The Absent City

by Ricardo Piglia

  “Physics develops so quickly,” he said all of a sudden, “that within six months all knowledge is outdated. They become hallucinations, forms that spring forth from memory. The moment you remember them, they are already lost.”

  He had had a serious illness and had stopped pretending he was European, and from the moment he became a naturalized citizen everyone started thinking that he was an Austrian, Hungarian, or German who pretended he was from Argentina, and they made him out to be a Nazi physicist hiding in the Tigre, an assistant of Von Braun, a disciple of Heidelberg. “You should not try to be one thing so that people will think that you are something else, if you know what I mean. If you are an anarchist, then be an anarchist, and they will assume that you are an undercover policeman and you will never get caught. If you are who you truly are, then everyone believes you are somebody else.” He even knew quite well that it was now being said that he was really Richter, the atomic physicist who had tricked General Perón by selling him the secret to make an atom bomb in Argentina. “But no,” he said, “I am the Russian.” He had studied Richter’s personality because he was amused by the deception he had been able to pull off, “a true virtuoso job,” but he was the Russian, an Argentine inventor who made a living selling small practical devices, cheap patents of simple machines that helped improve demand in hardware and general grocery stores in small towns.

  “Look at this, for example,” he said, and showed him a pocket watch. Then he opened it, wound it up, and the face became a magnetic chessboard with microscopic pieces that were reflected and amplified by a magnifying mirror on the concave glass top. “It is the first chess-playing machine designed in Argentina,” the Russian said. “In La Plata, to be precise. It uses the gears and the small clock wheels to program its moves. The hours are its memory. It has twelve options per move, and it was with this very apparatus that I defeated Larse the time he came to play in the Masters Tournament in Mar del Plata, in 1959.” He pressed a button on one of the wheels, and the clock became a clock again. “Inventing a machine is easy, as long as you can modify the parts of a previous mechanism. The possibilities of converting what already exists into something else are infinite. But I would not be able to make something out of nothing. In that respect, I am not like Richter. You cannot compare my discovery with Richter’s invention, he built an atomic plant for Perón using only words, just with the reality of his German accent. He told him he was an atomic scientist and that he had the secret to make the bomb, and Perón believed him and fell like a fool, and had underground buildings and useless labs with pipes and turbines built for him that were never used. Perón would stroll through the marvelously decorated facilities while Richter, with a strong German accent, explained his wild plans of how he would produce nuclear fission in a cold environment. He won him over with his story, he was just a poor high school physics teacher, and he was not even German, he was actually Swiss, and Perón, who spent his life surpassing everyone, who spent his time nudging and winking and saying things with double meanings, believed Richter’s fantastic story and defended it to the end. After all, though, it is the same thing, I mean, for Macedonio that was the basic principle to building the machine. The fiction of a German accent. Everything is possible, all you have to do is find the right words. When he found me, he immediately convinced me that we should start working together.

  “Look,” he said, “politicians believe scientists (Perón-Richter), and scientists believe novelists (the Russian-Macedonio Fernández). Scientists are big readers of novels, the last representatives of a nineteenth-century public, the only ones who really consider the uncertainty of reality and the form of a story. Physicists, Macedonio would say, added the quarks to the basic particle of the universe, in homage to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The only friend Einstein had at Princeton, his only confidant, was the novelist Hermann Broch, whose books, especially The Death of Virgil, he could quote from memory. The rest of the world spends its time believing superstitions on television. The criteria of reality,” the Russian said, “has crystallized and become concentrated, and that is why they want to deactivate the machine. I am sure you know the story of the Japanese soldier who stayed in the jungle fighting the American army for thirty years without surrendering. He was convinced that the war was eternal, that he had to avoid getting ambushed and keep moving constantly through the island until he made contact with his own forces. He grew old as he roamed around, eating lizards and weeds, sleeping in a straw hut, climbing up a tree during the typhoon season and tying himself to the branches. The fact of the matter is that that is how war is, and the soldier was only doing his duty, and, except for a nearly microscopic detail (the signatures on a piece of paper declaring peace), his entire universe was real. When they found him he did not know how to speak anymore, he just repeated the oath of the Imperial Army in which he swore to fight to the end. Now he is a ninety-year-old man, exhibited in the Museum of the Second World War, in Hiroshima, dressed in his threadbare officer’s uniform of the emperor’s army, holding a rifle with a bayonet at waist level, in fighting stance.

  “Macedonio captured very clearly the direction of the new situation. If politicians believe scientists, and scientists believe novelists, then the conclusion was simple. It was necessary to effect reality and use scientific methods to invent a world in which it is not possible to have a soldier who spends thirty years in a jungle following orders, or at least a world in which the soldier no longer serves as an example of conviction and a sense of duty that is reproduced by Japanese executives and workers and technicians who are living the same fiction today, on a different scale, and who are always presented as the representatives of modern man. Macedonio’s main enemy was the Japanese model of feudal suicide, with its paranoid politeness and its Zen conformity. They build electronic devices and electronic personalities and electronic fictions and in every State of the world there is a Japanese brain giving orders. The State intelligence is essentially a technical mechanism designed to alter the criteria of reality. We have to resist. We are trying to build a microscopic replica, a female defense machine, against the experiences and the experiments and the lies of the State.

  “Look,” he said, and raised his hand in a gesture that encompassed the trees and the nearby islands, “there are microphones and cameras and policemen hidden everywhere, they watch and record us around the clock. I do not even know if you yourself are a journalist or a spy, or both things at once. It does not matter, I have nothing to hide, they know where I am, and if they do not come it is because I am already outside the law. The State knows all the stories of all the citizens, and retranslates them into new stories that are then told by the president of the republic and his ministers. Torture is the culmination of that desire to know, the maximum degree of institutional intelligence. That is how the State thinks, and why the police mainly torture the poor, only the poor or the workers or the dispossessed, who you can see are darker-skinned or mestizos, they are tortured by the police and by the military. Only in very exceptional cases have they tortured people belonging to other social classes, and these cases have always become major scandals, like when Bravo, the student, was tortured by Amoresano and Lombilla in the time of General Perón. Because when they decide to torture people of slightly higher social standing, it always leads to a scandal, and in the last few years, in which the Army has acted with a homicidal and paranoid rancor, and men, women, and children belonging to distinguished spheres of society have been tortured and brutalized, everything has been denounced and has become known. And even if, of course, the largest number of those killed were workers and peasants, they have also executed priests, landowners, industrialists, students, and at the end they had to retreat before international pressure, which accepts as a given that the humble from the fields, the wretched and feverish from the ghettos and the poorest neighborhoods of the city will be massacred and tortured, but reacts when intellectuals and politicians and the children of well-to-do families are treated this way. Because, in gene
ral, the latter already collaborate of their own accord and serve as an example and adapt their lives to the criteria of reality established by the State, without there being any need to torture them. The others would do the same, but they cannot because they have been leveled and cornered, and even if they wanted to and took great pains to that end, they can no longer act like the model Japanese citizen who works fifteen hours per day and always greets the general manager of his company with the slightest of nods. They control everything, they have founded the mental State,” the Russian said, “which is a new stage in the history of institutions. The mental State, the imagined reality, we all think like they do and imagine what they want us to imagine.

  “That is why I like how Richter infiltrated the Argentine State, he infiltrated his own paranoid imagination into Perón’s paranoid imagination by selling him the secret of the atom bomb. Only the secret, because the bomb never existed — only the secret, which, since it was a secret, could not be revealed. Of course, now, after years and years of systematic torture, of concentration camps designed to make those who have repented perform informational duties, they have won everywhere and can no longer be infiltrated, and the only thing that can be done is to create a white node and start over again. There is nothing left, nothing at all, just us, to resist — my mother and I, on this island — and Macedonio’s machine. It has been fifteen years since the Berlin Wall fell, and the only thing left is the machine, and the machine’s memory. There is nothing else, do you understand what I am saying, young man?” the Russian asked. “Nothing, just the stubble, the dry plains, the marks from the frost. That is why they want to deactivate her.

  “At first, when they realized they could not just ignore her, when it became known that even Borges’s stories came from Macedonio’s machine, and that there were new versions going around about what had happened with the Islas Malvinas, they decided to take her to the Museum, to invent a Museum for her. They bought the building from the RCO and placed her there, on exhibit, in a special gallery, to see if they could negate her, convert her into what is known as a museum piece, a dead world, but the stories were reproduced everywhere, they could not stop her, there were stories and stories and more stories. Do you know how it all began? I will tell you. It always begins the same way, the narrator is sitting down, like I am, on a wicker chair, he rocks back and forth, looking out at the flowing river, it has always been like this, from the beginning, there is someone on the other side waiting, someone who wants to know what happens next. I had a small workshop in Azul around that time, I had lost my position at the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata for political reasons and had installed a workshop to repair radio and television sets. I was already carrying out my investigations, at night, I had begun to combine certain formulas together, to do some calculations, nothing too specific, around the time when Gödel’s and Tarski’s hypotheses first began to be disseminated. I applied them to a radio receiver, I was unable to build a transmitter, not at that point, just a recorder, my closet was full of tapes, recorded voices, lyrics, I was not able to transmit, only to capture, from the ether, waves, memories. I insist that at this point Gödel’s work had just appeared, around the same time as Tauski’s essay, I was in contact with the Rodríguez Bookstore in Buenos Aires, and I would get the latest scientific and philosophical books and journals every two months, in German, in English. I would work on my investigations at night and open up the electrical repair shop in the morning, until one day this man appears, a poet and a philosopher, I should say, he came to speak with me because everyone knows everything in small towns and he had been told that there was a European mathematician, he had come to spend some time at the small Arteaga farm, which was nearby, and was told that there was a German, because everyone always thought that I was German or Russian, and he wanted to meet me. That is how everything began. He had started before, actually, with other kinds of experiments, but along the same line.

  “I remember a friend of mine, Gabriel del Mazo, who knew him from when they were young. I remember hearing him say that one day he was in the living room in Macedonio’s house, at 2120 Piedad Alley, parallel to Av. Bartolomé Mitre. It was a big house that is still there, with a patio and a yard with grapevines. They used to meet there with Juan B. Justo and Cosme Mariño, the founders of the Socialist Party and the Anarchist Movement in Argentina, and Gabriel del Mazo remembered that Macedonio was still single and that, one day, he heard the strumming of chords on a guitar ceaselessly from the room next door, the strumming of the chords, Del Mazo said, keeping rhythm in long intervals with other chords, and others, and others and with nothing else. I was intrigued, he says, so I go and ask him what he’s doing. And he told me something that I fear I won’t be able to recount exactly because my memory is not that great, Macedonio does, Del Mazo says, but it went something like this:

  “ ‘That it is very interesting to look for the fundamental chords in music from which, perhaps, the entire universe is derived.’

  “As if he were searching for a kind of primordial cell, the white node, the origin of forms and words, in the strumming of a guitar, in the melody that is repeated and repeated and repeated and never ends. A nucleus that is the origin of all voices and of all stories, a common language, as if it were recorded in the flight of birds, on the shells of tortoises, a unique form. You might say that, metaphysically, he did not distinguish dreams from reality. His theory consisted of not differentiating between being awake and dreaming. Despite the objective appearance of reality, he opposed it with dreams. He did not believe that dreams were an interruption of the real, but rather an entranceway. You awake from one dream and into another life. The intersection is always unexpected, life is a woven tapestry that interweaves one dream with another. He thought that the self, when it dreams, lives with so much intensity that it experiences as much as, if not more than, when it is awake and its eyes are wide open. All his work revolved around this node. He has written on the subject. That which is not defines the universe as much as that which is. Macedonio placed the possible within the realm of the real. That is why we started discussing Gödel’s hypotheses. A formal system cannot attest to its own cohesion. That was our point of departure, virtual reality, worlds of possibility. Gödel’s theorem and Alfred Tarski’s treatise on the borders of the universe, the outer limits. Macedonio had a very clear awareness of the intersection, the shore beyond which something else begins. That is why when his wife died, it also became necessary for him to leave his life behind, that he too abandon his life, as she had abandoned hers, as if he had gone to find her and she was on the other shore, on what Macedonio called the other shore. He became a shipwrecked man carrying a box with what he had managed to save from the water. He lived in an imaginary island, in complete loneliness, for years and years, like Robinson Crusoe.

  “When his wife died he abandoned everything, his children, his legal title, even his writings on medicine and philosophy, and began to live without anything, almost like a vagrant on the road, with other anarchists who were hopping freight trains around that time, out in the country, under bridges, eating only soup, broth made from thistles, sparrow bones. Because he was an extremely ascetic person, no matter how much he had of something it was always more than what he needed, even if he did not have something it was still more than what he needed. He walked alone, played his guitar in small bars in the Province of Buenos Aires, carrying Elena’s soul, as he would say, in a small container usually used to carry mate. In other words, it contained the letters and the one photograph he had of her wrapped up in strips of cloth. He had discovered the existence of the verbal nuclei that keep remembrances alive, words they had used that brought all the pain back into his memory. He was removing them from his vocabulary, trying to suppress them, and establish a private language without any memories attached to it. A personal language, without memories, he wrote and spoke English and German, so he would mix the languages, in order to avoid even grazing the skin of the words he had used with Elena. T
oward the end he spent hours sitting by himself, in the patio of a house that his friends had lent him, in the district of Azul, just thinking, drinking mate and looking out over the plains.

  “He had met her in that very same place. After traveling around and around the Province of Buenos Aires, he ended up right back where he had started. Macedonio fell in love with Elena before he met her, as he used to say, because they had told him so much about her that it was as if a spirit had come to visit him. Even many of the things he had done earlier in life were to impress her at a distance and to try to get her to fall in love with him, he would say. He always thought that his passion is what made her ill, he always thought it was his fault that she died. Macedonio saw her for the first time at a cousin’s house the day she turned eighteen, and again by coincidence one afternoon on a street in Azul. This second meeting proved to be definitive. He had gotten off the train because he was doing an experiment having to do with measuring the length of thoughts. He got off there without knowing where he was because he had already traveled the number of leagues needed for his thoughts, and had decided to send a telegram from there saying he would be coming back late. When he left the post office he sat down at a bar to have a brandy, and then walked around the corner and ran into Elena, who was looking at the window of a shoe store, as if she had been placed there just so Macedonio would find her. She started to laugh because she thought it was funny to see that man dressed in a white shirt and a dark suit at siesta time, as if he were sleepwalking in a lost town in the middle of the Pampas. He looked like a seminarist going out to ask for alms for the poor of the parish. And I was asking for alms, Macedonio would say, because she gave me the grace of her beauty and of her intelligence, bright as the morning sun. He invited her to have tea with him at the café in the train station, and from that afternoon on, they were together until the day she died.”