The Absent City

by Ricardo Piglia

  THE INVISIBLE GAUCHO

  Burgos was a short cattle herder of Indian descent who was hired in Chacabuco to help drive a herd of cattle to Entre Ríos. They left at dawn, but were hit by a storm when they were only a few leagues out. Burgos worked with the others to keep the cattle from running off. Toward the end, he saved a lost calf that had gotten stuck in the mud, its legs spread out in the wind and rain. He hoisted it up without getting off his horse and placed it across his saddle. The animal struggled. Burgos held it with just one hand and rode over to release it with the rest of the herd. He did it to show off his skills, as if he thought the move would earn him the respect of his companions. But he regretted it at once because none of the other men looked at him, nor did anyone make the least comment. He put the incident out of his mind, but he began to get the strange feeling that the others had something against him. They only spoke to him when they were giving orders, and they never included him in their conversations. At night he was the first to go to sleep, and he would see them from under his blankets laughing and telling jokes near the fire. He felt he was living a nightmare. He had never been in a situation like this in the sixteen years of his life. He had been mistreated, but never forgotten and ignored. The first stop was in Azul, where they arrived late on a Saturday afternoon. The leader said they would spend the night in town and leave the next day at noon. They put the cattle in a small yard, which everyone called the church corral, close to where the town ended and the plains began. It was said that a chapel once stood there that had been destroyed by the Indians in the Great Indian Raid of 1867. There were a few low walls left that served to keep the cattle inside the corral. Burgos thought he saw the shape of a cross formed by the bricks where some weeds grew. It was a hole of light in the wall, drawn by the sunlight. Enthusiastic, he showed it to the others, but they walked right on past as if they had not heard him. The cross could be seen clearly in the air as the sun set. Burgos kissed his fingers and crossed himself. There was dancing in the general store. Burgos sat at a table apart from everyone else. He saw the men laughing together and getting drunk. He saw them head to the back room with the women who were sitting in a line at the counter, and would have liked to pick one out for himself as well, but he was afraid of being ignored, so he stayed where he was. Still, he imagined picking out the attractive blond in front of him. She was tall and seemed to be the oldest of the group. He would take her to the room, and when they were lying in bed, he would explain what was happening to him. The woman wore a silver cross that hung between her breasts and spun it around while Burgos told her the story. Men like to see others suffer, the woman said, they looked at Christ because they were drawn by his suffering. She spoke with a foreign accent. If the story of the Passion weren’t so horrendous, the woman said, no one would have bothered to look after the Son of God. Burgos heard the woman saying this to him and got up to ask her to dance, but he thought that she would not see him, so he pretended he had gotten up to order a gin. That night the men did not go to sleep until dawn, and everyone slept well into the morning. Around noon they started to herd the cattle out of the corral toward the road. The sky was dark and Burgos did not see the cross in the church wall. They galloped in the direction of the storm, where the low clouds blended into the broad fields. A little later raindrops as heavy as twenty-cent pieces began to fall. Burgos covered himself with his watertight poncho and rode in front of the herd. He knew how to do his job, and they knew that he knew how to do his job. This was the only bit of pride left in him, now that he was less than nothing. The storm grew worse. They drove the cattle to the edge of a ravine and held them there the entire afternoon while the rain continued to fall. When the weather cleared up, the men went out to retrieve the animals that had gotten away. Burgos saw a calf that was drowning in a lagoon that had formed in a hollow. It must have had a broken leg, because every time it tried to climb out, it slid back in. He lassoed it from above and held it up by its neck. The animal twisted around and kicked the air in desperation. It got away from him and fell back into the water. The calf’s head floated in the lagoon. Burgos lassoed it again. The calf was kicking its legs and gasping for air. The other men gathered around the edge of the deep hollow. This time Burgos held it up for a while, and then let it drop. The calf sank and took a while to resurface. The men started making comments to each other. Burgos lassoed it and raised it up, and when the calf was near the top, he dropped it again. The men reacted with shouts and loud laughter. Burgos repeated the operation several times. The animal would try to avoid the lasso and would sink back into the water. When it tried to swim away, the men urged Burgos to fish it out again. The game went on for a while, amid jokes and jests, until Burgos finally lassoed the calf out, after it had nearly drowned, and lifted it up slowly to the feet of his horse. The animal was lying in the mud, gasping for air, its eyes white with fright. Then one of the men jumped off his horse and cut its throat with one quick slash.

  “It’s done, kid,” he said to Burgos; “tonight we’re having barbecued fish for dinner.” Everyone broke out in loud laughter, and for the first time in a long time Burgos felt the respect and the comradeship of the men.

  Macedonio was always gathering strange stories. Even when he was a treasurer in the Province of Misiones, he was already compiling anecdotes and stories. “Stories have simple hearts, just like women. Or men. But I prefer to say women,” Macedonio would say, “because it makes me think of Scheherazade.” It was not until much later, Junior thought, that they understood what he was trying to say. Around that time Macedonio had lost his wife, Elena Obieta, and everything that Macedonio did since then (and especially the machine) was meant to make her seem present. She was the Eternal One, the river of stories, the endless voice that kept memory alive. He never accepted the fact that he had lost her. In this he was like Dante. And, like Dante, he built a world in which he could live with her. The machine was that world, it was his masterpiece. He got her out of nowhere and kept her covered with a blanket on the floor of a closet in the room of a boardinghouse around Tribunales, near the courthouse. The system was simple, he had hit on it by accident. When it transformed “William Wilson” into the story of Stephen Stevensen, Macedonio realized that he had the basic elements from which he could build a virtual reality. So he began working with series and variables. First he thought about the English railroads and the reading of novels. The genre grew in the nineteenth century, it was tied in with the mode of transportation. That is why so many stories take place on trains. People liked to read stories about a train while they rode aboard a train. In Argentina, the first train ride in a novel is clearly found in the work of Cambaceres.

  In one of the rooms of the Museum Junior saw the train car in which Erdosain had killed himself. It was dark green, bloodstains could be seen on one of the leather seats, the windows were open. In the other room he saw the photograph of a train car that belonged to the old Ferrocarril Central Argentino. That was the car in which the woman who fled at dawn traveled. Junior imagined her nodding off in her seat, the train cutting through the darkness of the country, all its windows lit up. That was one of the first stories.

  A WOMAN

  She had a two-year-old son but decided to abandon him. She tied him with a long belt to a hoop on the ceiling and left him crawling around in the room on a waterproof rug. She took the precaution of moving the furniture and piling it up against the walls, far from the child’s reach, so it would be like an empty room. She wrote a note to the cleaning woman, telling her she had gone out to run an errand. It was seven in the morning. The moment her husband drove off to work in his car, she called a taxi and took the first long-distance train out of Retiro Station. The next day she was in a small town on the border of the Province of San Luis. In the hotel she signed in under her mother’s name (Lía Matra). She spent the day sleeping and at night went down to gamble in the casino. The roulette was like the face of fortune. The men and women in the hall went there looking for answers, each in an isola
ted microscopic universe. (Those funereal croupiers, she thought, she would have liked to take one of them to bed with her.) It was a poor casino, with light-blue carpeting. She imagined that Hell must have the same decor. A half empty and poorly lit room, with an “electric” blue moquette. The men wore jackets, the women looked like retired bar girls. A cloud of insects buzzing around an artificial replica of passion and life. The woman thought of days or months and played them in progression and always won. When the casino closed they gave her the money she had won in a paper bag. She had to cross a plaza in order to get back to the hotel. There was a statue, benches, a garbage can chained to a tree. She was going to call home and let them know she had left. The woman hides the bag with the money in the bushes. The town is empty, a light shines in the distance where the old train station used to be. The woman crosses the street, goes up to her room, and only then decides to unpack her suitcase. She hangs her clothes up in the closet, arranges her bottles and creams in the cabinet in the restroom, closes the windows so the daylight will not come in. Calls down to the front desk, asks not to be disturbed, then kills herself.

  The room in which the woman committed suicide was reproduced in the Museum. Junior saw the picture of the son against the lamp on the night table. He did not remember this detail from the story. The series of hotel rooms was reproduced in successive halls. The boardinghouse in which an old man sat on a wicker chair and plucked at a guitar through the night. The washbasin on the iron base in which a German soldier’s lover had washed her hair. Junior saw the hotel room from Cuernavaca, the bed surrounded by a mosquito netting and a bottle of tequila. In another hall to the side was the room from the Majestic and the armoire in which the woman had looked for the bottle of perfume. He was astonished by the precision of the reconstruction. It seemed like a dream. But dreams were false stories. And these were true stories. Each one isolated in a corner of the Museum, building the story of their lives. Everything was as it should be. Military uniforms in tall glass cases, Moreira’s long dagger on a black velvet pillow, the photograph of a laboratory in one of the islands of the Tigre Delta. The stories were developed from these objects. They were crisp and clear as memories. The last room contained the mirror, and in the mirror was the first love story.

  FIRST LOVE

  I fell in love for the first time when I was twelve years old. A redhead showed up in the middle of the school year. The teacher introduced her as the new student. She was standing next to the blackboard, her name was (or is) Clara Schultz. I do not remember anything from the weeks that followed, but I do know that we fell in love, and that we tried to hide it because we knew we were too young and that what we wanted was impossible. Some of the memories still hurt now. The others would look at us when we stood in line together, and she would turn even redder, and I learned what it meant to suffer the complicity of those fools. I got into fights after school in the small soccer field on Amenedo with guys from the fifth and sixth grades who used to follow her around and throw thistles in her hair — just because she wore it loose and it came down to her waist. One afternoon, I came home so beat up that my mother thought that I must have been crazy, or that I had contracted some kind of suicidal fever. I could not tell anyone what I was feeling. I looked surly and sullen, as if I were always tired. We wrote each other letters, although we barely knew how to write. I remember living through an unstable succession of feelings that alternated between ecstasy and desperation. I remember that she was serious and passionate and that she never smiled, perhaps because she knew what the future held in store for us. I do not have any photographs of her, only my memories, but Clara has been present in every woman I have ever loved. She left just as she had arrived, unexpectedly, before the end of the year. One afternoon she did something heroic. Breaking all the rules, she came running into the boys patio, which was forbidden to girls, to tell me that they were taking her away. I can still see the two of us standing on the red bricks of the patio, the others in a circle around us, looking on sarcastically. Her father was a municipal inspector or a manager in a bank and was being transferred to Sierra de la Ventana. I remember the horror that the image of a sierra that was also a jail produced in me. That is why she had arrived in the middle of the school year, and perhaps also why she had loved me. My pain was more than I could stand, but I managed to remember that my mother used to say that if you loved someone you should put a mirror under your pillow, and that if you saw that person reflected in your dreams, it meant you would get married. At night, when everyone at home had gone to sleep, I would walk barefoot to the back patio and take the mirror in which my father shaved every morning off the hook. It was a square mirror, with a brown wooden frame, and a small chain in the back from where it hung on a nail in the wall. I would sleep and wake up frequently at night, trying to see her reflection when I dreamt. At times I imagined that I saw her beginning to appear in the corner of the mirror. One night, many years later, I dreamt that I was dreaming with her in the mirror. I saw her just as she was when she was a girl, with her red hair and her serious eyes. I was completely different, but she was the same, and she was walking toward me, as if she were my daughter.

  The mirror’s wooden frame was marked with gray notches, as if someone had chiseled it with a letter opener. Junior looked at his own face and saw the gallery reflected behind him. The guard had been following him silently at a distance. But now he walked up to him, one hand behind his back and the specter of the other in his pocket, and swallowed, or so Junior thought from the movement of his Adam’s apple.

  “What’s that?” Junior asked, pointing to a glass box.

  “Science has not yet been able to determine its nature,” he answered with an obviously memorized phrase. “A vulture, or perhaps a chimango. It was found in 1895 in the area outside Tapalqué by Doctor Roger Fontaine, a French scientist,” he said as his shaking finger pointed at the bronze placard.

  Inside the case there was a metal bird perched on a branch, pecking at one of its wings.

  “Strange,” Junior said.

  “And now look at this skull,” the guard said. “It’s from the same region.”

  It looked like a glass cranium. The Argentine countryside is inexhaustible. In small towns people hold onto the remnants of the oldest of stories.

  Next to it there was a series of objects lined up inside a low glass cabinet, all made out of bone. They looked like dice, or small knuckle-bones with which boys might play, or heretical rosary beads. Junior stopped to look at a Japanese vase, probably donated by some navy officer. He had seen a replica at the market in Plaza Francia, they could make reproductions so precise that they were better than the original. They could even get the copy to look older and more pure. The guard had disappeared quietly out a side stairwell. Junior walked through a gallery containing drawings and photographs from the police archives, and entered another hall. It was a room in a family’s house, the blinds drawn and a lamplight on, without any furniture. A little further down, almost at floor level, in the middle of the room, as if it were in a cradle, was the doll.

  THE GIRL

  The matrimony’s first two children were able to lead a normal life, especially considering the difficulties associated with having a sister like her in a small town. The girl (Laura) was born healthy. It was only with time that they began to notice certain strange signs. Her system of hallucinations was the topic of a complicated report that appeared in a scientific journal, but her father had deciphered it long before that. Yves Fonagy called it “extravagant references.” In these highly unusual cases the patient imagines that everything that occurs around him is a projection of his personality. The patient excludes real people from his experience, because he considers himself much more intelligent than anyone else. The world was an extension of herself; her body spread outward and reproduced itself. She was constantly preoccupied by mechanical objects, especially electric lightbulbs. She saw them as words, every time one was turned on it was like someone had begun to speak. Thus she
considered darkness to be a form of silent thinking. One summer afternoon (when she was five years old) she looked at an electric fan spinning on a dresser. She thought it was a living being, a female living being. The girl of the air, her soul trapped in a cage. Laura said that she lived “there,” and raised her hand to indicate the ceiling. There, she said, moving her head from left to right. Her mother turned off the fan. That is when she began having difficulties with language. She lost the capacity to use personal pronouns. With time she stopped using them altogether, then hid all the words she knew in her memory. She would only utter a little clucking sound as she opened and closed her eyes. The mother separated the boys from their sister because she was afraid that it was contagious. One of those small town beliefs. But madness is not contagious and the girl was not crazy. In any case, they sent the two brothers to a Catholic boarding school in Del Valle, and the family went into seclusion in their large house in Bolívar. The father was a frustrated musician who taught mathematics in the public high school. The mother was a teacher and had become principal, but she decided to retire in order to take care of her daughter. They did not want to have her committed. So they took her twice a week to an institute in La Plata and followed the orders given by Doctor Arana, who treated her with electric shock therapy. He explained that the girl lived in an extreme emotional void. That is why Laura’s language was slowly becoming more and more abstract and unpersonalized. At first she still used the correct names for food. She would say “butter,” “sugar,” “water,” but later began to refer to different food items in groups that were disconnected from their nutritive nature. Sugar became “white sand,” butter, “soft mud,” water, “wet air.” It was clear that by disarranging the names and abandoning personal pronouns she was creating a language that better corresponded to her personal emotional experiences. Far from not knowing how to use words correctly, what could be seen was a spontaneous decision to create a language that matched her experience of the world. Doctor Arana did not agree, but this was the father’s hypothesis, and he decided to enter his daughter’s verbal world. She was a logic machine connected to the incorrect interface. The girl functioned according to the model of a fan — a fixed rotational axis served as her syntactic schema, and she moved her head as she spoke to feel the wind of her unarticulated thoughts. The decision to teach her how to use language implied also having to explain to her how to compartmentalize words. But she would lose them like molecules in warm air. Her memory was a breeze blowing in the white curtains of a room in an empty house. It was necessary to try to take that sailboat out in still air. The father stopped going to Doctor Arana’s clinic and began treating the girl with a singing teacher. He had to give her a temporal sequence, and he believed that music was an abstract model of the order of things in the world. She sang Mozart arias in German with Madame Silenzky, a Polish pianist who directed the chorus in the Lutheran Church in Carhué. The girl, sitting on the bench, howled to the rhythm. Madame Silenzky was frightened to death because she thought the child was a monster. She was twelve years old, fat and beautiful like a madonna, but her eyes looked as if they were made out of glass and she clucked before singing. Madame Silenzky thought the girl was a hybrid, a doll made out of foam, a human machine, without feelings, without hope. She screamed more than she sang, always out of tune, but eventually she was able to follow the line of a melody. Her father was trying to get her to incorporate a temporal memory, an empty form, composed of rhythmic sequences and modulations. The girl did not have any syntax (she lacked the very notion of syntax). She lived in a wet universe, time for her was a hand-washed sheet that you wring out in the middle to get the water out. She has staked out her own territory, her father would say, from which she wishes to exclude all experiences. Anything new, any event that she has not yet experienced and which is still to be lived, seems like something painful, like something threatening and terrifying to her. The petrified present, the monstrous and viscous and solid stoppage of time, the chronological void, can only be altered with music. Music is not an experience, it is the pure form of life, it has no content, it cannot frighten her, her father would say, and Madame Silenzky (terrified) would shake her gray head and relax her hands on the piano keys by playing a Haydn cantata before they began. When he finally got the girl to enter a temporal sequence, the mother fell ill and had to be hospitalized. The girl associated her mother’s disappearance (she died two months later) with a Schubert lied. She sang the melody as if she were crying over someone’s death and remembering a lost past. Then, using his daughter’s musical syntax as a base, the father began working on her lexicon. The girl did not have any form from which to construct references, it was like teaching a foreign language to a dead person. (Like teaching a dead language to a foreigner.) He decided to begin by telling her short stories. The girl stood still, near the light, in the hall facing the patio. The father would sit in an armchair and narrate a story to her as if he were singing. He hoped the sentences would enter his daughter’s memory like blocks of meaning. That is why he chose to tell her the same story, only varying the version each time. The plot would become the sole model of the world and the sentences modulations of possible experiences. The story was a simple one. In his Chronicle of the Kings of England (twelfth century), William of Malmesbury tells the story of a young, sovereign Roman noble who has just gotten married. After the feasts and the celebrations, the young man and his friends go out to play bocci balls in the garden. In the course of the game, the young man puts his wedding ring, to avoid losing it, on the barely extended finger of the hand of a bronze statue. When he goes to retrieve it, he finds that the statue’s hand is now a tight fist, and he cannot get his ring back. Without telling anyone, he comes back at night with torches and servants and discovers that the statue has disappeared. He keeps the truth from his bride, but when he gets into bed that night, he feels that there is something between them, something dense and hazy that prevents them from embracing. Terrified, he hears a voice that murmurs in his ear: