“Even with just half the information I have,” she said, “you could run an entire special edition of the newspaper.”
She spoke informally to him, as if they were friends, and laughed with a clean, carefree laughter.
They set a time to meet at a bar, at Retiro Station.
“And how will I know you?” she asked.
“I look Russian,” Junior told her. “Like Michael Jordan, but white.”
“Michael Jordan?” she said.
“The guy who plays for the Chicago Bulls,” Junior said. “My face looks just like his.”
“I never watch TV,” the girl said.
Junior thought that she had been hospitalized and that that was why she did not get the references, as if she lived in a different reality. But he wanted to see her, he did not have too many other alternatives. He had walked through the cellars underneath the Mercado del Plata. He had looked for information in the news cemetery, in the old newspaper archives. He had had dealings in the bars of the Bajo where they sold fake documents, false stories, first editions of the first stories. His room was full of papers, notes, texts pinned up on the walls, diagrams. Recordings. He was trying to find his bearings in the broken plot, to understand why they wanted to disactivate her. Something was out of control. A series of unexpected facts had filtered through, as if the archives were open. She was not revealing secrets, and possibly she did not even know any, but she gave signs of wanting to say something different than what everyone expected. Facts about the Museum and its construction had begun to appear. She was saying something about her own condition. She was not telling her own story, but she was making it possible for it to be reconstructed. That is why they were going to take her out of circulation. She was filtering through real facts. The key was the story of Richter, the Engineer, as Fuyita called him. Junior wanted to make contact, he was certain that the story of the Clinic was a transposition. Maybe the girl could help him make some headway along these lines. Or maybe it was an insignificant fact in a plot with a different meaning. But it was possible she could help him process the information and bring the past up to date. He had spent two nights without sleeping hardly at all since he left the Museum. He was going in and out of the stories, traveling through the city, trying to find his bearings in that plot full of waiting and postponements from which he could no longer escape. It was difficult to believe what he saw, but he was finding the effects in reality, after all. It was like a network, like a subway map. He traveled from one place to the other, crossing stories, moving in several registers at once. And now he was in a bar at Retiro Station, eating a hot dog and drinking beer and waiting for the girl from the phone call to show up. An old man mopped the empty platform. The day’s activity was just beginning. Retiro Station was hardly used anymore. The trains to the Tigre Delta ran inconsistently. A woman approached him to ask if the lines were still running. It was six in the morning and the city was just starting to get going, he had to pay attention to all the activity around him without seeming overly anxious. He was watching the subway exit and the main hall. His eyes, like small clandestine cameras, captured the motion of the car that had just stopped to drop off the morning papers at the entrance to one of the platforms. It was the second edition of the day. They did not know what to say. The news continued to accumulate. The patrol cars controlled the city and you had to be very careful to make sure you stayed connected and could follow the events. The control was perpetual. The police always had the last word, they could withdraw his permit to move about the city, they could deny him access to press conferences, they could even withdraw his work permit. It was forbidden to seek out clandestine information. He was counting on Julia, he was waiting for her to show up. Maybe she was telling the truth. Or maybe she would come with a patrol car. There was a strange disparity of consciousness in what was occurring. Everything was normal and yet the danger could be felt in the air, a low alarming murmur, as if the city were about to be bombarded. Everyday life goes on in the middle of the horror, that is what keeps many people sane. The signs of death and terror can be perceived, but there is no clear evidence of behavior being altered. The buses stop at the street corners, the stores are open, couples get married and celebrate, nothing serious can possibly be happening. Heraclitus’s sentence has been inverted, Junior thought. He felt as if everyone were dreaming the same dream, but living in separate realities. Certain comments and a certain version of the events made him recall the days of the war over the Islas Malvinas. The Argentine military had lost the war and no one knew it. Women continued to knit jackets and blankets for the draftees in improvised booths in the square by the Obelisk. All certainties are uncertain, Junior ironicized, they have to be lived secretly, like a private religion. It was difficult to make decisions and separate facts from false hopes. He had sat down at a hot-dog stand, under the eaves that face the Plaza de los Ingleses. He was eating a hot dog and drinking a beer and reading the newspaper distractedly. The TV was playing a special program about the Museum. Political trash. The greasy smoke drifted in the air, and yet the place was pleasant. The presence of the drivers at the counter and the cashier in the black coat, who was getting change out of the register just then, cheered Junior up. A man talked to him as if he had known him his whole life. Something had happened with people’s sense of reality. The guy was talking with his brother, but there was no brother there.
“The president is an addict and he doesn’t even care if people know. Addicts are never embarrassed, because you can’t be embarrassed if you don’t have any sexual libido,” he said.
“Of course,” another man said, also sitting at the counter. “Once my wife didn’t leave the house for a week because she had a wart this big.” He showed everyone the end of his pinkie finger. “A whole week. She didn’t want to go out because she said she was disfigured.”
“She had tons of sexual libido,” the cashier said.
“A whole week without going out.”
“And Perón, with all those spots and blotches on his face, to the point where they were calling him ‘stain-face.’ And he was seen everywhere, he would have himself photographed up close, out in the open, with his leather face.”
“When a man has power, if he has it, he wants to be seen.”
“Because politics is a mirror,” the other man said. “Faces and faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again and are substituted by new faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again.”
“It swallows up faces,” said the man who had first spoken.
“But the mirror is always there,” the other man said, and dropped his head on his arms resting on the counter. “Give me another beer. Do you want another one too, pal?” he asked Junior.
“No, I’m set,” Junior said, and at that moment he saw the girl and immediately recognized her. She was coming from the end of the platform and smiled at him at once.
“Now, the truth is,” the cashier said, “that television is a mirror.”
“Exactly,” the other man said. “A mirror that holds onto the faces.”
“It has all of them inside and when you look at it you see the other’s face.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” the cashier said, growing pensive.
“I’m leaving,” Junior said, and set some money down on the counter. “Another round for everyone on me.”