On our walk that night, before dawn on the 21st of July, once the topic of virginity had been exhausted and the man who had lost his way looking for the Ezeiza airfields, where he thought Perón would be appearing the following day, was the memory of a fleeting anomaly, M and I ran into Sito. He came from the direction of Ciudadela. Much of avenida Juan B. Justo was still paved with colored cobblestones, and it was there, on one of those sidewalks, that we heard a loud whistle behind us. We turned at the same time — for a moment, M and I must have formed a strange, symmetrical figure — and we saw him coming up the middle of the street, signaling us with his arms. There was a block between us, but Sito did not hurry; he knew that we would wait for him (this sort of assumption inspires friendship). As he approached, I asked M, “How’s the mother doing?” “What mother?” he asked. “Sito’s mother, how is she doing?” “How is she doing what?” “You know… she drank, didn’t she?” “Oh. She’s the same.” As I remembered, she had given up drinking and gone back to it several times, in cycles that were always both drastic and drawn out. So I asked M, “The same as when?” “The same as always. She gives up drinking and then goes back to it.” “But how is she now? What is she doing?” I insisted. “Oh, now. I don’t know. Let’s ask Sito.” We had to wait a while before he joined us. The people he had gone to visit had not let him go during the day because of the violence; eventually, after he alluded to the anxiety his mother must certainly have been feeling, he had been allowed to leave. On days like those, and those that followed, danger returned the original sense of uneasiness to the geography of the city, its breadth. Just as in the past, setting out from Ciudadela for another place meant the risk of crossing hostile territory, giving people the sensation of going on a journey when they were only traveling between neighborhoods; movement was once again classified according to the risks it presented.
As he approached us, Sito noticed that we were talking about him; how could he not have, given the unexpected nature of the encounter and the fact that we were waiting for him. But he also knew that we were talking about his mother, despite the fact that we were too far away for him to possibly hear us, Sito confided in me the day we had a coffee after running into each other on Reconquista and Tucumán, as I have mentioned. He told me that he knew right away, that night as he walked toward us after whistling, when he saw us with our hands in our pockets, taking short steps almost in place, practically walking in circles without knowing it, that I was asking M about his mother. Hell is more predictable than heaven, said Sito, and living with her was a disaster, a perfect hell. Not only did he become accustomed to predicting her blows, her seclusions, her delirium, her tears, anguish, and complaints, Sito also grew accustomed to reading, in the faces of others, the appearance of his mother in the form of a question, pity, or disdain.
People made life with her more difficult, he continued. Sometimes he would get distracted and spend hours dreaming of a world in which he would never have to see anyone: he would busy himself only with caring for his mother, not with explanations. In that case, he thought, the alcohol would be less of an affliction than a hobby, since it was the others who saw it as a stigma, not the one who drank. It’s always the outside world that ruins family relations; were it not for their contact with the outside world, he and his mother would have enjoyed a tight and lasting, happy bond limited only by the length of their lives. In the same way, his marriage would be absolute heaven if the two of them never had to see or speak with anyone; the same goes for the children. But this is obviously impossible, admitted Sito, and so life turned into a hell. Something in the air told him when someone was thinking of his mother, which created a pressure behind his eyelids that felt as though his eyes were forcing their way forward. It left an impression on him when he was a boy, he continued, the way she would look first at the bottle, then at the glass, right before she took a drink. As though her eyes wanted to leave their sockets, to anticipate the materiality of the drink, pressed on by anxiousness.
Sito learned to monitor his eyelids when daily life suggested that the effect would be repeated. He conserved the reflex after the death of his mother, though it had been stripped of its original attributes. In her absence, this sixth sense had no purpose; but the eyelid, true to character, continued alerting him to other dangers: the change of tone in a conversation, defects in an elevator, someone lying in wait. Just now, I remember the gesture Sito made, of pressing or closing his eye with one hand, when I persisted in questioning his occupation with an attitude between grave and mocking. I don’t know why, but this reflex inspires a fear in me worthy of being expressed by one just like it; it seems like a dramatization of the unconscious, and for that very reason a sign that its master has embraced both innocence and cruelty, skirting both territories without exercising control. People like that are capable of the greatest malice, I thought of Sito’s tic, but not necessarily of him, as I walked along Bernardo de Irigoyen toward Constitución. We were talking when all of a sudden something went wrong; I don’t know what had happened, but I watched him smooth his eyelid with his fingertips every so often, following a convulsive movement of his arm that looked as though he were trying to shake something off. At one point, he knocked over a glass. In fact, he rubbed his eye throughout our whole conversation, and also while we walked down Reconquista and later along Corrientes toward the Obelisk. Sito may not have done anything else. I don’t know if I represented a danger, or if he told me that bit about the danger in order to explain a gesture that had no justification; the empty memory of his mother as she caressed the glass or bottle with the tips of her fingers, reading the worn label as though it were a means of understanding the true nature of the drink.
Sito’s silences were always unique, always his own. He had learned to live with drama early on, hence the combination of reserve and surliness that emanated from him, particularly from his eyes, when he fell silent. There was a reason that Sito had not stopped talking during our entire encounter; he had even found a way to correct those inevitable silences, when one thinks back or before going on, by coughing or making noise with something or another. As a boy he had been completely withdrawn and his friends had experienced his mortal silence as a burden; he could remain mute and impassive, answering in sporadic monosyllables that only served to underscore his solitude, for hours at a time. But now, with the weight of memory threatening to crash down upon his truth, a moment’s hesitation alluded to those past silences, making a fraction of a second seem intolerable; it was in this delicate and simple net that Sito had been caught. As such, despite their difference from the earlier ones in both their duration — these were nonexistent compared to those others — and their nature, Sito found that the value of his silences remained the same: reality seemed to shrink and objects to stretch out as long as the silence lasted. Everything seemed more ominous, there was nowhere to conceal a secret, because everything was brought into focus with clarity and immediacy. (If it had been concealed in the depths before, the truth was now right out on the surface.) It seemed to me that Sito also possessed a mineral obstinacy that equaled his verbal compulsion. The quieter the person, the less stubborn they tend to be. Sito spent much of the afternoon insisting that he couldn’t believe I was a writer, until he ended up admitting that he had always thought that the writer would be M. This opinion was so common on the block that his mother — irritated by the silent reproach of her son, whose sadness did not stop her from adding to the growing mountain of empty bottles — would order him, as a way of getting him off her back and as a kind of insult, “Go, go see that writer of yours,” meaning M. Sito would go see him, though they would never so much as touch on the subject of writers, or anything related to them. M was never interested in anything of the sort and yet, from early on, he had a reputation as a writer: a partial recognition, of course, but an emphatic one. More recently, after they lost the bond of free time, when they ran into each other every day or nearly every day, as I have said, M and Sito would exchange a few words. Usually when Sito would take the empty bottles out to the tracks at night, to leave them for drifters and vagrants to pick up later.