Later, he continued, it occurred to him that he should tell his friends, but there was nothing left to show them; he had destroyed the evidence. So he began to look for its mate: if he found one eye, he thought, he should be able to find the other. He inspected the stones again. The railroad ties, especially that day, were dead trees that could not exist in any form but as railroad ties. He looked up and saw the rails extending toward the center of the horizon, cutting the city in two. He could sense, to the right and the left of him, the world spreading out symmetrically on either side of the tracks, just as the Red Sea parted before Moses. “The planet divided by the San Martín line, who would have believed it?” he asked that frozen morning before heading into school, amusing himself with his witticism before the sun had yet warmed the space we occupied on the very planet he was talking about. “Why should anyone believe it?” I responded. “Believe what?” he asked. I looked at him without understanding. “What you’re saying, that the tracks divide the planet.” “No one has to believe it; they only have to understand it. You don’t know why I said that?” he asked. “Since when do I ever know what you’re trying to say?” I retorted. As an answer, he regarded me silently. Our conversations were occasionally that mangled.
M was lost in his thoughts about endless train tracks when he heard the whimper of a dog coming from the vegetation. The machines faded away; he forgot the impassive advance of the day, just as he had noticed it a moment earlier. It was not a pitiful howl like that of most dogs, but a feeble wail. Orienting himself by the sound, he advanced with caution. He saw a white head and a grey back in the tangle of vegetation; he went a little closer. The dog had its back to him. M had a sudden and devastating intuition: that was where the eye came from, he thought, that poor animal must have just lost it. To confirm this he would have to get it to turn around. He yelled, throwing stones at it, but in vain. The dog drew further into the vegetation, probably lamenting the bitter fate that had imposed the hostility of a child upon it. M was happy with the solution to the mystery. Finding the owner of the eye explained the discovery and therefore made it more real. But the irritation with which he had crushed the eye returned, only this time it was directed at the animal as a whole, as though there were an unfinished task he needed to complete. Meanwhile, the dog was moving away. “I could accept it if it runs away,” said M, “but not if it ignored me.” He quickened his pace and, when he got close enough, grabbed its tail and pulled, hard. This time the animal would react: it forgot the reason for its whimpers and let out a howl, forceful this time, as it turned its head to defend itself. Then M could see both eyes, which fixed on his for a moment.
He got out of there immediately; this time he was the one that fled. He climbed up toward the tracks as though he were returning to a brightly lit summit, to clear skies, from a place of nightmares and dreams. He didn’t know which of the two things (the eye or the dog) affected him more, but he could not imagine what use knowing would be, anyway. Perhaps affected was not the right word. They were two mysteries from which he should have retreated, even as a means of solving them. But by acting he had revealed them and, in his weakness, had found himself. He did not know what to do: he had been walking for the past few hours to kill time, and now, in the middle of the day, he was overwhelmed once more by boredom. The secret of the bored is that things always begin over for them. The sun loomed above him once again, he asserted, unlike a few moments earlier — as though it ever could have done anything else. Again he walked along one of the rails, balancing without trying to do anything in particular. Bewildered and receptive, he went along like someone calling forth on his return the same path he had traveled on the way, remembering details as suggestions that could finally be confirmed. Yesterday morning, M commented, ideas, discoveries, and impressions had a knack for turning back on themselves. Interest turned into apathy, fear into recklessness, audacity into caution, enthusiasm into tedium, and plenitude into nothingness. The very geography of the tracks confirmed the disposition of the place (because the place did have a disposition, there was no question of that): the events of the night, described by the neighbors with shock and fascination, extended through the air like the rays of a fable until they were diluted by the even light of day; the noises, extraordinarily loud, ceased a few meters further, defeated by the silence. The intense vapors, an attribute of the area, dissipated in the neutral air (in the scent of the air itself). Yet at the same time, as anything could become its opposite, this combination of things hinted at a menacing atmosphere whose violence sometimes manifested itself without warning when, within this more or less menacing and more or less peaceful environment, the sound of an approaching train could be heard, that calamitous disruption that plunged oblivion and serenity into a convulsive state of disorder with its din and its vibrations.
“As soon as I left the tracks I wondered if the eye had been real.” In the street, in the shade of the trees — M continued, using other words — I felt relieved that I had gotten out of the glaring sun. The eye seemed like something illusory, even false. The dog, too. Still, he had no reason to be surprised. “I had no reason to be surprised,” he explained, being so used to hearing stories about mutilated bodies on the tracks. It was rare for a week to go by without something turning up, but now, as the protagonist of one of these discoveries, M simply could not believe it. Things were always being found — it could be a limb, part of a limb, organs, et cetera — but now that it was his turn, he simply could not believe it. Nonetheless, it would not have been an exaggeration for him to say that he had already forgotten it by the time he stepped into his house (insofar as exaggeration means little when it comes to forgetting, as is well known). As soon as he left the tracks and stepped back onto the sidewalk, he was beset by doubt (not the garden-variety doubt suggested by the word beset; it was a dynamic sort of doubt) as to whether the eye had existed or not. A neighbor was repairing his car, his head, arms, and torso hidden under the hood; before reaching him, M noticed the frenzy of hammering, which sounded as though he were trying to break it to pieces. It was not the first time he had seen someone destroy his car. Surprisingly, the further away he got, the more clearly he could hear the banging.
The tracks, the eye — none of it mattered to him anymore; he just wanted to return to the peace of his room. The memories, despite their immediacy, seemed unreliable; later they would be untrue. He did not know how to explain where he had been. He said, “I saw an eye, and then a dog, which I followed,” and could not believe it; as a thought, it had an eloquent simplicity to it. Consequently, it was soon lost to him as a memory. It doesn’t seem like you’ve forgotten it, given the way you just told the story, I reasoned. At this point M began a long explanation, a rationale of the varied, contradictory, and often tyrannical forms of forgetting, finally concluding, “I only remembered at night, when I told everyone about it and no one believed me; no one but Sito. For the rest of the afternoon, though, I didn’t remember anything.” Wasted Sundays, he declared; mornings lost in the sun and afternoons locked up inside. Just like at dawn, when everything enters my perception at once as I sit up — the creaking of the bed and the striated light in the doorway — noise and light enter without warning, as though they had been waiting outside the whole time, readying the machinery of oblivion.