“Then,” Arana said, “where did you meet him?”
“In a boardinghouse in Tribunales, near the courthouse,” she said.
She was afraid. They were getting closer to the truth, as if they could follow the road of the memories of her life on a map. They seemed to know more about her than she did. She was lying on an iron bed, she had the sensation of being opened up and felt the freezing air from the fan on her bones. The amphetamines were making her hallucinate, her thoughts were racing much faster than she could articulate them, ideas transformed into real images. She could not stop, she would awake from one dream and into another reality, she would find herself in a different room, in another life, she did not want to fall asleep again. If she could only live in an eternal state of insomnia. He never slept. He would rest, but he did not sleep, he watched over her while she was in the hospital, not daring to enter her room, he looked in from the outside, through the windows that faced the patio. He stayed awake through the nights, sitting on the cretonne couches in the waiting room. He was afraid that the doctors would inject her with anesthesia and take her to the operating rooms. Then they would be able to process her memory and unrecord the information. As long as she was in the machine, she could overcome matter and resist. “A body,” Mac said, “does not mean anything, the soul is the only thing that is alive, and it takes the shape of the word.” She knew that the anarchs had infiltrated several men into the Clinic. They had given her the name of a contact to use in case of a desperate situation. Reyes. A woman in the Majestic. For the time being she did not want to think about him. But it seemed to her that everywhere around her there were letters forming the word “Reyes.” Mr. Reyes, a dealer and a gangster and a professor of English literature. The crowd was getting thicker, making it more and more difficult for her to move forward. The Tano stood there, pale, taciturn, more melancholy than usual. He had run out of money, had spent the last of what he had on a taxi. He was the best explosives technician that they had ever had, and he did not want to have any problems with the police. Elena went up to him when they stopped at a red light. The cars headed down Av. Corrientes in discontinuous waves.
“We have to get to the island,” she said without looking at him. “I have a contact, but I am being watched.”
“Everyone is being watched,” he answered. And smiled at her. When he smiled he looked like a madman. Then he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “The first thing is to get into the Museum,” he said to her. “There’s nothing there anymore, it’s been abandoned, there are only a few remnants left.”
They were in the Carabelas alleyway, behind the enormous concrete building that housed the Mercado del Plata. The site had been used as barracks during the war, and old faded photographs of Perón still covered the walls. A multitude of refugees and vagrants proliferated through the galleries. The police did not dare enter the building, but the place was infected with government agents. She had the feeling of being lost, of having lost her sense of reality.
“You have lost your sense of reality,” Arana said to her, as if he were reading her mind. Maybe she was thinking out loud.
“This is a place without memories,” she said. “Everyone pretends to be somebody else. The spies are trained to disown their own identities and use somebody else’s memory.”
She thought about Grete, who had become an English refugee who sold pictures in a locale down on the second sublevel. She had been infiltrated, so she buried her past and adopted a fictitious one. She was never again able to recall who she had been. Sometimes, in dreams, she made love to a man she did not know. Her true identity had been converted into unconscious material, episodes in the life of a forgotten woman. She was the best photographer in the Museum. She looked at the world through eyes that were not her own, and this distance showed in her photographs. They had to find her, she could take them to Reyes. The Tano wanted to know who Reyes was.
“He is an ex-professor of English literature who deals in methadone,” Elena explained to him. “He is in charge of the clandestine hospitals and the detoxification shelters.”
Grete believed that she used to be his wife, a young Englishwoman from Lomas de Zamora who had fallen in love with the young professor who taught courses in E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. The story was her alibi, she was a disillusioned woman secretly in love with a man on whom she wanted to take revenge. They had to find her. The cellars of the Mercado del Plata connected to the underground streets that crossed beneath Av. Nueve de Julio and the subway passageways of Carlos Pellegrini Station, where all the subway lines of the city converged. That was a point of escape, a nucleus for refugees and rebels, hippies, gauchos, spies, all sorts of ex’s, smugglers, anarchs. To get to the building they had to cross an abandoned parking lot, a no-man’s-land between the shelters and the city. They must surely have already seen them in the alleyway and were now watching them on the closed-circuit screens. She saw herself in the Clinic, the white eye of a camera on the ceiling. She thought Arana was speaking with a nurse behind her. She felt she was falling asleep. She was too tired. The Tano took her by the arm and forced her to keep going, almost running between the abandoned parking meters. It was like crossing a forest. The Irish band The Hunger could be heard through the loudspeakers. It was their new anthem, “The Reptile Enclosure.” They were the children of the children of the nationalist rebels. At seventeen years of age, Molly Malone was the leader of the band, and she had become a superstar singer with her glassy throat. Her brother Giorgio sang backups with his warm tenor voice, but he would go crazy and change the lyrics, sing rap improvisations over the anthems of the Republican Army. The crowds went mad over Molly Malone’s live performances. The concert lasted two hours. The observance personnel had in all likelihood connected their monitors to the broadcasts of channel 9. The Tano thought that luck was on their side and that they might be able to escape. They had one chance in thirty-six. It was always the same. He liked to play roulette because it was a replica of life.
“I’m from Rosario,” he said to the Korean guard at the door. “We have to get through. She’s a patient of Arana’s.”
He might be a policeman. Everyone works for the secret services, they all become spies and confidants and legal assassins and policemen who shoot up as part of their undercover work. (In New York half the addicts are detectives.) The more criminal activity found among Asian refugees, the more Asian refugees that the police must recruit as informants. Insanity of resemblance is the law, the Tano thought. To look alike in order to survive. If he was a government agent, he chose not to disclose it. He let them in and guided them to a stairway, and then to a door, and again to a stairway. The white walls and the lighted stained-glass windows created a strange stillness. The music had ceased.
“This is the Museum,” the Tano said.
The pavilions extended for kilometers on end, with glass cabinets displaying material from the past. Elena saw a room from a boardinghouse in Tribunales, and a man on a low stool strumming a guitar. She saw two gauchos on horseback riding across a line of small fortresses, she saw a man committing suicide on a train seat. She saw a replica of Arana’s consulting room, and again her mother’s face in the mirror. The Tano hugged her. And this she had also seen. The Tano hugging her in a room of the Museum. She saw the replica of the lighted stage with Molly Malone singing the chorus of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” in a feline voice.