The two of us walked along an avenue whose sidewalks were covered with tables and whose cafés bore signs that had been made to look like marquees. In front of one of these — passing through meant walking between tables, even though one was still in the street — four men were talking about the weather. They seemed relaxed, having stretched out to fill their seats completely; the table was cluttered with coffee cups, beer bottles, and whiskey glasses. Everything was empty, consumed; there were ashes and cigarette butts. A typical afternoon chat, M and I thought, without needing to say anything. Nothing seemed worthy of our attention, except what we heard. A man with ruddy skin said, “I don’t want to know the future, I just want to know what the weather will be like.” “Why?” asked another. “So you can lose again?” “Lose what?” “I don’t know. Lose. You must have lost something.” “I won what I lost before. I don’t lose. I pay.” “If you want to know what the weather is going to be, you have to learn to read its signs, like the gauchos do,” interjected another. “Signs of what?” they asked. “The signs of the weather,” he said. “And what are those?” asked a few. “The smell of the air, the color of the sunset, the clouds, the direction of the wind.” “But the gauchos don’t do any of that,” the fourth intervened, “they just know.” Yes, but that’s no guarantee,” specified the one who had asked. “I knew a guy once who had been living in the country for a long time. He was used to predicting the weather, and he bragged about it. He wanted to be asked about it, to show off his unusual skill. But no one said anything to him. In the country he had been a normal person who knew the same thing as everyone else; here, too, he was just a normal person. Until he went back. The first few times it went welclass="underline" just like at the beginning, he predicted the same thing as everyone else. They would get together at the bar and talk about the weather — and then the errors began. He stopped being normal. The radar he used to detect the weather seemed to be broken; it seemed to be working in reverse. If he predicted heat, it would be cold; if he announced a drought, it would rain for weeks; the skies never cleared when he thought they would. He finally asked himself, What good is this skill if I’m always wrong? I’ll draw the opposite conclusions. And so he did, and he was right again, by interpreting the signs as their opposites. He was happy to be normal; the weather once again fell under his purview, if not as an object of knowledge, then at least as one of intuition. One morning a few months later, though, he found himself unable to tell the difference between sign and interpretation: the inversion to which he had grown accustomed had been incorporated by nature, which meant that if he chose the opposite, he ran the risk of being wrong again, though he ran the same risk if he didn’t.” That was the last thing M and I heard as we passed, before the voices began to grow faint. The coincidence between what we had been discussing and the topic at the table did not surprise us as much as what would happen a few hours later, when the two of us, having forgotten what had happened, experienced a greater mystery than those usually created by the weather.
There was a convergence. A few blocks past the café, M and I said our goodbyes: each was headed a different way. I remember walking along treeless streets that were startlingly quiet, and ending up in a park that seemed to go on forever. I wandered deep into a neighborhood filled with workshops and enormous warehouses, where labor was something certain, tangible. I felt a foolish emotion, as has happened on other occasions, when I saw the rolling cobblestones of a few of its streets, their crests and folds like the workings of geology on a human scale, the effect of the tireless passage of trucks. I kept walking, thinking of things I no longer remember, when, on a corner of avenida Caseros, I unexpectedly ran into M. We stood there, amazed and confused, fearing that the other might have a secret. For a moment, we surrendered to the most painful anxiety. Could there be something to confess? we wondered, for a fraction of a second. Something similar had happened on another occasion, as I mentioned, when we backed into each other a few meters from a newsstand, but the coincidence was greater in this instance, because it had happened again. And unlike before, neither of us was able to justify his presence. Neither was lost, though we realized that each had an urgent engagement somewhere far away at that moment. Guided by mysterious forces, we had wandered for hours and hours until we ended up meeting on a forgettable corner, next to a mailbox. These forces, we saw, formed a point of convergence to which we gravitated, always.
This power brought us together almost every time, protecting us against distance. On other occasions it prevented convergences as though it exerted a negative force, impeding encounters — when it was a matter of bodies — and agreement — when it was a matter of consciousness. In those cases, shared feelings would vanish, as would convictions; the idea of having something in common seemed unthinkable, outside the realm of possibility. M’s hope, then, his desire to assign the photos — his or mine, in this case — a power that evaded and yet transcended the affective, is understandable. I have sometimes thought about how the magic of photos, according to M, is not contained by their visual aspect, their ability to provoke genuine surprise in the people who adopt a position of innocence to look at them, even when they know them and what they are of. The magic of photos was that they restored a rudimentary human faculty, though one that may have been forgotten: the inclination to endow an object, its interior or its future hidden by the very materiality of its mass, a logic that transcends all mysteries. “Why would someone hold on to his grandfather’s lighter or his father’s hat?” Not only because these objects bring them to mind and because the memory is permeated by a bittersweet emotion, but also because a protective energy emanates from them, though it may never prove its efficacy, one which relies on our belief in order to make us feel secure against the evil that threatens us always. This supernatural power, as such, is independent of our conscious mind and our will, and operates without our knowledge. As a result, we can disregard these objects and throw them into a bottom drawer where we never look for anything because they represent those responsible for our misfortune; we can indignantly renounce the things they touched, yet the benign force they exert will continue its work.