The tracks, the eye — none of it mattered to him anymore; he just wanted to return to the peace of his room. The memories, despite their immediacy, seemed unreliable; later they would be untrue. He did not know how to explain where he had been. He said, “I saw an eye, and then a dog, which I followed,” and could not believe it; as a thought, it had an eloquent simplicity to it. Consequently, it was soon lost to him as a memory. It doesn’t seem like you’ve forgotten it, given the way you just told the story, I reasoned. At this point M began a long explanation, a rationale of the varied, contradictory, and often tyrannical forms of forgetting, finally concluding, “I only remembered at night, when I told everyone about it and no one believed me; no one but Sito. For the rest of the afternoon, though, I didn’t remember anything.” Wasted Sundays, he declared; mornings lost in the sun and afternoons locked up inside. Just like at dawn, when everything enters my perception at once as I sit up — the creaking of the bed and the striated light in the doorway — noise and light enter without warning, as though they had been waiting outside the whole time, readying the machinery of oblivion.

The first time I went to his house, I noticed that his room matched the simple eccentricity of its owner. There was nothing particularly unusual about the correspondence — it was, after all, where he slept — but the truth was that, as I later observed, both room and inhabitant maintained an unawareness of one another, which is what allowed for their harmonious coexistence. M thought of his room as a private, even confidential, backdrop upon which his image could be reflected without the tiresome and obedient passivity of a mirror (and without its eloquence). In contrast, the room — in which there was neither a desk nor any sort of table, and which accommodated only a bed, two chairs, and a crooked wardrobe whose doors could only be opened by pushing up on one side — put up obstinate resistance, as compensation for its simplicity. As I mentioned before, the room was up high; accessible only by a narrow iron staircase. This was not particularly unusual, either. At the end of the day, an infinite number of houses had rooms built into their attics; the strange thing was that, instead of being above his own house, it was built above his neighbor’s. You went up the stairs and the wall that originally divided the two served as a landing, which meant that by walking into M’s room you were standing, irrefutably, on top of the house next door. This displacement was, I believe, the reason for the sense of resistance coming from the walls, from which an invisible and foreign substance seemed to flow. Although nothing looked out of the ordinary, you could always sense a presence not yet realized, as happens when we know the words that will be spoken to us before they are uttered. In this way, by passing through the door to his room I felt myself transported to a new expanse that was peaceful and yet enigmatic, foreign and welcoming. The most clearly discernible smells, for example, were those that came from the other house, and if a human presence could be felt nearby, it was usually that of the neighbors, not of M’s family. In this way, the very idea of contiguity — as he would explain, in different words — was challenged, since the house next door was actually his own, and vice versa; the room belonged to the neighbor’s house, though it was actually part of his own. You could still see the traces of a door that had been covered over, the frame of the original aperture half-hidden by plaster and paint, at the foot of which was a worn-down wooden sill that seemed unusual now, in front of a wall. Over on the other side of the wall, M explained, the first stairway — the original one — still led up to the door that had been sealed over.

His room offered other surprises, and not necessarily topological ones. I remember how, one morning when we had off from school, we were working on a project when my pencil fell from my hand, and, strangely, it rolled all the way across the floor. It is true that the room only appeared to be level; in any case, whether it had been caused by force or an incline, the accident resulted in a singular discovery. I crouched down to pick up the pencil and saw four or five plates and several sets of cutlery, all used, stacked precariously under the bed. He would forget to bring them down, and no one came up to collect them until their absence was noticed in the kitchen. I asked M about them, wanting to know what they were doing there. “What can I do? I forget to bring them down,” he said, smiling. Today I would assign it another name but, at the time, this recklessness — though I would not quite call it recklessness, just as I did not then — was extraordinary to me. Later, as time passed, how often I would eat there and feel myself taken over by a sense of urgency and uncomplicated happiness at the possibility of being the first to put his plate under the bed and look up at the walls with an air of defiance (evidently this possibility was nothing special to M; it belonged to the inventory of actions he performed day after day).

In this way, M possessed a unique autonomy that allowed him to arrange his room as though it were a separate residence. The organization of the space was in his favor, in this regard. It is necessary to exercise autonomy in order to determine its limits: sometimes it proves illusory, sometimes too limited. We never encounter a sense of autonomy radical enough to separate us from the world, apart from death. Even the stars and celestial bodies we often discussed, trying to excuse our ignorance with our enthusiastic veneration, which seem to travel through space with liberated precision millions of kilometers from our precarious influence, are actually subject to a complex network of forces that is always at work upon them, such that their movements are easily anticipated. Consequently, doubt and disillusionment about autonomy are understandable. Instead of being one, his room — because of its two entryways, the first closed off and the other in use — was two at once. This was the value of the scene — so far from ornamental and yet, at the risk of being redundant, so scenic — which endowed it with a combination of real, concrete elements, so long as no one stepped beyond the limits of the room.

THE SECOND STORY TOLD BY M

In the end, the pair from Formosa endowed their memories with a greater freedom than the modest one offered, even involuntarily, by life itself. They had come to wear the label of drifters affixed to their bodies, a mark found nowhere yet which nonetheless spoke volumes; they were stigmatized and the people around them acted accordingly. Their transitory routine (walking, being rejected more or less explicitly, which in turn pushed them not to linger) proliferated, not so much in events as in reminiscences more painful than any actual episode. And this made them withdraw, impervious to their surroundings. We are used to thinking about individual memories, but fall silent in the face of shared ones. Thrown out of their home, they traveled the city without looking for a place to stay; they returned to the old custom that, as they understood it, belonged to the natural realm alone. The vague intuition that they were in the wrong place did not discourage them, nor did it prevent them from enjoying the simple, portable pleasure of memories.

A neurasthenic juxtaposition of cornices, innumerable focal points within fragmented space: that was Buenos Aires. And that wasn’t the half of it: reliefs could be counted by the hundreds, planes, by the thousands. Just as when they had wandered through the provinces, and unlike their time spent in confinement, the streets, buildings, and spaces now amplified — in the sense that they multiplied — experience. Walking for half a day along an avenue might be more exhausting than, but was definitely equivalent to, spending a week anywhere in the countryside among the simple and isolated scenery of the interior. Yet they were not able to draw anything palpable from this urban plenitude, because it was deceptive: experience in the city might be more varied and abundant, but it was always less significant. There was no room for imagination (or the other way around: they could not find the imagination necessary for places that had already been defined and categorized). They did not find it necessary, as they had in the country, to compress either time or space: events unfolded at a normal rhythm, the time spent on a block blended with its length. Life in the city occurred on a grand scale ample enough to contain, without threat of disintegration, the geography in which events took place — streets and blocks — while dividing time to an extreme. They remembered their excitement at the promise of becoming someone else with each new town they visited, a desire to which they always surrendered; this memory consoled them when the fiction was interrupted by their arrival in Buenos Aires, where they were always the same. Marta, Sela, Mirta, Lesa, or whoever she really was, could have existed under any other name, but to them — though she took on various forms and images — she was a unique symbol.