“I am Emil Russian,” he said. “They think that I have a replica, but I am not the one who has a replica, there are other replicas, she produces stories, indefinitely, stories that become invisible memories that everyone believes are their own — those are the replicas. This conversation, for example. Your visit to the Majestic, the woman who drinks indefinitely from a bottle of perfume, the young woman in jail. You do not have to leave the island, this story can end right here. Reality is endless, it is transformed and becomes an eternal story, where everything always starts again. She is the only one who remains still, always herself, motionless in the present, lost in memory. If there is a crime, then that is it. She has no images left, there are only words in her memory, the peaceful flapping of the birds, the voices at night. I will show you the Archives, you will be able to see for yourself that the story is infinite. Look,” he said, and turned on a screen on the wall. An old super-8 film came on. At first a few numbers appeared on top of some moving lines, then the picture began with an old man, with white hair, wearing an overcoat, coming out of a wooden house, walking across a garden and sitting on a wicker chair and smiling.
“That man, the one you see right there, was a poet, a philosopher, and an inventor.”
Sitting on the wicker chair, Macedonio looked at the camera and lifted the lapels of his overcoat, as if trying to stay warm, while he said hello with a slight nod of his head.
2
They have closed down the Museum, so it is necessary to get past the iron fence that separates it from the street to get in. If one goes across the gardens, one can see a small light glowing in a window on the ground floor. To get there you must go up a ramp and through the circular rooms, until you reach the central gallery. The machine is at the end of a white pavilion, held up by a metallic frame. Her octagonal shape is somewhat flattened, her small legs resting on the floor. A blue eye pulsates in the dim room, its light breaking the stillness of the afternoon. Outside, on the other side of the windows, it is possible to hear the low rumbling of the cars heading west down Av. Rivadavia. The motionless machine blinks repeatedly in an irregular rhythm. At night, the eye glows, all alone, and its reflection shines on the window.
Are you Richter? Is somebody there? Of course it can’t be Richter. I just said that because I was afraid. As long as you’re there, I don’t care who it is. And if there is no one there? And if I were alone? No one comes anymore. It’s been days and days since anyone has come. An empty, circular place with windows facing the gardens and a stone ledge, on a platform, where I have been abandoned. Does anybody care what I say? Mental loneliness. Loneliness is a mental illness. They have locked up, no one can come here anymore, no one has ever come. Sometimes I have hallucinations, I go back over the archives and look for words, everything is so slow that I can barely see the light in the window, across the hall, I picture Fuyita in the lower level, sitting in his rocking chair, keeping watch, I can’t quite understand it, could they have left me alone? To disappear? I know there is a camera recording me, the eye of a camera in the corner of the ceiling, I can picture Fuyita in the small room below, his multiple vision of the entire Museum on the small closed-circuit screens, we are all going to end up like that, one machine keeping watch over another, the small video cameras on the corners of the ceilings, held up by mechanical arms, turning like glass eyes, sweeping and recording the rooms and the galleries. Sometimes they also record Fuyita’s memories, leaning on his walking stick, making his rounds through the Museum, wearing his municipal guard uniform and carrying a flashlight to see the corners and the stairwells. His small image, distorted in the empty space, and then Fuyita sitting on the rocking chair, again in the level below, rewinding the tape to see himself walking through the galleries. This Museum has become the biggest of its kind in the country, dedicated to the art of surveillance, just machines keeping watch and a guard going over the rooms. I know the Police Museum, with the wax reproductions of the criminals. Punk Head, Madman Gaitán, Ángel the Bad Boy, Agatha Galifi, Ranko Kozu, life-size, wearing the clothes they had on when they were arrested or killed (the shirt with the bullet hole in back), and the cells where they were locked up by the Argentine justice system, and the instruments used by the police for centuries to hold the murderers. He used to say to me that narrative is an art that belongs to the police, that they are always trying to get people to tell their secrets, to narc on other suspects, to tell on their friends, their brothers. That is why the police and the so-called justice have done more for the progress of narrative, he used to say, than any writer in history. And I? I am the one who narrates. For hours on end my image is the only thing that can be seen in the level below, it is actually recorded by two cameras, one in that corner over there and the other in that other corner on the ceiling. They only see my body, no one can get inside me, the brain’s loneliness is immune to electronic surveillance, television screens only reflect the thoughts of those watching them. You can only film and transmit the thoughts of people who voluntarily agree to watch what they think. That is what they call daily television programming, a general map of the mental state. The interior monologue, he would say, is now the daily programming on the TV screens, fragmented time, streams of consciousness, verbal images. But they have not yet been able to devise a machine that is sensitive enough to have telepathic television. They are researching it in Osaka, in Japan, Fuyita says, in the secret facilities of Sony-Hitachi, where they run experiments using the brains of dolphins, they want to design a machine capable of reading people’s minds and projecting it on a screen. I am an anachronism, so much of an anachronism that they have buried me in this white basement. That is why they want to keep me isolated, under control, under the exclusive surveillance of Fuyita, the Korean guard, like an embalmed corpse. I am picturing the corridors now, the ramp, the inner galleries of the Archives, if I try to remember and the purity of memory does not blind me, then I can see the door of a room, partially ajar, a crack in the darkness, a silhouette in the window. Just the door, partially ajar, of a room in a boardinghouse, was is it fifteen, or sixteen years ago? There is never a first time in memory, it is only in life that the future is uncertain, in memory the pain always returns in precisely the same manner, rushing to the present, you have to avoid certain places as you go over the past with the eye of the camera, whoever looks at himself on such a screen loses all hope. I can see the small lake under the low fog, the gray sky of morning, that is where my father killed himself, I saw the white marsh with the frost around the edges, between the rushes, right next to the mud with the tracks of the feet of the tero-birds. Every story is a detective story, he used to say. Murderers are the only ones who have something to tell, personal stories always turn out to be the story of a crime. Raskolnikov, he would say, Erdosain, Scharlach the Dandy. My father killed a man as he was coming out of a party. I am sure I will not be able to sleep now, I dream of a Hungarian engineer hidden in a house out in the country, in the skeletal frame of what is left of a ranch where a mechanical bird nests. The party had gone on until dawn and on the way out there was some kind of altercation on the veranda behind the house. I was unconscious for nearly two hours, according to the Hitachi watch that belonged to Fuyita’s mother. Then I saw the bright dial again and felt something heavy on my thigh. The Sony plays nighttime music on the radio station, if only I could make contact, transmit. Once a friend’s son hung himself so he would not have to serve in the military. He was twenty years old, he was to go to Campo de Mayo, he spent the night before he was supposed to report for service with a woman, then he went back home and killed himself in the tool shed behind their house. Didn’t want anything to do with the Argentine Army. Once a friend’s daughter received a letter that she herself had written to her ex-husband, who lived in Barcelona. The address had changed, or she had written it down wrong, in any case the letter was returned to sender and she read what she had written six months before. It was as if a stranger had written her a letter telling her the secrets of her life in Buenos Aires. Not at all as she remembered. In the Police Museum there was a room dedicated to the life of Lugones, the chief of police, whose name was the same as his father’s, Leopoldo Lugones. He founded the Special Division and introduced a substantial improvement to the torture techniques utilized in Argentina: he took the electric prod, which was traditionally used with cows to direct the cattle up the short ramps and into the English trains, and used it on the naked bodies of the shackled anarchists from whom he wanted to get information. Chief of police Lugones, the son of the poet, was the director of State intelligence, and it was he who carried out his father’s work to its full culmination, he was his executor and in charge of writing introductions for all of the poet’s poetic and literary compositions. When he used a tool from our cattle industry to improve State control over rebels and foreigners, he advanced and deepened the national spirit in the same manner as his father had when he wrote his “Ode to the Cattle and the Grain.” The retired chief of police ended up locked up in his own house in the neighborhood of Flores, with Parkinson’s disease, unable to sleep, with insomnia, terrified by possible terrorist attacks, by the possible vengeance of the children of the tortured anarchists, locked up in his own house, with doors and windows barred and an incredible and complex system of mirrors that allowed him to keep watch on all the rooms in the house simultaneously. They were reflected on the slanted mirrors mounted on the ceilings and the doors so he could see the entire house, as well as the garden and the front door, in a single view from a wheelchair on which he wheeled himself through the rooms of the house. This is historically accurate, absolutely historically accurate, it is all in the Police Museum and was also told to me by his daughter, who remembered her father with hatred and sarcasm, locked up in successive padded rooms, keeping watch over the corners of the house with angled mirrors, always armed in case of a possible attack, while he dedicated what was left of his life to protecting and publishing the work of his father, the poet Leopoldo Lugones. And, to assure the accuracy of his father’s work, he initiated lawsuits against anyone who alluded to his father’s writings without citing the appropriate detective interpretations of his son and executor, who looked over each and every one of the editions of Lugones’s complete works, which were read in schools and prisons. At the end, he finally killed himself, Lugones, the ex-chief of police, shot himself with a shotgun, the trigger, and this is known for certain, pulled with his toe, as is the tradition in these kinds of suicides, in these suicide stories the person committing suicide with a shotgun always pulls the trigger tortuously with the big toe, barefoot, while he holds the barrel of the gun aimed at his face. But in the case of Leopoldo Lugones (Jr.), the Parkinson’s disease complicated the maneuver to such an extent that the shot went slightly astray and the bullet went through his throat, and it took ten hours for him to bleed to death. In the gallery of the Police Museum dedicated to his memory, on Calle Defensa in Buenos Aires, you can see photographs and other belongings of his, and even his incredible and complex surveillance system, which he designed to protect his life from terrorist attacks, have been reproduced. Macedonio considered him a son worthy of his father, the most worthy son of his main enemy, since the chief of police, following the poet Lugones’s strict orders, had Macedonio Fernández followed and watched by the police for all those years, purely out of literary jealousy, envious of the respect that Macedonio’s sober attitude elicited among the younger generation, who scorned Lugones for exemplifying the writer who always allows himself to be used by government and those in power. So Macedonio was accused, and with good reason, of being anti-Argentine and an anarchist, and they started following him, which was a worthless infamy, because he was a peaceful man, he wouldn’t even kill a fly. At the end even Lugones was being watched by his son’s police force, driving him to commit suicide, because the son had threatened the father with denouncing him publicly when his investigations revealed to him that the poet was in an adulterous relationship with a teacher to whom he sent mystical and pornographic letters, with semen and blood splattered on the paper, and when the chief of police, Macedonio used to say, ordered him to leave his clandestine lover and threatened him with making the affair a public scandal, which would destroy his reputation of being a moral Argentine citizen and a representative of the extreme right of Argentina, the poet, with a final gesture of dignity, took a motor launch up the Tigre to a resort and committed suicide in 1938, exactly thirty years before his son would do the same. All of this is in the Police Museum, even the letters written by Lugones’s lover, the mirrors of the chief of police, Leopoldo Lugones Jr., and his father’s complete works edited and introduced by him with his detective-fiction interpretations, all of that can be found in the Museum on Calle Defensa. Macedonio used to get melancholy when he told the story, but also sarcastic, because he thought that it was a good example of detective fiction on the part of his private enemy, the poet Leopoldo Lugones. That is the first case of a poet whose son was a policeman, it’s common to find examples of policemen whose sons are poets, Macedonio used to say, but the other way around is very rare. Was it he who used to say it to me? Did he say it to me just now? Sometimes I get confused and think that I’m in the hospital. I think and I think and I see a corridor, in my memory, and then another, they were rolling me away and I