As time went by and their religious life expanded, they would attract the attention of the neighborhood; first as two people unusually attached to their vigils, and then for their demeanor, which gradually grew more cautious and reserved. They wanted to be invisible but they could not, and so the care with which they moved and the way they directed their gaze recalled the behavior of certain animals. At a time when the city was filled with Paraguayans, they were unable to distinguish themselves as natives of Formosa; if they did manage to do so, it was only a little while before the simple and ruthless judgment of the people, which assigned nationality by association, would render the distinction irrelevant. Apparently, this situation reproduced the one in Clorinda. They were suspicious in the eyes of others, regardless of the situation. The fact that they retained, even after living in the city for years, the traits of vagrancy — an inability to distinguish between the fleeting and the permanent, a penchant for long periods of fasting, a tendency toward vacillation — would make things even worse. A cult was attributed to them that was much more exotic and, in its way, much more provocative than the innocent, private one that they practiced.

The emptiness was palpable, with the exception of a few old-timers annoyed at having to walk all the way to church when there was a perfectly good altar nearby. There, in the tiny room that crowned the courtyard and was reached by a narrow flight of stairs with bowed slats, the habit of prayer and of honoring the memory of relics and beliefs they had shared throughout their life together created a unique sanctuary. What causes a cult to grow, to expand? It’s hard to say, exactly. The cult grew. When it was private, the room presented no problem; once it acquired a certain reputation, however, a window would have to be opened to air out the smoke from all the candles the people brought in. And that is how an individual, or dual, cult came to expand. The hosts, whose sense of hospitality at first led them to politely explain the images to which the place was dedicated — alluding to a divine intervention in the midst of their prolonged itinerancy, offering proof of Marta’s story — would later watch strangers arrive who were already initiated, in a wayward sense, in the details and events of the iconography. The cult took on a life of its own, as did the worship in the chapel; they said that three hundred was an ideal number of followers. Peering in from a landing on the stairs, the heads drew back as before a mystery: this was the reason they were there. But since that mystery also attracted them, it kept them from withdrawing enough to forget.

Their worship could not be kept secret; little by little it would be rejected by the community and its churches. What did they get out of their cult? The freedom they had lost in the prison in Buenos Aires, the abstract pleasure found in the proliferation of the air and the landscape. Looking at the images that hung from delicate nails, they were able to breathe the rich and enigmatic aroma of nature once more. Standing before the photos of Marta and the pictures of the virgin, they caught their breath, began to dream again. Veneration, as both a credo and an experience, was the next best thing to itinerancy; the key to both was less a matter of continuity than it was of persistence.

One day they had a dream: They were at the foot of a mountain. They looked up and were overwhelmed by the climb ahead of them. They turned and saw a peaceful valley, with lazy little foothills spilling over into a river, a narrow and sinuous strip that reminded them of a snake. The noise of beasts hidden in the underbrush filtered down along the dense face of the mountain; from the valley they could hear the whisper of the breeze, an anxious whistle. The plain stretched on and became a narrow crate that made the wind rear up in frustration. In the dream they remembered moments from real life. These moments no longer belonged to their past, but rather to that of the dream: they were planes superimposed upon one another, searching for a framework that could accommodate them all. In the meantime, they needed to decide. They didn’t have all day. Above them was the mountain, below them, the valley. The dream repeated this over and over, highlighting a difference that disconcerted them, first and foremost because it was so obvious, and secondarily because it revealed to them that they were nowhere. At first they thought that the moments of their shared past were coming from above and prepared themselves for the climb, but then they saw that they were coming from the river and started their descent. Every call they heard was followed by its opposite. All of a sudden, someone wearing a uniform came down — he looked like the agent or guard of something — someone who protected a good or goods. They thought maybe a forest ranger (but that was ridiculous, there were no forests). They asked him about the truth, but he turned away before he could say anything. And so they came to know a kind of terror not born of fear, but of confusion.

The pressure grew; combined with the prevailing climate in the community, it would end up destroying the chapel. They had to lock it up and turn it over to the house next door for use as a bedroom. They sealed off the door and made another, facing the back and opening on to an empty space where a flight of stairs would soon be built from the neighboring courtyard. But it was not enough. Their persecution ended up consecrating the place, and a religious multitude chose it as the site of their gatherings. The story would end shortly thereafter when the two decided to run off in the middle of the night and were never heard from again. Some have said they’ve seen them off to the side of the train tracks with their packs, looking like vagrants; others say they’ve passed them walking up and down the avenues with a blank stare and an absorbed look on their faces, paying no attention to the world evolving around them. Either way, it is hard to imagine two more innocent souls.

Unlike in nature, where everything is explicit and categorical, in the city, they remarked, the abstract imposes itself upon the concrete. In the city, mental operations come before facts. At the very least, said M, the streets are an entelechy, defined by what they are not. It is the space of withdrawal, the scene of mental operations. The names of the streets are the greatest proof of this misunderstanding and the origin of the most notable exercise in abstraction of all, M continued: the routes of public transportation, which arbitrarily unite remote points. One can imagine, in an instant, the slow trajectory of a bus — have its entire route in one’s mind. (“I wish I could do that,” said M. Make connections, establish confines not only in thought, but also in practice.) The way the line refers to a specific geography is just as arbitrary as the names of the streets, but of a greater complexity; if the former suggest a trajectory, the bus routes also assume the complication of obstacles, traffic regulations, unevenness in the terrain and in neural centers, which are also pathways. He would be overcome with excitement as he named a line for the other to translate. It could have been the 109 (Liniers-Luna Park), the 96 (San Justo-Constitución), the 53 (Boca-José C. Paz) or the 61/62; when he described the return route, he provoked outbursts of admiration from M, who would stare at him wide-eyed. The lines that had been shut down remained as traces, as living furrows in memory, as did those that came before the ordinances that would transform them, the ones that had belonged to trolleys or streetcars. The various names of certain streets were also a source of mystery and happenstance; as tends to be the case, chance was obscured by reality. “Uruguay becomes San José,” they recited, “Cobo de Caseros, Yatay de Muñiz,” and so on.