Ricardo Piglia - The Absent City

“There’s this telepath,” Elena said. “He follows me around and reads my thoughts. His name is Luca Lombardo, he’s from Rosario, everyone calls him the Tano. If I tell you what you are asking me for, he is going to blow up the microspheres implanted in my heart.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Arana said. “You have become psychotic and are in the middle of a paranoid delirium. We are in a Clinic in the neighborhood of Belgrano, this is an extended drug session, you are Elena Fernández.” He stopped and read her chart. “You work in the National Archives, you have two children.”

“I am dead, he moved me here, I am a machine.”

“We are going to have to use electric shock treatment on her,” Arana said to the doctor with the baby face.

“Listen,” Elena said. “In the cellars of the Mercado del Plata, in the Korean sector, the one everyone calls Seoul, there is an English photographer, Grete Müller. She works for the rebels.” She had to give her up in order to save Mac. Maybe she could warn her before the police showed up. The information had become public. Investigating virtual images, she had found the way to draw pictures of people and things she had never seen.

“We know,” Arana said. “I want names and addresses.”

Everything was starting over again. The sun rising in the city, the lights of the Mercado del Plata still on. There as well everything was starting over again. In the cellars of the Mercado del Plata, in a lab illuminated with a red light, Grete Müller was developing the photographs that she had taken in the aquarium that night. The patterns on the shells of the turtles were the symbols of a lost language. Originally, the white nodes had been marks on bones. The map of a blind language shared by all living beings. The only traces left of that original language were the patterns on the shells of the sea turtles. Prehistoric shadows and shapes recorded on bone plates. Grete enlarged the photographs and projected them on the wall. The series of patterns were the base of a pictographic language. All the languages of the world had evolved through the centuries from those primitive nuclei. Grete wanted to get to the island, because with this map it would be possible to establish a common language. In the past we all understood the meaning of every word, the white nodes were recorded in the body like a collective memory. She went over to the window high on the wall and looked out over Av. Nueve de Julio. The number of cars declined at that time of the morning, all the activity in the city was nocturnal. Perhaps she would finally be able to sleep and stop dreaming about the Museum and the machine and the proliferation of languages jumbled together to the point of incomprehensibility. They are forgotten worlds, she thought, no one keeps the memory of life anymore. We see the future as if it were the memory of a house from our childhood. She had to get to the island, find the legend of the woman who was going to come and save them. Perhaps, Grete thought, she is lying peacefully on the sand, lost on an empty beach, like a rebellious replica of a future Eve.

Junior woke up, startled. Once again the phone was ringing at midnight. It was the same woman who mistook him for someone else and told him her ex-husband’s sad story. A man she called Mike had gone to Mar del Plata to work as a night watchman in a hotel that was closed down for the winter. He was found dead one morning. They followed the music from the radio from one empty room to another until they finally discovered his body in a dark room with the blinds drawn. The woman said that at first they thought it was a suicide. Then they thought he had been killed by one of the State’s secret services. Her ex-husband was on the run, his group was withdrawing in complete disorder, he belonged to the People’s Revolutionary Army, a Trotsky-Peronist organization. He was a Trotsky-Peronizt, the woman said, and immediately lowered her voice and began to tell him about the Clinic. She had just spent two months there, she said, in the jail, in the colony. She was rehabilitated, now her name was Julia Gandini. He imagined the woman submerged in a false reality, stuck in someone else’s memory, forced to live as if she were another woman. These kinds of stories were circulating throughout the city, the machine had begun to incorporate material from reality. Julia told him that she was not being followed, that she was eighteen years old, that she wanted to see him.

“Even with just half the information I have,” she said, “you could run an entire special edition of the newspaper.”

She spoke informally to him, as if they were friends, and laughed with a clean, carefree laughter.

They set a time to meet at a bar, at Retiro Station.

“And how will I know you?” she asked.

“I look Russian,” Junior told her. “Like Michael Jordan, but white.”

“Michael Jordan?” she said.

“The guy who plays for the Chicago Bulls,” Junior said. “My face looks just like his.”

“I never watch TV,” the girl said.

Junior thought that she had been hospitalized and that that was why she did not get the references, as if she lived in a different reality. But he wanted to see her, he did not have too many other alternatives. He had walked through the cellars underneath the Mercado del Plata. He had looked for information in the news cemetery, in the old newspaper archives. He had had dealings in the bars of the Bajo where they sold fake documents, false stories, first editions of the first stories. His room was full of papers, notes, texts pinned up on the walls, diagrams. Recordings. He was trying to find his bearings in the broken plot, to understand why they wanted to disactivate her. Something was out of control. A series of unexpected facts had filtered through, as if the archives were open. She was not revealing secrets, and possibly she did not even know any, but she gave signs of wanting to say something different than what everyone expected. Facts about the Museum and its construction had begun to appear. She was saying something about her own condition. She was not telling her own story, but she was making it possible for it to be reconstructed. That is why they were going to take her out of circulation. She was filtering through real facts. The key was the story of Richter, the Engineer, as Fuyita called him. Junior wanted to make contact, he was certain that the story of the Clinic was a transposition. Maybe the girl could help him make some headway along these lines. Or maybe it was an insignificant fact in a plot with a different meaning. But it was possible she could help him process the information and bring the past up to date. He had spent two nights without sleeping hardly at all since he left the Museum. He was going in and out of the stories, traveling through the city, trying to find his bearings in that plot full of waiting and postponements from which he could no longer escape. It was difficult to believe what he saw, but he was finding the effects in reality, after all. It was like a network, like a subway map. He traveled from one place to the other, crossing stories, moving in several registers at once. And now he was in a bar at Retiro Station, eating a hot dog and drinking beer and waiting for the girl from the phone call to show up. An old man mopped the empty platform. The day’s activity was just beginning. Retiro Station was hardly used anymore. The trains to the Tigre Delta ran inconsistently. A woman approached him to ask if the lines were still running. It was six in the morning and the city was just starting to get going, he had to pay attention to all the activity around him without seeming overly anxious. He was watching the subway exit and the main hall. His eyes, like small clandestine cameras, captured the motion of the car that had just stopped to drop off the morning papers at the entrance to one of the platforms. It was the second edition of the day. They did not know what to say. The news continued to accumulate. The patrol cars controlled the city and you had to be very careful to make sure you stayed connected and could follow the events. The control was perpetual. The police always had the last word, they could withdraw his permit to move about the city, they could deny him access to press conferences, they could even withdraw his work permit. It was forbidden to seek out clandestine information. He was counting on Julia, he was waiting for her to show up. Maybe she was telling the truth. Or maybe she would come with a patrol car. There was a strange disparity of consciousness in what was occurring. Everything was normal and yet the danger could be felt in the air, a low alarming murmur, as if the city were about to be bombarded. Everyday life goes on in the middle of the horror, that is what keeps many people sane. The signs of death and terror can be perceived, but there is no clear evidence of behavior being altered. The buses stop at the street corners, the stores are open, couples get married and celebrate, nothing serious can possibly be happening. Heraclitus’s sentence has been inverted, Junior thought. He felt as if everyone were dreaming the same dream, but living in separate realities. Certain comments and a certain version of the events made him recall the days of the war over the Islas Malvinas. The Argentine military had lost the war and no one knew it. Women continued to knit jackets and blankets for the draftees in improvised booths in the square by the Obelisk. All certainties are uncertain, Junior ironicized, they have to be lived secretly, like a private religion. It was difficult to make decisions and separate facts from false hopes. He had sat down at a hot-dog stand, under the eaves that face the Plaza de los Ingleses. He was eating a hot dog and drinking a beer and reading the newspaper distractedly. The TV was playing a special program about the Museum. Political trash. The greasy smoke drifted in the air, and yet the place was pleasant. The presence of the drivers at the counter and the cashier in the black coat, who was getting change out of the register just then, cheered Junior up. A man talked to him as if he had known him his whole life. Something had happened with people’s sense of reality. The guy was talking with his brother, but there was no brother there.