They immediately reconsidered. They were prepared to venerate Marta, but could not live with either Mirta or Lesa. And if they were going to venerate, they preferred their memory of the Girl a thousand times over. With this conviction, they sank into an uncomfortable silence and, again, deep into regret. They didn’t want to seem insensitive but, at the same time, could not make that mistake knowingly. Meanwhile, the girl waited longingly for some sign, even the most ambiguous, even part of a word; she could have waited there for hours and at the slightest hint of an invitation would have said yes, she would love to join them. The two, for their part, knew that they would never see her again. They no longer had the will to console her, aside from telling her how worried her family was. Then they wished her luck. Forgetting that both their lives and the landscape contradicted the excuse of haste, they said their goodbyes in a rush: it was urgent; they had to get going right away. And so, once again, they left a little girl alone in the middle of nature. But, just like the word urgent, the word left rang hollow to them, as drifters. Both words, against the desolate backdrop of nature that surrounded them, took on a hue of irrelevance — though they were familiar with the word abandon. Still, since they had certainly never possessed Marta, they did not know which sense to adopt. Mirta, Sela, or whoever she would be from then on, would hold a special place in their hearts. How perfect it would have been had things gone differently: if Marta had woken up in a way that would have allowed them to adopt her. But nothing ever happens according to plan.

They continued down the road. Sometimes they would come across train tracks and follow them for weeks, stopping to cook on the crossties and spending the night off to one side. Life went on as usual, which is why they did not notice how long it had been that any image of a girl — a photo, a drawing, any portrait on any surface — would bring the oval of Marta’s face back to them. Every morning they woke up not knowing where they were. This happened to both of them. They had been sharing feelings for some time; these almost certainly passed through their skin and were transmitted through the air. Sometimes they surprised themselves by thinking the same thing; other times one noticed that the other’s thought was not new to him, but was rather the memory of another, similar one. They never quarreled, never separated. Yet even recognizing that few other unions could be as harmonious, the memory of Marta proved to them that no relationship could ever be intense enough, profound enough. Her memory reproduced itself on an industrial scale. Photos of schoolgirls, illustrations of small female athletes, simple and anonymous charcoal portraits: any image of a girl produced a passionate feeling of devotion and kindness. Yet, strangely, they were impervious to girls of flesh and bone. This detail caught their attention right away — they interpreted it as yet another aspect of their own eccentricity — then, little by little, it took on a menacing air. The fact that Marta was not called into presence by the living and corporeal, a person, but rather by these images, made them wonder whether the world of travel that they had chosen might not also belong to a secondary order, a reflection or shadow of the real one. A world built by the imagination might be limitless, of this there was extensive proof, their own inexhaustible, intense experiences included; yet in order to last it needed the calm of the other world — the real, tangible one — because when it erupts, whether under the sign of condemnation or redemption, the other surface of the planet — the hemisphere of the imagination — becomes the substance of that breach, the fuel for the fire. Sometimes truth and imagination seemed like two fairly harmonious hemispheres, other times they could seem like different moments in the cycle of the same one; yet the fall of one always meant the rise of the other, as they consumed one another. This was the amorphous substance of which their vague intuitions were formed.

It was so easy and entertaining to formulate theories that a few years later, unaware of any danger, they were detained as vagrants outside Buenos Aires. They had not been arrested since Clorinda, nor had they spent much time in any one place. At first they were taken to the famous prison Villa Devoto. They would be moved often after that, though not as often as they would have liked. What is more, the places they were taken were increasingly unsubstantial; the last ones, little barracks scattered at random across a field zigzagged by barbed wire, barely sealed them off from the outside. Their time in prison was a time of stillness, of the lack of movement. This conclusion, obvious to anyone, held for them the inverse meaning, as well: that stillness was a prison. They had been locked up for two years more than they had spent on the road. They came to understand that if, in the country, the poor had a right to wander, in the city they had to follow a prescribed circuit; the rich, on the other hand, who stayed still in the country, were the ones who commanded the surface of the city, constantly moving from one place to the next. They could hear tango music all the time, no matter where they were inside the prison. It was better not to think in there; wide eyes wakefully dreaming and a blank mind made it possible for time to pass more quickly, for little to happen and, at the end of it all, to leave behind a lean life, with few things to remember. When they were finally released, it took them a long time to recognize themselves. They had to reconstruct the image from memory. They saw their own suffering in the eyes of the other; as consolation they walked away from the prison reliving the heights of their wanderings.

Buenos Aires accomplished what Clorinda could not: it did not even occur to them to go back to their old life. They preferred to hold on to the memory of a countryside “of our own,” as they would say, that nonetheless was as neutral as the sea, as ephemeral as time and as undefined as Marta. When they moved into the house that would become their home, they were surprised at how young the trees on the block were. The train, whose tracks were just a few meters away, also embodied the ideas of travel, freedom, and migration: this was a comfort to them, as well. The first thing that happened to them was finding a large image of a certain virgin. They adopted it, as they had not done with Marta. There, from the living room, she would oversee the daily activities of the pair, who had gone from being perambulatory to being sedentary and, what is more, to being still. In a language so secret that it was never even expressed as sound, they called her “the colossal virgin” (or something like that): the lack of space, territory, and mobility lapsed into a pious devotion. They also lit candles to the memory of Marta, for whose presence they were able to find no better image than that of a girl about to dive into a pool, her hands folded together as though praying downwards, cut from an old magazine of current events. Marta’s innocence became atemporal; even the vocabulary that described it changed, swelling with mysticism, something like a beatitude. If they had, up to a certain point, referred to their first encounter as her “arrival” and their second as her “return,” now they spoke of an enduring presence, albeit one that chose to manifest itself only occasionally. Marta had shown herself at one moment or another, though she had — since they had met her — always been present; she still was, only in absence.

It was inconceivable to anyone who saw them that they had been consummate, slightly diffuse travelers (a passing difference). The hostile air of the city, which was intangible but nonetheless verifiable, forced them into their home, pressing them into its corners. They never went downtown, or anywhere too many people got together or too many things happened at once. They knew only the streetcars and buses that took them to work. They were not aware that the city was changing; had they known, they would not have cared. When they would think back on their glorious past, the whistle of a train would save them from sadness, transporting the imagination of both to the great open spaces of the North.