there was a sort of blockage in my life, of which I was barely conscious, inciting me to change: the sensation that I was going around in a circle, never moving forward, of being always a little too far from or close to things, of failing to fit into any definition, of never knowing for certain whether I was dreaming or awake, of not knowing how to choose between the well defined options which others presented to me. For years it had seemed to me that this ineptitude was mine alone, subjective, that my personal history had unfolded so as to imprison me within it, practically incapable of decision, and that others, whom I perceived from the outside, did not experience, in this world, the smallest inconvenience. Nevertheless, within two years my husky smoker’s voice disappeared, along with my Buenos Aires accent, but the ancient reservoir that lies low and sometimes trembles, heavy, down below, sending up signs of life, reminds me that, though I have chosen a convenient mask, we humans, whatever the color of our destiny, will never be adequate to our circumstances, or, frankly, to the world.

Veiled

A furniture salesman who had just purchased a second-hand armchair discovered that, in the hollow part of the backrest, one of the former owners had hidden a diary. For some reason — death, forgetfulness, abandonment, seizure — the diary had remained there, and the salesman, an expert in furniture construction, had come upon it accidentally as he tapped the back of the armchair to test its sturdiness. That day he stayed late in the store stacked full of beds, chairs, tables, and dressers, hunched over his desk in the back office reading the diary by lamplight. Day by day, the diary revealed the emotional problems of its author, and the salesman, who was an intelligent and sensible man, understood at once that the woman had been hiding her true nature, and that by some incomprehensible twist of fate he now knew her far better than any of the people who had lived alongside her and whom she mentioned in the diary.

The salesman sat thinking. For a while the idea that someone could keep something hidden in her house, something veiled from the world — a diary or whatever it might be — seemed strange to him, almost impossible, until a few minutes later, at the moment he stood up and began to tidy his desk before heading home, he noted, with no little astonishment, that he himself had, in some places, hidden things the rest of the world knew nothing about. In his house, for example, in the attic, in a tin box buried among old magazines and useless junk, the salesman had hidden a roll of bills that thickened from time to time, and whose existence was unknown even to his wife and children. The salesman could not say precisely why he was saving that money, but little by little it had been adding to the unpleasant certainty that his whole life was defined not by the quotidian activities he performed by the light of day, but by that roll of bills crumbling in the attic; and that undoubtedly all of his actions, at their base, were aimed at adding another bill every once in a while to that crumbling roll.

As he turned on the neon sign, filling the black air over the pavement with a violet light, the salesman was seized with another memory: he had been looking for a pencil sharpener in his eldest son’s room when he stumbled upon a series of pornographic pictures his son had hidden in a dresser drawer. The salesman had put back the pictures immediately, less from embarrassment than from the fear that his son would think he was in the habit of snooping.

During dinner, the salesman observed his wife; for the first time in thirty years it occurred to him that she might also be keeping something hidden, something so personal and so deeply buried that, even if she wanted to, even under torture, she could not have confessed it. The salesman felt a sort of vertigo. It wasn’t some banal fear of being betrayed or swindled that made his head spin as if he were drunk, but the certainty that, just as he stood at the brink of old age, he might find himself compelled to modify the most elemental notions of his life. Or what he had called his life: because his life, his real life, according to his new intuition, turned out to be in another place, in the darkness, veiled from events, and that life seemed more remote to him than the very outskirts of the universe.

The Mirror

For the boys at the office it’s already completely natural, and almost all of them think of me as a good coworker. They even look out for me, and there is a tacit understanding between us whereby they accept me and I keep my private life out of the office, even though this divides my life in two. They consider me cultured, tasteful, delicate. It is difficult for a person like me to make it into his forties, I realize, and although they tolerate my idiosyncrasy, I feel that the time for revelries has ended and that maturity has come at quite a cost.

When book vendors come to the office, the boys always consult me before buying a set. I recommend Huxley (Aldous), Mauriac, Shakespeare, firstly because anyone can enjoy Shakespeare, and moreover because Shakespeare is such a well-respected author that someone might get offended if I didn’t recommend buying his complete works. I never recommend Oscar Wilde or André Gide so as not to arouse suspicion, but I myself read them with an enthusiastic sarcasm, I brandish them in silence as evidence, alone, against no one, in our ancient house in the south where my mother and sister, old and deaf, move about in the evening shouting and almost swimming in the violet light that filters through the blinds. Since my room is the one at the end of the hall and I am the one supporting the family, on the days I don’t stay out drinking wine until the last bars have closed in the wee hours of the morning, I receive “visitors.” Sometimes, in the past few years, I’ve been obligated to pay, or at least provide a little gift.

It’s just that there is a high price to seeing oneself in such bright light, a price that cannot be reckoned in cash or in kind. The others turn into me, and I am the others, so that I get back all that I give. To make the world in my image, I have had to turn myself into the world, and I spread myself out like it, offered up, open. I pass over the world along with everyone who passes over me. In the great mirror of love, the world and I regard each other, surprised, each in the guise of the other, attempting to read into that manifold inversion as into an impossible palimpsest.

My Name is Pigeon Garay

My name is Pigeon Garay. I’ve lived in Paris for five years (Hôtel Minerve, 13, rue des Écoles, 5eme). Last year, in July, Carlos Tomatis dropped by for a visit. He was fatter than ever, nearly 200 pounds I’d guess, smoking cigarettes as he has been doing for the past seven or eight years, and we talked in my room, sitting before the window with the lights off, until dawn. I still remember the complex, rhythmic sound of his breathing emerging from the darkness as the temperature of our dialogue began to rise.

Two or three days later he went to London, leaving me to steep in an atmosphere of memories part-rancid, part-renewed, part-dead. There was something in that spider web of memories that recalled a living thing, the dying cub that trembles a bit, still warm, when one gently pokes it to see if it has died, with the tip of a stick or a finger. Afterward the thing stopped flowing and the animal went rigid, dead, made only of edges and cartilage.

My name, I say, is Pigeon Garay. So to speak.

Memories

Here you have me practically losing my voice and full of memories. They must be governed by some law; that is certain. But to discover that law it is necessary to empty oneself of them, to turn oneself inside-out like a glove. Everyone knows, anyway, that they obey no chronology. The philosophical prison we all carry within us has unleashed an assault onto our memories, decreeing unto them the fiction of chronology. And yet they continue, obstinately, to be our only freedom.

Let them at least become an obsession. Then they would obey a sort of law of exceptions, strict and absolute. Someone called them “incessant.” With a regularity all their own, certain memories of the smallest incidents, without any apparent narrative content, return again and again to our consciousness, neutral and monotonous, until, having returned so often, our consciousness invests them with feelings and categorizes them: just as when a stray dog passes by to contemplate us silently, every day, in front of our door, we end up giving him a name.

A narrative could be structured simply by juxtaposing memories. It would just need a reader without illusions. A reader who, having read so many realist narratives that tell a story from beginning to end as if their authors possessed the laws of memory and of existence, aspired to something a bit more real. This new narrative, based purely on a foundation of memories, would have no beginning or end. It would be more of a circular narrative, and the position of the narrator would be like that of a boy who, riding a horse on a merry-go-round, tries at each pass to snatch a steel loop from the ring. It takes luck, skill, and continual adjustments of position, and having them all one would still come up most of the time empty handed.

There are many types of memories. Generalized memories, for example. During my childhood, during our summer siestas, my uncles would drive over from the neighboring village and the car’s chrome radiator, glittering in the sunlight, would be full of yellow butterflies smashed into the metal vents. The image that remains with me is not of any particular event. It is an abridgement, almost an abstraction, of all the times I saw radiators full of butterflies. And yet it is a memory.

There are also immediate memories: we are bringing a cup of tea to our lips when we remember, even before the cup reaches its destination, the previous moment when we lifted it noiselessly from the table. And I would even venture to say that there is also a category we could call simultaneous memories, which consist of remembering the instant we are living in the same instant we live it; that is, we remember the taste of this tea and no other, in the same moment we are drinking it.

There are intermittent memories, which flicker periodically like lighthouses. Distant memories with which we remember, or think we remember, the memories of others. And also memories of memories, in which we remember remembering, or which present us with the memory of a moment when we had remembered something intensely. As you can see, remembering is complex stuff. Memory itself is not sufficient to grasp it. Voluntarily or involuntarily, our memory cannot control the act of remembering; it is more accurately a servant to it. Our memories are not, as empiricists claim, purely illusions: but nevertheless an ontological scandal separates us from them, constant and continual and stronger than any effort we can exert to construct our lives like a narrative. That is why, from another point of view, we could consider our memories a region even more remote than the whole world outside ourselves.

The Traveler

He broke the watchthe glass that protected the great face whose Roman numerals ended in florid filigreesdelicatehe scattered the pieces onto the smoking heap of ash that two nights ago had been a flickering fire he himself had set

He had squatted for a momentutterly absorbed in the childish task of brushing all the gray, caked-on lumps of soot from the glassafterward he paused and gazed at his surroundings

It continued to drizzleslowly impalpablycondensingso that it looked more and more like mistexpanding toward the great circular horizon

His face remained firmer and calmer than if he had raised it to see the time on Big Ben

He was so accustomed to that plain which seemed to retreat before him even as he advanced that he felt for a moment the illusion of not having progressed at allhe had become so familiar with it and at the same time had always thought of himself as such a genteel and resigned sort of fellowthat the notion of wandering around in it for the past five dayshis horse had tripped in a ditchcracking one of its front hoovesthe notion of having walked around in circles without being able to find any point of reference a ranch a treeor any possibility of using the stars to guide him since it had not let up raining for more than a few hours in the whole five days and even when it had the sky had never fully clearedthe notion of being lost on the plainwithout a thing to eat without speaking anything but English without seeing another living thing besides some birdsblack stiff highin the airmigratingthey didn’t seem to elicit any emotion from himserene confirmationcold desperationperplexity

The moment before he broke the watch his perplexity had grown somewhatdiscovering that after having walked for two days straight and stopping only once in a while to catch his breathhe had arrived once more at the place where a brief respite from the rain had allowed him to light a weak fire in the hope that someone would notice its glowthe perplexity grew somewhat settling in his face in the form of a wry smile

Nobody had seen a thingnot the fire he had lit nor the other firesthe ruddy face with bluish bags under the eyesthe red hair surrounding his large balding forehead and patethe unrelenting water makes them glisten

Again he has come to the place where he lit the firehe removed the watch from his packbroke itscattered the little shards of glass onto the ash heapsquatting

He stopped and gazed toward the horizonel pajonalhe didn’t know the straw was called thatit extended all the way to the uniform horizonmonotonously

He was up to his hips in itstraw

Sometimesthere were little clearings between the tufts of grassa man could lie down there and disappearone had to be there to know such clearings existed

When he advanced the blades of grass whipped open and then closed behind himhe stoppedturned aroundnot even a trace of his passagehe was going in circles and couldn’t tell the differencenot at allhis language his memory said I have gone in circlesI have gone in circles I wasn’t always looking this way

He can’t detect the smallest difference

It’s precisely the samethe rain is denser or more transparent closer or farther away from the horizonthe gray skybelowthe strawel pajonalhe didn’t know it was called thatto the horizongray uniform monotonous

Reasonably and gracefully I acceptI have gone in circlesI’m facing the other directionNow I’m calling out againI’m in the same place againI thinkI persevereJeremy Blackwood in the name of the companyestablishes the cardinal directionsI’ll find the salting room

He looked at the ash heapthe broken watchscattering he continued to walk

He walked some incalculable interval

blackness more even than the straw and denser than the rainwhipped by the supple blades of grassimmersed to the hipsit rang in his mind in his memoryfor hourseven if it paused for a moment it did not crackHe could not filter the silence

A dry snap ending in a sort of slipping snappingback in place the blades of grass unleashedthatnoise and made it swayingand resounding

He awoke

Everything remained thereidenticalsevereimplacablethe rain the sky the horizon the straw

I know I’ve gone forwardthe company from Londonhe knew he was walking and advancingI seeat dawn a point identical to the restan identical pointbut not the sameI’m sureit is my own wordagainst the rain the sky the horizon the straw

He pants

Everything is wetthe leather sacktwisted stuck to his bodythe waterdrippingover his facehis carrot-red locksdarkly blazing

He walked all dayI’m going to stop when the water stopsstopping only to catch his breaththe night came and the mist

He stopped

He toppled forwardonto the straw blades that opened and closed like a whip

He remained sleepingstill

At dawn his dreams unfurleda phosphorescent screenhe saw Londonfloatingilluminated like a transparent cathedralLondonred bricksthe sound of carriages resounding on the pavementgossips calling out from window to windowmarketsshort pyramids of tomatoesfish laid out smooth and open like womenlive shrimps dragging themselves across the fishmonger’s counterlewd red beefsteak dismemberedprostitutes flashing their sin-stained titslittle boys running among the merchantsmusic from taverns and from the blind beggars rising above the throng

He awoke immobilizedhis face squashed against the straw moved a bithis eyes still closedhis smile shattered by his position and the shivering

I will get to the salting house because the company has chosen medignified honored predestinedJeremy Blackwood redheaded and well bred with the reasoning and the memory of his stationto defeatthe temptation of the identical of the immobile

Blessed be London

Blessed be the throng that walks its benevolent pavements

Blessed be the light that shines from the windows of its houses

Blessed be the noise and the color of the cities

Jeremy satslowlyhe kept his eyes open for a momentproud

He lowers his head and sees againthe blackened ash heapthe scattered shards of glass the broken open watchthe great face whose Roman numerals ended in florid filigreesdelicate

Glory

To English travelers and more than anything

Glory

To Jeremy Blackwood who left not a trace of his journey

Abroad

Nothingness doesn’t occupy my thoughts so much as my life, I read, some days ago, in a letter from Pigeon Garay. I don’t give it the least thought all day; and I spend all night having dirty dreams. It must be because nothingness is a certainty, and there is a race of men, to which, presumably, I must belong, who only dance to the music of the uncertain.

That’s the kind of thing that, occasionally, from abroad, I receive from Pigeon Garay. Or this: “Living abroad doesn’t leave a trace, only memories. Often memories live outside us: a Technicolor film for which we are the screen. When the projection ends, darkness overcomes us again. Traces, on the other hand, which come from deeper, are the mark that accompanies us, deforms us and molds our face, like a punch molds a boxer’s nose. One is always traveling while abroad. Children don’t travel, they just expand their native country.”

Another of his letters brought the following reflection: Garlic and the summer are two traces that always come to me from far away. Being foreign is a complex, useless mechanism that has taken garlic and the summer from me. When I find garlic and the summer again, foreignness demonstrates their unreality. I am trying to tell you that being foreign — that is, my life for the past six years — is a moronic circle, or perhaps a spiral, that pulls me around, again and again, level with the center, but a bit further away each time. Re-reading this, I can confirm as usual that I have left the essential thing unsaid.

Or even: Blessed are those who stay behind, Tomatis, blessed are those who stay behind. Traveling so much, your footprints overlap, your traces are submerged or washed away and, at any rate, if you should ever come back, it comes with you, intangible, that foreignness, and seeps into the very place where you were born.

The Scattering

The people of my generation scatter, in exile. From the living branch of our youth there remain no more than two or three pale petals. Death, politics, marriage, travels have been silently separating us, prisons, possessions, oceans. Years ago, in the beginning, we met in blossoming patios and conversed until daybreak. We walked slowly around the city, from the illuminated streets of the center to the dark river, shrouded in the silence of sleeping neighborhoods, on the cool café sidewalks, in the paradise of our natal homes. We smoked tranquilly beneath the moon.

Of that past life, nothing remains but news or memories. But all of that is something compared with what has happened to those who have not scattered. Among them the exile is even greater. Each one has been immersing himself deeper into his own ocean of hardened lava, and when they imitate conversation, anyone can see that it is nothing more than noises, with no music or meaning. They have all turned their eyes inward, but those eyes see nothing more than a sea of minerals, smooth and gray, refracting every resolution. And if you can look into their pupils, which rarely happens, you would catch a glimpse of a desert compared to which the Sahara would doubtless acquire all the attributes of the Promised Land.

The Body

The body sends messages saying “don’t forget, you up there.” It throbs dully. Death, an elegant exit to such indecisive precariousness, approaches, coming from the very beginning by its own road, until it arrives, so to speak, out into the open. It keeps rising despite every obstacle or interruption.

The problem, Barco kept telling himself, was not in trying not to die, but in maintaining some equilibrium between what lay above and below, chance and its opposites. The body is chance. Its opposites vary historically — if not, really, ideologically.

Today I do not have the strength, truly; no strength. Not even that nourishing strength we call the power of seduction. The absence of hunger is morally wrong, they claim, in this century of gluttons. Do you see what I mean when I say that the opposites of chance vary historically? Illness, fatigue, failure of will: you have proven wisely the durability of chance against the dictatorship of insatiable hunger.

On Dry Shore

The day after acing his geometry exam, Tomatis convinced his father to renew his membership card at the Boating Club and spent the whole afternoon in the office going through the paperwork to reissue it. It was sitting in a cubicle while he waited for the new card that he conceived of the idea of the message, and when they gave him the card he went down to the bar and called Barco on the phone. Barco liked the idea. He said that he had sealing wax — because they would have to seal the top of the bottle — and that they should meet up that very night to discuss the contents of the message. So it was that, at around nine when it began to get dark, Tomatis heard Barco’s voice from his room as Barco spoke with his father in the kitchen, followed by his footsteps coming up the stairs onto the landing. The window to Tomatis’ room was open, and having entered without so much as a hello, Barco poked his head outside and said something about the starry sky. He undid the top two buttons of his shirt and began to wave it against his chest to dry his sweat. From the window Tomatis hollered to his mother to make them some sangria, because the whole house had been inclined to grant his every wish since the day before when, with his geometry exam, he had finished his degree. While they waited for the sangria, Barco helped him hang, on the yellow wall, over the couch, to one side of the bookshelf, a copy of Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows that Tomatis had gotten framed in a picture shop that morning.

They argued over the text of the message for more than two hours, drinking the sangria that Barco continually stirred with a spoon so that the sugar in it wouldn’t settle and the ice tinkling against the inside of the frosty pitcher would melt faster. The idea of writing the message in verse, suggested by Tomatis, was rejected instantly.

“They might think we actually talked like that,” Barco objected.

Immediately they began to throw out ideas: a summary of the city’s history, or perhaps a catalogue of inventions of the era, or, better yet, a brief biography of Carlos Tomatis and Horacio Barco, or even a deliberately false description of the human body to provoke an erroneous theory of evolution. They were tempted for a moment by the last option and laughed about it until they were both in stitches, roaring so loudly that Tomatis’s father, who had gone to bed some time earlier, scolded them from the darkness below to keep it down. Then Barco remarked that the inclination to humor always spoiled things, and that, in the end, the contents of the message didn’t matter — the important thing was the message itself, because the value of a message lay not in what it said, but in its ability to reveal the existence of men disposed to writing messages. He said that if the contents of a message were so important, it wasn’t a message at all but simply information.

“The best thing a message can say,” said Barco, “is just message. So even when everything would seem to indicate we should write HELP! I’d suggest that we write this is a message, or just message, short and sweet.”

Tomatis considered this a moment and at last agreed, only to encounter another question: who would write the word?

“Keeping in mind,” said Barco, “that the idea was yours and that there’s reason to believe that in time you’ll become a professional writer, I propose the writing of the text should fall to you.” That said, Tomatis tore out a blank page, placed it on the table under the light of the lamp, cleaned the point of his pen, tested it out on the margin of his geometry notebook and then, slowly, with great care, feeling Barco’s gaze over his shoulder fixed on his steady hand holding the pen, he wrote in great black printed letters the word: MESSAGE; and, as his hand continued moving from right to left, the blank rectangular page passed from extreme whiteness, undifferentiated, from limbo, from a flat and anonymous horizon, selected by chance by a blind hand from among a mountain of identical sheets that lay dusty and mute in the desk drawer, until the word was written, neat and even, and the identity of the page was erased once again, consumed by the intermediate darkness of the message.

The next day they woke at dawn. Tomatis phoned Barco to tell him that in a minute he was headed down to catch the streetcar, that Barco should wait for the next number two car because that was the one he was taking, and soon he saw Barco, through the streetcar window, on the corner, carrying a shovel, the bottle, and a bar of sealing wax. For his part, Tomatis had brought a can of sardines, some tomatoes and peaches, and a bottle of wine he had taken from the fridge. He carried the message, folded into quarters, carefully in the right-hand pocket of his shirt. They arrived at the club, donned their bathing suits, put everything but the shovel in a canvas bag, put the bag and the shovel at the bottom of a canoe, and then pushed the canoe into the river. Barco began rowing, pushing away from the club dock and the suspension bridge and setting a course between the islets and tributaries, skirting the shore that frequently closed in around them, and when at last he was directing the boat with some degree of mastery and had begun to approach the coast it was already past eleven. Barco’s face was red, his body covered in sweat. The sun was white, arid, and its rays perforated the naturally porous and open canopy of weeping willows, projecting patches of light onto the water. They left the canoe in the shade — it caught the patches of light on its bottom — and made their way inland with the shovel and the canvas bag. They wandered for half an hour. Barco discovered a snake and with the edge of the shovel he completely severed its head, neatly, in a single blow; afterward they chose the spot. It was a clearing surrounded by a circle of trees, but trees so short that their branches couldn’t tangle together to form a shaded bower. The sun had dried the ground and the grass around was sparse and yellowed. Tomatis began to dig: the first few impacts sounded dry and the shovel bounced back from the ground, breaking its shell and sending up chips of hardened clay in every direction, but the outer layer gave way quickly and then the earth came deep, soft, cold, and dark, its weight pulling Tomatis’s arms softly downward every time he hoisted a shovelful and dumped it onto the mound that had begun to form to the side of the hole. After a while Barco took over and Tomatis leaned panting against one of the absurd trees and dedicated himself to watching him work. They dug a hole almost six feet deep, wide enough for a man to enter standing. Afterward they sat in the shade and Barco carefully folded the sheet of paper, pushed it down the neck of the bottle, replaced the cork, slapping it with the palm of his hand until he got it in far enough, and in a moment readied the sealing wax and the matches, and lighting one, began spinning the bar of wax on the point of the flame, taking care that the drops of wax fell directly onto the bottle’s spout and the rounded top of the cork. They used up a lot of matches before it was done. Tomatis’s gaze fell alternately on the point of flame melting the wax (sometimes it followed the path of the red wax drops that glittered as they splattered over the spout of the bottle, droplets that Barco ended up filling in and spreading out with the softened end of the bar) and on the interior of the bottle, in which was still visible, through the green glass, the sheet of paper folded so many times it looked like a rigid strip of tape, one end standing on the base of the bottle and the other on the green wall, at a diagonal. Even when Barco moved the bottle, the paper stayed where it was. And when he finished, Barco picked it up and held it with such delicacy that Tomatis wondered if Barco wasn’t just clowning around again, but then, seeing him move toward the hole carrying the bottle in both hands, and afterward kneel next to the mouth of the hole and lean in, inserting the hand that held the bottle in order to deposit it as smoothly as possible at the bottom, almost touching his forehead to the ground, Tomatis understood that Barco wasn’t joking, and if perhaps he wasn’t going as far as solemnity, he was at least disposed to smoothly and simply follow things through. Barco dropped the bottle on the bottom, considered the result of the fall, judged it adequate, and then stood up and began to pour dirt back into the hole with the shovel. After a time he passed the shovel to Tomatis, and when the hole was full to the brim, he took the shovel in his hands again and began to smooth down the top, trying to erase the evidence of their excavation.

“If it rains tonight,” He said when he finished, leaning on the shovel and mopping his sweat, “by tomorrow there won’t be a trace left on the ground.”

And it did rain. Tomatis heard it drumming against the roof as he lay in the dark of his room on the landing. When they finished they had put the shovel back in the bottom of the canoe and then gone for a swim, eaten the sardines and the peaches and drunk the bottle of wine, slept a while beneath the trees and then returned, rowing slowly, taking turns, the river below, arriving so late that when they moored the canoe at the club dock, surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes, it was already dusk, blue and full of noises and voices coming from the beach and the lit-up bar. They took the streetcar home and Barco jumped off and disappeared through the door of his house. Tomatis took a cold shower, ate something, and went to bed. Almost instantly he fell asleep. More than the sound, it was the smell of the rain that woke him, making the heated roof tiles crackle, and afterward the freshness, the fullness of the water coming in through the open window. As he became more lucid, Tomatis thought of the bottle buried in the darkness of the earth, just as he himself was buried in the darkness of the world, and he asked himself what the fate of the bottle would be. Because it could happen that whoever found it might speak some other language, or the same language in which, nevertheless, the word “message” would have a different meaning, even the opposite meaning from what they had intended, even the meaning of “information” that Barco had wanted to eliminate, or possibly that no one would find the bottle at all, the race of men would be blotted from the earth, and the bottle would remain forever buried inside a dry, empty planet, spinning in the darkness of space. But finally, just before falling asleep, Tomatis considered that even when men capable of understanding it might encounter their message, it would not contain them, Barco and Tomatis, just as it would not contain the crashing waves, in the slow smacks of the canoe at each firm stroke of the oar, the lit-up bar they made out from the dock engulfed in blue darkness, and the scent of fresh rain that came in through the window, in gusts, at that very moment.

Letter to the Seer

In the grand tradition of the enlightened, I occupy, always, the last place. I’m not speaking in a chronological sense, but hierarchically: sleepiness, drowsiness, myopia fill my resumé. From Petronio’s frenetic maelstrom I have retained no more than a sentence: “A day is nothing: there is just time to become yourself, and then night is upon you.” In those conditions laziness is not so much a vice as an ontological subject. So then, what does a man see between two dreams, when he has not yet freed himself of the first to fall immediately into the second? He sees nothing. Because seeing, madam, is not a matter of contemplating, inert, the tireless passage of apparitions, but of seizing, from those apparitions, some meaning. In a word, the vertical work, like that of the ray, of the enlightened one, which you know and employ, or, really, that which employs you. For that reason I came to you saying that in the grand tradition of the enlightened, I, always, invisible, occupy the last place.

Sleepiness, drowsiness, myopia: and the hand, too, that, in this semidarkness, moves, errs, closing, opening, showing openly, easily, how it has grasped nothing. The greatness, the subspecies, related to sleepiness and the hand, is, you will have already guessed, darkness. The great black magnetic mass that drags our gestures downward, one by one. In that blackness, the world, I accomplish my designated task, clumsily, according to the rules. My muse, if I may call her that, is, if you like, a manual. The subtle mechanics of the ray, if, from time to time, it touches me, are useless among so much darkness.

So I send you nothing. Nothing to submit to your clairvoyance. The monotonous, dull universe has nothing to do with the monotonous, dull fragments in me. And if I speak now, this once, unmediated, in the first person, it is in order to demonstrate clearly that through me no otherness shall be manifest, nothing that is not in the fleeting stains; fugitive, intermittent, whose borders are invaded by darkness, and which we call the world. From this purblind letter, I ask you to draw no conclusion. Because a conclusion is always behind and is, in relation to its parts, an “other.” Now then, for a blind man there can certainly be otherness, unity, everything. A blind man enjoys his right to imagination. A myopic man should be modest: a mobile stain occupies the entirety of his reduced field of vision and annihilates, without malignancy, everything else. The blind man, as far as he is from the world, can, with a vertiginous imagination, grasp it. The myopic man is too close to the remaining fragments to escape, in a leap, his plain.

What can be expected, then, from a dozing man? Nothing more than a series of fragments, dense, uncut. Let the world shine in them, if one of the ways of the world is to shine.