For a long time, the other would feel the fingers of the man on his back, pushing him toward the car. The man urged them to close the trunk, yet he, barely any further away, was incapable of doing so. M and the other had spoken on several occasions about animals in the city, which were invariably incorporated into its landscape. They began by talking about the way dogs walked, then thought of other animals until they had compiled a long list. Each species could have its specific attributes, but each individual — the cat that only crossed the street on a diagonal, the sparrow that hops to the left before flying to the right — was a cipher unto itself, turning its back on its peers. The meaning consisted of this, of seeing each animal as the atypical emblem of a group. All toads, for example, behaved as though they were toads, yet none could hide the singular disposition that revealed them to be an exception to the species. M and the other thought that animals were too easily distracted, that they were excessively curious, that they often forgot themselves, that they could not measure danger, that they possessed a human sense of eagerness. Animals make selective use of their instinct, M and the other observed, thinking of all they concealed. Yet animals inhabited the city, rendering themselves transparent by living alongside people.
The father, M, and the other looked for a branch, a stick, a pipe — anything long that they could use to close the trunk from a distance. They did not find anything nearby, but a little further along, about fifty meters away, a pile of junk imposed itself on the sidewalk and on part of the street, the way rubble tends to be left in the suburbs. Maybe, thought the three without saying a word, they would find the magic rod in there. As in all triads, there were certain rules: there could not be a fifth element. As such, the fourth — the driver of the car — was erased from the minds of the three so that the stick, pipe, or whatever it was could occupy his place. Meanwhile, the man’s affliction continued to grow; he was being taken over by a violent anxiety. The three were infected by his nervous breathing: they heard its murmur, faintly; an articulation preceding a cry, like a dream or a spasm — the picture of reflexive fear. Not so much because of any danger presented by the rats — their sheer number rendered them abstract, and their lack of place made them seem clumsy — but due, rather, to the terror of the driver, their role as guardians became clear to them and they acted accordingly.
And so M, his father, and the other began a nervous dialogue filled with elided and half-spoken words, urgent gestures that were too quick and tense to actually communicate anything; they, too, had been left breathless. It was a matter of finding, in that pile of junk, the instrument of their salvation. M and his father resorted to a disjointed, but apparently effective, language. “Bugs and nails,” stammered the father, pondering the dangers of rooting around in there. He said it too late: M was already on his way, after replying — though he spoke first—“I’ll get.” His words, as sometimes happens, would hang in the air as he moved into the distance.
I found it surprising, under the circumstances — that mix of disquiet, hesitation, pressure and reserve brought about by the rats — that M would return, with those two words, to a domestic language lost who knows when by who knows whom. That “I’ll get” had its own, immediate, referents: in my own home there were those who said I’ll get several times a day. Between “I’ll get it” and “get going” or some other variant, those two words emerged, diluting the meaning by which the phrase was assumed to be conjugated, imprecisely but with eloquence: a paradigm of ambiguity. It was only a few minutes before dusk: the horizon was not yet ablaze but the process of the sunset was already set in motion, tinting the end of the street with a yellow that grew more and more intense, and would soon veer toward orange. M looked like a shadow cut out of that backdrop as he leaned over the mountain of junk, rummaging through it for the magical lance with the delicate movements of a rag and bone man.
In this way M, whose form was already slight, seemed to grow even more delicate from where we stood. The intensity of the light blotted out his silhouette, like those moths that grow even more transparent when they come to rest on a lamp. For a moment, we did not hear the rats, the man interrupted his litany, and M was endowed with a distinct plasticity in which magic, something ritual not unlike a dance, combined with beauty, drama, and surrender as we watched his body dissolve like a cloud against the light. His father and I watched as his silhouette, cut through by the line of the street, grew more and more narrow; his feet, restless atop the chaos of objects, tried to gain the balance that would allow him to continue his search, disappearing for fractions of a second at a time. It was then that he levitated before us, our impassive eyes filled with admiration. His father said, “He moves like a frog,” or something to that effect, alluding to his tentative movements and his transparency. I did not answer him; I understood the processes of the afternoon that were making M dissolve. Knowing this, however, did not reduce my fascination; on the contrary, it was enhanced because I was able to see this effect as essential, a legitimate confluence rather than something providential. As such, I was left in silent awe.
It would be easy, now, to interpret these incidents like dreams and M’s powerful, though fleeting, luminous apogee as the prefiguration of his absence, but this story has been particularly redundant and there is no need for allusions. Just as consciousness registers what is easy, incorporating it in a more or less mysterious way into its workings, it also coexists with the difficult, even the unknown, in order to dispel the field of darkness against which its silhouette appears. Now I am more than twice as old — that is, as many years have passed since M’s disappearance as did, for either him or me, before his death — and I simply can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Despite the workings of time, which forces us, among other things, to give up our resistance and yield to its advance, and despite the fact that this “I can’t believe it” became, in some way, rhetorical as the years went by, over time this rhetoric acquired, or regained, the full measure of truth contained by the original words. It is against the backdrop of the shallow, dark pit formed by that conclusive reality, the deepest subjective manifestation of which is, after all, this “I can’t believe it,” that I float, repeating the words. Like all rhetoric, it alludes to a truth in and of itself, though with years of repetition I have distanced myself from the original mystery, from the root of that darkness, to construct another: the foundation of all the time that has passed without M. Event and disbelief are castled, changing places as though “I can’t believe it” were the event and M’s disappearance the verbal form that questioned it. Sometimes I catch my mind wandering, as everyone’s does, only to immediately return to this thought and, if the circumstances are right, repeat under my breath that I can’t believe I can’t believe it, when so much time has passed and nothing has filled the void of his absence.
One afternoon a few weeks ago I was walking north along an avenue. Sundays in Caracas, as in a good number of cities, are calm and quiet. The light was diffuse; it was somehow fragmented and visibly corpuscular as it was returned by the mountain, as though the sun at its height were not enough and a greater intensity were required, the reflection off the slope, to ignite the air. A trail of marks along the street registered the activity of the people: contradictory, almost always aggressive, marks that spoke of a lack of peace. All of a sudden, a signal blinded me from up on high: someone had probably raised their hand in the foothills and the light from the sun had bounced off the face of their watch. This lasted an instant — a moment more brief than an instant. I observed the slope and thought about how far that particular light had traveled to reach me, guided with greater precision by chance than any other that surrounded me in that moment or this one. That flash had crossed the orbit of planets, illuminated asteroids; it was also the energy that propelled the comets and which had apparently originated in the sun and expanded as light and solar wind before dazzling me. One final moment of concentration, its reflection in the face of that watch, delayed its ultimate dissolution as it fell to earth, promising to make it unique one last time in the form of a flash of light. I don’t know why, but that was enough to make M appear in my memory. A cloud floated just above where the reflection had originated, girding the mountain in silence. “From there, Caracas looks like the model of a city,” I recalled, and continued on my way.