That morning, the tall grass, bent slightly by the breeze and a bit more by its own weight, caught the light, and from time to time the late call of a rooster could be heard from some nearby property or another. “What a morning!” thought M. “Such a hypnotic intelligence to it.” Clarity, air, silence; light. Walking along the tracks stimulates thought. I’m in my room and notice the time, I can hear the sounds of cleaning — my mother and the neighbors — I hear a television — nothing irritates me more than the sound of a television in the morning — and with all of Sunday ahead of me, I feel a sense of terror at the monotony to come: I am bored in advance. So I get up and go for a walk. One imagines that things reach a limit at the tracks, even go beyond it, particularly at night, but that all signs are erased by the morning. Everything that has occurred either belongs to the obscurity of oblivion or was once harmonious (but that never happens). Being young, M believed that at night evil — pure horror, according to his imagination — occupied space in such a way as to saturate it without leaving a trace; the disruption of the landscape was so great that not even the most patient efforts of man would be enough to restore it, and yet every day the morning set about its reconstruction and, in fact, did so without any help at all. Partial measures would have been no match for evil’s absolute power of devastation. Terror nested there at night, but nonetheless during the day it inspired the calm confidence of a well-maintained park.
Dying cats and dogs come to the tracks, he continued, to lie down in the vegetation and wait; other times people bring them there, already lifeless. Dead bodies. Someone is walking along and he catches a scent, heavy and sweet, that quickly turns into the undeniable smell of decomposition. As he gets closer, discerning the body and being overtaken by its intolerable stench are one and the same thing. He needs to quicken his pace and get past the critical area, to cross through the field of odor and feel as though he’s gone back to the beginning, the sweet air as an advance toward normalcy. A strange feeling because, even as he keeps moving forward, the return down the scale of odor makes it seem as though he were going back the way he came. But, as also happens with noise, the direction of the wind has an effect.
That morning there was no wind or any dead animals, or at least none that stank. At the most, a faint breeze rustled the vegetation. What a prodigious morning, what extraordinary light, he repeated. The thought that a train might approach seemed unrealistic, not because it was impossible — in fact, one must have been headed that way — but because the tumult of vibrations, noise, and air, the rupture, however fleeting, of the peace of that morning, would have seemed like something from another world. M paused to listen more closely and without realizing it looked up into the sky, as though he were expressing gratitude to a god, then back down at a jumble of weeds that looked as though they had been embedded in the soil by a giant fist. Curved against the blue sky, they wavered just slightly under their own weight, an effect distributed along the line. Further down, the wind could not so much as stir the leaves on the trees; any agitation, like that of the grass, should have shown its cause; otherwise, it would not have been perceived at all. Meanwhile, deafening noises emanated from the houses. On Sundays the neighborhood turned industrial; workshops became factories, there were storehouses where lathes and grinders, if not power saws and sanders, were kept running all day. Mechanics revved motors just to see what they could do. “Shut off” was not part of their vocabulary: the entire neighborhood seemed to have its generators going. You could even hear the sound of hammers on metal. The clamor of machinery was concentrated near the plateau of the tracks and spread upward from there. The silence was an illusion, but the noise, being so frenetic, also turned out to be illusory, like those Sunday afternoons when the stadium seemed to roar.
M, absorbed in his thoughts, might hear nothing for a long stretch, and then, out of nowhere, he would hear everything a few steps later — not just the sum of the noises, but each of them, at full volume. Always inclined to frustrate desires, the trains had refused to run for hours, he told me, perplexed. At the dead ends he stopped to look left and right at the other tunnels of shadow formed by the branches of the trees that met several meters above the street. The absence of trains amplified the brightness of the tracks to the point that it made them seem impracticaclass="underline" the train could be eliminated and the rails would go on gleaming for all time; two long, straight, silver lanterns, M added. It was this gleam and nothing else that made the trains run, but it also frightened them (another of his theories). “I went alone, the boys from the block didn’t come with me” (I remember his voice, like that of an adult, and which I struggle to hold on to, saying that childish phrase I doubt belonged to him; nonetheless, he said it). He thought about the weight of the trains relative to the width of the tracks, about how strange it was that, on other vehicles, the widest were the most light. What I am trying to say with these examples is that M proceeded through the transparent dust of the tracks, lost in his thoughts but in some way already aware of what would soon catch his attention, when he stopped with the intuition of having seen something a few meters ahead, something he had not yet made out, but which would — once he had covered a considerable distance — come to the forefront of his perception. It was the eye. From that moment on, though he would not understand it, he would be at the mercy of the search.
The layer of dust left by the trains, the invisible shavings that come loose with the friction, the organic remnants the wind has torn from the trees; these were and are the only things on the tracks, and they’re incapable of rousing anyone’s interest. Nonetheless, M was interested. Very. His steps seemed to be driven by something outside himself, but it was actually something internal. The gravel, covered by a waxy grey that announced its own passivity, played a prominent role. Prominent and undeserved. M retraced his steps without knowing what he was looking for, leaning forward as though he had lost something. He couldn’t help but feel ridiculous and embarrassed. Someone, hidden in the shadows of one of the many attic rooms around him, might have been laughing at his every move as he bent pathetically over a stretch of land that could never hold anything worth looking for. Ever since he was a child, he said, as though he were no longer one, he had known how to choose at first glance the perfect stone for whatever game he was going to play; this knowledge, like all others, is not easily lost. At most it is forgotten, but it is always recovered. Now, however, those same stones refused to take on any particular shape, or rather, they organized themselves according to an unexpected order, taking on a quality beyond any classification or meaning. He stumbled twice. There was no question that they were stones, but the fact that he did not know what he was looking at, or for, meant that they could have been anything at all while still remaining themselves. After a few meters it finally appeared, close to one of the rails and on top of a small mound: nestled alongside two pebbles as though it were a third, there was the eye, looking out toward the horizon.
M told this story one Monday morning before class, and I still have my doubts about it. At the time I didn’t believe him — how could I? It was so strange: the absolute solitude, the radiant day, the discovery, which seemed so outlandish. Then I thought the opposite: Why not? I said to myself. What is the difference between an eye and a stone? (Discoveries of any kind are always somewhat exceptional.) Later it was the rest of it, everything surrounding the eye, that seemed unconvincing: finding an eye might not be that unusual, but filling the scene with a combination of primordial elements like the weather, the light, the noises, and the smells — all fairly vague and only halfway comprehensible — seemed a bit gratuitous and tenuous. The eye to which M wanted to call attention was invisible; it was hidden in a chasm of nature. For this reason, I didn’t listen to him at the time; I thought about other things while M went over the minute details, for example, the morning light on translucent leaves, the struggle between the sun and the raised branches of the trees; this scene of harmony and natural tranquility seemed more unrealistic than the discovery itself. A scene that did not actually end up being harmonious because the machines thundered on continually, the distorted voices of the neighbors splintered the air, and the tumult of the clouds, their urgency, was palpable; three or four times during his walk, M watched the sky darken, the light fade, and a storm almost erupt. If all these things remained on the verge of happening, even those that would have been by all counts mutually exclusive, without any of them actually taking place, it was natural to think that the eye itself had a limited, if not shadowy, existence.