‘Maybe that’s what we did,’ Emilia says. ‘Maybe we were just figures on a map that he and the comandantes were drawing, and everyone on that map got lost. There’s nothing more disorienting than falling into a map and not knowing where you are.’
‘The writer with the slate who paced the corridors told us that twice he had disappeared inside a map. The first time was in Japan, he said, just after the war. He was supposed to be coming back from Nagasaki to Buenos Aires, he’d got his ticket, but he had barely any money. He was desperate. He spent his last yen on the taxi that took him to the airport. Bad luck always comes at the worst possible time, and that was what happened to him. There was torrential rain and all the flights were cancelled. If the writer didn’t make it to Tokyo that night, he would miss the weekly connecting flight to Buenos Aires. He didn’t speak a word of Japanese, didn’t have a penny to his name, as I said, he had no idea how to ask for food or shelter. He was worse than a beggar, he was a man without a language. Someone working for the airline took pity on him and gave him a ticket to Hakata train station. In nearby Fukuoka he would be able to take a flight to Tokyo and all his problems would be over. Miming, he asked how many stops it was to Hakata. Six stops, the attendant told him. To confirm it, he held up six fingers. The writer got on the train, saw an empty seat and rushed over to take it. All around him were other passengers relaxing in comfortable berths. The conductor offered him a white dressing gown, but he refused, he was afraid he might have to pay for it. Everyone else had a dressing gown, and he felt ashamed to be the only one not wearing one. Before the first stop, he saw some of his fellow passengers eating balls of rice they dipped into a dark sauce. The writer was famished but to calm himself he tried to think about something else. As he fell asleep, he began to repeat the only word that mattered to him: Hakata. Hakata-ga? Hakata-wa? One of the other passengers scornfully held up five fingers. He felt reassured, since this confirmed that after the first stop, he had to wait five more stops. He leaned his head against the window and fell fast asleep. He woke up in the middle of the night. Rain was lashing at the windows, as though the skies had been ripped open. The mountains in the distance were framed by moonlight, and next to the trackers, peasants were harvesting rice. He could not imagine where he had strayed on the map. He didn’t dare to think what would happen when the conductor forced him to get off the train. He resigned himself to spending the rest of his life in the paddy fields with people he would never understand. Eventually, the train stopped. He could not work out the name of the station, because the signs were all in Japanese ideograms. “Hakata?” he asked the neighbour who had previously held up five fingers. “Hakata-ga, Hakata-ka,” the man replied. He unfolded a map and pointed to a huge icon which meant nothing to the writer. It looked like a box raised on a pair of legs. “Hakata,” the passenger said again. He opened a secret door in the icon, winked at the writer and gestured for him to go in. The writer thanked him and entered. On the other side, it was daytime. A brilliant sun blazed in the sky. In front of him he saw a little station which looked just like the icon he had just come through. Two soldiers stopped him. They were talking to each other in a language that was not Japanese. It sounded more like Hebrew or Arabic. The writer spoke to them in English and, to his surprise, they understood. “Where am I?” he asked. “You are at the Mandelbaum Gate, on the border,” they said. “If you want to cross, you have to show your passport.” The writer had his passport with him, he also seemed to have his suitcase, his umbrella and the books he had brought with him. “Hakata?” he asked fearfully, showing them the passport. The soldiers stamped it and pointed to a long track. “No-man’s-land,” said one of them. “Hakata no-man’s-land,” the writer repeated, satisfied. He walked along the track between pebbles, twisted metal, rusted fences and the skeletal remains of useless tanks. In the distance, he could make out the minarets of a mosque, could hear the chanting of the muezzin. He didn’t know which side of the border he was on, and he didn’t care. “Hakata?” he said aloud to cheer himself. To the right of the path, unseen by anyone, on a ruined wall, was a huge map of the city of Jerusalem: the Jerusalem of Ptolemy, the centre of the world. Above the map was the Japanese ideogram he had never been able to understand. He was amazed and heard himself exclaim: “Hakata!” A door opened in the map and, unable to resist, he popped his head through to see whether it was night-time on the other side. He hoped that by going through the door he might find himself back on the train, get to Hakata and catch the plane to Buenos Aires. “In a sense, I was right,” the writer said, “because I wound up in the old folks’ home and now I can’t leave here. Sometimes I try to draw the Japanese map on the slate. It never works, I end up drawing islands, countries even, I don’t recognise.” I asked him to show me the drawings,’ says Simón, ‘and he set me in front of the blank slate. I told him there wasn’t a single mark on the slate and he told me that it was his finest drawing: an island that disappeared as soon as it found a place in space. That’s what I’m trying to do too,’ Simón goes on. ‘I copy the island, carefully reproduce every line, every curve, but nothing happens. Sometimes I draw the sea around it, put a compass in the corner so it can find its place in space, and when I look again, the island is where it always was.’
‘Your island is just a metaphor,’ says Emilia. ‘But the man with the slate, on the other hand, managed to make his maps a metamorphosis. In fact, now that I think of it, the man himself must have been a moving metamorphosis. He escaped along the tangent, allowed himself to be enveloped by his eternal noon. The man who left Nagasaki was not the same man who boarded the train to Hakata or the one who crossed the Mandelbaum Gate — which, as you know, doesn’t exist any more, and hasn’t since the Six Day War in 1967 — or the man you met in the old people’s home. You were lucky to run into him there. It could have been anywhere, or nowhere. At least you met one person you could talk to about maps. I’m surrounded by cartographers and I’ve never had a conversation like the one you had that night.’
The doorbell rings insistently. Unhurriedly, Emilia goes downstairs and pays for the food. She sets the table and warms the sake. She reminds herself that she should barely pick at the food — the steam from the rice has already made her aroused and she does not want Simón to see her as an oversexed animal. ‘What happened to you in the old people’s home is like what happened to me in my dreams,’ she says. ‘I saw places that no longer exist, people who disappeared the moment I tried to slip inside them. I saw cities shift onto maps that had not yet been drawn. The seasons passed quickly in my dreams; winter at night was spring by morning, summer became autumn or west became south. Why don’t we eat, amor?’
‘Let’s eat later, let’s eat tomorrow,’ says Simón. ‘Right now, let’s just go to bed.’
Emilia once more feels like the smitten girl who listened to ‘Muchacha ojos de papel’, who walked the streets of Buenos Aires with Simón’s hand in hers; she feels a great tenderness burst inside her, a door opening in a Japanese ideogram; she says something that she did not believe herself capable of, in a voice that comes from some other body, some other memory: ‘Fuck me, Simón. What are you waiting for? Fuck me.’