The Absent City

by Ricardo Piglia

  There is only one known case in the history of the island of a man who knew two languages at the same time. His name was Bob Mulligan, and he claimed that he dreamt incomprehensible words whose meanings were transparent to him. He spoke like a mystic and wrote foreign phrases and said that those were the words of the future. A few fragments of his texts have survived in the Archives of the Academy, and one can even listen to a recording of Mulligan’s high-pitched, mad voice as he tells a story that begins like this: “Oh New York city, yes, yes, the city of New York, the whole family has gone there. The boat was full of lice so they had to burn the sheets and bathe the children in water mixed with acaricide. The babies had to be separated from each other, because the smell made them cry if they smelled it on each other. The women wore silk handkerchiefs over their faces, just like Bedouins, although they were all redheads. The grandfather of the grandfather was a policeman in Brooklyn who had once shot and killed a gimp who was about to slice the throat of a supermarket cashier.” No one understood what he was saying. Mulligan wrote the story down, as well as several others, in that unknown language, but then one day he announced that he could not hear anymore. He would come to the bar and sit there, at that end of the counter, drinking beer, deaf as a post, and he would get drunk slowly, with the facial expression of someone who is embarrassed to have made himself noticed. Never again did he want to talk about what he had said. He lived the rest of his life somewhat removed, until he died of cancer at the age of fifty. Poor Bob Mulligan, Berenson said, when he was young he was a sociable guy, and very popular. He married Belle Blue Boylan, and a year later she died, drowned in the river. Her naked body showed up on the east bank of the Liffey, on the other shore. Mulligan never recovered, nor married again. He lived the rest of his life alone. He worked as a linotypist at the Congressional presses, and he would come with us to the bar, and he liked betting on horses, and then one afternoon he started telling those stories that no one understood. I believe, Old-Man Berenson said, that Belle Blue Boylan was the most beautiful woman in all of Dublin.

  All attempts to create an artificial language have been derailed by the temporality of the structure of experience. They have been unable to construct a language that is outside the island, because they cannot imagine a system of signs that could survive through time without undergoing any mutations. The statement a + b equals c is only valid for a certain amount of time, because in the irregular space of just two seconds a becomes — a and the equation changes. Evidence is only good for the length of time it takes to formulate a proposition. On the island, being fast is a category of truth. Under these conditions, the linguists of the Area-Beta of Trinity College have achieved something that should have been all but impossible: they have almost been able to root the uncertain form of reality within a logical paradigm. They have defined a system of signs whose notation changes with time. That is to say, they have invented a language that expresses what the world is like, but is unable to name it. We have been able to establish a unified field, they told Boas, now all we need is for reality to incorporate some of our hypotheses into the language.

  They know that there have been seventeen cycles to date, but they believe that potentially there must be a nearly infinite number, calculated at eight hundred and three (because eight hundred and three is the number of known languages in the world). If in almost a hundred years, since the changes began to be recorded in 1939, seventeen different forms have been identified, then the most optimistic believe that the full circle could be completed in as little as twelve more years. No calculation is certain, however, because the irregular duration of the cycles is part of the structure of the language. There are slow times and fast times, just like the different stretches of the Liffey. As the saying goes, the lucky ones sail in calm waters, and the best ones live in fast times, where meaning lasts as long as a rooster’s bad mood. But the more radical youth of the Trickster group at the Area-Beta of Trinity College laugh at these silly old sayings. They think that as long as language does not find the borders that contain it, the world will be nothing more than a set of ruins, and the truth is like fish gasping for air as they die in the mud when the level of the Liffey recedes in the summer droughts, when the river becomes nothing more than a small, dark-watered rivulet.

  10

  I said earlier that tradition has it that the ancestors speak of a time in which language was an open field, where one could walk without finding any surprises. The different generations, the elders argue, used to inherit the same names for the same things, and they could leave written documents behind with the certainty that everything they wrote would be legible in times to come. Some repeat (without understanding it) a fragment of that original language that has survived through the years. Boas says that he heard the text recited as if it were a series of drunkards’ jokes, the pronunciation thick and pasty, the words broken up by laughter and other sounds that no one knew any longer if they formed part of the original meaning or not. Boas says that the fragment called Regarding the serpent went like this: “The season of the strong winds has arrived. She feels that her brain is torn out of her and that her body is made out of tubes and electrical connections. She talks nonstop and sometimes sings and says she can read my mind and asks only that I be near her and not abandon her on the sand. She says that she is Eve and that the serpent is Eve and that no one in all these centuries and centuries has dared to utter this pure truth and that the only one who said it was Mary Magdalene to Christ before she washed his feet. Eve is the serpent, the endless mutation, and Adam is alone, he has always been alone. She says that God is the woman and that Eve is the serpent. That the tree of knowledge is the tree of language. They only start talking once they eat the apple. That is what she says when she is not singing.” For many this is a religious text, a fragment from Genesis. For others it is only a prayer that has survived the permutations of language in people’s memory, and has been remembered as a game of divination. (The historians assert that it is a paragraph from the letter that Nolan left before killing himself.)

  11

  A few geneaological sects maintain that the first inhabitants of the island were exiles who were carried there by the rising river. Tradition speaks of two hundred families confined in a multiracial camp in the slums of Dalkey, north of Dublin, who were rounded up and held in the anarchist neighborhoods and suburban areas of Trieste, Tokyo, Mexico City, Petergrad.

  Aboard the Rosevean, a three-mast ship, with a Pohl-A-type propeller, in the north bay, according to Tennyson, they were carried backward in time on the river, by the freezing gusts of the January winds.

  The experiment of confining exiles to an island had already been utilized before as a way to confront political rebellions, but it had always been used with isolated individuals, especially to repress leaders. The best-known case is that of Nolan, a militant of a Gaelic-Celtic resistance group who infiltrated the queen’s cabinet and became Möler’s right-hand man in the propaganda planning campaign. He was uncovered because he used meteorological reports to encode messages to the Irish ghettos in Oslo and Copenhagen. History recounts that Nolan was found out by chance, when a scientist from MIT in Boston used a computer to process the messages emitted by the meteorological office in the span of a year, with the intention of studying the infinitesimal weather changes of Eastern Europe. Nolan was exiled. He reached the island after drifting randomly for nearly six days, and then lived completely alone for almost five years, until he committed suicide. His odyssey is one of the greatest legends in the history of the island. Only a stubborn, Irish son-of-a-bitch could have survived that long by himself like a rat in this vastness, singing Three quarks for Muster Mark! against the waves, screaming it out loud, on the beach, always looking in the sand for the footprint of another human being, Old-Man Berenson said. Only a man like Jim could have built a woman to talk to during those endless years of solitude.

  The myth says that he built a two-way recorder with the remnants from the shipwreck, and that w
ith this he was able to improvise conversations using Wittgenstein’s linguistic games. His own words were stored by the tapes and reelaborated as responses to specific questions. He programmed it so he could speak to a woman, and he spoke to it in all the languages he knew, and at the end it became possible to believe that the woman had even fallen in love with Nolan. (He, for his part, had loved her from the very first day, because he thought that she was the wife of his friend Italo Svevo, the most beautiful madonna of Trieste, with that gorgeous red hair that reminded you of all the rivers of the world.)

  After being on the island for three years, the conversations began to repeat cyclically, and Nolan became bored. The recorder started mixing up the words (“Heremon, nolens, nolens, brood our pensies, brume in brume,” it would say, for example), and Nolan would ask “What? What did you say?” It was around that time that he began calling her Anna Livia Plurabelle. At the end of the sixth year of exile, Nolan lost all hope of being rescued. He could no longer sleep properly, and he began having hallucinations, and dreaming that he was awake all night long, listening to the sweet, wireless whispers of Anna Livia’s voice.

  He had a cat, but when the cat went up the hillside one afternoon and did not return, Nolan wrote a farewell letter, set his right elbow down on the table so his hand would not shake, and shot himself in the head. The first people from the Rosevean who went onshore found the voice of the woman still talking from the bifocal recorder. She barely mixed the languages, according to Boas, and it was possible to understand perfectly the desperation that Nolan’s suicide had produced in her. She was on a rock, facing the bay, made out of wires and red tapes, lamenting Nolan’s death in a soft metallic murmur.

  I have woven and unwoven the plotlines of time, she said, but he has left and will not be back. A body is a body, but only voices are capable of love. I have been here alone for years, on the banks of every river, waiting for night to arrive. It is always daytime, at this latitude everything is so slow, night never arrives, it is always daytime, the sun goes down so slowly, I am blind, out in the sun, I want to tear off “the iron blindfold” from my head, I want to bring “the concentrated darkness of Africa” here. Life is always threatened by hunters (Nolan has said), it is necessary to build meaning instinctively, like the bees their honeycombs. Unable to ponder my own enigma, I conclude that he is not the one narrating, but rather his Muse, his universal song.

  12

  If the legend is true, the island was a large settlement for exiles during the period of the political repression following the IRA counteroffensive and the fall of the Pulp-KO. But there is no historian who knows the least bit about that past or about the time when Anna Livia was alone on the shore or about the time when the two hundred families arrived. There are no traces left attesting to any of these events. The only written source available on the island is Finnegans Wake, which everyone considers a sacred text, because they can always read it, regardless of the stage of language in which they find themselves.

  In fact, the only book that lasts in this language is the Wake, Boas said, because it is written in all languages at once. It reproduces the permutations of language on a microscopic scale. It is like a miniature model of the world. Through the course of time it has been read as a magical text containing the keys to the universe, and also as the history of origin, and the evolution of life on the island.

  No one knows who wrote it, nor how it got here. No one remembers if it was written on the island, or if it was brought on shore by the first exiles. Boas saw the copy that is kept in the Museum, in a glass box, suspended in nuclear light. A very old edition printed by Faber & Faber, over three hundred years old, with hand-written notes in the margins, and a calendar with a list of the deaths of an Irish family in the twentieth century. This was the copy used to make all the other copies that circulate on the island.

  Many believe that Finnegans Wake is a book of funereal ceremonies and study it as the founding text of the island’s religion. The Wake is read in churches like a Bible, and is used for sermons in every language by Presbyterian ministers and Catholic priests. Genesis tells of a curse from God that led to the Fall and transformed language into the rough landscape it is today. Drunk, Tim Finnegan fell into the basement down a flight of stairs, which immediately went from ladder to latter and latter led to litter and with all the confusion became the letter, the divine message. The letter is found in a pile of trash by a pecking chicken. Signed with a tea stain, the text has been damaged by the long time it has remained in the trash. It has holes and blurred sections and is so difficult to interpret that scholars and priests conjecture in vain about the true meaning of the Word of God. The letter appears to be written in all languages at once and continually changes under the eyes of men. That is the gospel and the garbage dump whence the world comes.

  The commentaries of Finnegans Wake define the ideological tradition of the island. The book is like a map, and history is transformed depending on the course chosen. The interpretations multiply and the Wake changes as the world changes, and no one imagines that the life of the book might cease. However, in the flow of the Liffey there is a recurrence of Jim Nolan and Anna Livia, alone on the island, before the last letter. That is the first nucleus, the myth of origin precisely as it is told by the informants (according to Boas).

  In other versions, the book is the transcription of Anna Livia Plurabelle’s message. Her reading her husband’s (Nolan’s) thoughts, and speaking to him after he is dead (or asleep), the only one on the island for years, abandoned on a rock, with the red tapes and the cables and the metallic frame in the sun, whispering on the beach until the two hundred families arrive.

  13

  All the myths end there, and so does this report. I left the island two months ago, Boas said, and I can still hear the music of that language that flows like a river. They say there that he who hears the song of the washerwomen at the shores of the Liffey will not be able to leave. I, for my part, have not been able to resist the sweetness of Anna Livia’s voice. That is why I will be returning to the city that exists in three times at once, and to the bay where Bob Mulligan’s wife lies, and to the Museum of the Novel where Finnegans Wake is found, alone in a room, in a black glass box. I, too, will sing in Humphrey Earwicker’s tavern — drinking beer and pounding on the wooden table with my fist — a song about a one-eyed bird that flies endlessly above the island.

  IV ON SHORE

  1

  Following the turns of the channels and the tributaries of the major waterways of the Delta that borders the city, with its islands and streams and waterlogged lands, was like looking at the chart of a lost continent. Junior had a map, and when he arrived at the Tigre he asked around and was shown the route at one of the terminals of the Inter-Islander. He hired a pilot from the station and rented a motor launch at the Rowing Club. If his calculations were correct, the Russian’s colony should be off of one of the bends of the Pajarito, before reaching the open river. They had to navigate up the Carapachay and come out along the stronger currents of the northern waterways. The further he went up the Paraná de las Palmas, the more and more secure Junior felt, as if he were crossing a border that was taking him back to the past — and somehow, strangely, bringing him closer to his daughter. After traveling for two hours, the vegetation became denser, and they passed the remains of a laboratory, indicating that they were approaching the Russian’s plant. They skirted an islet full of rushes, then a sandbank, and came out again into open waters. Up ahead, hazily in the fog, he could see higher ground, with jagged ravines and cement foundations. In the middle, elevated on stone pillars and surrounded by an iron railing, was a fortified building with broad circular windows facing the gardens and the river. A man on the dock waved his hat at them, motioning for them to moor there. He was one of the Russian’s assistants. He welcomed Junior and helped him off the motor launch, holding his arm firmly, and showed him the path up to the house. The building was in the middle of a clearing. A pebbled path cross
ed through a small forest of willow trees and led right up to the wire fence surrounding the house.

  “Santa Marta Island, and on this side is the Biguá creek. This area has always been occupied by foreigners,” the man explained to him. He seemed friendly and obliging, and spoke with a slight accent that sounded like a speech defect. They went through the gate and climbed toward the gardens. At that moment, a tall, thin man was seen walking across the gardens toward them with his hand extended.

  “I am the Russian. You are the journalist, and I must ask you to be discreet and not take any photographs. Come, sit here,” he showed him a wicker chair on the veranda that surrounded the house. “They think,” he said, “that they have disactivated her, but that is not possible, she is alive, she is a body that expands and retreats and captures what is going on. Look,” he said, “there is a faucet out there in the garden, almost at ground level, and very cool, clean, crisp water comes out of it, even in the middle of summer. It is at the foot of those hedges over there. Sometimes I imagine that I go over and lie face up on the grass, to drink. But I never go, so I keep a certain possible action alive. Do you see what I mean? An open option, that is the logic of experience, always what is possible, what is to come, a street in the future, a door in a boardinghouse by Tribunales, near the courthouse, and the strumming of a guitar. There is no such thing as an imperfection, in reality it has to do with stages, the third stage or the third area, as was foreseen. There has been a retreat, a strategic withdrawal.” “We,” the Engineer said, “have reached a point in which we are able to conceive of life as a mechanism whose most important functions are easily understood and reproduced, a mechanism that we can make run at faster or slower rhythms, and thus at a higher or lower intensity. A story is nothing more than a reproduction of the order of the world on a purely verbal scale. A replica of life, if life consisted just of words. But life does not consist just of words. Unfortunately, it is also made up of bodies or, in other words, of disease, pain, and death, as Macedonio would say.