And yet that was not how it happened; the discovery was real. M was filled with panic, but he did not run. “I was scared,” I remember him saying, “but I didn’t run.” An eye silently calls out for its complements: the lid, the lashes, eyebrows, even the rest of the face (a face, in turn, would demand a head, and the head a body, the body a life, et cetera; something is always missing, in that moment). The solitude of the solitary eye keeps it from being an eye in the broad sense of the word: it is a lost eye, which is a different thing. M did not know what to do. Somewhere nearby, perhaps no more than a few meters away, was an empty socket. Up close, it was bigger than he would have imagined; it blended with its surroundings, seemed like another stone. Its solitary nature was useful in this respect. M studied the eye until another burst of silence drew his attention away. “I couldn’t hear a train, or any other noise, just like I couldn’t feel my tongue resting in the space where my tooth used to be.” The eye had him in its power, its sphere of influence extending for several meters in all directions, making no distinction between animals and minerals. M amused himself by imagining its perspective, which lacked a focal point; so much so that he got the idea of lying down and looking in the same direction: the rail, a steel fence, the ground, craggy with stones, and a sphere too high above him, the sky. Now, for example, if someone were to look over they would see M lying across the tracks, his face resting on the sharp pebbles, looking off to the side. He thinks about people who commit suicide: maybe the eye he is trying to imitate belonged to one of them. M remembers: He once saw a mother who was unable to commit suicide without her son. The child was trying to get away from her, but she held on to him, impatiently awaiting the arrival of the train. The two were behaving normally; they did not draw any attention. No one noticed them. Did the child know the mother’s intentions? There is no way for M to know. They were seated on a bench in the station, wearing long coats that covered their bodies. It was winter, and although M has no memory of the cold, he can still see the swollen and flushed faces of mother and child, the watery eyes, the lips pressed tightly together. He also sees the breath that the mother expels from her nostrils; the child does not give any off. It is strange that, even when faced with the elemental state that is suicide, people tend to behave according to habit. There was nothing unusual about the scene of a fussy child, restless for whatever reason, and the mother forcing him to stay near to her. In those moments, according to M, the mother forgot about suicide. What mattered to her was not drawing any attention to herself; to her, composure was a gift, not just a behavior — it was a deep-seated value that opened the door to other virtues. Whether or not it came naturally was secondary, it was a gift that must have been ingrained, a deep conviction. M saw then that people’s natural actions served as a pretense to conceal self-destruction. It is true that this is the definition of pretending, doing something without calling attention to it, but M was not sure that the mother was pretending at alclass="underline" to her it was essential that the child behave himself. It was everyone else that was concealing something, the situation as a whole. The mother’s efforts brought several jokes to mind: for example, the one about the prisoner condemned to death who, as he steps up to the gallows, turns down a final cigarette because they are bad for the health. Still, it is understandable that she would want to die in full possession of her convictions, not just her faculties. There was also a practical concern: the child could escape just as the train was coming, which would have meant waiting for another. But did the child know the mother’s intentions? Could he sense the danger? M thinks not. Mother and child were unaware of each other, even though they were together; he was used to expecting the worst and she to giving it to him. The child’s gestures were those someone would make around an unfamiliar person, a stranger, even. The mother bored him, so he grew restless. For her part, the mother was filled with two intermingling desires: not dying alone and not being accused of leaving the child to fend for himself. Abandoning the child meant recognizing that she could have chosen life; taking him with her affirmed her decision, made it unequivocal. She had little to think about, then, as these desires clearly indicated what should be done. Still, M kept returning to one thought: there was something so natural about the mother’s impatience at the child’s fussiness that it suspended the notion of death. M demonstrated this by turning it around, suggesting that the emotions were the individuals and the individuals the emotions. On one had, the desire for suicide: on the other, childish agitation. The first is the mother of the second. Suicide is ashamed of the effects of agitation; it does not show itself as it is because in those moments the desire for suicide forgets itself, becomes more concerned with not making a scene and shows a hidden sense of maternal propriety, wanting agitation to behave itself, not to be rude. If we believe this, that these two states have taken on form and that mother and child — two beings only half protected from the cold — are no more than the vague ideas known as Suicide and Agitation that inhabit bodies of flesh and bone, what name can we give the remains scattered on the tracks once the train had passed? What do you call the torn overcoat, the lone shoe with a foot still inside it, the crimson scarf? The desire for suicide cannot put on a jacket, nor can childhood agitation carry sweets in its pocket. Laid out across the tracks, M thought about that day when the whole station froze in an expression of horror as it watched the mother run, clutching on to the child.
M stood up and observed the eye from above. If it came from a suicide, it had not stopped pretending, he thought, except that now it had chosen to be a stone. He thought for a moment about his missing tooth. Only for a moment, but it was enough: he picked up his foot and brought down the heel of his shoe on the eye, as hard as he could. The rite had reached its apex; the sacrifice was complete. A white liquid splattered his other foot with such force that it seemed to come from something living. The delicate resistance of the eye was, for a few chaotic instants, a vivid and lasting memory; stepping on something rarely has such a contradictory effect. He observed the colloidal remains, which were just as disquieting as they had been a moment earlier, even though their origin was, by then, difficult to discern; a new, undefined state. He was afraid. “I must have been afraid, I don’t know” he clarified; either way, he found it intolerable. The eye, that solitary presence, left the body that had served as its vessel and its protection exposed; far from establishing its autonomy, this produced only confusion. It was like the sudden jolt caused by the presence of an insect, only in this case it was not precipitous, but belated. With the eye smashed, a change had taken place. It was striking: though the morning was not yet over, M sensed the premature decline of the day; the light began to withdraw and shadows stretched languidly across the ground.