es 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 could see the lights on the ceiling and the white-tiled walls. He never thought that he would leave and that I would remain behind here, lost, a woman on a hospital bed, tied down with rubber belts to the back of the bed, my wrists above my head, tied up like that. You’re crazy, he said to me, lost, that’s the murmuring of love, the voice of the woman who narrates what she has seen, the screen white as a sheet, if I stop then life too will stop, I see what I say, now he’s there, right there, he tells me what I want to hear. I am and have been what I am, a crazy Argentine woman who has been left alone, now, abandoned forever, he is how many years old now? They say that his hair turned white overnight when I left, he was always beautiful, he looked like Paul Valéry, more distinguished than Valéry, a real Argentine native, his body smooth, and that way of leaning against me, still talking, whispering on my neck. Once, on the low wall behind my sister’s house, during siesta time, he held me like this, with his arm, just like this, he lifted one of my legs and took it out, the buttoned fly, he had been playing paddleball and had that smell and looked straight at me as he put it in me like this, yes, right there, yes, almost sitting on the wall, I wasn’t wearing anything underneath, I never wore anything underneath, I felt the skirt against my buttocks, the crease, I was always hot, first he put his open hand right there, as if he were going to sit me in the air, he lifted me up, I was lifted up, there was always a flame burning in the room on Calle Olazábal, against the full-body mirror, you could really see yourself in that one, he had me turn around, my elbows against the wall, until my face touched the mirror, like a cat. We spent a winter in Mar del Plata because he was running away, he’d been found out and was being followed, and they lent us that apartment in an empty building, on Calle Olazábal, you could see the ocean from the small window in the kitchen, and the stove on, above the oven, was the only light at dusk. I am Amalia, if you hurry me I will say that I am Molly, I am her, locked up in the big house, desperate, pursued by Rosas’s mazorca, I am Irish, I will say then, I am her and I am also the others, I was the others, I am Hipólita, the gimp, the little cripple, I tottered slightly when I walked, Hipólita, I say to him, and he smiles, Hipólita, with “the gloves on her small hands,” she ran away with the psychopath, the big castrated psychopath who could tell the future on Tarot cards, he had a scar in his groin from here to here, Fuyita has a slash between his legs, below his torso, like the edge of his hand, a scar, red, an impotent director, the great seducer was all tongue, he carried a stalk of corn covered in Vaseline in his small suitcase, I am Temple Drake and then, oh you despicable creatures, you made me live with a justice of the peace. These and other stories, I have told them already, it does not matter who is talking. I remember, when Richter was around and Perón fell in the German trap and poured everything into trying to build an atom bomb in Argentina and achieving economic independence, during those months of waiting and denial, Evita slapping the ministers around, yes, she would slap the Minister of the Interior on the face the moment he uttered even the slightest derogatory comment about the working classes, about those poor dregs, slap, slap, across one cheek and the other, with her strong little hand, thin and fierce, sometimes she had to just about get up on the toes of her feet because those political bosses were tall, some were dark, but all were psychopaths, they stole everything, even the small lightbulbs from the bathrooms in the government buildings, their fingers yellowed from nicotine, wearing horseshoe tiepins or sometimes the Peronist emblem in diamonds, Eva saw the social injustice cropping up in the ministers themselves and defended herself by slapping their faces, she would call the ministers over and stand up on the toes of her feet and slap them across the face, slap, slap, that is how the Peronist Resistance began. Those stories have circulated from the beginning, from mouth to mouth, when they emptied out her body and embalmed her, that is how she ended up the same, a doll with a small watch on her wrist, so thin that the band was too big and could not be closed, locked up in a box, on top of a wardrobe in the offices of the General Labor Confederation, covered with a blanket, because the marines wanted to throw her into the river, sink her to the bottom. A woman who was not allowed to die in peace, she’s also in a museum, God only knows what she was dreaming about when she died. I remember the room in the hospital, all the poor who came to see me, they would stand at the foot of the bed, holding their caps in their hands, they have come to give me their condolences, none of my old acquaintances have recognized me, the Russian is here, Rajzarov came at the last moment, with his metal body, rebuilt, politics is the art of dying, a cold politics of pride, Rajzarov says, of the kind that goes around at night to vindicate the humble and the sad, it is the art of death. The women knitted sweaters for the soldiers in the Plaza de la República. To be anonymous politics must be clandestine, there is a slight breeze coming from the galleries, I’m in a glass room, exhibited like a doll, I’m the queen bee, mounted on the velvet cushion, the tiepin has a pearl and pierces the butterfly’s body, you have to pierce them onto the cushion when they are alive, he says, this way they won’t end up rigid and they’ll preserve their elegance, if you pierce them onto the cushion when they are dead the colors of the wings fade. That’s me, the cat strolling through the hallways, alone in this empty room, then left to the inner patio and the window facing the vacant lot. A Korean man, Tank Fuyita, has been the keeper and the guard for years, he came with the second generation of immigrants, smugglers of cheap watches on the free market, they wore the watches on their arms, ten or twelve Japanese watches, and spoke in their Oriental whispers, in the Once neighborhood, in Ciudadela, but liberalism ruined the business, free trade was the end of our smuggling operations, Fuyita would say, the end of Argentine history. That was a river novel, it started in 1776, on both shores of the Río de la Plata, the boat with the English goods, and now it has ended, so many deaths for nothing, so much pain. And now who’s there? Fuyita? The Russian? No, who would come around here at this time of day, you’re crazy, what are you waiting for, you’re dying of cancer, you’re just another crazy woman, a crazy nobody waiting at the edge of death. Now I feel like there’s a current blowing, the soft flash of lightning in my vertebrae, the electric shock that used to make my sister María turn white with fear. A fine sheer net of incredible exhaustion falls with the edge of night, a fatigue that won’t let me think, that’s how she used to speak. They kept her in Santa Isabel for almost ten years, they would partially erase from her memory the voices that she tended to hear at dawn, the cadence of the water from the faucet in the bathroom, Sister María used to speak with Satan, she and he had been lovers, she left everything and entered a convent in Córdoba, the Discalced Carmelites, she had sung tango in the Chantecler Cabaret, Sister Ada Eva María Phalcon, they called her The Egyptian, she had been kept by faros and by Argentine gentlemen of the oldest stock who, at the end, when she entered the convent, would travel all night, those men, to hear her sing in the choir of a church. She used to say: “We see the ashes of the days that have gone, floating in the past, as we see the dust of our journeys at the end of the road.” That’s how she used to speak. She had a daughter with aphasia and educated her with music, a plaintive love song by Esnaola, this is how you strum the guitar, see, you’re left-handed so we’ll have to change the strings around. She would go out dressed like a country girl, flowered skirt and braids, with her silly old guitar and sing the tango “Sin palabras.” Without words, this music is going to hurt you, the girl thinks, doesn’t speak, a verbal musi