After that Monday morning — once inside the school, we stopped talking — though it may seem strange, we never spoke of the matter again. Now, as I watched an empty train pull into an abandoned platform, I regretted not having remembered the story that afternoon, so I could have asked Sito how he had come up with that line of reasoning. Not only that, I thought, standing in Constitución, Sito might have been able to explain things to me that I still didn’t know or understand. But I didn’t ask him anything, I said to myself, which was an error and a gaffe. We spent most of the afternoon in a café; at his invitation we had two coffees each, we even made small talk, as they say, and I was incapable of asking a thing about M. Standing there in the station, I honestly could not believe it. As I said, it is true that Sito did not ask any questions, either, but it was certainly I who should have made the first move, as corresponded to his invitation. He must have been thinking, with all assurance, as he walked away along Carlos Pellegrini and later, when he stopped at the kiosk and waved to me, “What a cretin. Talking all afternoon and never once bringing up the memory of his friend.” Evidently, if this was what he was thinking, he was not wrong. I thought I had seen a condescending smile in that long-distance greeting, though at the time I had considered it an effect of the caramel he was eating. Now, on a platform in Constitución station, where I had walked for no reason in particular other than to watch the trains come and go, the gesture seemed both completely reasonable and unmistakably lucid.

FOUR

For those who give themselves over to a territorial friendship, time — even space — is an excuse, secondary to a single, essential element: the indirect path, often sinuous and always arbitrary, along which the traces and labors of distance accumulate as silt does beneath water. It is paradoxical that territory, a spatial concept, should see its own condition dispelled as it grows unfathomable and manifests itself in the form of a delay or of an often irrecoverable past, a lapsed apogee or a liberated present able to change form and occupy another place at any moment, under any circumstance. Sometimes on our walks, the day — despite its clumsy and forced evolution — would not progress. The light, the weather, or the set of sensorial tools one uses to locate oneself within the jumble might change, but there was a residue that literally stopped the passage of time; one felt one might remain there forever. At those moments it was as though we were in a painting over which a faint vapor hovered, or was perceived: some sort of shadow or mist at the horizon, a mix of light and color — or cold and heat — through which an imprecise form, probably that of trees or houses, could just barely be discerned.

For months we walked around different parts of the suburbs almost every day. Both before and after that time — a period in which we were searching for something, something that would become a symbol of salvation, as I will explain in a moment — both before and after that time we walked around intermittently, almost always casually and often without any particular reason but, as I have said, with the same feeling of recklessness and the same excitement, the same combination of abundance and delirium. At that time, when we would go on the walks I am about to describe, it was still four years before M would disappear. If I say now that the future to come would have seemed unreal, unthinkable in that moment, I am truly not exaggerating. No one thinks about the future; we are ignorant of what is to come and abandon ourselves to the void of its mystery. It is also true that, while no one can see the future, we attempt in vain to anticipate it. Those with foresight think about what is to come, those without it think about the moment. At the end of the day, everyone belongs to one of these two groups; yet the idea that M would disappear within a few years would have sounded far-fetched to anyone. As a concept, we expect nothing of the future, which is a good thing, but we expect everything of the moment and of what is to come. (This everything has a literal value here: I mean that “everything” includes the word change, as well.)

Something about the city brings us to accept transformations; this thing becomes familiar, and in that moment we acknowledge, or rather, embrace it. Change, novelty — despite being beyond our grasp because, in the city, things happen without our knowledge — are the proofs offered to us by the present in an unremitting stream. The proliferation of events, the propagation of signs, those forms in which the city expresses itself are the language used by the present to renew itself and, in this way, construct its simulacrum of the future. How else would the future manifest itself, if not in the image of the contemporary? And what is the contemporary, par excellence, if not life in the city? City, future, proliferation, truth: the four ends of an equilateral cross, at the top of which figures the word “city.” The other three are interchangeable.

Just as the geography of the city conditions us to accept change or novelty despite the fact that change and novelty are rarely within our grasp, assigning to the present the fantastic ability to contain infinite occurrences, people feel compelled to make their predictions: the city as an innumerable series of events that take place within a defined space, and what is to come as a hypothetical realm in which occurrences proliferate at the heart of a hidden moment, impossible but nonetheless concrete, similar to those that occur all the time on the streets of distant neighborhoods. Even this seemingly forced metaphor between the future and the city allows for the idea of proximity and its effects: nearness and immediacy — essential relations for those anxious about what is to come. On the other hand, the city offers validation to those who do not make predictions: change, the bustle that grows more or less feverish depending on the hour and the circumstance, which can be represented — and contemplated — from a single point. This observation often takes place from a café table or — in the neighborhood — from chairs set up on the sidewalk, open windows, et cetera. The city is not only simultaneous — we know that at any moment, in any place, there are always a number of different things happening — but also spontaneous: events unfold without reason or accord, which makes them appear autonomous and random. Those who live in the moment find, in this exercise, the natural model for their lack of foresight. The same thing happens with noise: noises do not fade into the distance, die out, or grow, they simply stop or are drowned out by another, stronger one. Yet the city — which, if one must define it, could be said to be the place in which the greatest number of obstacles comes together — finds its promise of privacy eradicated by sound. M’s meticulous observations about the clamor of the trains and the cheers coming from the soccer stadium on Sundays are definitive proof of this. From bombs to the clap of thunder, via the drip of a faucet or the crackling sound of cars inching forward on the wet pavement — these noises moderate the inevitability of its construction. Geography is an art of vision; it is in its profound independence from geography, which is condemned to absorb it, that the difficulty of sound resides. Sound is equivalent to the future: that which one cannot see. This is why the first thing we forget about a person is their voice. M and I used to listen for sounds and reflect on this dubious philosophy, usually on our walks without a set destination — or with a destination that was so unknown that it ceased to be such — while we thought of ourselves as planets. It seems to me today that Buenos Aires had, at the time, a certain essential quality; it was a crystalline city. Now, though, its inhabitants are made of liquid.