The story begins like this: Unsettled by the lack of activity in the furthest reaches of their native province, they were driven by a shared passion for itinerancy. Back issues of any magazine, any fuzzy photograph, could become a promise of the oft-postponed odyssey, especially when the stories were about exotic lands. The photos, better than nature itself, preserved their hope and aroused their desire. According to these, leaving the city meant finding oneself at the edge of a dense African jungle, a few meters from pyramids of yellow sand, or in the land of the kangaroo. Distance was not overcome but was, rather, ignored; the clearest examples of this were the reports from visiting travelers who arrived in the country as though they had simply made a little detour, were just passing by, as they say. In magazines of the region, Argentina, the continent, seemed the place prescribed for little detours, where anything that could happen would, and to which all visitors from the exterior arrived as a result of absentminded and persistent displacements. This fact, which might seem mundane, made both the visits and the desire to travel even more real.

In Formosa, as in the rest of the world, there was unanimous agreement on the benefits of settling down in one place; yet some are not satisfied by this coziness, and these two were among them. Their bodies occupied such a small space compared to the one promised by travel that, from the virtual epicenter they represented, nature could not help but be an expanse that offered no resistance. The moment arrived one morning after months of preparation that was more verbal than practical: feverish conversations that seemed to exhaust the very experiences they were hoping to have. One morning the cardinal points extended in subtle combinations to form a range of real possibilities, and they departed.

Formosa, a land without a sea, offered no obstacles to its crossing. They avoided unnecessary goodbyes and headed north, following the widespread belief that things would be closer at hand. In those days few things mitigated the hostility of the roads, one of these being that, because they were so bad, a day’s travel was forcibly reduced. But since the two were not trying to get anywhere in particular, their days always lasted the same amount of time; weariness was their only limitation. Public transportation did not exist; every now and then a sympathetic truck would bring them a little closer. Under these conditions, hardship and danger were commonplace. When faced with adversity, they would look at one another and immediately recover the spark of that first day when they left the city, which they thought they could see in the eyes of the other like a faint line on the horizon, out beyond the suburbs. In this way, they overcame weakness. They rarely ran into other travelers, but if someone asked them where they were going, they would lift their eyes toward the clouds and sigh uncomprehendingly. Such an infinite range of possibilities rendered specific goals irrelevant — and also unnecessary. It seemed as though they had been driven mad by their pursuit. In reality, they desired neither to go anywhere nor simply to wander around. The journey, paradoxically, consisted of a sort of tranquility that sought to adapt itself, with the least amount of movement possible, to the gradual shifts in perspective of which walking was the principal effect. They were not proud, but they were envious of wealth; particularly the kind which, being poor, they associated with variations in the landscape.

Their first great disappointment took place in Paraguay, where they were disheartened by a panorama overwhelmingly similar to that of Formosa; if they distanced themselves from the memory of the days spent walking and resting, it was as though they had never left. The names of places, which — according to them — should identify particular and distinct environments whose variety would be grounded in difference, were simply denominations of the State. The identical was superimposed over the same; not only was the toponymy astonishingly consistent, it was so precise that it became useless: for example, a gully that had been baptized a gully. Yet nothing made any mention of the horizon. It was the State that baptized the horizon; along that line difference was neither recognized nor represented, the proof of which could be seen precisely in the similarity between Paraguay and Formosa, they complained, indignant. Though they had not set out in search of diversity, they were disappointed by similarity; it made sense that they would wait, expectantly, for the road to provide adventures previously unknown to them.

They had reached a turning point. Afraid that the similarity would only increase the further north they traveled, they decided to change directions and head south. But they had trouble at the border with Argentina; they simply were not allowed in. No one had slowed them down when they were leaving, but now that they wanted to return, they were bombarded with questions. They were taken for illegal immigrants, two of the many Paraguayans who turned up with the hope of living in a shack in Clorinda before moving on to legality or escape. Thus, once more because of the State, they realized that it was not only the landscape that was the same, but also the people. Their papers were examined in great detail in search of the error that would reveal the truth, the detail that would uncover the lie. Nowhere else had they been detained or asked their nationality, but they were immediately viewed as suspicious for wanting to enter the country, even though there is nothing less mysterious than the desire to return. Through this contradiction they came to understand the mistrust that surrounds travelers. Until that moment, rest and movement had been parallel conditions; something like mutual exclusivity confirmed the implication of one by the other. Now a separate conviction arose, an independent truth of which each felt himself the bearer: stillness and movement were the interchangeable poles of disorder and that everything — the static and the dynamic, the two of them, the people they would meet and the mirages that would catch their attention — would belong to a new kinetic category. Something like a state of perpetual creation in whose breast everything expanded and contracted without interruption, like a heartbeat. The immediate implications of this discovery were also the most profound: the journey as a progression, a collection of actions that seek to realize a goal, was invalidated, as was its opposite: the idea of the detour also became useless. The ideal, then, would be to proceed without pausing at the obvious and, rather than overcoming an obstacle, to ignore it. Though this belief could, in many cases, provoke a lasting feeling of anguish, in theirs it simply resulted in a sense of bewilderment.

They did not understand the weeks of waiting; every day under the merciless tropical sun with the other immigrants while someone — who knows who — carried on with the examination of their documents. They thought they were being detained not because of something related to them or to their condition, but because of a circumstance — singular, perhaps, but also certainly arbitrary — which, at the end of the day, was external to them: the fact that they had displaced themselves. In reality, they had not been detained for their nature, but rather for their condition. If you think the life of a lawman is hard, it’s nothing compared to what they inflict upon the immigrants, they consoled themselves by whispering into the wire fence of the camp before the evening came to separate them. They watched a flock of parrots approach; as soon as they had passed, their low flight turned into a memory made of light — a few spots of green cut out from the sky — and the fading echo of their raucous calls. They longed for their past freedom, which they had seen as an inexhaustible resource, not realizing that it had actually run out too soon. It may have been brief, but it was of an immeasurable intensity.