“They call it the Bar of the Lost Souls,” Arana explained.
Elena found a place at the bar. She wanted a beer. The bartender smiled. Perhaps they had already given her the injection. Imaginary landscapes had been fully explored by Doctor Arana. Reality was made up of personal visions. The Clinic was the inner city and each person saw what they wanted to. No one seemed to have their own personal memories. The bartender treated her as if she were a friend of his. In the mirror, Elena saw her mother’s face in her house in Olavarría. Everyone was an addict, submerged in their own deliriums and ghettos, using their own personal hermetic metaphors. The guy next to her at the bar introduced himself by raising his glass.
“My name is Luca Lombardo,” he said. “I’m from Rosario, they call me the Tano, they locked me up here for my own protection. What took place in the province of Santa Fe is a tragedy, they killed children, women, the men had to show the palms of their hands and if they saw that they were laborers they’d shoot them right there on the spot. The only thing left is the desert and the river. Many escaped to the islands and are living in the middle of the tall bamboo plants. They live like Indians, in the Lechiguanas Islands, wherever they can, they heat water in little pans to make mate. They’re waiting for the soldiers to leave.”
The Tano stared at the bottles behind the counter as he spoke. The bar was packed. A disc jockey put on an album by The Hunger. Mobs of people were roaming through the place. They all looked alike, sallow and dressed in fringed shirts and leather. Lumpen from the surrounding hotels and tense solitary tourists in search of pleasures not indicated in Michelin Guides. Very old or very young men walked in discontinuous waves in opposite directions. The attractive women, on the other hand, with their prostheses and their melancholy eyes, stood to the side, in the corners, or sat at the bar, like Elena. At that time of day the halls with the games of logic were already open. In the place across the way Elena saw a very young super-D with eight-diopter glasses solving syllogisms at supersonic speeds. He caught them in the air and ran up points with the elegance of a bird. His opponent was a shy and smiling youth with a dark complexion who spoke with a sing-songy Paraguayan accent and was the best Frege semanticist in the city. He read a comic book calmly as he waited his turn, sneaking glances out the side of his magazine at the rising scores of the super-D youngster.
“So you are willing to collaborate with us,” Doctor Arana asked her.
“In exchange for what?” Elena asked.
She was trying to buy time and put together a line of defense. She was afraid of betraying herself and being forced to inform. She knew about the ones who went out into the streets and sold out everyone they knew. They wore masks made of synthetic skins and rode for hours in patrol cars through the center of the city.
“In exchange for curing you,” Arana said.
“I am not interested in being cured, I just want to change hallucinations. Is that possible?”
Arana served himself some mineral water in a plastic cup.
“We could disconnect you,” he said, “but that is very expensive.”
“Money is not an issue with me,” she said.
“It will be necessary to work on your memory,” Arana said. “There are areas of condensation, white nodes, which can be untied, opened up. They are like myths,” he said; “they define the grammar of experience. Everything the linguists have taught us about language also applies to the core of living matter. The genetic code and the verbal code present us with the same characteristics. That is what we call the white nodes. The clinic neurologists can attempt an intervention. It will be necessary to work on your brain.”
They were going to operate on her. She felt sluggish and empty, she was afraid they had disconnected her.
She thought about the Tano, running away from Rosario, saying he belonged to the PRA, the People’s Revolutionary Army, but the PRA no longer existed. She pictured him going in and out of detox clinics, lost in a virtual reality, hidden in clandestine houses and getting caught again, evading the controls, living in subways. He was a rebel and she was the heroine, a Mata Hari, a double agent, a confidant for anyone in dire straits. She had to get out, return to the streets. She saw the Tano’s room in the Bajo, near the port. She was going to contact him, he was the only one who could plan an escape for her. But she had to forget, she could not compromise the plans. She destroyed the meeting on the platform at Retiro Station, the bums toasting stale bread over a small fire, the Tano and her getting on the train. She knew how to erase her thoughts, like someone forgetting a word they were about to say. They would not be able to make her talk about what she did not know. A navy officer appeared, and she thought she saw armed men in the hallway behind him.
“See, captain,” Arana said, “this woman says that she is a machine.”
“Very beautiful,” said the man dressed in white.
Elena looked at him with scorn and hatred.
“You’re an ex, there are only patients here.”
Arana smiled as the light slid down his skin. He had aluminum teeth, a very expensive ultralight crown of the kind only made by Gucci, the artist, in the clinics in Belgrano R neighborhood.
“Take it easy,” he said. “If you want to be cured, you have to collaborate with us. The captain will help you remember. He is a specialist in artificial memory.”
“Madam,” the officer said, “we would like to know who Mac is.”
They knew everything. She had to escape. She had fallen asleep, but now she was awake and made an effort to keep going. It was getting dark, the light from the large billboards was starting to fill the air with bright faces and images. The Tano came out of the subway and up an escalator at Diagonal Station. The pleasant spring breeze and the smell of the lime trees in the avenue produced a sudden happiness in her. Elena leaned against the window of the Trust Jeweler shop. Multiple clocks read 3 P.M. They had merged the time zones everywhere in the world so they could coordinate the eight o’clock news. They had to live at night while the sun rose in Tokyo. It was better this way, the endless darkness worked to their benefit, they had nearly fifteen hours to get across the city and out to the open country. She pictured the still Pampas, the last towns like hills in the distance. They had already decided they would go live with the Irish, the Tano knew how to get into the Delta and meet up with the rebel ghettos. She had heard about Finnegans Isle, far up the Paraná River, on the other side of the Liffey, perhaps they could make it that far. It was populated by anarchists, the children and grandchildren of British settlers from Santa Cruz and Chubut Provinces. The Tano walked toward her among the crowd of workers and policemen and Bolivian immigrants heading south on Cerrito, downtown. She could make out his set, massive figure in the sea of anonymous faces. All of them, and perhaps she as well, in a hospital bed.