‘That’s impossible,’ said the woman leaning against the French door, ‘because then it would seem stationary in the sky. And something that seems stationary can’t leave a trail on the sea or in the sky, anywhere.’ Since this seemed illogical but plausible, several of us agreed with her. What we couldn’t agree on was the size.
‘The size of the moon,’ said the woman in the light-coloured armchair.
‘Of a very small star,’ said the man who was putting on the tape of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and he added that it could only be distinguished from the star by its tail. And how long was the tail? The questions never stopped.
‘My grandfather told us he’d seen it,’ said the man smoking a pipe. ‘He was in the courtyard, sitting on a three-legged stool’ (I thought the stool was an aleatory detail and I immediately decided that his testimony was suspect) ‘and the comet went by, neither very slow nor very fast, like a scarf made out of light. No: like a scarf made out of air that was also light, I think he said.’ But, of course, this piece of information was simply too unreliable: given the age of the man with the pipe, his grandfather must have died long ago. Even if he hadn’t made the story up (as the detail of the stool led one to suppose), who could swear that the grandson remembered the words exactly? And would he have been able to tell what was false from what was true? In fact, he had repeated the thing about the stool without lending the superfluous detail the slightest touch of irony.
But why were we to care what that grandfather saw? We had no need for grandfathers; our turn had come at last: it would cross the skies of our time. And we felt fortunate in those unfortunate days just being alive, still able to move around happily, still able to wait happily on the night of the comet.
Actually, that whole year had been the year of the comet, but since the previous week everyone’s hopes had run wild. The newspapers predicted glorious events: this time it would pass closer to the Earth than at the beginning of the century; it would look mainly red; it would look mainly white but would be dragging an orange tail; it would have the apparent size of a small melon, the length of a common snake; it would cover seventy percent of the visible sky. This last possibility intrigued us the most.
‘What do they mean, seventy percent of the sky?’ asked the woman drinking coffee.
‘But then almost the whole sky will be the comet,’ said the man who had come with his girlfriend.
‘Night will become day’ (the woman lighting the cigarette).
‘Better than day’ (the man with the pillow on the floor) ‘as if the moon, with all its reflected light, were barely a hundred metres from the Earth. Low down, in a corner, one sees the black night sky, but all the rest is Moon. Can you imagine? Solid Moon.’ There was a silence, as if we were all trying to imagine a sky of solid Moon.
‘And how long will it stay like that?’ (the man with his eyes glued on the woman who came alone).
‘The comet is constantly moving. It will move on and the strip of darkness will become wider and wider until there’s only a thin thread, a thin thread of light on the horizon that will then disappear and it will be night again.’ I felt a sort of sadness; I had only just realised that this thing which had once seemed out of my reach — like the boiling oil thrown by the women of Buenos Aires on the invading English troops in the mid-eighteenth century, or the Firpo-Dempsey match — was not only about to take place; it would also come to an end.
‘But how fast will it disappear?’ No one knew.
The woman with her back against one of the men’s knees hit herself on the forehead: ‘Now that I think about it, no,’ she said, ‘it can’t be the width. The comet will take up seventy percent of the length. Don’t you see? The tail. It’s the tail that will take up seventy percent. Like a rainbow going from here to there’ (she drew a vast segment of a circle with her extended arm) ‘but ending before it reaches the horizon.’ She thought for a moment. ‘At a distance of thirty percent,’ she added, with a touch of scientific rigor.
That wasn’t bad, though I still preferred the vast Moon unfolded a hundred metres from Earth. And at what speed would that great arch of light cross the sky? That question — and many others — remained unanswered.
But we didn’t feel uneasy. Uneasy we had felt at the beginning of the week, when the papers announced that the comet was already over the world. We had always imagined that we’d rush out into the street to greet its arrival. ‘Here it comes, here comes the comet!’ But none of that happened. We looked up into the sky and saw nothing.
There were those with telescopes, of course. Those with telescopes made calculations and drew up schedules and strategic points. It seems that the brother-in-law of the woman caressing one of the men’s ears, after consulting several manuals, had found the very best optical conditions: on the balcony of one of his cousins at 3:25 Wednesday morning with a telescope aimed at 40 degrees off the constellation of Centaurus.
‘But your brother-in-law, did he actually see it?’ we asked at the same time, as both the man and I played with the cat.
‘He says he thinks he saw it,’ was the cautious answer.
We had heard of some people who had travelled to Chascomus or to a place somewhere between San Miguel del Monte and Las Flores, or of others who had hurried to Tandil, to a small hill close to the Moving Rock. But as we had not had the chance to talk to any of them, we didn’t know whether these peregrinations had been fruitful. Through adverts in the newspapers we knew that several kinds of charters had been organised, from a jet flight to San Martin de los Andes that included champagne dinner, diplomatic suite, sauna and full American breakfast, to bus tours to several suburban areas, a few with traditional barbecue and guitar music under the comet’s light. We didn’t know what the results had been. But three very precise lines in a Thursday paper made us dismiss all those telescopes and nocturnal ramblings. And that’s how it had to be. Because what we had always dreamt of, what we truly wished for, was simply to look up and see it. And that, the three lines in the paper said, would become possible on Friday night once it was completely dark; then the comet would come closer to Earth than ever before. Then, and only then, might it be seen as those men in boaters and those women in hats had seen it, as the grandfather on his three-legged stool and the bewitched family in my reader had seen it. Right here, by the river, on the Costanera Sur. And, in honour of that unique moment for which we had longed since our days of reading adventure stories and which, with luck, would repeat itself for our children’s grandchildren, this Friday night, all the lights of the Costanera would be switched off.
That was the reason that waiting in this house in San Telmo, among lamps and stools, was something of a vigil. Every so often someone would go out onto the balcony to see whether it was already dark.
‘No use going earlier’ (the woman drinking white wine). ‘We wouldn’t see anything in the light.’
And the man on the balcony: ‘No, it’s not because of the light, it’s because it won’t come over the horizon until it’s dark. That’s what the paper says.’
But at what time exactly? We didn’t know that either. Darkness isn’t something that falls over the world for an instant. True. But there comes a moment when, suddenly looking out at the street, one can say, ‘It’s night already.’ This was said by the man eating peanuts, and we all went out onto the balcony to check.
On the way to the Costanera we said very little. We were crossing Azopardo when the man nearest to the sidewalk asked, ‘You think it’s appeared already?’