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 music, the story of Venus’s ring, the daughter sitting in the garden out back. At first it was the sad and small country hotels, the dresser with the mirror above it, and up above, on the shelf, between the hangers, the bottle of perfume, a room facing Av. de Mayo in the Hotel Majestic. They spent two years running from the police, she never knew exactly why, something having to do with morphine, they had rented a coupé, they were singing artistes, on tour, until she decided to stay in Córdoba and enter the convent. She went to the church one afternoon and laid face down on the freezing tiles in front of the altar and opened her arms to form a cross. Sister Superior, she said, I am Ada Eva María Phalcon. Could I join this congregation? I have been evil, I have sinned, the lower I sank the purer my voice became, the more men I slept with the purer my voice was, Sister Superior. I have brought, she said opening her jewelry case, these jewels are for the Lord to use, for Christian charity, for the forsaken children, and she cut her long hair with a pair of shearing scissors and said that at night, sometimes, in the middle of the night, on tour, in the small country hotels, she had heard the voice of Satan, his song, he murmurs music to me vocally, I can’t hear him, I have never heard him, I only listen to him, Mother Superior, Sister Clara, Sister. She left her jewelry case at the altar and laid face down until they allowed her to enter the convent (because she was a sinner), and now she sings in the choir with the other nuns, and the men who used to hear her sing in the Chantecler Cabaret now come on Sundays, they travel to Córdoba just knowing, they say, that Ada Phalcon is singing there, lost and anonymous in that choir of nuns. That is a story, in the Archives, that is the story of the singer, there are others, I close my eyes and see, a street, oh, how real, the light on me, the light of day, the pure physicality of experience, the level of the river going down in that house out in the Tigre. I know I have been abandoned here, deaf and blind and half immortal, if I could only die or see him one more time or really go insane, sometimes I imagine that he is going to come back, and sometimes I imagine that I will be able to get him out of me, stop being this foreign memory. Endless, I create memories, but nothing else, I am full of stories, I cannot stop, the patrol cars control the city and the locales below Av. Nueve de Julio have been abandoned, we have to get out, go across, find Grete Müller, who is looking at the enlarged photographs of the shapes etched on the shells of the turtles, I have seen them and now they emanate from me, I pull events out of live memories, the light of the real quivers, weakly, I am the singer, the one who sings, I am on the sand, near the bay, I can still remember the old lost voices where the water laps ashore, I am alone in the sun, no one comes near me, no one comes, but I will go on, the desert is before me, the stones calcined by the sun, sometimes I have to drag myself, but I will go on, to the edge of the water, I will, yes.