After the shower, I gathered my passport and address book, and lined up my shirts monastically in my suitcase. My edited conference papers I discarded in the metal wastebasket next to the desk; then I retrieved them and tore them into strips, arranged them in the bathroom sink, turned on the fan, and burned them. The greasy, sour smoke made me gasp, and these gasps resurrected my bodily pain. I coughed up fine-misted blood. Blood soaked the dressing in my molar hole, soaked and colored it completely. The smoke cloud lingered, quivered, above the sink. I closed the door to conceal it, as one might tenderly close a door to contain a tender odor. It nonetheless leaked autumnally into my room as I packed my socks and my books. Chulkov’s General Theory and the Apukhtin crushed my shirt collars, and then suitcase darkness crushed them, gravity crushed the closed suitcase, and God (who does not exist) crushed everything else.
I found Violeta in the living room, pouring water into the vase with two lilac stems, and told her I wanted to settle up. She led me to a small room off the kitchen, its door locked with two locks, and, at a narrow-legged black desk, using a black calculator that spat out white paper, she totaled my bill. It was much less than what it should have been, given her nightly rates. Perhaps her sense of dignity as a hotelier prevented her asking full price from a guest who had been arrested and beaten by the University police. We shook hands, hers still warm, still strong, and she asked if I intended to fly out that day. Yes, I said. I cannot recommend that, Mr. Pasternak, she answered, and then added that the airport was closed. For how long, I asked. Until tomorrow afternoon, most likely, she said, they made the announcement while you were asleep. My suitcase creaked, and with it my lungs. I asked when the next bus to Retiro Station left. A much better choice, Mr. Pasternak, she said, they mentioned nothing about trains. I knew where I wanted to go, to Chile, to Ana’s homeland. Getting there was simple. The Belgrano line took you right over the border. And there I could dig up her father — he lived, I remembered, in Antofagasta, once a copper-mining town — and contact the police of Chile, famous through the contemporary southern world for their incorruptibility. Yes, I would announce, I would announce her death… the term sickened me, but no other, nonperiphrastic term for death exists. Ana was dead, I assumed. I had already wept for her. And we never gave in to domestic theatrics. Reporting her death to any authority here was useless. But she retained Chilean citizenship, that I knew, and perhaps her onetime state might care enough — or at least despise its neighbor enough — to take notice.
On the bus to Retiro, the conductor looked at me over his shoulder. I saw his pitted cheeks and convict’s stubble. Isn’t everything possible, in the end? Even the black spire of Retiro station is possible. Only that spire is possible. Gallery lights, sulfur-yellow, poured forth from the upper facade. Students and pseudostudents leaned against the casemented bulwark facing Ramos Mejía. Around their necks nylon collars: black, green, blue-and-white checked, red, a few tangerine. Attached to the collars tin tags shaped like crossbones. These chimed at each student gesture, each student breath. In their numbers the tags could be heard above the taxis, the bass blares of bus horns. Two sets of steel bowls sat before the north and south entrance arches, in which marble-lit darkness gathered. Slicing this darkness: arms and legs. I kept my gaze on the dim cement as I crossed the pavement skirt and inhaled the powerful student smell — sweat, soap, and smoke. My raw eyebrows hurt and my bruises ached; I paused over each garbage can to empty my mouth of bloody spittle. But the security officers didn’t notice me, their sky-blue limbs went on slicing up facticities and shards. Despite their presence, the station appeared to be open and functional.
Within, the student smell overpowered the last remnants of coagulated blood in my nose and pharynx. Here they leaned against the walls, sat on the floor. Their shadows flickered near the short corridors leading to the restrooms. At the doors of shops, near the electronic ticket kiosks, and outside the currency exchange they formed knots of five and six and held empty metal bowls up to passersby, who threw change and paper money into them. The security officers did nothing to dislodge them. The students pulled out apitos, referee whistles, or small dog-shaped plastic toys (you pressed your lips to their tails) and blew short, shrill notes to greet each officer as he or she passed. Other whistle-bearing students heard and responded. The blasts propagated themselves through the shallow nave of the original station building, which dates to the presidency of Victorino de la Plaza. The officers smiled faintly at the whistlers and passed onward; as I was spitting blood into a trash can the owner of a cart selling fried meat slabs tapped an officer’s shoulder, begged her to intervene. These fucking kids are driving me crazy, ma’am, he said. But she jerked away from his touch. The meat vendor suffered so-called state paralysis. Cartographic grease stains enriched his apron.
To reach the platform from which the Belgrano-line trains departed, I had to pass through the stone building pierced with whistles. All the stores and even the food-sellers had set out meat and water bowls. The disappointed fried-meat vendor was, in fact, beginning to lay fresh slabs down and to pour fresh water from a plastic bottle. He knelt by his bowls, head lowered, eyes almost shut. The vast doors leading to the platforms flamed up before me, filled with sunset, orange, reddish, umber — in general furnace-like. A raft of trains was boarding: the announcements rippled through and over each other, trains for Coronel Pringles, Mendoza, Tucumán. The granular human flow ramified. The students stayed where they were against walls and near doors. Security officers continued to amble and pace. My train was not due for another forty-six minutes.
Other travelers loped alongside me, hushed and polite, gazing at the dark floor tiles (as if measuring distances). As I (we) neared the doors, as the curved glass roofs above the platforms gleamed and the rail yards extended their extensibility, the stream thickened and hardened, slowed. Our progress stopped. The segmented glass glowed, in a chitinous fashion. Security officers trotted from traveler to traveler, asking soft-voiced questions. They followed no visible pattern, moving as the winds of the state blew them and wearing their blinding smiles. Dental smiles. No other kind is known to taxonomic science. A male officer leaned in to ask a woman in an indigo dress with white flowers standing near me: Is your destination domestic or foreign? She answered domestic, and the officer touched her elbow. The woman sped off, toward a widening group gathered near a newspaper kiosk. The officer’s nameplate read TUCHOLSKY. His face was long and ended in a roundish vertex like a rat’s. I readied myself for his question. But he did not ask it. He showed me his upper teeth — hypertrophied, again like a rat’s — and drifted away.
Tendrils budded from the domestic train group. The tendrils became thick trunks of their own. A vegetal process took place in metaphor. Also reality. Each trunk was a line; each line formed, I saw, according to destination: Coronel Pringles, Mendoza, Tucumán. At the head of each line an officer in sky blue. The travelers leaving Argentina were far fewer in number. I was one, an old man skillfully peeling an orange with his thumb — the rind came away in a single unbroken skein — was another, and a young family, all short, wide-shouldered, and black-haired, mother, father, and daughters, formed the third and last group. The security officer who took my initial information (her name plaque read MAUTHNER) handed me off to another officer (GIEHSE). Giehse wanted to know my destination country. I told her Chile. She held my passport up, to compare my photo with my face, and asked me what had happened. I answered with a brief lie. Two guys had beaten me up in Balvanera because they thought I was looking at their girlfriends, I said. I don’t blame you for leaving town, Giehse answered. I asked what the next step was, and if she thought I would make the next train. That is not up to me, Mr. Pasternak, said Giehse, you’ll have to speak to our exit visa section administrator. She pointed her impeccable finger (the sunset blazed through it) toward the far end of the concrete platform where the passengers would wait to embark. It was completely empty except for a line of brown notice boards and a sky-blue hexagonal shed at the northwestern tip.