No one imagined that, years later, those walks would end up this way, taking the form of words on paper. Still, our steps — as firm and as weightless as the mornings in those days — shone with their own light, without assistance. Those walks through Greater Buenos Aires were predictable, probably boring, and perhaps too speculative. The truth is that very little happened, almost nothing; it was like sailing with a course but no destination. Whoever believes in destiny expects, at the very least, that things should happen; though it might be a mistake, just as no one thinks of tedium as a property of action, no one considers passivity to be the work of destiny, when actually it is. So minor and insubstantial were the events we stumbled upon that the idea of living at the mercy of chance would only have provoked incredulity in M and me. We were contemplative. When not overwhelmed by the desert, travelers see mirages; they expect this, make nothing of it, and carry on accordingly. But to us, saturated by the landscape of the suburbs, the absence of action was intoxicating. We wandered like planets, our orbits well outside the sphere of activity. Events did not affect us; they belonged to an order that was not only absent, but had been effaced, dissipating just a few meters before we reached them.

It was always like that during the time of our walks, one morning after another. And yet one day — which seemed to have been marked to produce, in the space of a few hours, something that had not happened for months on end — would be the exception. We were at the middle of one of those typical suburban blocks with little traffic and unused sidewalks. Because our surroundings kept us from any practical sort of trance, our only option, apart from walking and looking, was to talk. We made bets on finding the car. The father calculated fifteen days, M bet thirty, and I — so as not to discourage them — said a week, when I really thought it would either take more than four months or was simply impossible. Since finding the car depended, at the end of the day, on coincidence, anyone could see that these calculations were just another topic of conversation. The father would say, “In fifteen days we will have covered more than 5,000 blocks, which, added to the 12,000 we had already done, make 17,000,” though he did not specify why that was the number required. M, for his part, doubled the figure, perhaps thinking that twice as many opportunities might present themselves that way — as though we might find two cars, or the same car two times. He would take a deep breath and say, “We walk 11,000 blocks every month, plus the 12,000 we’ve done already makes 23,000. With that many, nothing could get by us.” His father would get annoyed and cast him a sidelong glance. “I’d have to be crazy to walk that.” Our conversations were of that nature. In my case, I thought we still had something like 44,000 blocks to go — four months, plus the 12,000 that, according to M and his father, we had already covered, or it might even have been that we needed a total of 100,000 blocks, or eight months. But since I did not think it opportune to be honest, I only said, “I think it will all be settled in a week, with the car waiting for us on X as though nothing had happened. I don’t think we have more than 2,500 blocks to go.” X was the street where M lived. They listened to me as though a divinity were speaking. “From your lips to God’s ears,” the father said.

At that moment we reached a corner. We saw, due east, a sun that cast no shadow on the pavement on either side of the street. On the next block, M and I thought about the religious implications, for both of our beliefs, of the words “From your lips to God’s ears,” though they might have been nothing more than another way of saying, “Let’s hope,” as one might do several times a day. Just as we were crossing the street, we heard a scream, a mix of panic and grief trailing off into a wail; it came from behind the line of doors. To get closer we needed only to keep walking, but we stopped instead of advancing; the surprise held us paralyzed in the middle of the street. Another scream, and someone came running out at full speed, though not in our direction. The man’s pants were open and he was having a hard time holding them up. One could see, in his movements, the clumsy syntax of escape: the fear that drew his feet in search of a safe place to hide and the contradictory, apparently mutually exclusive, movement of his body, which froze for a moment with each new scream. The man had raped, but the rape had not reached its conclusion; perhaps this was the cause of the tension between urgency and interruption. People who lived nearby peered out through their windows, others flooded into the street.

Overturned bicycles appeared on the street: people were coming over to watch. It is strange that when something happens, very often something terrible and unexpected, one’s first reaction is to wait, as though only another event could bear the tragedy out. People crowded around like ants, circling, exchanging information. And so a somewhat brief period elapsed in which no one noticed the passage of time, all were so absorbed by the gathering. Once it had its fill of words, the tribe regained its disquiet. It wanted facts. A statement, more obvious than novel, was made: The police were slow in coming, and should hurry. It was not hard to gather the details of the story, a familiar series of sordid scenes. The girl or young woman — they mentioned her by name, which left her age unclear — was a victim of the jealousy of her mother, who shut her inside the house whenever she went out, locking all the doors and leaving her without keys. This maternal jealousy had come to be projected through the throat of the daughter, in the form of screams and nervous fits, an echo of itself. That which was sown by one was reaped by the other, it seemed. The lecher, for his part, had fallen back on an old technique — entering through the roof; when he realized he was in danger, he tested the efficacy of another, also old — a leap from a window. Nonetheless, between one event and the next, there was a mystery that was difficult to resolve; at first the lecher thought it was danger he sensed, a threat inscribed in the scream of the girl, but he immediately realized it was a weariness subject to something far deeper, something fairly complex and difficult to gauge. It was the weariness of the limit; it is always exhausting to exist at a limit. It was something related not to time, to the prolongation of a condition, but rather to the intensity — or depth — of that state. To be on the verge of flight, on the verge of invasion: frontiers that, when mentioned in this way, may seem trivial or as light as a cloud, but which weighed the shoulders down with a load that became increasingly difficult to bear, especially when they arose unexpectedly. This weight bent a body in two and leaned over its waist, grabbing on to its hips; and in the midst of it all, there was the urgency of escape. This could last unbearably long.

The women who lived nearby were left at the mercy of fear and consternation, and yet several were less indignant at the incident than at the detestable publicity that had been afforded a private act. Children were running around; every now and then a few would shoot off after receiving an order from the adults. There was also talk that the father, who had been separated from the family for some time, had taken his revenge on the mother through the body of their daughter. Within five minutes everything was possible, even true. There were more hypotheses: that the mother had instigated it, leaving the house at the most opportune moment in order to destroy both husband (or ex-husband) and daughter, for whom she felt no love; this was why she ordered the girl to sleep in her bed, so the father would mistake her for the mother (that is, for her) and both would find damnation through sex. It could also have been that the mother, allied with the father against their daughter, had planned the rape. Many described the house as a living hell: at night, the screams could be heard along the entire street, the neighborhood falling asleep to the recent memory of profanities. They preferred not to talk about the victim, draping over her a veil of suspicion more cruel than even the most aberrant accusation; it was a silence whose fissures gave way to complaints, disdain, slander, and eventually condemnation. Several acknowledged wearily that they had seen her on the corner well into the night, sitting on the sidewalk with boys from outside the neighborhood.