“It’s done, kid,” he said to Burgos; “tonight we’re having barbecued fish for dinner.” Everyone broke out in loud laughter, and for the first time in a long time Burgos felt the respect and the comradeship of the men.
Macedonio was always gathering strange stories. Even when he was a treasurer in the Province of Misiones, he was already compiling anecdotes and stories. “Stories have simple hearts, just like women. Or men. But I prefer to say women,” Macedonio would say, “because it makes me think of Scheherazade.” It was not until much later, Junior thought, that they understood what he was trying to say. Around that time Macedonio had lost his wife, Elena Obieta, and everything that Macedonio did since then (and especially the machine) was meant to make her seem present. She was the Eternal One, the river of stories, the endless voice that kept memory alive. He never accepted the fact that he had lost her. In this he was like Dante. And, like Dante, he built a world in which he could live with her. The machine was that world, it was his masterpiece. He got her out of nowhere and kept her covered with a blanket on the floor of a closet in the room of a boardinghouse around Tribunales, near the courthouse. The system was simple, he had hit on it by accident. When it transformed “William Wilson” into the story of Stephen Stevensen, Macedonio realized that he had the basic elements from which he could build a virtual reality. So he began working with series and variables. First he thought about the English railroads and the reading of novels. The genre grew in the nineteenth century, it was tied in with the mode of transportation. That is why so many stories take place on trains. People liked to read stories about a train while they rode aboard a train. In Argentina, the first train ride in a novel is clearly found in the work of Cambaceres.
In one of the rooms of the Museum Junior saw the train car in which Erdosain had killed himself. It was dark green, bloodstains could be seen on one of the leather seats, the windows were open. In the other room he saw the photograph of a train car that belonged to the old Ferrocarril Central Argentino. That was the car in which the woman who fled at dawn traveled. Junior imagined her nodding off in her seat, the train cutting through the darkness of the country, all its windows lit up. That was one of the first stories.
A WOMAN
She had a two-year-old son but decided to abandon him. She tied him with a long belt to a hoop on the ceiling and left him crawling around in the room on a waterproof rug. She took the precaution of moving the furniture and piling it up against the walls, far from the child’s reach, so it would be like an empty room. She wrote a note to the cleaning woman, telling her she had gone out to run an errand. It was seven in the morning. The moment her husband drove off to work in his car, she called a taxi and took the first long-distance train out of Retiro Station. The next day she was in a small town on the border of the Province of San Luis. In the hotel she signed in under her mother’s name (Lía Matra). She spent the day sleeping and at night went down to gamble in the casino. The roulette was like the face of fortune. The men and women in the hall went there looking for answers, each in an isolated microscopic universe. (Those funereal croupiers, she thought, she would have liked to take one of them to bed with her.) It was a poor casino, with light-blue carpeting. She imagined that Hell must have the same decor. A half empty and poorly lit room, with an “electric” blue moquette. The men wore jackets, the women looked like retired bar girls. A cloud of insects buzzing around an artificial replica of passion and life. The woman thought of days or months and played them in progression and always won. When the casino closed they gave her the money she had won in a paper bag. She had to cross a plaza in order to get back to the hotel. There was a statue, benches, a garbage can chained to a tree. She was going to call home and let them know she had left. The woman hides the bag with the money in the bushes. The town is empty, a light shines in the distance where the old train station used to be. The woman crosses the street, goes up to her room, and only then decides to unpack her suitcase. She hangs her clothes up in the closet, arranges her bottles and creams in the cabinet in the restroom, closes the windows so the daylight will not come in. Calls down to the front desk, asks not to be disturbed, then kills herself.
The room in which the woman committed suicide was reproduced in the Museum. Junior saw the picture of the son against the lamp on the night table. He did not remember this detail from the story. The series of hotel rooms was reproduced in successive halls. The boardinghouse in which an old man sat on a wicker chair and plucked at a guitar through the night. The washbasin on the iron base in which a German soldier’s lover had washed her hair. Junior saw the hotel room from Cuernavaca, the bed surrounded by a mosquito netting and a bottle of tequila. In another hall to the side was the room from the Majestic and the armoire in which the woman had looked for the bottle of perfume. He was astonished by the precision of the reconstruction. It seemed like a dream. But dreams were false stories. And these were true stories. Each one isolated in a corner of the Museum, building the story of their lives. Everything was as it should be. Military uniforms in tall glass cases, Moreira’s long dagger on a black velvet pillow, the photograph of a laboratory in one of the islands of the Tigre Delta. The stories were developed from these objects. They were crisp and clear as memories. The last room contained the mirror, and in the mirror was the first love story.