The old man kept his eyes on his orange and the squat family glanced downward as I passed. They were bound for Bolivia, that’s what the wife told the officer questioning them, her voice low and measured. I looked behind me, at the everyday void, in which Giehse stood. I took one step back, then another, a third. I’d almost passed her, I was close enough to smell her grassy perfume, when she gripped my upper arm. Is there some problem, Mr. Pasternak, asked Giehse. I said that there was no problem, just that I thought I had forgotten my razor back at my hotel. And which hotel was that, said Giehse. La Veneziana, I said, I always stay there. I know the hotel, said Giehse, it’s a quality establishment. You don’t need to worry, you can let them know you left something and they’ll send it along to Chile. A line of officers now divided this section of the station from the central hall, questioning and directing departing passengers to the appropriate group, and the domestic travelers’ conclave knotted, swelled, darkened. I envied them and their Coronel Pringles, I envied them and their Tucumán. Mr. Pasternak, said Giehse, I’m afraid once you’ve reached this point you have to continue, otherwise we’ll need to process you all over again and you’ll miss your train. Her fingertips rustled against my windbreaker. Yes, the tones, the suave tones. I didn’t move. I watched the domestic travelers. Mr. Pasternak, said Giehse, is there some issue you’d like to tell me about?
I turned to face the blue shed, and Giehse released my arm. You have nothing to worry about vis-à-vis your possessions, Mr. Pasternak, she said as I walked, continuing past her into the warming emptiness. The metal and glass vaults covered most of this platform, but my destination lay on the exposed section, at the extreme end. I was the only traveler on the Belgrano line, it seemed; no one had been processed before me. My footsteps scraped against the porous, faintly blue concrete of the platform. The sun fragmented on the shining roofs of the shantytown spreading eastward from the bus parking lot across Mugica, spreading and taking root beneath the Arturo Illia overpass. Radios and speakers blared there as well, but not the strains of the Dog Symphony, I noted: soccer announcers, droning old songs from Mexico, advertisements for soap and the lottery. This mild cacophony went unheard by any security officers. None stood with me on the platform. The Department knew none would be required, that all the travelers would conduct themselves like obedient lackeys from that point onward; they would march across the concrete, enter the dark shed, and kneel (even if they remained standing).
I made my way toward the blue kiosk. At first it looked empty, so I dawdled, I watched the other travelers, I smelled the air — lilac, iron, and rotting trash — and I listened to the creaking of my suitcase. The kiosk was not empty. A human or allegedly human figure stood within, perfectly motionless and erect. A stooped man, I saw, wearing a white shirt, the collars and cuffs grayed by clerical grime. His clean naked scalp, ivory with age, defied the whiteness of the shirt as well; his hexagon within the kiosk was empty except for his wheeled stool and a sky-blue safe the size of a North American mailbox. I approached him, suitcase sighing (like the breath in my lungs). I crossed the wooden threshold (also sky blue). He asked for my passport, and his molars flashed.
As the security officer had done before him, he held it up, looked from it to my face, looked from the digestive pupil of the state to the digestive octagon, and then said: You look like you’ve lost weight, Mr. Pasternak. He asked me my destination, and after I told him, he asked why on earth I wanted to go to Chile. A smile, as ivory as his pate, appeared as I babbled out an answer in earnest: I had always wanted to see the famous town Antofagasta, I said, due to my great amateur interest in copper mining, the town’s historical industry. Sweat burned in my scabbed eyebrows, and the clerk released a dusty laugh or curt belch. You do not strike me as the type to be interested in historical main industries, said the clerk. I assured him I was, that while I had come to Buenos Aires for a conference I had a strong personal interest in all historical industries, especially copper mining. The clerk stroked his sternum (above the heart) with a placatory hand, which resembled an inflated sterile glove. I started to assure him again that I was a lover of industry, but he interrupted me: One moment, Mr. Pasternak.
He turned and opened the safe with three deft movements of his swollen hand and tossed my passport into the thick darkness it contained. I objected, but the clerk repeated his injunction: One moment, sir. He shut the safe. On the wooden lip that served as his clerical counter were two objects, a (sky-blue) telephone and a dense-looking registry (bound in sky-blue leather). Each page frail enough to mildly transluce as he turned it with a licked, leaden finger. Human voices rose and fell in the warm, scented evening. No train had yet arrived but this did not disturb the general, jovial calm of the other travelers, those standing on the platforms to the west, beyond the clerical hexagon containing Pasternak and dust motes. Here too the Department had placed no barriers to burgher behavior. Here too they counted on innate lackeyism to keep travelers from deviating, from violating procedure. And the insult, well, it pierced me more and more, crushed and insulted me more and more. I was swaying, now, my eyes on the endless kiosk floor tiling, my pupils twitching as they counted off: one, two, three.
The clerk finished leafing through the registry. He glanced up at me and fell into a swift, azure silence, an azure silence in which he glanced at the sky-blue phone on the lip of his kiosk. Stay where you are, please, he said in his dry, precise voice, I will return your document once we have finished here. You understand that I need to contact my superiors, said the clerk. And the void glared from his mouth, cloaking his molars. The clerk cried out in pleasure as he located the entry in the register he had been seeking. His grayish hand settled on the blue, curved receiver. He lifted it, showing me once more his vacuous, mephitically twinkling mouth.
In the filthy tunnels of memory, to my eternal guilt, I recalled that Ana was dead, gone from this life, gone at the hands of, gone at the mustache of. I recalled this only then despite earlier claims, only then, only now, now, now. Only as that black-mouthed clerk fondled the receiver. I rushed up to the waist-high partition between us and drove my fist into that starry nothing.
The clerk’s teeth tore open the sticky, serpentine wound across my knuckles left by a baton blow. His shoulders and head collided with the rear kiosk wall; he himself, or his soul, or his colon whined. I struggled over the wooden lip, I entered the choked hexagon within the kiosk, and I kicked the supine clerk in the face, I kicked him once, twice, three times, four, five. Each blow revived my bodily pain, each blow sent sweat stingingly into my open brows. The clerk piped whistling cries as sleep or shock dragged him down. He was old, but I do not apologize. He had the immortal Department as a conceptual parent, and a Department voice now spoke through the fallen receiver: Hello? Hello? Blood from the clerk’s mouth smudged my wingtip, and a gold incisor lay on the blank floor tile.