The houses, whose façades constituted the exterior, were — according to M — pure reality, the backdrop of private experience and real life that nonetheless depended on the street to define itself as such. Safe within their homes, people entered a realm of shadow day after day, like the planets; here, however, shadow was a rhetorical quirk that meant isolation. And light meant the presence of others, of witnesses, in the street.

THREE

The story about the pair of nomads absorbed me just as much as the one about the eye. Unlike me, who was unable to describe the events of the previous day except in the most confused terms, M abounded in stories and anecdotes that not only concerned him directly, relating to his own experience like the episode of the eye, but also encompassed broader, more diffuse — and therefore more debatable and controversial — material, which reached him from who knows where to adopt a new form through his voice. This is why it is clear to me that, were he still alive, he would have been the writer, the novelist. (The surrogate that I believe myself to be at times does not represent a fault; I do not see it as such. I cannot say, “I failed,” I am not myself, et cetera.) On the other hand, writing is the order best suited to take up error and even simulation, converting them first into chance and then into fortune; I can hardly mistrust my affinity for replacement and substitution, as I have been convinced for years that if there were something to be said in my — particular — language, not the words or the facts, but rather the morals behind some and the value of others, it would be dictated in some way by the memory of M.

A sense of loyalty to his memory leads me to write. At times I have thought that with this work I abandon myself, submit myself to an unclear condition in which personal feelings and the ideas derived from them are mixed together. Yet it is also true, I believe, that there are few things as amorphous as identity, in terms of both depth and breadth, and that it is therefore pointless to wonder about its limits. I am here right now, but suddenly I cease to be; I am another, or simply less. Imagine the strain of someone trying to be himself all the time. M taught me to recognize the moments in which our identity appears, becomes a category, emits energy, and then subsides into a lethargic state of anticipation that lasts who knows how long. In less than five minutes we are able to oscillate among an infinite number of states, from abundance to saturation to emptiness. It is also true that we are not aware of when we are; those around us notice this when our signs become visible to them. Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle? M and I achieved solidarity, a bond through which our own intermittence was able to develop with neither pressure nor strain, but with a sense of union. If there were a dominant state (climate) in my memory of the friendship, it would be that of harmony and serenity, a nucleus of emotions, from the bosom of which emerged the certainty of creating something unconditional and everlasting, the loss of which I have never overcome.

The real illusion that is space, or, more accurately, the confined, familiar city in which our reciprocal identity manifested itself, disappeared in M’s absence. There was no sense trying to recapture it through intermittent, inevitably anonymous, and more or less melancholy visits to his neighborhood or the places we used to go because, unlike objects — which, like photos, can at any moment become talismans or relics — space has its own ephemeral hierarchy. Space is silent, it says nothing to us; it has no surface and yet, paradoxically, it is the most lasting of times. Armed with this proof, after circling the blocks around his house in the months that followed the abduction and returning every day empty-handed, as tends to happen, I understood the bewilderment of the two drifters who were dazzled by their surroundings but were blind to its successive manifestations. An event unfolds before our eyes; we attempt to uncover it, but cannot because it has taken the form of a landscape. There will always be an element of disappointment, just as happens with noises, which are always too loud or too soft for our consciousness. This frequent disappointment was the force that pushed the pair to want more countryside, more space, horizon, views; through the innocent — in that it was derived from their own movement — succession of these, their fantasy of the journey was returned to them. This fantasy shaped the pliable material of which they were made. The vast territory they crossed over the years was, and is, legendary, but their vague sense of distraction failed to take in these legends, which touched upon them in one way or another nonetheless. Occupation, conquest, camping, residence, property: these words were foreign not only to them, but also to nature. They were satisfied simply to cross. In this way, at the mercy of their indecision and to the rhythm of their footfall, a reciprocal being and identity grew to their own measure in the form of outbursts and lulls that flared and languished with fits of clarity and withdrawals into opacity. Similar oscillations between geography and consciousness would shape our friendship, as well.

One day, something very strange happened, something that would have a double effect, lasting into the future and decisive with regard to our shared past. M and I were walking through a neighborhood where the streets, as full of Tipa trees as a park and as bright and as wide as avenues, seemed to want to hide their double excess by tending toward a categorical magnitude. We had come to prepare something like a class project on the climate. We had to choose two phenomena. Far from the chilly snow or the malevolent hurricane, and negating any misplaced inclination toward exoticism, our preference tended toward the fog and the mist. Two phenomena that were both diurnal and nocturnal — the former less so than the latter — and were as common, though not as frequent, as the breeze. We were supposed to produce charts to adorn the walls of our classroom: this was the “special” part of the class and the artifice that made the exercise “didactic.” Aside from graphs of isobars, isohumes, isotherms, other diagrams and charts, et cetera, we set ourselves the task of representing the mist and the fog. Wanting to elevate their mystery — the common trait of all atmospheric phenomena — we tended toward exaggeration: the mist looked like a downpour; the fog, like a dense sponge stuck to the ground that blocked out the light. There was no violence to this enterprise: the drawing belonged to the field of interpretation. Carefully considered, the fact that mist was not a deluge and fog was not a dense cloud was only a matter of scale. “To an ant, a drop of dew is enough to cover his head and a light mist can seem like an impenetrable fog,” M argued innocently. A light mist or a drop of dew could be as devastating as a tropical storm; how, then, could the real nature of the mist and the fog not give one pause? Added to this were connections that presented alternatives to those of global topographies: maps organized according to intangible affinities, such as variations in climate, revealed a living network of relations that exceeded their expectations. El tiempo, in the most ambiguous and enigmatic of the word’s dual meanings of time and weather — that is, as it refers to the weather — evinced not only an extreme relativism by positing various parallel systems, all integrated with reality, but also offered us the possibility of presenting these as both simultaneous and verifiable. And so we walked along, making absentminded comments about the climate and the atmosphere. (Those dialogues, I believe, were the most complete testament to our friendship; I have never had one like them in spirit or, for that matter, in substance, with anyone else.)