In the course of this intensive labor, there was no place he did not visit; grocery shops seemed to be born and develop as an effect of his passing. If the neighborhood had been the unit of measure when he had the car, now it was the block. After a few weeks of walking, he understood the contradiction between these two aims; selling and searching were mutually exclusive, particularly because a sale meant coming back — it would have been foolish to lose a good client — and coming back, after all, meant going to the same place over again. It is true that the car was not necessarily always parked; there was also a chance, albeit a minimal one, of seeing it pass by, although considering this possibility would have meant accepting its ultimate implication: that all they had to do was stand on the corner and wait, though obviously the car might just as easily never pass by. As such, he would dedicate certain days to sales and others to the search. On those mornings, before setting out on his expedition, he would choose the perfect epicenter as our starting point, one that would ensure the fewest obstacles given the enormous distance that we would cover. Once there, we would begin to walk in a spiral, inevitably deferring to the shape of the blocks. When, after a few hours, we found ourselves forced to walk in a straight line for several blocks before being able to turn, the notion of progress and expansion left us and we were humbled by a sense of linearity. The loop took on such a wide arc that it ceased to be such; we thought we were simply headed forward, not realizing that we were actually only two blocks to the right or the left of where we had passed, distracted, just a little while earlier. The father was in charge of the turns, and from time to time consulted a street map that was bound like a book — it often forced him to flip back or skip ahead several pages, even when it was only a matter of crossing a street or turning a corner. Finding our location on a map means seeing ourselves from the outside; it has a greater impact on us than looking at old photographs, in which we are caught off guard by a discolored, outdated figure, the memory and foundation of the present, which is recovered as soon as we lean over the portrait. A reality at once uncomplicated and global seems to be present in a map, in such a way that when we coincide, occupying the point observed with our bodies, the only requirement remaining for the map to become truth — that is, ourselves — has been met.

When the three of us stopped to look at the atlas, trying to anticipate natural obstacles — gullies, dead ends, factories, barracks, and the like — to the orderly progress of our spiral trajectory, a deliberation that overlooked the actual object of the walk nearly always occurred: interests and preferences would emerge, the desire to see a certain place or neighborhood based fundamentally on its name. Atlases do not describe anything: they only list streets, ways, and plazas, and public or private facilities that are considered especially large. It would be difficult to imagine their saying much more than that, but in any case our hunger for adventure sought to compensate for this silence by visiting them. It was, precisely, a matter of visiting a name: indistinguishable places and streets marked only by their denomination that added nothing to the landscape, apart from their presence. The vastness was multiplied geographically, but also nominally. Repetitions immediately made the differences between the street in the capital and the homonym on which we stood appear obvious. Others lacked a counterpart in the city, but when one of these, generally named after national heroes or mere dates, so much as suggested an association with a similar name or date, it seemed to be the echo of another street or plaza, and served only as a vague recollection in the topological memory of the people.

We looked like tourists. And, as happens to tourists, when I look back on those walks a surreal nostalgia and a confused feeling of abundance colors their very existence with a sense of ambiguity. Though it may be redundant, it is worth noting the essential scenic value that the landscape, geography, had in the consolidation and development of our friendship. The words scenery or scenic sometimes tend to be taken as a sign of vain ornamentation having little impact on the mysterious series of circumstances that is life; yet scenery is practically everything, and nothing could be less ornamental. I do not mean to say that life is theatrical but rather that, as we pass through it, we erect a stage for its scenes; this is represented by geography. The constellations that M and I believed we formed throughout the day as we connected our individual trajectories needed the space of the city to be understood as such, as the orbit of planets whose course is influenced by the relative effects of mass, force, gravity, and things like that, which define the breadth and depth of their impact as complex equations and reciprocal equilibrium; in this same way, the two of us seemed to bear the weight of the city on the transparent lines that connected our bodies in movement.

It does not matter whether it seems possible for Buenos Aires to exist beyond our influence; what was essential could be found in the diagrams we etched into the territory, which conferred an additional valence upon the known plan of the city, turning it into more space, another surface, while still remaining itself. The universe would continue to exist if the solar system disappeared, but the solar system would not be the solar system without the universe. The universe is preeminent in appearance only, because the solar system is a category separate from it: without the universe, there would be no solar system, but without the solar system, the universe would be different, other. Something similar could be said about our friendship. The city was crisscrossed by the imaginary lines of our bodies in movement, patterns and designs that became part of the geography; these would not have existed without Buenos Aires — nor, apparently, would our friendship. (Now, and for years, these are also what has been missing.)

As I have already written, a recurring subject of the digressions with which we passed the time was to hypothesize about the essential differences between the city and the suburbs: distinctions whose existence could not be questioned. There is no point in repeating our ideas on the matter, many of which were the belated aftereffects of those walks we took while searching for the car, and which had simply been rescued, or rather salvaged, from the depths of M’s consciousness months or even years after the fact. Impressions like the vague recollections being expressed now, in any event. There is no need to clarify that these pages constitute a belated and almost unexpected aftereffect of situations and memories. Compared with the years retained by the average memory, or the span represented by the coming millennium, the choice to recount the few events of this story, not quite two decades after they occurred, might seem a bit hurried. Neither of us would have imagined that, years later, these events would be written down on paper. If we had foreseen this, we would have acted differently, guiding our steps according to our idea of posterity; fortunately, we did not. (This foreseeing should be clarified, however, given that if M knew the reasons why I would end up writing these pages, he certainly would have done what was needed to avoid his abduction, though, in fact, he did nothing at all to cause it. They say that one could avoid innumerable problems, mistakes, and catastrophes if one knew how things were going to turn out, but this is an impossible dream. The most extreme example of this is that we are all certain of death — and even, expanding things a bit, about the decline of civilization, the destruction of the environment, and the inevitable ostracism of the sun — but are still unable to avoid the end. What keeps us from losing hope in the face of this inescapable truth? A belief in the interim, in the fact that, in the meantime, things happen that are worth experiencing.)