FIVE
Despite the hazy origin of our friendship, which lacked a precise moment in my memory and was, like so many other adventures, mixed up in a bundle of circumstances in which very little is clear, I retain a vivid image of the gradual approach or affinity that, following the involuntary and somnolent rhythm of schoolchildren, would grow into a relatively close relationship. And yet sometimes I give in to a false notion: that our friendship began when I received his photo and M mine, not before. I convince myself of this. This conviction is so vivid that it veils all thought in one single color; I am unable to think otherwise until a while later, when I realize my error — that is, when I remember. Like any ceremony, the exchange was meant to inaugurate a new time, to divide a before from an after. Yet instead of indicating a beginning, I see now that it left one behind, forgot it, or something more: that private ritual, which was somehow innocent in that it did not attempt to engage anything beyond the people involved in it, that is, the two of us, set an ending in motion; its culmination was excessive in relation to its trivial beginning. By that time, Argentina was already filling up with the dead. If it had been normal before for them to show up in ditches and vacant lots, they now rejected all sense of measure and took on, in the form of corpses, a central role as the dead (but also as anonymous corpses, which in turn heightened the sinister hierarchy of the whole) in the verist theater that politics had become. When death is common, corpses become commonplace; there is nothing new to them. These corpses, because they were disturbing, seemed more numerous than the dead; thanks to their tragic nature, they also acquired a greater significance. This progression shows how fully their meaning could be inverted; not long before, the dead had exceeded corpses in number and significance. It seemed that there were more dead than living and more corpses than dead.
I am going to recount, as I remember it, something that happened on the night of June 20, 1973, while I walked with M in the early hours of the 21st. Public transportation was not running; nothing moved, in general. The few signs that indicated that the city had not been abandoned spoke of a recent tragedy, or worse, of some kind of catastrophe, incomprehensible and not yet over. Half a block from the avenida del Trabajo, a woman waited for her son, in tears. She was sitting in a doorway and strangely, despite the shadows, I remember her face as being illuminated. She repeated the boy’s name; it wasn’t enough for her to wait, we thought, she also had to call to him. But there was no reaction, not from the boy or from the people shut away in the neighboring homes, despite the fact that they had probably been listening to her for quite some time. We drew closer. M and I wanted to imagine the interior of the house from which she voiced her living warning and her absent need, though this may sound contradictory. The woman took no notice of us, but we could sense the silence of the home, the objects that, from that night on, would be redundant, useless. A nightstand, a bed, a shelf, a brush.
We walked from Mataderos to Villa Crespo; the same funereal silence inhabited every neighborhood, every block. We met with a dual intimation and an ambiguous beauty in the dark streets. A few hours earlier Perón, the political leader, had returned to Argentina; a throng of people had gathered to wait for him, but the desert around us brought to mind a city that had obliterated its inhabitants. The great mass of porteños slept, protected by walls and roofs, on beds tucked behind the façades of their houses, as we walked. Like ships, M and I floated along a surface composed of silence, the rough and the smooth of things, with the disciplined fatigue of the traveler. The shipwrecks were the others, the ones who waited, like the woman with the illuminated face.
That night, M and I talked about virginity. Not about our experience with it — it was still of longstanding relevance to one of us, though I will not say which — but rather, in anticipation of the truth, about the false promise hidden in its loss. One of us attempted to deny any change, and to this end alluded to a number of impossible absolutes. Experience, as the different pressures, sensations, and temperatures to which our skin is submitted, did not matter; the memories that could be etched into the mind on the basis of these circumstances mattered even less. Their triviality was absolute. The moments of a life, which, by the same mystery that allows it to unfold can take on significance despite being the pinnacle of superfluity, cannot be compared with the importance of “that” moment, despite the fact that it is the one truly fated to wane. The millions dispersed after waiting for the leader. Some had gotten there days in advance, but everyone wanted to leave at the same time. They turned and began to walk toward their homes, lost and disillusioned. As is well known, many remained where the bullets found them.
M and I sensed an abyss that divided us from the masses; this might have been due to our natural condition as members of the minority. Of all possible emotions, the masses inspired in us more sympathy than mistrust, more disbelief than fascination. The majority, overwhelmed by its own numbers, was unable to recognize the same essence from which it drew its own strength in the scarce, the brief, and the scattered. Yet one dreamed of joining those vital swells, the very identity of which pulsated in the form of a crowd, because they offered the possibility of giving in to the current and floating along without a care for the truth. Now, as I have been saying, the sea that had been swelling at the outskirts of the city to the southwest of Buenos Aires had dispersed in all directions.
At the corner of Rivadavia and San Pedrito, we relived the sensation of crossing, within just a few meters, a great divide between civilizations: just barely past Rivadavia, we were already nearing Nazca. Someone approached us, breaking our silence. He was poor, probably younger than his appearance let on, with a round face that promised virtue; he did not know which way Ezeiza was. He was walking, like us, which meant that we could have sent him a number of different ways; as such, Ezeiza — without being metaphorical — could be in any direction. “Ezeiza is so far away,” we answered, “that you could get there by going this way, or that way, or by heading over there. But the rally’s over.” “Do you think I could get there before dawn?” “It depends which way you’re going,” we offered. “To Ezeiza,” he answered. M and I looked at each other: “Ezeiza is a big place.” “To where the rally is.” That place was good only for escape. It had nothing to offer now, hours after the violence; it was of no interest to anyone. “You won’t find what you’re looking for,” we warned him. “I’m going to the rally. I’m going to welcome General Perón. My neighbors told me he was coming tomorrow.” He had been on foot since Retiro, where he had gotten off a train and had found no other way to keep moving. We asked him when they had told him this. “Yesterday,” he said. “Yesterday when?” “Yesterday, yesterday afternoon.” “Listen, it’s already over — that was today.” “Right, like I said, it’s today.” “No,” we explained, “that was today, or rather, yesterday. Perón already came back.” “It can’t be,” he said, embarrassed. “Yes — in the end he didn’t get off the plane at Ezeiza, but he arrived.” “So where did he go?” “I don’t know,” we said, “Morón, El Palomar, who knows…” The man walked off to the west; at that exact moment, the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees. The clear sky, the stars, orderly beyond the clouds, the absolute silence, and the cold, pulsating, closing in on us from all directions, even from within our own bones. It all seemed like an illusion, like the morning that follows a night of excess, only the other way around. We stayed on Nazca, crossed the tracks, and a few blocks later picked up our topic of conversation.