The Absent City

by Ricardo Piglia

  “I’m from Rosario,” he said to the Korean guard at the door. “We have to get through. She’s a patient of Arana’s.”

  He might be a policeman. Everyone works for the secret services, they all become spies and confidants and legal assassins and policemen who shoot up as part of their undercover work. (In New York half the addicts are detectives.) The more criminal activity found among Asian refugees, the more Asian refugees that the police must recruit as informants. Insanity of resemblance is the law, the Tano thought. To look alike in order to survive. If he was a government agent, he chose not to disclose it. He let them in and guided them to a stairway, and then to a door, and again to a stairway. The white walls and the lighted stained-glass windows created a strange stillness. The music had ceased.

  “This is the Museum,” the Tano said.

  The pavilions extended for kilometers on end, with glass cabinets displaying material from the past. Elena saw a room from a boardinghouse in Tribunales, and a man on a low stool strumming a guitar. She saw two gauchos on horseback riding across a line of small fortresses, she saw a man committing suicide on a train seat. She saw a replica of Arana’s consulting room, and again her mother’s face in the mirror. The Tano hugged her. And this she had also seen. The Tano hugging her in a room of the Museum. She saw the replica of the lighted stage with Molly Malone singing the chorus of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” in a feline voice.

  “Let’s go,” he said, “we have to get out of here.”

  They came out into a television repair workshop. An old man with white hair and a white beard raised his head from a microprocessor. It was Mac. Elena felt that she was about to cry. The Tano opened the back of a microscopic television set and put it down on the glass counter.

  “This apparatus is a family relic,” he said, “and I want to keep it running.”

  “And what is the problem?” asked the man, who spoke with a German accent.

  “It only gets channels from the past.”

  The old man raised his head.

  “Everyone wants to be a comedian,” he said, and went on connecting the cables of a video recorder that he had to adapt to a closed-circuit.

  “She’s Elena,” the Tano said.

  The old man was adjusting the three bands of images, his myopic eyes moving astutely across the microscopic circuits that he himself had designed. He looked at her, but did not recognize her.

  “We want to get into the factory,” the Tano said.

  There was a soft light in the locale, and the rumbling from the subway trains made the ceiling vibrate.

  “It’s here,” the old man said.

  A group of scientists had deserted the institutes dedicated to atomic investigation that had been built in the mid-1940s. They started with a small repair shop in an abandoned garage. The factory kept growing quietly, scattered across the desert and the provincial towns.

  “We keep in contact,” he said. “We are waiting for the right moment to move. There are forty-three of us and we are going to participate in the rebellion.” He opened and closed his left hand, as if he were counting the scientists five at a time. “I cannot say anything else. I do not know anyone.” He looked at Elena and smiled. Then he spoke to the Tano.

  “You can take that apparatus away now, it is fixed. Turn it on.”

  The tiny images flashed on the screen, and immediately they could see a series of small workshops disseminated across all the towns and small cities of the country. They could see men with white overalls taking apart old radios and rebuilding unused motors.

  “What are we going to do?” Elena asked, surprised.

  “Nothing,” the old man said. “Get out of here.”

  It was Mac, but he did not know her. She did not go near him, she did not want to touch him, she did not want him to touch her. The world of the dead, Dante’s map of the Inferno. Circles and circles and circles.

  “So then,” Arana said, “you are dead and in the Inferno. Isn’t that smart.”

  “I used to be smart,” Elena said. “Now I’m a machine that repeats stories.”

  “The one fixed idea,” Arana said. He gestured for his assistant. A young doctor wearing a white coat and surgical gloves leaned over Elena and smiled at her with a childlike expression.

  “We have to operate,” he said. “We have to disactivate her neurologically.”

  “He repairs television sets,” Elena said.

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

  There was a pause. The white glass of the cabinet in the consulting room reflected the spinning fan.

  “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.

  III MECHANICAL BIRDS

  1

  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.

  “The president is an addict and he doesn’t even care if people know. Addicts are never embarrassed, because you can’t be embarrassed if you don’t have any sexual libido,” he said.

  “Of course,” another man said, also sitting at the counter. “Once my wife didn’t leave the house for a week because she had a wart this big.” He showed everyone the end of his pinkie finger. “A whole week. She didn’t want to go out because she said she was disfigured.”

  “She had tons of sexual libido,” the cashier said.

  “A whole week without going out.”

  “And Perón, with all those spots and blotches on his face, to the point where they were calling him ‘stain-face.’ And he was seen everywhere, he would have himself photographed up close, out in the open, with his leather face.”

  “When a man has power, if he has it, he wants to be seen.”

  “Because politics is a mirror,” the other man said. “Faces and faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again and are substituted by new faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again.”

  “It swallows up faces,” said the man who had first spoken.

  “But the mirror is always there,” the other man said, and dropped his head on his arms resting on the counter. “Give me another beer. Do you want another one too, pal?” he asked Junior.

  “No, I’m set,” Junior said, and at that moment he saw the girl and immediately recognized her. She was coming from the end of the platform and smiled at him at once.

  “Now, the truth is,” the cashier said, “that television is a mirror.”

  “Exactly,” the other man said. “A mirror that holds onto the faces.”

  “It has all of them inside and when you look at it you see the other’s face.”

  “That’s t
he beauty of it,” the cashier said, growing pensive.

  “I’m leaving,” Junior said, and set some money down on the counter. “Another round for everyone on me.”

  There were thank-yous and good-byes as he got up from the stool and walked toward the girl.