“Let’s go,” he said, “we have to get out of here.”
They came out into a television repair workshop. An old man with white hair and a white beard raised his head from a microprocessor. It was Mac. Elena felt that she was about to cry. The Tano opened the back of a microscopic television set and put it down on the glass counter.
“This apparatus is a family relic,” he said, “and I want to keep it running.”
“And what is the problem?” asked the man, who spoke with a German accent.
“It only gets channels from the past.”
The old man raised his head.
“Everyone wants to be a comedian,” he said, and went on connecting the cables of a video recorder that he had to adapt to a closed-circuit.
“She’s Elena,” the Tano said.
The old man was adjusting the three bands of images, his myopic eyes moving astutely across the microscopic circuits that he himself had designed. He looked at her, but did not recognize her.
“We want to get into the factory,” the Tano said.
There was a soft light in the locale, and the rumbling from the subway trains made the ceiling vibrate.
“It’s here,” the old man said.
A group of scientists had deserted the institutes dedicated to atomic investigation that had been built in the mid-1940s. They started with a small repair shop in an abandoned garage. The factory kept growing quietly, scattered across the desert and the provincial towns.
“We keep in contact,” he said. “We are waiting for the right moment to move. There are forty-three of us and we are going to participate in the rebellion.” He opened and closed his left hand, as if he were counting the scientists five at a time. “I cannot say anything else. I do not know anyone.” He looked at Elena and smiled. Then he spoke to the Tano.
“You can take that apparatus away now, it is fixed. Turn it on.”
The tiny images flashed on the screen, and immediately they could see a series of small workshops disseminated across all the towns and small cities of the country. They could see men with white overalls taking apart old radios and rebuilding unused motors.
“What are we going to do?” Elena asked, surprised.
“Nothing,” the old man said. “Get out of here.”
It was Mac, but he did not know her. She did not go near him, she did not want to touch him, she did not want him to touch her. The world of the dead, Dante’s map of the Inferno. Circles and circles and circles.
“So then,” Arana said, “you are dead and in the Inferno. Isn’t that smart.”
“I used to be smart,” Elena said. “Now I’m a machine that repeats stories.”
“The one fixed idea,” Arana said. He gestured for his assistant. A young doctor wearing a white coat and surgical gloves leaned over Elena and smiled at her with a childlike expression.
“We have to operate,” he said. “We have to disactivate her neurologically.”
“He repairs television sets,” Elena said.
“I know,” Arana said. “I want names and addresses.”
There was a pause. The white glass of the cabinet in the consulting room reflected the spinning fan.
“There’s this telepath,” Elena said. “He follows me around and reads my thoughts. His name is Luca Lombardo, he’s from Rosario, everyone calls him the Tano. If I tell you what you are asking me for, he is going to blow up the microspheres implanted in my heart.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Arana said. “You have become psychotic and are in the middle of a paranoid delirium. We are in a Clinic in the neighborhood of Belgrano, this is an extended drug session, you are Elena Fernández.” He stopped and read her chart. “You work in the National Archives, you have two children.”
“I am dead, he moved me here, I am a machine.”
“We are going to have to use electric shock treatment on her,” Arana said to the doctor with the baby face.
“Listen,” Elena said. “In the cellars of the Mercado del Plata, in the Korean sector, the one everyone calls Seoul, there is an English photographer, Grete Müller. She works for the rebels.” She had to give her up in order to save Mac. Maybe she could warn her before the police showed up. The information had become public. Investigating virtual images, she had found the way to draw pictures of people and things she had never seen.
“We know,” Arana said. “I want names and addresses.”
Everything was starting over again. The sun rising in the city, the lights of the Mercado del Plata still on. There as well everything was starting over again. In the cellars of the Mercado del Plata, in a lab illuminated with a red light, Grete Müller was developing the photographs that she had taken in the aquarium that night. The patterns on the shells of the turtles were the symbols of a lost language. Originally, the white nodes had been marks on bones. The map of a blind language shared by all living beings. The only traces left of that original language were the patterns on the shells of the sea turtles. Prehistoric shadows and shapes recorded on bone plates. Grete enlarged the photographs and projected them on the wall. The series of patterns were the base of a pictographic language. All the languages of the world had evolved through the centuries from those primitive nuclei. Grete wanted to get to the island, because with this map it would be possible to establish a common language. In the past we all understood the meaning of every word, the white nodes were recorded in the body like a collective memory. She went over to the window high on the wall and looked out over Av. Nueve de Julio. The number of cars declined at that time of the morning, all the activity in the city was nocturnal. Perhaps she would finally be able to sleep and stop dreaming about the Museum and the machine and the proliferation of languages jumbled together to the point of incomprehensibility. They are forgotten worlds, she thought, no one keeps the memory of life anymore. We see the future as if it were the memory of a house from our childhood. She had to get to the island, find the legend of the woman who was going to come and save them. Perhaps, Grete thought, she is lying peacefully on the sand, lost on an empty beach, like a rebellious replica of a future Eve.
III MECHANICAL BIRDS
1
Junior woke up, startled. Once again the phone was ringing at midnight. It was the same woman who mistook him for someone else and told him her ex-husband’s sad story. A man she called Mike had gone to Mar del Plata to work as a night watchman in a hotel that was closed down for the winter. He was found dead one morning. They followed the music from the radio from one empty room to another until they finally discovered his body in a dark room with the blinds drawn. The woman said that at first they thought it was a suicide. Then they thought he had been killed by one of the State’s secret services. Her ex-husband was on the run, his group was withdrawing in complete disorder, he belonged to the People’s Revolutionary Army, a Trotsky-Peronist organization. He was a Trotsky-Peronizt, the woman said, and immediately lowered her voice and began to tell him about the Clinic. She had just spent two months there, she said, in the jail, in the colony. She was rehabilitated, now her name was Julia Gandini. He imagined the woman submerged in a false reality, stuck in someone else’s memory, forced to live as if she were another woman. These kinds of stories were circulating throughout the city, the machine had begun to incorporate material from reality. Julia told him that she was not being followed, that she was eighteen years old, that she wanted to see him.