Ricardo Piglia - The Absent City

“The Russian used to live here,” she said. “But that is not his name anymore, now he is somebody else, he uses a European name. You have to protect yourself in this country. They come after you because of your past here. I will show you the house now,” she said then. “So you can see it.”

An empty lot and a wire fence could be seen on the other side of the window. Junior realized that the architecture of the place was strange, as if all the rooms faced a single spot, or as if they were circular. The afternoon was freezing and overcast. At the far end of the room, in a glass cage, there was a monstrous reconstruction of what could be assumed had once been a bird. It was nearly one meter tall and it moved its neck with slow movements. “The bird’s madness will stake us out and that will be the last of us,” Carola said. The animal was moving around, fluttering, bumping into the bars of the cage. “It’s blind,” she said. To a side a doll was moving its arms and trying to smile. Junior had the impression that he had seen it before and that it was far too sinister to be artificial. “The Russian was the most important expert in automatons in all of Europe. Look,” she said, and opened a wardrobe. They looked like wire insects. “He made them for me, they are the fruits of love. I have spent hours at the train station hoping to see him go by,” she said, and smiled. “Me, a seventy-year-old woman.”

It was moving to hear her talk. She seemed to be in love with a shadow, with a man who had entered her life for an instant and left her in the past. There was a telescope at one of the windows. Through it you could see the endless plains and the reflection of the small Carhué lake. “The young one moved to Buenos Aires,” Carola said, “and I have lived here, alone, in this house, ever since. My brother comes to visit every once in a while, but he is very upset because of everything that has happened.” She spoke to him calmly, in a friendly tone, as if Junior were her confidant, the first one who had finally gone there to hear the truth. “They keep me in here by myself because I know the Russian’s story. He married me and now I am paying the consequences. They came to get him and he escaped. They wanted him for no reason at all. But he is not dead,” Carola said, “he is just hiding on an island in the Tigre Delta. Now he has another name. He is no longer the Russian, or perhaps he is the Russian now and he used a different name before. In any case, the man who came to get him in the Buick was an undercover police agent. In plainclothes, dressed in brown. We have everything recorded. The past lives on. Look, see this map, if you follow this branch of the river here, you will find the island. Do not tell him that you have seen me. You must find him. Macedonio Fernández was always interested in the story of the automatons. That is how they met, when his wife died.”

Junior saw the bird in the glass cage again and imagined it flying with a stiff flapping of its wings in the distance. She lived in the middle of all those replicas. A world of madness and mechanical images. “Underneath this room, several hundred feet down, I have discovered two large subterranean caves, old cemeteries of the Indian tribes that lived in this part of the Pampas last century. Those kinds of burial grounds are not that rare in this province, especially in Bolívar. There were large massacres around here. A few old men out in the country still remember.” To a side there was a stairwell that led to a basement, illuminated by a dim light. It was a hole reflected in a kaleidoscope, and from there you could see the plains and all the items in the house and the small Carhué lake again. “See that ray of sunlight,” Carola said. “It is the eye of the machine. Look,” she said to him. In the circle of light he saw the Museum, and in the Museum he saw the machine on the black platform. “Do you know what is going on?”

“Yes,” Junior said, “they’re replicas.”

“They were replicas,” she said, “but they have destroyed them.” The bird was moving its wings and rubbing its beak. It sounded like dry leaves crackling.

“So then nothing is for certain,” Junior said.

She smiled. “Macedonio came to this house, running from the pain of the loss of his wife. Elena died and Macedonio abandoned everything. He joined the Russian and spent some time here. The Russian had a lot of difficulties with the language, his dream was to return to Europe. Macedonio was the only person who understood and spoke to him. They spent many days in this house because Macedonio wanted to be convinced. They walked down a hallway and into a room full of small beveled windows that blocked the outside view. He thought that if he went out to the plains at night, and looked in through the lighted windows, he would see scenes that would help him recover his lost wife. The Russian wanted to build him a world at the level of that illusion, so that he could slowly return to the past. To build him a reality as if it were a house, so that Macedonio could live there. He was so desperate that he had abandoned everything, even his dear little kids, and had come out to the country. He jumped the freight trains heading south with the other vagrants. He lived for a time in the Carril cattle ranch, in the town of 25 de Mayo, and finally came down to Bolívar. He drove a hired car out to the house. They finished the machine out there,” she said, and shook her hand toward a shack in the patio.

“At first it was about automatons. The automaton outlasts time, the worst of plagues, the water that wears down stones. Then they discovered the white nodes, the live matter where words were recorded. In the bones the language does not die, it persists through all transformations. I will show you the place where the white nodes have been opened, it is on an island, on a branch of the river, it is inhabited by English and Irish and Russians and other people who have gone there from everywhere in the world, pursued by the authorities, political exiles, their lives threatened. They have been hiding there for years and years, they have built cities and roads along the shores of the island, they have explored the world following the course of the river, and now all the languages of the world have mixed together there, every voice can be heard, no one ever arrives, and if someone does, they do not ever want to leave. Because the dead have taken refuge there. Only one person has come back alive, Boas. He came to report what he had seen in that lost kingdom. Here,” she said to him. “Listen, now you will see. Perhaps this story is the road that will take you to the Russian.”

We yearn for a more primitive language than our own. Our ancestors speak of an age in which words unfolded with the serenity of the plains. It was possible to follow a course and roam for hours without losing one’s way, because language had not yet split and expanded and branched off, to become this river with all the riverbeds of the world, where it is impossible to live because nobody has a homeland. Insomnia is the nation’s most serious disease. The rumbling of the voices is continuous, its permutations can be heard night and day. It sounds like a turbine running on the souls of the dead, Old-Man Berenson says. Not wailing, but interminable mutations and lost meanings. Microscopic turns in the heart of the words. Everyone’s memory is empty, because everyone always forgets the language in which remembrances are recorded.

When we say that language is unstable, we do not mean to imply that there is an awareness of the modifications. You have to leave in order to notice the changes. If you are inside, you think that language is always the same, a kind of living organism that undergoes periodic metamorphoses. The best-known image is of a white bird that changes colors as it flies. The rhythmic flapping of the bird’s wings in the transparent air gives off the false illusion of unity in the changing of the hues. The saying is that the bird flies forever in circles because it has lost its left eye and is trying to see the other half of the world. That is why it will never be able to land, Old-Man Berenson says, and laughs with the mug of beer at his mustache again, because it can’t find a piece of land on which to set down its right leg. It had to be one-eyed, a tero-bird, to end up on this shitty island. Don’t start up, Shem, Tennyson says to him, trying to make himself heard in the noisy bar, between the piano and the voices singing Three quarks for Muster Mark!; we still have to go to Pat Duncan’s burial, and I don’t want to have to take you in a wheelbarrow. That is the meaning of the content of the dialogue — it is repeated like an inside joke every time they are about to leave, but not always in the same language. The scene is repeated, but without realizing it they talk about the one-eyed bird and Pat’s burial sometimes in Russian, other times in eighteenth-century French. They say what they want to and they say it again, without the slightest idea that they have used nearly seven languages through the years to laugh at the same joke.