The One Before

Half-Erased

A harsh diagonal column of light comes in through the window and settles, on the wood floor, in a yellow circle inside of which a million pale particles wheel around, while the smoke of my cigarette, rising from the bed, enters it and slowly disperses, on this May morning, from which I can see, through the window, the blue sky: insomnia. I’ll get up in a while, take the clothes off of my brother’s empty bed, get dressed, go out into the street for my first cup of coffee at the galleria, smoking my third or fourth cigarette of the day, standing next to the counter, looking down the way, not speaking, not tasting either the coffee or the smoke, a man about thirty years old to those who see me from the outside, sometimes mistaken for my brother — someone will surely come along to greet me thinking I am him and not me, the one I know myself to be — and through the windows of the galleria I will see the sunlight falling onto the red metal tables in the practically empty patio: the workday. I contemplate — having overcome my bewilderment at being alive, still, and awake, again — the room being divided in two by this diagonal column of light, and I see the furniture, my own clothes, my brother’s empty bed, the light itself, the smoke: separation. At once, suddenly, rapidly, resonating even more intensely than my own silence and louder than my silence can bear, from what my mother calls the foyer, the phone rings. From afar, Héctor’s voice asks if I heard the explosions last night, and I use my voice for the first time today to say that the first explosion went off as Tomatis and I were standing in the doorway of the game room at the Progress club, and that when the second one went off we were playing truco and the cards on the table, on the green felt, were the ace against the king on top, and the jack against the knight below. Life imitates art, Héctor says, adding that he’ll come pick me up in half an hour to go see where the dynamite has opened breaches along the coast road. Standing on the sidewalk I see the car approaching in the sun, the cigarette between my lips and the smoke dissipating just above my face — standing on the piece of sidewalk that I have just been contemplating from the balcony, having hung up the phone and gotten dressed — into the air, sunny and windless, but cold. The car moves ahead among others like it, black, slow, and its chrome sparkles in the sun. It is just another particle of the monotonous noise generated, for some time, by the city, a particle of the tumult of staining and shifting that has begun to work early this morning. We go straight, slowly, stopping every minute among the cars that follow us and those that cross in front of us, and when we get to the central post office and the bus station, we turn onto the Avenida del Puerto and start speeding up, freeing ourselves from the cramped nucleus of the city, seeing the palm trees come toward us and then fall behind, grayed and fraying at the onset of winter. The car’s side windows are foggy. The hard light of the sun breaks at sharp right angles upon the trees and houses. The men walking along the sidewalks and others, working on the beach as longshoremen, are bathed, so to speak, in the cold light. Leaning forward, Héctor has taken out, from the glove compartment, a flask of cognac, offering me a sip. I have refused it. Still, he has given me the flask, covered in hard leather, so that, as he drives, I can unscrew the metal cap. The smell of alcohol floods my nose, even colder than the air I was just breathing on the sidewalk and that still scratches my nostrils. Beyond Héctor’s profile, raised in the act of drinking, even beyond the foggy glass, there is a white wall passing, recently painted, endless, and behind it I know there are men, at this very moment, making blocks of ice. The rough pavement makes the white image tremble in the dingy window. And suddenly, calmly, I remember a dream, as if someone had offered me a glimpse inside a barely open box, only to slam it shut just as I leaned in, just as I’ve begun to guess what’s inside. I don’t remember what the dream was about, just that I have had it. It seems to me that there was no white wall in it, no car, nor was Héctor in the dream, nor, moreover, did it take place on the Avenida del Puerto, and yet I remembered it, for a moment, when I looked, beyond the raised profile and beyond the dingy window, at the white wall. A policeman, cloaked and serious, refuses, at the suspension bridge, to let us pass. It seems it is uncertain whether or not the water, flooding up over the breaches, will block the road. Héctor takes a press pass from the glove compartment and hands it to the policeman, whose face, the color of wood, half hidden between the rim of his cap and the collar of his coat, peers through the window. At last we cross the bridge, heading onto the road, surrounded on either side, as far as the eye can see, by water: water, and sometimes, in the middle of a field, a farmhouse in ruins, of which we can just make out the roof and a bit of the walls; not even the tops of the trees; everything else is water, smooth and calm, level with the embankment. When we get to the first breach we stop the car and get out. The noise of the car doors opening, the sound of our voices and our shoes scraping against the asphalt strewn with rubble rings out and then fades. Héctor talks about science fiction. Then, as we are bent over the rubble watching the torrent flow — in what direction? — through the breach, where the two liquid plains join, almost soundlessly, he recalls Faulkner. Too much literature for a painter, I say. Héctor doesn’t answer me. He removes the flask from his bag and takes another sip of cognac, wrinkling his elastic face. I draw my dull gaze from the torrent at the depths of the breach to the two smooth expanses divided by the road. They tell me nothing. For the first few days I tried to feel bewilderment, even fear, pity for those who the water would sweep away, something, but I managed nothing. I see nothing but a smooth surface, almost placid, extending to the horizon from each edge of the road strewn with rubble, and it gives me no sign. The thing that really makes me shudder, says Héctor, is to think this idea we have that the water must, at some point, stop rising and begin to recede might be utterly wrong. In the middle of the street, the black car, its chrome sparkling in the sun, its doors open, looks as if it had been abandoned long ago. It looks, so to speak, dead. And we, the only moving things in this harsh, monotonous landscape, have also fallen still. A helicopter appears. It wheels over our heads a couple times before heading back toward the city, fading from view. The pilot must have seen us from above, two men dressed in black overcoats, in full sunlight, squatting amid the rubble, looking at the breach in the embankment, and the black car abandoned in the middle of the road, its chrome resplendent in the sun, its doors open. We turn around slowly, cautiously avoiding the water, and once we are pointed in the opposite direction we start heading back to the city. As we leave the bridge behind us and Héctor gives a friendly wave to the policeman who intercepted us on our way out, I see the helicopter passing over our heads again and heading toward the other side of the bridge, flying over the road in the direction of the breaches in the embankment. The delicate frame, red metal and glass, flies low, and I wonder what the pilot must see from above, apart from the breaches and the rubble and the blue strip of asphalt and the two liquid plains. All of that without us, without the black car, I mean, and then, as we begin to drive back along the Avenida del Puerto, Héctor tells me not to worry, that while the water continues to rise — and the radio bulletin, at precisely that moment, says that it is still rising, and will continue to rise — I can stay perfectly calm because, after all, in four days I will be in Paris. I know that he’s watching me intently, with no regard for the road, to see what effect his words have had on me — or at least I assume that if he is watching me so intently, it is for that reason — but I keep staring at the white wall through the dingy window. Really, his words have had no effect on me. I feel as if the tips of everything metal were rippling, now that the sun is almost at its zenith. I haven’t had coffee. Héctor suggests we have lunch together. During the meal, Héctor says, I think, that travel will do me good, take me out of myself a bit. Then he starts, out of habit, to talk about Cat. I think Cat, he says, just doesn’t want to grow up. Predictable end for Cat: a nuthouse. He asks me if I will see him before I leave. And as Héctor talks at the other end of the table, from above his head and his elastic face, above his perfectly cleaned and coiffed hair, the tumult of the restaurant, of which we, too, form a part, the homogeneous noise of the interior where we sit is like an orchestral accompaniment, a base that improves Héctor’s voice, it seems to me, slightly. There is a deafening cacophony of noise. Someone in a gray overcoat, clean-shaven, opens the front door and enters, followed by two women. He approaches our table, removing his black leather gloves. I feel his cold hand when I shake it, because Héctor has introduced him to me. He’s a painter from Buenos Aires or something like that; he has the air of someone who is moving up in the world, or has moved up in the world, economically speaking. The two women linger by the door, taking off their coats. They talk about something they were doing together last night at the time of the explosions. They have been, it seems, at a party or something like that. They mention something that happened, something funny, it seems, because they laugh and Héctor, who is standing next to his chair — just like me, leaning over, with my knees half bent, my left hand holding a glass of wine — says that when I heard the first explosion I was entering the games room at the Progress Club with Tomatis, and that, according to me, when the second explosion went off, the cards on the table were the ace winning against the king on top, the jack and the knight below. And I told him, says Héctor. I told him: Art imitates life. The man throws his head back when he laughs, exposing his shaved neck. Then he leaves. He sits with the women at a table behind Héctor’s head, and I continue to see them the whole time beyond his elastic face, while Héctor is talks about Cat. Not just growing up: Cat has never shown a real or consistent interest in any serious pursuit his whole life. He’s too mercurial. Héctor keeps talking, but all the while food is disappearing from his plate. At last he uses a piece of bread to soak up the red sauce, leaving the white porcelain streaked with red lines, dry and flecked with white. The food must be gathering now in his stomach, which has begun to work in its own way. Two or three discrete belches attest to this work. Then Héctor adjusts his chair and lights, having meticulously prepared it beforehand, a pipe. I smoke a cigarette. Héctor seems to be reflecting on the things he has just said about Cat, as if it is the first time he has said them and he is trying to polish them, mull them over in his mind to reformulate them more precisely. But he has already formed them many times, with that same disjointed style, with that same rhetoric doubly weakened by lack of conviction and repetition. Something about the imminent winter settling down outside has invaded the restaurant, and I think for a moment, fragmentarily, about the breaches in the embankment, opened onto the coastal road, about the asphalt, cracked at the borders and strewn with rubble all around. I think that Héctor must not have looked at me this whole time. I think that he has not even looked at the smoke from his pipe as it unwinds slowly before his face, a blue smoke, and that what he seems to be contemplating now, with his half-closed eyes, is neither the blue smoke nor any present point, nor my face. So entering the games room at the Progress Club with Tomatis, he says, brusquely. Yes, I say. His elastic face flinches from the smoke, and it is obvious how the skin there has worn away and wrinkled over the years. More than feeling unfamiliar, I tell him, then, when he asks me how I will feel abroad, I will have to deal with the unfamiliar thought that a city where I was born and where I have lived nearly thirty years will continue living without me, and then I say that a city is an abstraction we concede to so we can give a particular name to a series of places that are fragmentary, unconnected, lifeless, and that most often exist in imaginary time, bereft of us. And then, slowly at first, timid, polished and perfected through continuous repetition, like the foot of a marble saint smoothed by the kisses of interminable pilgrims, in an order that varies less and less, the stream of Héctor’s memories of Europe: his three years living in Paris, first on the rue des Ciseaux, then on the rue Gassendi, his summers in Italy, his expositions in London, in Amsterdam, in Copenhagen. One of them was attended by Matta, the Chilean surrealist, whom he connected with Breton. He had been to Breton’s house several times, had translated surrealist texts that Edgar Bayley tried to have published in a magazine that recently went out of business. As we leave the restaurant, this stream continues monotonously. In the street, as we walk toward the car, on the sidewalk in front of the Municipal theater, wide and warmed by the sun, another of our friends stops us, extending an icy hand: have we heard the noon bulletin saying that the water is still rising, and will continue to rise? We respond that we had heard the explosions; we’ve also heard the bulletin. Shaking his cold hand again. In the car, having started the motor, we take turns sipping from the leather-covered flask until we’ve emptied it, putting it back into the glove compartment. Héctor doesn’t talk anymore. He holds the pipe, unlit, between his teeth, like a rigid, slightly more polished appendage, the same color as the inhuman material of his face. I’ve just put out my cigarette, and there is a strong, diffused scent of ash in the car. With the motor on, the heater gets going. There is a clear contrast between the cold light outside and the hot, contaminated air inside the car. Now we have reached the southern tip of the city, Boca del Tigre. There is a checkpoint at the convergence of three avenues, and behind the checkpoint the bridge and the highway. On either side of the bridge, water. Closer, to our left, in the huge open space before the soccer stadium, tents, an encampment, military vehicles, an interminable disorder of objects: beds, dressers, paintings, chairs, pots, carts, quilts, animals, people. The sun warms this dismantled anthill. Héctor talks about Marché aux puces and Hôtel Drouot, Parisian markets for secondhand goods, highly surrealist places. He quotes Discépolo from Tango Cambalache: you’ll see the Bible weeping against a water heater.¹ It follows that reality itself is surrealistic, though he has renounced surrealism because too great a love for objects disrupts metaphysical reflection. But the genius of objects, he says, they have it. They have it. Objects tend to gel together, they are gregarious, he says. Adornments are to objects as nineteenth century realism is to surrealism. Still, he, Héctor, he says, is looking for a new way, a third position. Thus, when he is interviewed, he says, laughing, when asked what school of art he belongs to, he responds: Justicialism. When he drops me off at my door, he tells me he will be at his studio at 8 P.M. sharp. I am passing through the little room my mother calls the anteroom when the phone rings. Elisa’s voice asks me if Cat has come back from El Rincón. I tell her that he hasn’t. She asks me if the explosions went off in El Rincón, and I tell her, no, they were much closer to the city, two or three kilometers from the suspension bridge, long before you get to La Guardia, and that I’ve just come back from seeing the resulting breaches with Héctor, before lunch. Elisa asks if Héctor is with me and I tell her that we just parted, that I don’t know where he’s gone. With my husband, you never know, Elisa says, although you can very well imagine. I’m not sure what to say, so I say nothing. After a short, mutually reproving silence, we say our goodbyes and hang up. I smoke for around an hour in bed, thinking. My overcoat and my jacket lie on Cat’s empty bed. The room is filled with smoke. Through the spotless windows, I see the cold light recede. From the other side of the house drifts the sound of television. It is a dull mix of voices and music. From the street, on the other hand, the homogenous murmur, familiar, identical to, although perhaps more profound than this morning, and which will tear itself apart in the evening, rises and resounds. I listen to it for a moment, I focus my attention on it, but it doesn’t leave the slightest impression. Against the wall, on the other side of the bed, is my suitcase, packed since yesterday, next to the blue coat. I have shut it under the impatient gaze of Tomatis, who, I think, was playing with his gloves, bringing them with his fingers up to his face and then letting them fall upon his knees. Or perhaps not, perhaps he was smacking his knees with them, or the palm of his hand. It was probably the palm of his hand, or perhaps his chest. Or even his face, because he was lying face up on Cat’s bed while I packed the suitcase, impatient to go out to eat, or more precisely to go out, because later, as we were eating, he was also impatient and wanted to go I-don’t-even-know-where. Some place other than where we were, I suppose, some place where he, I mean, was not at that moment, thinking perhaps that he should walk around for a few minutes to get under control — I’m not sure if I’m being clear here — because it preoccupied him to know that wherever he was, there was a mountain of other places he wasn’t at all. I get up and put the ashtray, which had been balancing on my chest, on the nightstand. In this room there is a bluish semi-darkness. I must have been lying here almost an hour. I walk around the room a bit and then poke my head out the window: on the sidewalk before me murky figures are passing in front of a shop window with six television sets, all identical, all on. On all six, arranged in two rows of three, one on top of the other, the same flickering image appears, steel blue, the enormous head of a man crying, his face buried in his hands. I recognize the afternoon soap opera. Then I step back from the window, cross through the blue bedroom and the little room my mother calls the foyer, through the living room, where, for a moment, I interrupt my mother’s field of vision as she watches the man crying. When I get to the study, I turn on the light. There are two empty desks, one facing each window, so that when Cat and I would sit down to work, we would be back to back. From Cat’s window one can see the brick-colored tile terraces, patios with dark trees, the white municipal building against the red splendor of the sky. Mine looks out onto an interior patio with yellow and blue tiles lined up against the wall. I’m standing under the light hanging from the ceiling, between two windows, in front of the bookshelf. I’m not looking at anything in particular. Now that I am sitting before my desk and, opening the top drawer, I take out a few blank sheets. At the desk I lift up a green ballpoint pen and write: Dear Cat. I was going to pass by El Rincón to see you but I didn’t have time. I can only hope you aren’t up to your neck in water. It looks like you will be soon enough. I hope you’ve got some news from Washington. Mama won’t be too much work while I’m gone: wake her up after the end of the daily broadcast on TV and tell her she can go to bed now, and turn down the volume for her every once in a while during viewing hours. As always, I am well, and I’ll write to you as soon as I get settled in Paris. Tonight they’re throwing me a goodbye party at Héctor’s studio (he told me not to tell you about it) and I guess I have to stop here because I’m going to be late. A hug. Pigeon. Now I open the drawer to Cat’s desk to leave the note and I see the photograph: there we are, in t-shirts, smiling at the camera, six or seven years old, Cat or me, because I can’t tell anymore which of the two appears there, with part of the house in El Rincón, white, behind us, to the left, and to the right, further off, a few willows and the river. You have to be inside to know which one you are, and in this photo, Cat or me, it must be twenty years ago, in a T-shirt, laughing at the camera, is outside. There is another photo, identical, not a copy but another photo, or perhaps a copy, in one of my desk drawers. Some distant relative took them both, the same day, in the same pose, in the same place, a few minutes apart, not having foresight like my mother, who wasted her youth planting clues all over the world that would help distinguish us; he sent the pictures to us a few months later. As I am passing again through the living room, intercepting the television screen with my body, my mother tells me, according to the bulletin in the afternoon, that the military has exploded dynamite along the coast road to allow the water to flow out and reduce the pressure that has been building for days against the suspension bridge, threatening to sweep it away. She asks me if I have heard the explosions. Now I am putting on my jacket, slowly, and then my overcoat. I close the door behind me, putting on my gloves. It’s utterly dark outside. The murmur fades. Standing in front of the counter of the bar in the galleria, I drink a cognac, slowly, smoking. There’s hardly anybody here. The cashier, dressed in green overalls, flips through a comic book. A man eats green olives from a plate and drinks vermouth, sitting at one of the tables in the hall. Now that I am in the taxi headed toward Héctor’s studio, it occurs to me that I am no longer in the room with the two desks, the room with the two beds, or intercepting the screen with my body as I pass through the living room, or standing in the bar in the galleria. Nor am I in the place where I began thinking, because the taxi is cutting through the cold night and leaves behind street corners fading ever darker. Yet, having stood for a moment between the two desks, under the light, or crossing the living room, intercepting the blue steel of the television screen with my body, I am struck by the fact that the living room and the room with the desks are still in their places, emptied of me, at this very moment. Of all the things in this world, I am the least real. Moving an inch, I am erased. And I see, as we move away from the city, through the streets growing darker and darker, more and more deserted, through the frosty glass, the fixed neighborhoods on whose sidewalks leafless trees expose their ruins to the first frost. Constant and practically lifeless, soundless, a straggling light from a pharmacy or a corner store that shines on the sidewalk, a quick message shouted from one side of the street to the other, a car passing on a cross street, they extend around me, as I pass through rapidly, these neighborhoods that persist. Héctor comes forward to receive me when I clap my hands to announce I’ve arrived. There’s still no one around. He has invited the whole world, he tells me, to come at nine. He says that he wanted to set up the grill and talk to me in peace. All of the lights in the studio are lit and the white, arid walls refract the light and compound its clarity. Only the very top lies in darkness. On the back patio, while he watches over the fire and the meat, and the smoke pries tears from his eyes that dry into the folds of his elastic face, Héctor, who has laid a bottle of wine and two glasses on top of a table covered in a white piece of paper, says that if the water continues to rise, the highway from Boca del Tigre will be cut off and the bus taking me to Buenos Aires won’t be able to get through. I tell him not to exaggerate and Héctor laughs. He’s a bit drunk; weepy. He says that exaggeration is an art form. Cat has perfected it, he says. He does everything too well, he says, Cat does, and he is too well provided for to be capable, even when he tries, and he has tried, moreover, many times, to stick with something. We return to the shed and Héctor shows me the painting he is finishing. It is an arid, white rectangle that in no way differs from the white walls of the studio. It is perhaps a bit whiter and more arid than the walls. The whiteness of the walls has, on the one hand, it seems to me, the purpose of suggesting a certain width, as well as a certain height; in the painting, the horizontal quality is, I have the impression, so to speak, erased. Its whiteness is exclusively vertical. I don’t know if I have seen this or if it was Héctor himself who told me so this morning. In Héctor’s paintings, everything is vertical; not ascending, not descending, just vertical. Serving glasses of wine in the open air by the fire in the back patio, Héctor smokes his pipe and tries to explain to me what it is he wanted to express. We are interrupted by someone clapping their hands in the entrance. It is Raquel. She kisses us quickly on the cheek and disappears into the studio. She returns without her coat and with an empty wineglass in her hand. After taking her first sip of wine she asks us, looking more at Héctor, if we heard the explosions last night. Héctor responds that he was with people, at a party, and that I, when the first explosion went off, was with Tomatis, passing through the door to the games room at the Progress Club. He says that when the second went off the cards on the table were the ace and the king on top, the jack and the knight below, Héctor says. And I told him that life imitates art, he says. For a moment, while the meat crackles over the coals and the smoke rises in a dense, diagonal column, we smoke in silence, taking small sips of wine. Raquel asks me how I feel now that I’m about to leave for Paris. I say nothing. Raquel’s green wool dress hugs her thick body. We are, so to speak, almost cold, between total exposure and the hot splendor of the coals. Héctor starts up again about Cat. Cat is the plague, says Raquel, laughing. A new interruption: Héctor disappears toward the front door, and there comes an increasingly loud tumult of familiar voices, male and female. Quiet, we look at the fire. Now, before Héctor and the recent arrivals appear on the patio, other knocks at the door ring out and the voices multiply. They are all too familiar for us to pay attention to them. In a low voice, Raquel asks me if we could get a drink alone together after the party. Before I can answer, Héctor reappears on the patio. He invites us to come inside. The recent arrivals, six all together, contemplate, arranged in a semicircle before the easel, Héctor’s latest painting, the white surface. They admire it, each in his or her own way. Now the semicircle breaks apart and we greet each other in scattered groups. We talk about the explosions. The night bulletin, someone says, has reported that the water is still rising, and will continue to rise. Alicia, dressed in blue, disappears toward the patio, because Héctor has been called away for a moment to the door. He watches us serenely, his pipe in his mouth, jutting out from his elastic face. At the very moment Alicia disappears, Elisa comes through the front door, without knocking. She greets us seriously, but not coldly. Kissing me on the cheek, I feel her tense a little, as if she were saving for me the little hostility of which she is capable, or perhaps because she has seen, over my shoulder, just as she kissed me, Alicia appear on the patio, followed by Héctor’s misty eyes, which contrast against his dried up, elastic face. At the table, Elisa sits to my right, Raquel across from me. Like a spontaneous, stable, even warm radiation, Elisa’s hostility crashes constantly against my circumspect profile, which sometimes turns, gently, toward her, and rebounds against her wide, stony face. No one who doesn’t know us well, who isn’t habituated to our most intimate particularities, and sometimes even under those conditions, is able to tell us apart, Cat and I, and even we ourselves look at photographs in our desk drawers and doubt the mirror in which we contemplate ourselves reciprocally, identical, and she, who for at least five years has been thinking day and night about Cat, who has been sleeping with him two or three times a week for at least two years, cannot be less than two meters from me without starting to radiate repugnance and hostility. It’s as if I were the inverse of Cat. And he will stay: he will keep waking up every morning beside the river, in the house in El Rincón, will pass through the bars of the city getting drunk until morning, and he will pass through the door of the games room at the Progress Club with Tomatis, he will look at the white municipal building sitting at his desk, not reading or writing anything, and then he will go out onto the street to meet her, to stretch himself out over her, naked, in some hotel, in the house in El Rincón, where Héctor knows he shouldn’t go without calling first, as do I, greeting, on the corner of San Martín and Mendoza, someone who has wished him a good afternoon thinking he is me, he will be standing on the corner in the afternoon, in a T-shirt, freshly bathed, in the summer, smoking. Héctor talks about the breaches. He has seen them, he says, with me, this morning. They are several meters wide and the crumbling borders look like the mouth of a volcano; all the asphalt is strewn with rubble; they are inspecting the area with helicopters, and all around, up to the horizon, smooth, monotonous, yellowing, rising ever higher, is the water. Someone tells us that he was sleeping at the moment the first explosion went off; another, making love. One of them asks me where I was when I heard them; I was with Tomatis in the games room of the Progress Club, I say. Now some people walk across the great white shed that, apart from the easel with the painting, the disordered tables and chairs, contains practically nothing. I am sitting on a divan jutting out from the wall, between Raquel and Alicia. I see people, from afar, who cross the shed, groups that converse, laughing faces coming toward me, and talking to me: from time to time when I serve myself wine and smoke, I talk. The words form between my teeth and my lips, so that they slip out half chewed, half smoked. Even so, at this time, I am not absent; I am here. Nowhere else. Here. I see Elisa go out; she has said goodbye to some people, not to everyone, not to me. It must have been to avoid coming close to Alicia. I see her dress, red and blue flowers printed on a white background, disappear beneath her overcoat, and then the rest of her disappears, suddenly, through the front door. Now the huge white shed is practically deserted. Héctor, Alicia, and a couple are standing in front of the easel, looking at the arid, white, vertical rectangle. Slowly, at a diagonal, someone crosses the empty shed, and goes to sit in a chair, behind the easel. Raquel is stretched out on the divan, her head in my lap, her eyes closed; her hand, hanging over the side of the divan, holds a cigarette that burns out on its own, sending up smoke between her fingers. The four figures, standing out starkly against the broad background, speak in low voices and sometimes shake their heads or lift a hand, that they immediately drop, indicating, without enthusiasm, the painting. Now there are no more than four of us in the studio. Héctor, Alicia, Raquel and I, looking, without speaking, for a moment, in the same direction, at the white wall before us, from the other side of the empty shed where the brick floor ends. Now the light goes out. I see the form of Raquel’s body stretched out beside mine, in the reddish semidarkness produced by the electric stove by the divan. The white walls, in the semidarkness, emit a weak phosphorescence. The white painting, from far away, is, so to speak, like a window from which one is watching the sunrise. I feel, from beneath her dress, Raquel’s warm, slightly loose flesh. Now we are naked, covered by a blanket. From the attic noises filter down to us of the wood of the floor and the bed creaking, hushed voices, laughter, and later cries and moans from Alicia. Hearing them, Raquel lets out a short cry, which she muffles by pressing her mouth against my shoulder. It remains there for a moment. There is a mouth against my shoulder, open, the same mouth that hours before has asked me to go with her to get a drink after the party. The mouth descends my right arm to my elbow and stops there. Her whole body has been fidgeting beneath the blanket. Now that the mouth has paused on my arm, she is quiet. Nothing comes from the attic. Her body, standing, bending, moves a little, before her mouth begins to move, now that the mouth moves from my arm to my belly and even a little lower. The mouth begins to make some noises that resound in the empty shed. I catch a glimpse of Cat sleeping in El Rincón. He is not me, so that I am not him either, he who is standing on the corner, in summer, in a T-shirt, freshly bathed, nodding to someone who has confused him for me. A summer so large that, so to speak, I cannot fill it completely. The mouth, without a body, without me, works, with a regular rhythm, in the reddish semidarkness, while my confused thoughts intermix, the way an insomniac experiences a vivid dream and then, slowly, begins to wake. The light is on again now, Raquel and I beneath the blanket, naked, and Héctor and Alicia, dressed, standing beside the stove, facing the divan. We make space at the end of the table, among the remains of the cold food, and we sit down to snack, sipping wine. Raquel’s mouth receives the pieces of cold meat, chews them slowly, flashes her tongue when she licks her wrinkled lips, talks. Héctor speaks, once in Paris, they, too, had held a barbeque in an atelier that he shared with a Greek painter, a surrealist. The painter was a lesbian. She smoked cigarettes. She drank kirsch and, at dawn, went out onto the street to steal the milk bottles deliverymen left on the doorsteps of groceries. Now he turns to me: is it true, that story Cat would tell about the brother of our great-grandfather who was an intern in a hospital in Buenos Aires during the yellow fever outbreak, and who, according to Cat, abandoned his post for fear of the contagion and appeared in the city, in our great-great-grandfather’s house, no one knowing what in the world he was doing there; and who, according to Cat, says Héctor, had brought the fever with him and died four days later, spreading the plague? Héctor asks me if it is true. I say that if Cat said it, it must be true. Héctor laughs. They are quite different, says Alicia. Cat is the plague, says Raquel. That glut, that abandon, that oblivion, that death, is necessary so that one may begin, gradually, like a sun, to rise up, tracing a parabola with a zenith and a nadir, with its own rhythm, at the time when histories are intertwined, confused, superimposed, corrected, perfected, falsified, in a cold dawn in an illuminated shed with white walls, heated by electric stoves. Cat, who, once, at the School of Fine Arts, shattered a cast of the Venus de Milo; the time Cat and I shared the same woman, and we alternated weeks sleeping with her, convincing her that we were the same person; the version Cat came up with, in which the woman also had a twin sister, who switched off with her to receive us; the man who, last year, threw himself out the window of the courthouse after being sentenced by the judge, my cousin; the time during which Héctor and the lesbian made copies of famous paintings and sold them on the Pont des Arts; stories about Washington. Fixed, closed, we shuffle them like cards for two hours. They move from mouth to mouth, like passwords. They have been, so to speak, polished so much, like stones, their contours so precise, distinguished so easily from one another, that it is as if, at a certain moment, they stop being stories, things that have happened in space and time, and turn into objects, algae, blossoms. It is easy, since they are already in the past. But what is happening in time, what is happening now, the time of the stories we remain inside, is inexpressible. Now we are standing again before the arid, vertical rectangle. Héctor, whose elastic face has grayed a bit, traces imaginary vertical lines before the canvas with the mouthpiece of his pipe. Raquel asks if it took him a long time to paint it. A month of Sundays, says Héctor. Now we are sitting again at the corner of the table, drinking coffee. Héctor drops a lump of sugar into a glass of water and we sit watching it dissolve. The objective durée, says Héctor. The what? asks Alicia. The objective durée. The durée. Durée. Duration, says Héctor. To be objective, says Héctor, one must measure it, one must be present. His painting, he says, is an amplified fragment of the objective durée. At the bottom of the glass there remains a sandy sediment of little crystals. Then nothing more. The glass alone remains, with the water, without any durée. Look: not even a trace of the objective durée, says Héctor. To listen to Héctor, who has explained the meaning of the painting, I have reverted my gaze to his elastic face, taking it from the glass. When I look back at it, there is at first the sandy sediment and then nothing: the glass with the water, with no durée. Now Raquel and I are heading out into the icy dawn, toward Raquel’s car, parked on the other side of the deserted avenue. The interior of the car is freezing. As the motor warms up, Raquel lights a cigarette and passes it to me, and then lights another that she leaves hanging in her mouth. Now we have pulled up in front of my house. You’ll laugh at me, she says. You’ll tell me not be pushy, but this is stronger than me. You’ll be wanting kids one of these days, sometime, with someone, I say. She says she’ll be at the station the day after tomorrow, at ten to twelve, to see me off. And now that I am lying down, smoking, through the window I see the cold blue sky, a ray of sun, full of a million dancing particles, passing through the glass to draw a clear circle on the parquet. My clothes lie on Cat’s untouched bed. Standing next to the desk, I see, through the window, the white apartment block, vertical and full of dark rectangular perforations, the municipal building. Now I’m looking at the ferns on the patio, the flowerpots lined up along the yellow walls. There is light in the patio, but not a single patch of sun. I am standing next to the counter at the bar, in the galleria, looking at the cashier dressed in green overalls. The owner of the bar comes out of the back room with an empty glass in his hand, which he puts down on the coffee machine. At the bottom my cup still holds a trace of coffee. The owner of the bar says something to me, in a vague way, which is typical of him, I think because he is never sure whether he is talking to me or to Cat. He talks about the explosions, doubting the results: they should have waited, he says, until the water got to the highest point, but — he looks at the empty patio, over my head — who could tell what the highest point would be? What could be used as a reference? The past? There was a flood in aught five, in twenty-six, in sixty-two; those were the biggest ones. None of them got up to the same point, they were all different. He falls silent. When they rise, slowly, over months, burying entire provinces beneath dark water, those chaotic rivers take not only our lands, our animals, our trees, but also, and perhaps in a surer and more permanent way, our conversations, our courage, and our recollections. They entomb, they disable our communal memory, our identity. And, although it is cold, the May sun shines down on the empty red metal tables arranged on the patio. There is a sunny silence. There is a fixed green stain, the cashier sitting upon a stool, one hand resting on the lever of the cash register. The murmur of the city, intermittent and continual, comes to me mutedly. Now that I let myself be consumed by the crowd, on the corner by the bank, standing immobile, smoking, I think, unpremeditatedly, about the empty bar in the galleria, about the sunny patio, about the green stain that is the cashier, his hand resting on the lever of the cash register. They will persist, empty, without me. Suddenly, smoothly, standing fifty centimeters from my face, a man, with a rosette in the lapel of his overcoat, clean shaven, about thirty years old, pats my arm, smiling, his head somewhat bent toward me and his green eyes half closed: what am I so pensive about standing on the street corner at eleven o’clock in the morning, although getting a bit of sun is certainly worthwhile. His face is somehow familiar to me. He must be, I think, one of those friends that Cat makes every time he goes on a bender with Tomatis or with Héctor, at the Progress Club or at Copacabana. One of those who thinks that Cat has forgotten about them — Cat never forgets anyone who has spoken two words to him, ever — when they confuse me for him on the street and I receive them coolly. Now he has gone. People pass around me, on the sidewalk and on the street, and when I throw it, my cigarette hits the curb and keeps smoking on the asphalt. Bringing a piece of warm meat to my mouth, in the restaurant, at the same table where I ate yesterday with Héctor, before Héctor’s empty chair, among the muffled sounds, I stand still, not suddenly, midway, recalling the shaved face, the green eyes, the gray coat, the lapel: accustomed to his mistake, about to leave, with my suitcase packed beside the bed, the plane ticket, exhausted, I see that failing to recognize the man on the street corner by the bank as the painter Héctor introduced to me, fleetingly, in the restaurant, shows that I can only conceive of being recognized for myself with uncertainty or disbelief. I shake my head, laughing; I swallow the mouthful. The taxi driver stops before reaching the bridge, when the policeman seems to want to come out of the sentry box to signal to him. Vehemently, looking at me from time to time through the rearview mirror, where a fragment of my face appears at one of the angles, the driver, whose bald oval head seems incapable of sitting still for even a moment, has been telling me that the explosions were a faulty measure, proposed by the army, and that now those breaches will stay open for years. I pay him and get out. Until he has seen the car turn around, after two or three laborious maneuvers, and take off down the boulevard, the policeman doesn’t look at me. In the siesta sun, a head taller than me, hands held away from his body, dark face below his visor, body covered in the maroon overcoat belted by a bandoleer, legs akimbo, the policeman, because he is far from me, seems more precise, more perfect. He uses not only his gaze, but his whole body to watch the car depart. Now his sparkling boots scrape threateningly as he turns toward me. Yes, there are steamboats and canoes going out to El Rincón. You get off at La Guardia, there is a motorboat pulling a barge, and then, at the entrance to the town, a canoe. Out of habit he stands at attention, unostentatiously, at least it seems to me, when I leave. The breeze cools the light in the middle of the bridge, a weak platform above the water, which dominates everything, and from which emerge, intermittently, trees, posts, buildings. Below, against the central column, currents, visible on the surface, intertwine, breaking the smoothness of the great liquid expanse, lifting crests that shudder, rugged and foamy, as if around the column there were, so to speak, a deep hole into which all of the water had come to fall. From the bridge, before reaching the other end, I see the Boating Club building, red tiles and white walls, half submerged: water comes and goes through the doors, through the windows. On the other side of the club are a ravine and a narrow path that runs along the water among the trees. Soldiers, people, canoes, and a steamboat are visible. An officer directs the embarkation. There is a strip of dry land thirty feet across and no more than six feet wide. I approach the group, keeping quiet: almost no one speaks. Some have boarded the steamboat. Others prepare to get on. Others watch, as if they weren’t going themselves. Suddenly, a telephone rings. I see then that the officer, elated by his job and the general situation, jumps toward the side and plunges his feet into the water, and I can make out, upon a slim, narrow little table, the telephone. With my eyes I follow the cable, which, going over the tops of the trees, disappears into the Boating Club. The officer speaks into the telephone for a moment, his feet sunk in the water. When he’s finished, he returns to directing our embarkation. Now, searching blindly, having left the shore, for what, until a few months back, was the path of a stream, we sail, precariously, slowly, crammed into the little steamboat, the rhythm of its motor broken, intermittent, in the middle of the great aquatic expanse from which tall tufts of paja brava grass, camalote and, far off, ranches and trees, half flooded, jut forth. Next to one of them I can make out, now almost stripped of paint, the metal of its roof eaten away by rust, a minibus submerged in the water. We get off at the asphalt road. There are people waiting for the steamboat on the shore. The motorboat is nowhere to be seen. When the steamboat’s motor cuts so we can dock, and we are slowly approaching the shore, the silence is so great, so vast, that I sense, for a fleeting moment, arduously, completely, growing, the exodus, the general dread, the distress, the death. Touching land, I trip and fall forward. Someone holds me up — there are exclamations and a few laughs. Many of those dark faces, that all look alike, are familiar to me. Some greet me. The majority of those waiting on the shore get onto the steamboat. Soldiers, a non-commissioned officer, direct the embarkation. Off to one side of the dock, hastily reinforced with wood and sheets of zinc, precarious, is a drink stand. Someone says that the motorboat has just left for El Rincón and won’t be back for another hour. Others talk about the explosions, the bulletins, the military. An entire family that didn’t manage to get onto the steamboat and now stands on the shore, waiting for its return, ask a soldier for information about the encampment at Boca del Tigre. From the way he answers them, vaguely, quickly, indecisively, I sense that the soldier doesn’t even know the encampment exists; the totality of a catastrophe is the privilege of its spectators, not its protagonists. At the drink stand I have a gin, between two men speaking in low voices. I buy a bottle for Cat. There is something else I catch, for a moment, in the flavor of that gin drunk in the cool, sinking sun, other than the years I’ve already lost, other than a certain forgetfulness and a certain immobility, a certain objection, and it is, mixed with the scent of water and the scent of poverty, something invisible and ironclad like a root, food, a preexisting relationship through which my separation is not the division of two distinct parts which coexist, in enmity, inside me, but the end of a marriage to something that, for lack of a better word, I call the world. Needles, as you might say, of gold, still high up, draw lines across the blue sky. Before the motorboat, sending up its weak, regular explosions, arrives, again, full of people, coming slowly to dock, sailing over what used to be a street in La Guardia, fragile, old, the steamboat. With the glass of gin in my hand, I see, from among the group that has crammed onto shore preparing to board, people jumping to the ground. Now I am standing on the barge pulled, laboriously, by the motorboat, and I grab hold of the crosspiece, looking at the fields on either side of the road. Not too high, contained, but demonstrating, nevertheless, through that calm, that it will be the last to withdraw, the water covers the fields, coils around the trunks of trees, hammers, imperceptibly, against walls, bridges, embankments. The asphalt is stained with mud, detritus, debris. In Colastiné, on a relatively elevated point around which the water nibbles tranquilly, there is another encampment. The motorboat stops; children and dogs run from the tents toward the people getting off, and women and men, busy boiling water, chopping wood, interrupt their work a moment to look in the direction of the trailer. Soldiers walk idly among the tents, around which accumulate, in disorder, baubles, blankets, and basins. Then the orange motorboat starts up again, with the driver, who holds his back, covered by a short wool jacket, rigid, before me, and a soldier who accompanies him, standing in the front, his face ruddy from the cold air. All these months I’ve gotten no impression of any sort of violence from the water, but rather, and even more when its habit of growing had settled down inside us, of discretion, placidity, silence, and I have had to see the people at Boca del Tigre, in Colastiné, in encampments, piled up in front of the slate at La Region, talking about the explosions, the bulletins, to perceive, in flashes, like someone coming upon zones, crossing them, and finally leaving them behind, stable, the violence. Now I jump down from the barge, at the entrance to El Rincón; my feet, flexing, stick firmly on the asphalt and I straighten up to contemplate the water covering, with a reddish tinge, the wide, straight road, on whose edges the abandoned houses, made of concrete or adobe, vivid in the sun, still high in the sky, stand half submerged in water. The sun at four, pale, sparkles weakly in a green sky. There is within us, despite the canoes that wait on the shore, against the embankment, despite the tents scattered along the road, around which human figures move, despite all of this and because of the silence, now that the motorboat has stopped and the few voices that can be heard fade away almost instantly, diffused, a sense that, rather than standing before an abandoned town, we have arrived, for the first time and being, moreover, the first ever, in a virgin place, without fauna, submerged in blind water where life has not yet formed. The man from the canoe, who rows in front of me along the submerged road, toward the center of town, swaying back and forth rhythmically, with a cigarette between his lips that has gone out, turning his head every so often to look at the patios entombed underwater, asks me, after a moment of rowing in silence, above the regular splash of his oars that has been the only sound flowing out into the green air before his voice, if I have been in the city or if I have only come from La Guardia, and if I have come just to buy a bottle of gin and go back. I tell him that I’m coming from the city. You got here quick, he responds, incredulous. Then he says they shouldn’t have blown away the road: that the soldier had told him yesterday afternoon that the army was preparing the explosions and that he hadn’t believed him until he heard them; that he was sleeping in a tent and that he had not only heard the noise but felt, both times, the tremor of the ground where he was lying. He himself, he says, is not from the town but from up north, beyond Leyes, where there’s practically no dry land left at all. To San Javier, from the city, he says, you have to go by boat; they’ve filled in the embankment with sandbags, but the water gets through anyway. Now he is quiet; we proceed through deserted streets, and the oars, hitting the water, bring up a weak crest that opens out toward the shores, more every time, and crashes against the sidewalks, against the fronts of houses; where there are no buildings, the little crest goes through the tissue of wires and loses itself, silently, at the end of patios, among the tree trunks. Turning onto a cross street, I see, through the wide-open door of a house, the water running over the legs of the furniture, and on the wall, beside another door that leads to a room further inside, a mirror, and over it, on the blue wall, a large oval portrait. After turning two or three times, in complete silence, at the height of twilight, toward the outskirts of town, asleep more because of the water and the time of day than because of the rhythm of the oars, not anxious, not euphoric, divided, over the head of a man who leans forward, straightens up a moment and then leans back, growing, coming closer, the only dry point in town even though it is built on the banks of the stream, over the ravine, vivid, compact, its windows open, human vigor emanating from it even though no one is yet visible, separated from the water by many yards of dry land, on a slope, a bit strange to me because of its savage contrast to the landscape, elevated, in the middle, white, enormous, the house. In the cold it looks even whiter, more arid. In front of the door there are some canoes that tremble in the wake that grows larger as we approach the shore and dock. Pushing in the half-open door, I hear, muffled, the slow tapping of a typewriter. Now that I have passed through the first room I see, immediately, by the light of the kerosene lamp, rigid on his chair, contemplating the paper in the typewriter with his hands elevated, about to hit the keys, the figure of Washington, whose white head moves brusquely toward me, unperturbed. He regards me for a moment, fixed, without blinking, as I advance toward the center of the sphere of clarity diffused by the lantern. I thought it was Cat, Washington says, offering me a bony, dry hand, which he takes back in a moment. I ask how he is. You can see for yourself, he says. From the patio comes the cry of a child, a laugh. It’s Don Layo’s family, Washington says. Cat has left them behind, the same as him: they didn’t want to stay at home and had gotten some tents from the army. We’ll lose everything this time, he says, because the whole island is underwater. He’s silent. The disappointment of discovering that it is me and not Cat must have mixed itself within him with the feeling that I am an intruder, simply because, to his eyes, my love, my veneration, which may have been, in other times, greater than Cat’s, have the defect of not being Cat’s. He lowers his eyes, playing with the cold mate on top of the table. Cat, he tells me circumspectly, has gone to the city, to see me: he’ll be back at six. But six is also when the last motorboat leaves for La Guardia, where it meets with the last steamboat. I tell him to keep working, I’ll wait. I regard him fleetingly, two or three times, while he writes on the typewriter. Now he’s sitting in the chair. No longer is he like the last time I saw him, in November, on the patio of his house, a mate in his hand, standing next to Cat and Tomatis, talking about the fundamentals of Tendai, beneath the hot sun, against a background, fresh and flowering, of birds of paradise and laurels. Now he is seated before me. The keys of the machine resound, pounding against the white sheet, in an atmosphere of circumspection. He is, facing me with his white head, his dry face, the color of earth, despite his wool shirt with large red and white checks beneath whose half-open collar peeps a woolen undershirt, despite the invisibility of the time that he has lived, or perhaps more than anything because of it, in which he has been a child, an adolescent, an adult, despite his multiple lives, sitting before the typewriter, without glasses, tidy, extravagant, an old man. Voices keep coming rapidly, in bursts, from the patio, and when the typewriter stops and Washington sits with his hands suspended in the air, over the keyboard, his gaze fixed on the piece of paper, they sound louder, sharper. Now I am standing on the balcony out back, seeing the tents scattered on the patio, among the trees, and among them a bonfire, whose tallest flames are even taller than the tents, spreads a reddish splendor in the still-bright air. Don Layo has greeted me, among the tumult of his nephews and the women who are preparing pots and kettles around the fire. Then he disappeared inside one of the tents. Five or six dogs prowl in the background, behind the tents which are separated from the balcony by a great expanse of open terrain where there are not even trees, in which are strewn car batteries half-buried in the ground among the yellowing grass, the tips of which has been singed by the cold. Men, tents, trees, mixed up, extinguishing themselves with the day, are enveloped and cushioned by a lilac twilight, now that I have gone out again with the glass of gin in my hand to pass along the balcony I hear, faintly, with momentary pauses and new starts, intermittent, weak, hesitant, the tapping of the typewriter that comes, in bursts, from inside the house. Our two shadows project, silently, against the white wall, enormous. He has just said that Cat, unless by exceptional means, won’t be coming. For him to manage it, there would have to be the possibility, utterly remote, of obtaining permission from the police or the army to cross the suspension bridge, by foot, at night, and the possibility, afterward, of some embarkation from the Boating Club to La Guardia, and furthermore of walking from La Guardia to the entrance to El Rincón, and managing to find someone to bring him in a canoe from the entrance of town to the house, in the middle of the night, which would oblige one, like it or not, to dismiss the idea that he could be coming back tonight. He takes a large sip of gin, a shorter one, leaves the glass on the table, slips a cigarette, deliberately, into the black mouthpiece, bites down on it, tasting it a little with his lips while he searches for the matches on the table, lights the cigarette, draws a mouthful of smoke, drops the matches back onto the table and, pulling the mouthpiece between his teeth, supporting it over the edge of the table and waving his hand in front of his face to disperse the smoke, smiles briefly and adds that if everything indicates he won’t come now, it may very well turn out the opposite, because with Cat, I know quite well from experience, you just never know. Now I am sitting before the typewriter, my hands held above the keyboard, waiting for Washington to dictate to me. If, as I hear his voice and bend over quickly, pounding the keys with the pads of my fingers, someone were to enter, seeing us, without knowing, from the doorframe, holding his hand out to greet us, affable, he would believe, and would continue to believe if we didn’t reveal his error, that I, leaning over the keyboard, was someone else. And I myself, at the moment I begin to type, emptied of prejudice, of spite, of fear, of indifference, dedicated simply to writing, suspend myself, erasing myself, without being myself, and having, for a moment, if not the possibility of being someone else, the certainty, at least, of being no one, nothing, just as I am not the sentences that come from Washington and pass through me, from my arms, exit through the tips of my fingers and imprint themselves, in pairs, on the paper sitting in the machine. The smoke from our cigarettes is filling up the sphere of light radiating from the lamp, and from outside, no noises, no voices come to us, nor the horizon of animal sounds, polyphonic, that the water forces, so to speak, according to Washington, toward the dry border, where they are stored. There is nothing, now that Washington, absorbed in the translation that he is dictating to me, thinks neither of me nor of Cat, but only about the sentences that he polishes with his gazed fixed on his notebook while he wrinkles his forehead and arches, reflectively, his white brow, nothing but my conviction, extremely weak, my impoverished certainty, to corroborate the idea that I have not been here all day, sitting before the typewriter copying Washington’s translation, and that rather I only arrived here a few hours ago, on a boat, on an orange motorboat, on a canoe. I have just conserved, weakly, mixed up, diffused, the little flame burning, that now, suddenly, at the moment when I return to re-reading, at Washington’s request, a sentence I have already written, when my attention is displaced, insignificant, dies out. I end up thinking that the two of us are outside of something, something that has bid us goodbye, leaving us outside and closing the door behind us at the edge of darkness, even when we are perhaps the only ones, in the darkest point of a night replete with water, who are exposed in full light, arid and slow, as if under observation. I am not in that exteriority; although he is absent, Cat is there. Now Washington dictates to me: A good laborer a good laborer does not make with a needle more than with a needle a good laborer does not make more than five stitches per minute comma more than five stitches per minute comma per minute comma while certain circular machines While certain circular weaving machines make thirty thousand in the same time period Every minute of machine work every minute of machine work Every minute of machine work is equal therefore Every minute of machine work is equal therefore to a hundred hours of work by a laborer semicolon or rather every minute of work or rather every minute of machine work allows the laborer permits the laborer ten days of rest period ten days of rest period Now I am walking behind Washington, who carries the lantern, with the bottle of gin and the glasses, following him in the direction of the kitchen, behind the swinging lantern that produces continuous, irregular movements of light and shadow all around, crossing two of the large white rooms, practically empty. Now Washington cuts an onion into fine slices on the stove while I am peeling, a cigarette hanging between my lips, potatoes that now I begin to dry and cut into slices so I can throw them into the oil that crackles in the black saucepan, over the fire. Born from the belly of a woman, fed by two great white tits and sheltered by a firm skirt against the broad belly of his mother in the years of his infancy, obsessed during his adolescence with the delirium of women’s bodies, married, divorced, then both again, father of a daughter, frequenter of prostitutes at sixty, surrounded by women like a stamen surrounded by petals, Washington does not seem, now, leaning over the stove, as he slices the onion, either androgynous or hermaphroditic but asexualized, as if the floodgates of sex had closed for him, in him, and now there were a pair of old people living together at the end, tranquil, reconciled, at the same time, in the same body. And eating, now, separated by the bread and the bottle of wine, I see, firmly, his age. He chews slowly, erect, ascetic, never allowing his rough, wrinkled hands, or his lined mouth to be stained or shine with oil. He condescends to speak, even though I am not Cat. He holds his glass of wine in the air, chewing, serious, and affirms: to travel, you will see, is to pass from the particular to the universal, and as one travels the particular turns into the universal, and the universal, the particular; they do nothing, that is, but switch places. Now he is setting the lamp on the table, next to the typewriter. I contemplate him; I can, if I like, he says, sleep, though it will only be a few hours, in Cat’s bed; Don Layo, in the morning, will take me to the road. From the bed I hear the typewriter, in the other room. On the table the light burns, tranquil, a lamp; it doesn’t even flicker. Lying face-up as I smoke, I extend, without looking, my hand toward the nightstand and pick up the tall glass of gin. I sit up and take a sip. Now there is no more noise from the typewriter. Nothing is audible. Hearing nothing, one knows that one is within the black point of the present, a grain of sand, so to speak, in the lunar sphere, the black point of the present that is as long and as wide as time itself, in someone else’s bed. And now in the sun, in the back hall, I see boys playing against the tents and the smoke, while I listen to Don Layo chewing his mate, one foot propped up on a half-buried car battery: they have said, yes, about the explosions; as far as the island, everything is underwater. A black dog jumps two or three times in front of the old man, and then stands on his hind legs. Don Layo refills the mate and offers it to me. Washington comes out of the house, with his own mate and another straw. I end up between the two old men who talk, tranquilly, about a catastrophe that, in one sense, doesn’t even graze them, me, who flees from it practically trembling. Two old men who speak serenely, respectfully, who have had time, paying for it with their years, to get to this point and in which, surrounded by water that is rising, and that will continue to rise, are standing, firm, polished, like bones, drinking mate in the cold sunlight of the morning, warmer, paradoxically, than at noon. Still, they offer, so to speak, no lesson. They offer nothing. More exterior than the house, the trees, the smoke, and more fleeting, they extract, even for themselves, no conclusion. Now I watch Washington suck the mate, put the silver tube in his mouth, sip, and sip for him, in him, while Don Layo, watching him, waiting, offers me the full mate again. I sip, in turn, from the other mate. Go take a look at the Federalists’ Wall when you get there, he tells me, at the door, as I am getting into the canoe. I tell him that I will go. Say hello to your mother for me, Don Layo tells me, when he leaves me at the road. And then, again, in an inverse sense, standing in the barge being pulled, slowly, by the orange motorboat, I retrace the path, seeing how, helplessly, dark, among the children, the dogs, the smoke, the tents slip away. And then: La Guardia under water, the bridge, the city. I cross, so to speak, a fixed place that I believe, because I am traveling, will stay behind. In the galleria, Elisa, in a blue dress, sits at a table on which there are two small cups, both empty. He went back to El Rincón, she tells me. I sit down in front of one of the cups; Elisa is sitting in front of the other. They went around looking for you, with Tomatis, she says. She looks at me. She thinks, even so, that I am not Cat. I ask myself what he has to go to El Rincón for, she says. Washington is with him, I say. In the silence that follows, monotonous, the proprietor’s voice comes from behind the counter, speaking with the cashier. Héctor’s elastic face, behind his pipe, appears in the corridor of the galleria, and when he sits with us, Héctor, after thumping me twice softly on the shoulder, asks after Cat: someone, he says, told him that he saw him around here yesterday. He returned this morning. He must have come to say goodbye to me, I say. Elisa says that she must get the boys when school gets out. Héctor gives her the keys. I don’t think I’ll be able to come to the station tonight, says Elisa, standing up. I feel, for the last time, against my arid cheek, her own, smooth, fleeting when I stand and brush, as a goodbye, my left cheek against her right cheek, after having brushed, quickly, for a fraction of a second, my right cheek against her left. Héctor is watching me as I remain standing, seeing her pass through the glass door, enter the corridor, disappear among the illuminated places, thinking, imprecisely, vaguely, that it is not love that awakens nostalgia, but, more mechanically, the experience, the perception, the familiarity even with that which rejects us, going around us, inert. Now the two of us are standing in the sun, on the sidewalk, the pipe that juts out of his elastic face emitting a weak column of smoke among the people who pass and who, inattentive, must change directions to pass the part of the sidewalk we intercept with our bodies. Now, after having rejected his invitation to go to lunch, saying I have mountains of things to get done at home, after having said goodbye until tonight at the station, I cross the sunny street, make it to the other side, walk through the murmur of the city as if submerged in a transparent river, dull, continuous, in the direction of my house. Now I am in the bedroom, standing between the two beds, seeing Cat’s, slept in, and mine, made up. On my pillow there is a note: I couldn’t find you anywhere. You shouldn’t have gone to El Rincón. We were looking for you, me and Tomatis. What about the explosions? Come back soon because out there you will find nothing. Send me your address so I can write to you right away. Hugs. Cat. One more thing: Since we didn’t have enough time to pay the bill — we ate at El Tropezón — I signed your name. Don’t worry, Tomatis will drop by to take care of it. More hugs. Now I am looking at the white municipal building through the window. It is immersed, so to speak, in the blue sky. I have come this morning from El Rincón, I have been with Elisa and with Héctor in the bar in the galleria, I have walked home, I have been in the bedroom seeing Cat’s disheveled bed and my intact one, I have read the note he left for me on the pillow, and now I am standing beside the desk, looking through the window at the white municipal building that shines in the noon sun and is immersed, so to speak, in the blue sky. Chewing with difficulty, slowly, listening to my vague story about Don Layo’s family and the submerged island, without much effort, my mother, younger than her salt-and-pepper hair, which gives her the air of a mature actress made up to play an old woman on television, conceals, beneath a thin patina of resignation, a certain indifference. A kind of tiredness prevents her from showing more effusion. We are delivered from this embarrassment, suddenly, by the telephone. The maid comes to say that it is for me. I am still swallowing when I pick up the earpiece and hear Tomatis’s voice. It, he says, is sinking. It is sinking. It keeps rising. Tonight they will blow up more of the embankments. The ones who are leaving are right to go. I tell him that I have been to El Rincón to see Cat and that Cat, on the other hand, had come to eat in the city with the rest of the tramps. Tomatis laughs: he had suggested to him, he says, that I might have gone to El Rincón. Well, Pigeon, says Tomatis, for the last time: give up this absurd trip! I promise, if you do, to wash away your sins with water, so much water. Your limitations, I say, are the same as the Devil’s: temptation is your only power. The only real power, says Tomatis: the rest is pure demagoguery. He too, will be at my sendoff, that’s why he’s called, he says, tonight, at ten to twelve, at the bus station, and between the end of his sentence and the sound of the operator cutting the line, there is a silence, a vacillation, something imprecise, as if his voice, already faint, were trying fruitlessly, indecisively, to say something and not at all to rectify, to distance himself, to console himself, but simply, almost mechanically, to continue talking a bit, to fill, with a pause, the duration, which is not more than a moment, in which his voice, fragmentary, sticks, just like my mother now, just now, delaying the end of dinner, offers me dessert, an orange, a coffee, to stick something clear, precise, formal, to the unmediated duration that, if you like, is no longer than a moment but as wide, even so, as time itself. Now the two of us are standing before the steel blue light of the television, seeing the bulletin. It is rising, and will continue to rise, says the bulletin. We see soldiers evacuate, to the north, an entire village: cots, blankets, heaters, animals, children pass by, precariously, in trailers, in trucks, are outlined, in single file, on the embankments, surrounded by water, against a background of naked trees and ranches in ruins, half submerged in water. Taken from the air, we see, on the coast, a strip that clearer and almost imperceptibly more serene than the two great plains that hem it in, the breaches in the embankment, and, beside the first, almost flattened against the pavement and the rubble, a black car and two human figures. After the image fades I recognized myself, retrospectively, standing next to Héctor as he contemplates, leaning over, the water flowing from the breaches. Now they show the breaches again, empty, always from above, and the image advances, devouring the road, the water, leaving it behind, until the tips of the towers of the suspension bridge come into view, its platform, seen from above, seeming level with the water; at the mouth of the bridge, heading out slowly toward the boulevard, a black car — us — and the first houses. I get up, intercepting, for a moment, the steel blue image. Slowly I cross the anteroom, the bedroom, and I see, from the window, the steel blue image, showing, flattened, from above, beside the breaches, two human figures, Héctor and me. Then I lay down and smoke, in silence, with the ashtray on my chest as I look at, without seeing, the ceiling. Strictly speaking, I think for fifteen minutes, while I smoke, about nothing. I am, so to speak, the center, the white wall, where images undulate like flags. Now I am passing again before the flickering steel blue screen, intercepting, for a moment, with my body, my mother’s vision as she fidgets, slightly annoyed, in her seat. Standing now, fixed, I am once again looking at the white municipal building immersed, so to speak, in the blue sky. An exceptionally small man, visible only from the waist up, walks in the sun, on the terrace, half of him erased by a white wall. He leans on it a moment and looks down. It is easier, like that, at a distance, to be standing, looking down, no vertigo, no memories, with the cold wind that should be blasting up there — more so since the light has begun to fade — in bursts, on his cheeks. He is relaxed, compact against the sky. Nothing at all seems to rise, from his toes to his head, nor does there rise, toward his muscles, his skin, the unstable, continuous murmur of his entrails working, complex, in the dark. He advances, perfect, opaque, indestructible, half of a dark figure emerging from the white wall, in the terrace, and now that I turn toward my desk he disappears, becoming a new memory that I carry with me and that begins to descend, like food, toward the combustion engine of memory that chews it, mixes it, polishes it, stores it in a great mobile enclosure in which all things, though they may change size and place, remain. From the third drawer in the desk, which is open, I am taking out reams of paper, tearing them up without looking at them and dropping them into the trash. I do that for half an hour. I look out, once in a while, at the flowerpots in the narrow patio, blocked off by the yellow walls. And now once again my body is intercepting the flickering steel blue image, in the room through which afternoon advances getting colder and darker. Her arms crossed over her chest, her salt and pepper hair, too smooth and well combed and parted to seem natural, immobile and half standing in the direction of the flickering image, my mother asks, distractedly, without listening for my laconic affirmative response, if I have everything ready. Now I am adjusting the collar of my overcoat as I go slowly down the stairs. When I open the door, the homogeneous murmur of the city becomes more varied and stronger than what had been coming to me as I descended, adjusting, unhurriedly and ineffectually, the collar of my coat. Innumerable, the city embraces me. It is more than the straight, gray sidewalks I walk along, more than the shop windows, diverse and packed with things, that flank me, than the people who come walking in the opposite direction on the same sidewalk, on the opposite sidewalk, who pass beside me, brushing me lightly, who cross the street, who stand before the shop windows and the cigarette kiosks, who watch me pass from inside the bars, who pass by driving cars, more than yellow, white, gray houses, one or two stories tall, and the bus and the cars that pile up on the main streets and wait for the signal of the traffic guard, their motors running, more than the sounds, the neighborhoods, the smells, more even than the memories interwoven in a common space that, even so, is not the same one where our bodies pass, more than the empty spaces, the water that rises, slowly, surrounding it, more than the opaque material that is always before our eyes and nevertheless refracts our memory, through which I advance, moving my arms and legs as if I were swimming, with my eyes open, in an ocean of stone. In a city without memory, those who remember, in your streets, direct like destinies, erroneous, fateful, they are mistaken, I formulate, attempting, fruitlessly, to memorize it as I arrive, walking slowly, at the bus station. In your straight streets — amended — continuous like rays, erroneous, fateful, they are mistaken. I pass through garages stained with oil, passing among the great yellow and red buses. Loudspeakers blare, confused, urgent. There are mountains of suitcases around the cigarette kiosks and newsstands. I argue for some minutes, leaning in front of the hole in the ticket window and manage, at last, urged discretely by the impatient line, to change my ticket. And now I am again, the cigarette smoke mixing into the weakest, most transparent of coffees, standing in front of the counter of the bar in the galleria, with my back to the full patio on which the cold clarity of the end of the afternoon falls monotonously, and already I am going up to the cashier in green overalls, the pads of whose tidy fingers brush the palm of my hand at the moment he returns my 100 pesos change. Those who remember, I settle on, at last, listless, weak, knowing that I will forget it, in your streets, direct like destinies, erroneous, fateful, they are mistaken. And now I am again climbing the stairs of my house, getting free of my coat, intercepting again with my body, for a moment, the steel blue image that flickers in the room, even darker, perceiving again, as I pass, my mother’s white head that nods a moment, to one side, losing no time to recover the image that I have blocked. Now the suitcase and the blue bag, on the bed. I see, through the window, on the sidewalk out front, repeated six times, in two rows of three, one on top of the other, the face of a man who speaks and then of a rapid cut, also repeated six times, to another face, its head covered by a military cap. I stand for a moment to listen as I am passing from the bedroom to the library: it is a colonel informing the populace: it is rising, and will continue to rise. They are evacuating Boca del Tigre, Barranquitas. There will be more explosions. And then, mutely, the images start up: military trucks advancing, darkly, down an avenue, turning on cross streets, in a monotonous convoy that divides, coming to a corner, into two files going in opposite directions; a great expanse of water from which emerge, half covered, feeble ranches; military tents set up on an enormous fallow field, among which a few women gathered in a circle, dressed in black, speak with two soldiers; once again, in detail, moving with a regular rhythm, chewing away at the border of an embankment, which has been reinforced with sandbags, firm, placid, the water. And again, from the air, the clearest strip of road between two interminable expanses and beside the breaches in the embankment, a little closer than the black abandoned car in the middle of the road, with its doors open, two figures, irreconcilable, flattened, and immediately, also from above, the tips of the towers of the suspension bridge and its platform, from whose edge, at the entrance to the city, Héctor’s black car slowly goes out and, with some maneuvering, heads onto the boulevard. Other images accompany me spontaneously when I come, perhaps for the last time, to the desk and sit, looking out at the patio surrounded by the yellow walls and at the flowerpots whose ferns have already begun to be erased, spreading out into the twilight: the arid, white house, in the January sun, and the river, from which Cat comes spouting water, passing, narrowly, golden, toward the south; Washington talking, when the smoke from his cigarette rises in the sun, about the fundamentals of Tendai — first proposition: the world is unreal; second proposition: the world is a transitory phenomenon; third proposition, and pay attention, this is the fundamental one: the world is neither unreal nor a transitory phenomenon — close to Cat and Tomatis, against a background, fresh and flowered, of birds of paradise and laurels; and last, mobile, harmonious: Cat, freshly bathed, descending the stairs in shirtsleeves, a drop of water falling from the hair stuck to his sunburned forehead, the smell, crude and savage, of the river still impregnating his body, stronger than the soap and the summer, coming afterward, so identical to me that he waves two or three times, from one sidewalk to the other, at some men who have confused him for me, on one corner in the city where he stands, smoking. It is not, I formulate, I realize, either love, or nostalgia, or any elemental cause that calls forth these brilliant images, but rather the mystery of time, of space, its inert, dense, solid operations, purer and clearer, more real than our own weak adhesion, I formulate, like the shadow, speckled with light, of a tree over the river. More embattled, stronger, the streets, the houses, yellow and gray, walls, on the foundation of the planet, in the mornings, in the afternoons, should not leave, so to speak, a greater trace than the time they are made of, toward the outside, for no one, constant, blind, refractory, occasionally wetted by the pendulum of the rain, regularly charred by the swing to summer, now that I stand up in the darkness and go, silently, to the kitchen to watch the steam rise, in front of my mother at the other side of the table, from my bowl of soup. We hardly talk, separated by a white and green checkered tablecloth, the bread cut in two, the tureen that shines in the light of the lamp and steams, the half-full bottle of wine and two full cups, the thick white crockery plates, the meat, the pepper, the oil, the oranges, the salt. Only when I tell her that I have changed my ticket, that I will go at ten instead of at midnight, does she shake, without effusion, her salt-and-pepper head, too well-kept to seem natural, hiccup two or three times, and burst into tears. Her cry is only a couple seconds long, flushing her face and passing immediately. And now I am putting on my overcoat, adjusting the collar, picking up the bag and the suitcase, having said goodbye, slowly going down the stairs and arriving on the street just in time to see three military trucks, in a line, coming from the darkness, pass under the light at the corner, identically, slowly, and go on to be enveloped into the darkness of the next block. I think about nothing, I formulate nothing. And it is not them, on the other hand, the streets, the corners, the signs, all of which remain behind me as I walk toward the station, receding, but me, more precisely, who is erased, gradually, from these corners, these streets. The green bus waits, half empty, illuminated inside, on the platform. At the newsstand I buy La Región: It is rising and will continue to rise. Among the others there is a blurry photograph, taken from the air, of the breaches in the embankment: the great white expanses, the slightly darker strip upon which a black car is visible, its doors open, as if abandoned, and beside the breaches — an uneven fringe of arid blackness — two flattened figures, dressed in black. Just when I put my foot on the step, my right foot on the step, my left hand holding the blue bag into which I have put the paper, from far away, I hear the explosion. The glass and the metal shake, briefly, on the bus. Walking down the aisle, I pass, so to speak, through a murmur of discrete commentary, looking for my seat. There is still a vague echo of the explosion in my head. There is no memory, it is still too fresh to be more than a residue, already extremely thin, of perception. And now, the illuminated bus starts up, slowly, leaves, so to speak, because it’s me who is above, leaving behind the station, the streets of the city, like a node of lights, red, green, blue, yellow, violet, the corners, the coupled houses, monotonous, one or two stories tall, the parks crisscrossed by the darkness, the humble avenues, the neighborhoods scattered among the trees, the city that closes itself off like a sphincter, like a circle, bidding me farewell, leaving me outside, further outside of her than of my mother’s womb, and she herself further outside, with all of her men, and her memories, and the passion of all of her men that mixes together, even so, in a zone that coexists, higher up, on level with the stones. We stop, before reaching the checkpoint, behind a file of military trucks. On the other side of the avenue is the soccer stadium, and closer up, in the enormous open space that separates the stadium from the avenue, the tents erected in disorder, darker than the frozen night that envelopes them and lower than the point of the bonfires that burn, scattered, in the clearings and that form an arid, mobile circle of yellow light in the darkness. The light inside the bus goes out: someone, something contemplates, or, more accurately, looks at, or, more accurately, sees, through the cold glass, the garbage heap, the wide winter, the mute tents, the bonfires, and some anonymous shadows that move around the fire, piles of objects without names, stored in disorder, bodies, denser, like the tents, than the night, but taller, sometimes, than the flames, cross the black open air that must be impregnated with the smell of water, and in which must flutter, at times, with the sound of flames, the broken canvas of the tents and the murmur of the trucks, and the crystal of the frost and the cries of the beasts accumulated on the narrow fringes of the still-firm earth. We start up. The second explosion goes off. I enter Boca del Tigre.

1. Tango Cambalache (Junkshop Tango), 1935