M and I were in our third year of high school. The next morning, his father began to walk around the suburbs, swearing that he would not give up until he found it. He would abandon his dedication to the car a few years later, because of his son (in this sense I still remember the father, his figure, under a sign of mystery). M would go out with him some days, and on occasion I would accompany them. We were going out to wander around, according to the mother. Despite the lack of signs — or hope, for that matter — and the discouragement that brought down our spirits, especially those of the father, I still have a clear and, I would almost say, happy memory of those walks. In the first place, the likelihood that the search would succeed was so slight that, far from being a duty, it took on the quality of an adventure, of frivolity: there is nothing better than an unlikely objective to make a task that might appear important seem gratuitous. In the second place, I have never again had that feeling, except in memory, of setting in motion the proliferation of whitewashed houses and perfectly regular blocks that unfolded before us as we walked at a leisurely pace. Even poverty, which can often seem unexpected and overwhelming, as one might imagine, proved to be gradual in that territory. Entire blocks of indecision or timidity, and occasionally of cowardice or bashfulness, regulated any contrasts. As it was, the geography of Buenos Aires could not be thought of in terms of depth, but only of breadth — we had not actually entered into anything in particular, but were rather crossing a surface that lacked any real variation — these were poor areas in which the deterioration was so aligned with its medium that it seemed as though they might never end. Surface and poverty were two complementary echoes coming together to create a concrete reality, each multiplying the effect of the other. In the meantime, it seemed as though we — alert, attentive to the appearance of that blue car — were skirting the outer reaches of a territory, an ever-changing yet boundless country. I would not be exaggerating if I said that, despite the difficulty of the operation, we were able to take note of the balance of things, like that of our heads and our bodies as we moved, which was similar to the undulating line of the horizon discerned by a camel. As we advanced, I went over my doubts about the endeavor: it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, I had said to M, without any originality. Now, however, I had no regrets about joining the committee—“the investigative committee,” as the father would joke; despite the growing concern that overwhelmed him, he was always at the ready to amuse the two of us, who were still boys in his mind. I had no regrets; on the contrary, I wanted more streets to walk down, and was happy to have the chance to wander without boundaries, as though Greater Buenos Aires were truly the territory of vastness.
Sometimes M’s father would plan our routes to coincide with stores where he could solicit orders. M and I would wait outside, hiding from the sun under a tree, silently surprised that not a soul would come down the street. Other times we would go in, and the father would introduce us to the owner in a way that seemed excessive, not so much because his remarks were particularly fawning, but for the profusion of details he used to describe us. Later, the shopkeepers would ask how the search was going. The father would answer reproachfully with an oath I have not been able to recall exactly for some time now, perhaps because of the jarring effect that it produced, swearing that he would wear out all his shoes before he gave up. Almost imperiously, he insisted that we go in with him when he made use of the walks to sign on new clients; our presence was a force that was hard for the owners of these businesses to overcome. They were flattered by the fact that three people were engaged in the effort to sell them a few little things; they were grateful for the service and, caught somewhere between confusion and pretension, ended up buying more than was expected. The father often used the phrase “poor guy,” and on more than one occasion said, “Everyone in Greater Buenos Aires is down on his luck,” usually without noticing my presence as I walked beside him through the vastness like one more of those, according to him, poor guys from the suburbs. When he did notice, too infrequently for my taste, he would improvise some gesture of surprise and excuse himself, patting me on the back. First he would say my name, and then add, “Nothing personal” (the order never changed).
Though we might be inclined to talk about it as something common, it is always startling to see the effect displacement has on the organization of space. Scale and trajectory, the tools necessary to organize a route, depend on movement rather than geography; speed is the determining factor. When one walks, one moves within an environment on a tremendous scale; when one travels by train or car, the environment is reduced to a moderate scale; the airplane, on the other hand, belongs to the small scale. To cross half a continent in a few hours, or to walk on both shores of an ocean in the same day, not only contradicts anyone skeptical of movement, but also means the compression of a seemingly impossible distance. Forced by the theft to walk day after day with a double purpose, M’s father would discover a parallel essence in the suburbs, supplementary to the one he had observed from his car. The deferred realm of the large-scale, paradoxically, individualized the streets and multiplied the businesses. In this way, he experienced — or rather relived, since this is, as I recall, a characteristic of children — a communion with the minor and the microscopic: fleeting moments, brief interruptions, a limited radius; murmurs and exclamations, as well as small businesses, kiosks, garages, and vestibules.
In the course of this intensive labor, there was no place he did not visit; grocery shops seemed to be born and develop as an effect of his passing. If the neighborhood had been the unit of measure when he had the car, now it was the block. After a few weeks of walking, he understood the contradiction between these two aims; selling and searching were mutually exclusive, particularly because a sale meant coming back — it would have been foolish to lose a good client — and coming back, after all, meant going to the same place over again. It is true that the car was not necessarily always parked; there was also a chance, albeit a minimal one, of seeing it pass by, although considering this possibility would have meant accepting its ultimate implication: that all they had to do was stand on the corner and wait, though obviously the car might just as easily never pass by. As such, he would dedicate certain days to sales and others to the search. On those mornings, before setting out on his expedition, he would choose the perfect epicenter as our starting point, one that would ensure the fewest obstacles given the enormous distance that we would cover. Once there, we would begin to walk in a spiral, inevitably deferring to the shape of the blocks. When, after a few hours, we found ourselves forced to walk in a straight line for several blocks before being able to turn, the notion of progress and expansion left us and we were humbled by a sense of linearity. The loop took on such a wide arc that it ceased to be such; we thought we were simply headed forward, not realizing that we were actually only two blocks to the right or the left of where we had passed, distracted, just a little while earlier. The father was in charge of the turns, and from time to time consulted a street map that was bound like a book — it often forced him to flip back or skip ahead several pages, even when it was only a matter of crossing a street or turning a corner. Finding our location on a map means seeing ourselves from the outside; it has a greater impact on us than looking at old photographs, in which we are caught off guard by a discolored, outdated figure, the memory and foundation of the present, which is recovered as soon as we lean over the portrait. A reality at once uncomplicated and global seems to be present in a map, in such a way that when we coincide, occupying the point observed with our bodies, the only requirement remaining for the map to become truth — that is, ourselves — has been met.