I decided to leave the bench and resume my walk. I looked over to where the old man was sleeping: he hadn’t moved, other than swatting the occasional insect. I looked at his hands, folded together over his belly, and only then did I realize that the book I’d taken out when I sat down was still in my lap; at one point I’d opened it, surely like those readers on trains or in waiting rooms who interrupt their reading, look up, sit there rapt in something, and don’t start reading again for quite some time. I had fallen into one of those reveries, I realized now, and I also knew I wouldn’t return to the book for the rest of the day, or even attempt to.

The alameda that served as a stage for the monumental fountain opened out impressively; it must have been a hundred-odd meters long and some thirty meters wide. It offered two parallel walkways, which ran its entire length, crossed every few meters by transverse paths. Between the walkways was a narrow watercourse, half-concealed by the paths, beneath which you could make out small cascades or locks through which the water travelled on its way from the fountain. Trees surrounded the area with an equal denseness. Given the land’s gentle downward slope, from its topmost point the alameda seemed more extensive than it really was; but above all it looked like a startlingly geometric clearing amid the dense plant life, because wherever one looked one could make out, under the green of the trees, shadowy masses, spaces at first sight overgrown and impenetrable. I headed off down one of the walkways. On my right I could distinguish something like an Oriental garden, or strictly speaking Japanese, with a great number of stones and promontories, shallow waterfalls, and very narrow canals that connected two ponds that were equally diminutive, given the scale of their surroundings. From a distance I saw too, a number of sculptures, of a Buddhist sort, solid and dark gray, which because of the contrast these made with the innocent wooden bridges scattered here and there gave the garden a mien that was somber, even threatening, rather than harmonious.

Toward the left of the alameda, in the other area, stood a dense forest, broken at times by a few small clearings where they’d set out rustic tables for snacking or picnicking, or both things at once. I spied three men sitting around one of these tables, devoting themselves to what appeared to be a game, dominoes or cards, I couldn’t tell. Needless to say, I had reason to doubt my first impressions; the dominoes may have been a misperception, a mere whimsical transposition of images from the past, of those facts, perennial in their way, that alight in one’s memory and lead a furtive life there, surface occasionally and are then obliterated until their next appearance. I recalled a fairly hot summer, in another city. The doors and windows in the neighborhood open day and night, the neighbors avoiding the insides of their houses, etc. I remembered the dry slap of the dominoes on the tables set up in the street or in courtyards and gardens. Sessions that lasted for hours. Several games were most likely being played, one after the other, but as a result of the repetition and the unrelenting heat, these turned into a single game that never ended. As a background to the slapping of the tiles, you heard the murmur of voices; it was the conversation that flowed on, independent of the game, to be interrupted every now and then by long intervals of silence, or, depending on the ups and downs of the play, by a volley of shouts that died away almost instantly. And it wasn’t just one table, there were hundreds spread out all over the neighborhood, from which the sound of the slapping Bakelite would carry distinctly, although that didn’t matter, because given the similarity of the sounds, one could reconstruct those that were the faintest, determine their true source, and above all, their true color.

I went on considering the waves of sounds that ran like currents and seemed to work by emulation. I would hear them far off, then near, I’d feel how they enveloped me, little by little, then left me behind, their aftereffects slowly fading, and so it went, several times a day. I was capable of finding a poetry in that, but even to me, accustomed to being satisfied by so little, it seemed obvious. As is evident, I was growing gloomier and more fatalistic. Maybe that’s why I thought it all too likely that the park would offer me no other varied or interesting things, though it’s true that at that point in the afternoon — or more generally, in my life — I could no longer be sure of what I expected. I then decided to find the closest exit. I wanted to return along a different route and perhaps in this way come across some impressive monument, a grand gateway arch, the iconic portal, I don’t know, because everything told me that I’d approached this park haphazardly, and it had therefore revealed itself to me slightly at random, failing to display its potential pathways or its perhaps intentional contrasts. On the whole, the same thing always happens to me. I set out from the margins or at the back doors, and that obviously determines how my impressions unfold. A handy example is the aviary, a place whose melancholy had surprised me, and which I had no desire to visit again; its melancholy would probably have moved me if I’d come across it in another sequence. I no longer remember the aviary in that way, but I was still under the effects of the place, the silence typical of caged creatures. And so, desiring to escape my own associations, I left the Buddhist area behind and took one of the side paths to the right, which led into the heart of the park, crossing it diagonally.

Once again I discovered on the ground the kind of earth with which I was by now familiar: a worn, near-pulverized gravel that resembled dirty, powdery sand. As I walked along, the noises from outside became more subdued and, apart from the predictable trillings and screeches now and then, a threatening silence prevailed. I don’t know, to me the silence seemed the most visible proof of the falsity, or rather, the invention or manufacture, of an allegedly natural environment in the middle of a city. In the past, the park had probably been the site of farms or a post station, and then the city proceeded to engulf it. As I considered this, I realized that my dichotomous thinking was surfacing, because on the one hand, I love parks — or their funereal variant, cemeteries — and love them far more than any space devoted to natural habitat, or the alleged wild; but on the other, I never pass up a chance to slander them inwardly and verify, time and again, whenever I walk through them, the forced affectation that sustains them. At any rate, I suspect it’s a useless battle, lost in advance: who would have any interest in what I think about parks, or better still, who would care what I think about anything. That’s why, as I wrote before, I prefer untended parks, those that have been overtaken by neglect, because no one expresses any strong opinion about them and so they take on a still more autonomous life and, in that sense, presumably a more authentic one. . Although of course, one can never know.

I now covered a long stretch on the diagonal path, where everything seemed to sleep, protected by the shade. It was an ideal path for walking aimlessly, indifferently. I kept seeing discarded candy wrappers and empty soft-drink cans on the ground. Some had been there for a long time, since they were weatherworn and had, in their own way, adapted to the colors in their surroundings. Because there were no benches or tables nearby, I surmised that on the weekends the path was heavily used. This made me want to know where it led to. From time to time I saw large trash cans, which were in any case brimming with papers and plastic bags. Not much else at all, besides the trees, the dry earth and the predominant shade. As had happened several times earlier on this outing, before long I spotted a light area toward the end of the path; and when I drew closer, some ten minutes later, I glimpsed a tableau that at first disturbed me, I don’t know why: over there a good-sized, tranquil lake lay hidden, and from where I was approaching I could make out some unexpected, gigantic swans, stock-still and arrayed as if in regimental formation. As I drew nearer to the water and the scene grew better lit, I felt a mixture of wariness and wonder. Wariness owing to something quite primal, for which I realized I wasn’t prepared: simply the size of those pedal boats in the shape of swans, which one associated more with some monstrous scale than with any idea of a replica or an amusement; and wonder because of the illusion of standing before an inanimate army, but one that seemed subject to a latent vitality, ready to awaken or be activated at any moment.