“Elena saw her death coming. Even though no one was able to find a single symptom of any known illness, even though Macedonio Fernández was really the one who was perpetually ill, and who tried extravagant systems of gaucho medicine, such as drinking fermented milk and soup, and never took any chemical medicines, and even though he was the one who experimented with medical knowledge, she was the one for whom death was imminent. That is why her illness and Elena’s end and Macedonio’s attempts at curing her with his medical knowledge were such a tragedy. Macedonio thought Elena’s death was an experiment that included his life in the future. A scientist does not personally participate in his experiments, that is what makes him different from a mystic. But Macedonio participated until the very last moment in Elena’s illness, trying to cure her. To give you an idea, it would have been as if Einstein had gone personally to Hiroshima to test his theoretical hypotheses on the structure of the atom. When Macedonio finally realized he had been defeated, that life was a horrible erosion destined to kill everyone off one by one, and that he was unable to stop the illness, and that it was even useless for him to try to get sick in her place, he agreed to have her taken to the hospital. He circled about the pavilions and looked through the windows of her room, from the outside, not daring to go in. He went around the gardens and waved at her through the glass, not daring to go in and see her die. From then on he hated all doctors and scorned medicine, which he considered to be a hopeless science, incapable of fulfilling its mission of preventing human beings from dying. Doctors are always failures, it is only a matter of giving them enough time. They have never been able to save anyone from death. They are arrogant imbeciles, precisely because they have never succeeded and have never been able to save anyone. She was lying in a bed in a hospital and Macedonio looked in through the window, and waved at her from the other side, and she smiled back without any strength left.
“And that is how Elena died, frail and delicate as happiness itself.
“The end was so horrible and so interminable that Macedonio remembered everything — the cretonne couches in the waiting room, the physical impossibility of going to the bed where Elena’s body lay in pain — with the distinct feeling of being in a dream and being unable to wake up from it. In the waiting room there were other men waiting at sunrise for other agonies to end. They smoked and stared into space in a time without time, where what one waits for is what people who are distanced from the pain refer to in resignation as ‘the inevitable.’ Until one afternoon her brother Alfredo came down the corridor toward the waiting room, and Macedonio saw his face, which had been his father’s face, and gestured for him to stop, and Alfredo leaned against the white tiles of the wall and watched him walk away. He would not be back, let his dear kids grow up as bastards, he wanted to negate everything that would remind him that she had left this world. Elena’s death (she was twenty-six years old) was an unexplainable event, it belonged to a parallel universe, it had occurred in a dream. (He dreamt that she was killed in a field of straw by a group of tigers.) As if he had paid a man who was coming down a dirt path in the dark with a lantern and handed him her body for him to hold. In exchange for what? It was a deal. He thought that sacrifices were actions that maintained the order of the universe. They were not public (they had ceased being public), but they still had to be performed, and instead of arrogant theatrical ceremonies they were now being performed on innocent and beautiful victims in white hospital rooms. If this was the case, then there was still hope. The sacrifice had already been consummated and he decided to place himself at the center of an experiment. I was married around that time, and my wife became very good friends with Macedonio — he was polite and courteous with women, a seductive man, friendly, incredibly intelligent, anyone who knew him will tell you that. A first-class intelligence, he would discern paradoxes instantly, tautologies, I remember that one of the first things he said to me was that he was interested in William James because James studied beliefs. Philosophers, he says to me, are generally interested in tautologies (in other words, in mathematics and formal logic), or in proofs (events and verifications), but not in absent reality. I can still hear him, that soft firm voice of his.
“ ‘Absence is a material reality, like a hole in the middle of the grass.’
“After Elena’s death, he could not go on living, and yet he did go on living. (Io non mori e non rimasi vivo, is how Dante cried.) He told me that he remembered a Russian student who had had a bomb blow up on his body because he had not wanted to kill an innocent family that was crossing the street (the mother, the children, the French governess) when he was about to carry out an assassination attempt on the chief of police in Odessa. He met him in Adrogué, years later, old and completely disfigured by the explosion. He was like a ghost. When a man loses the woman he loves he is like the man who has a bomb blow up on his body and does not die. That is why Macedonio thought that the impetuous Rajzarov was like his brother, that Russian who was made more of metal than life. His steel teeth sparkled when he spoke, he had a silver plate in his head, a gold lattice interwoven like a three-dimensional tattoo held together the few strands of cartilage and bone that were left in his right knee — a man-made badge of pain that he would always recall simultaneously as a painful memory and as a circle of liberating fire, as a medal of honor that he carried about with the utmost pride. For it was invisible, recorded inside his body. An operation in the dark that lasted four hours, on the Eastern front, in a basement of the organization in Crimea, they did not have any sulphamide, or any anesthesia, no wonder he was so proud. That is how Macedonio had ended up, metallic, impaired, held together by operations and prostheses, the same pain and the same body artificially reconstructed, because Elena was suddenly absent. Frozen, made out of aluminum, walking as if his arms and legs did not belong to his body, like a metal doll, he was unable to smile, he could not raise his voice. ‘There is nothing left that does not hurt.’ ”
“His friend Rajzarov was with him when Elena died, he spent the entire day with him, walking about with the heavy melancholic movements of a robot, the weight of iron in his soul, the absence stamped on his chest. Macedonio was lying on a couch and the dauntless Rajzarov tried to cheer him up a bit. Macedonio listened very attentively to his anarchist exploits, without saying a word. But once, after a pause, when Rajzarov was taking a break, drinking a brandy, Macedonio said in a voice that seemed weightless from not having spoken in hours:
“ ‘An Austrian general once said to my father: “I will think of you after I am dead.” For me to think about her is normal, but for her to think about me, now that she is dead, is something that saddens me deeply.’
“He could not handle the idea that she, dead, might remember him and feel sad because he was alone. He was thinking about the memories that survive after the body is gone, about the white nodes that stay alive even when the flesh disintegrates. Engraved on the bones of the skull, the invisible forms of the language of love stay alive. And perhaps it was possible to reconstruct them, to bring those memories back to life, like someone plucking music written in the air by a guitar. That afternoon he came up with the idea of entering those remembrances and staying there, in her memory. Because the machine is Elena’s memory, it is the story that always returns, eternally, like the river. She was his Beatrice, his universe, the spheres of hell and the epiphanies of heaven. There is a heretical version of the Divine Comedy in which Virgil builds a live replica of Beatrice for Dante. An artificial woman that he finds at the end of the poem. Dante believes the invention and destroys the cantos he has written. He looks for Virgil to help him, but Virgil is no longer at his side. The work therefore becomes the automaton that allows him to recuperate the eternal woman. In that sense, I have been his Virgil. Months and months locked up in the workshop, reconstructing the voice of memory, the stories of the past, seeking to restore the frail form of a lost language. Now they say that they have deactivated her, but I know that is not possible. She is eternal and will always be eternal and in the present. To deactivate her they would have to destroy the world, negate this conversation and the conversations of those who want to destroy her. She is like the river, flowing slowly and calmly in the afternoon. Even if you are not in it, the river still flows. They will not be able to stop something that began before they understood what was happening.