— I saw myself in the street, twice, I said.
— Don’t go egomaniacal, Ángel, said Tomatis, uninterested. Then he started typing.
The third time he didn’t see me, and I was able to follow him for two blocks. It was during Carnival. A million people were lined up watching the murgas and the masquerades, and the guy was standing on the edge of the sidewalk, trying to cross the street. I was moving through the crowd, looking to write a fluff piece about the parade, for some extra cash, and I saw him from the opposite sidewalk, just as he started crossing toward me. I was blown away seeing him there, a cigarette pressed between his teeth, his head lifted, his eyes narrowed to keep the smoke from bothering him. My heart started pounding — he was walking straight at me. But he didn’t stop, and he didn’t seem to see me, but he passed so close that his shoulder rubbed against mine. I froze up when he touched me. Something turned over in my stomach. He looked so much like me — he had on a discolored blue shirt and white pants, exactly like the ones I was wearing — that on his right arm, exposed through his short-sleeved shirt, I even saw a white scar that was identical to mine, a long, whitish stain that the summer sun hadn’t been able to tan. I followed him. It was easy, at first, because he was walking against the wall and everyone else was pressed up to the edge of the sidewalk to get a better view of the parade, leaving a path open between the wall and the crowd. Less than ten meters separated us. He stopped suddenly because a water balloon flew past, exploded against a shop window, and splashed him. Instinctively, I brought my hand to my face to wipe off the drops. The guy took a handkerchief from his back pocket and dried his face and part of his head, then put the handkerchief away. I watched him and started following again when he walked on. Just above the right back pocket of his pants I could see two dark stains and realized they were ink stains I had made, a few months back, putting a pen away in the back right pocket of the pants I was wearing. He crossed the street and I followed him. On the next block I decided to speed up so I could talk to him — I had no idea what to say, but I wanted to talk to him — and I had already cut in half the distance between us when suddenly something blinded me. I felt a torrent of water — like a million liters — hitting me in the face. For half a minute I didn’t know if I was on San Martín or at the bottom of the Pacific, and when I opened my eyes I saw this shitty little brat looking at me from a doorway with an empty bucket in his hands, and when he saw my face — Mr. Hyde probably would have looked like Shirley Temple next to me just then — he took off into the house. When I dried my face off and looked up, the guy was gone.
I took a mental note of the address of the house, thinking the Vampire of Düsseldorf might want to pay a visit, and then I went home. I saw my double again in mid-April, but I couldn’t follow him because, just as I was catching up to him, crossing the street, a truck almost ran me over. And, in any case, I was sure I wouldn’t catch him.
On May second, before getting up, I thought about all of this. I wondered if seeing my double several times in the street, and once wearing the double of my discolored blue shirt and the double of my white pants with two ink stains on the back right pocket, wasn’t some feverish hallucination caused by the insane February sun roasting my skull. Because it had been a crazy summer. House roofs were cracking, and the walls had to be mopped up to dry the water pouring in. Millions of mosquitos were devouring anyone who went down to the riverbank to play sports — they lined all the jocks up along a wall and opened up the machine gun on them — and the pavement had turned black with the beetles that crashed against the streetlights and fell to the street with their wings broken. By January, the trees were surrounded by piles of charred leaves, and anyone who spent more than an hour in the sun would spontaneously combust. But I was sure it was real, because he had bumped into me the night of the parade. I was sure he existed. So I pictured him existing in a small world, like mine. Our worlds never overlapped, except through some unlikely accident that occurred three times. His world and mine, limited as they were, ran together if they approached each other, and his realm of experience was unknown to me, but familiar. I knew that the things that could happen to him in his world could be different from what happened to me in mine, but they were still similar. And if they seemed identical — if he looked at the back of his hand on April seventh at ten thirty-five in the morning, for example, at exactly the same moment as I was doing exactly that — they were, nevertheless, different things. Maybe he was following me in his world, along a duplicate and inverted path that I had mistakenly wandered onto the same night of carnival, when I was following him in my world. Or maybe we lived different lives. One thing I was sure of: our spheres — our worlds — were closed and only touched by accident. It could also be that everything has a double: Tomatis, Gloria, my mother, my notebook, my weather report, the La Región newspaper, Ernesto’s illuminated block where Shönberg’s Violin Concerto plays. If that was true, something different had to happen in the other world, because an exact replica seemed absurd and deranged to me, especially because it threatened to multiply indefinitely. There couldn’t be an identical bed repeated to infinity in which a guy like me, also repeated to infinity, thought about the possibility of the bed and the guy being repeated to infinity. That kind of thing was crazy. But when I got up I thought that it was just as crazy for there to be only one bed and one guy, and that the only horrifying thing about the double was the possibility that he was living a life I couldn’t. So I took a hot shower and went to the courthouse.
Ramírez said all the rain was caused by sun spots, which in turn had been caused by the atomic bombs. I said that the sun spots and the atomic bombs must have been what caused the coffee in the press office to taste like ass, and Ramírez laughed as best he could, but didn’t manage to hide the infamous, brown sierras that were all that was left of his rotten teeth. Then I went to Ernesto’s office and asked for him. The secretary told me that the judge was in a meeting. I told him to say that the La Región reporter was here and ask when the inquest we’d talked about would be. The secretary came back immediately.
— The judge says tomorrow at four, because he has to interview the witnesses first, he said.
So I went back to the paper. I typed out the courthouse report that Ramírez had given me on transparent paper, submitted the headline for the weather report—No Change in Sight—and then went to lunch. I didn’t see any sign of Tomatis in the office, but when I went to the administration to pick up my check, they told me that Tomatis had been in that morning to pick up his check and then had gone off who knows where. When I got back, Tomatis was opening correspondence addressed to the “Director of the Literary Page.”
— Regrettably, everyone in the world has feelings, he said. Because of this, everyone makes literature.
— I know a guy who doesn’t have feelings but still makes literature, I said.
— Must be a great writer, said Tomatis.
— He writes with his dick, I said. He dips it in ink and writes like that.
— Those must be some broad strokes — his penmanship I mean, said Tomatis.
— I don’t know, I said. I never saw the originals.
— Gloria says hi, said Tomatis. She said she’s going to call you up some afternoon to play poker and then invite you to dinner with her winnings. And she said you shouldn’t have stepped on her underwear and that she was just waiting for you to pull back the covers so she could slap you.