M and I looked at one another; without saying anything, we agreed that if these were the things that had to transpire so that something would happen on our walks, it was better that nothing at all occur. We were not only disillusioned by the situation, empirically speaking, but also by the tenor of the comments. It was disappointing that, in a land as slow, as luminous and, in its way, as elastic as the suburbs, common sense would reign as resoundingly as it did everywhere else, even in the capital. Is the world the same all over? we would ask ourselves later, as we remembered the scene and compared it with others, which were always the same though they occurred in different places.

With the confusion at its height, we started off again on our walk; after a few blocks, we were surprised by the sound of a gunshot. We had been walking and talking about rape in general; M’s father was telling a story about a rape that, as far as he knew, had taken place on the train tracks a few meters from his house, when all of a sudden, off to our left, we heard the blast (the shot).

THE FIRST STORY TOLD BY M’S FATHER

Shielded by the darkness of the train tracks, a rapist committed a rape. Then he arranged to meet the victim the following night. “Same time tomorrow,” he declared as he zipped up his pants, convinced of the fear or the desire this might provoke. The victim did not intend to go. The rapist knew this, but he could not think of a way to prolong the possession, the feeling of power, other than by offering her the freedom to return, regardless of whether she did so or not. (That is what orders are for.) The next day he waited for five hours in the dark, feeling his way along or sitting on the rails with vermin scurrying around him in the underbrush. Her delay undermined his authority and wounded his pride, although, in the hope of restoring them, he was inclined to return to the scene day after day. The following night afforded him proof of the intermittent nature of cold, as opposed to heat, which is constant. They say that waiting softens emotions (an aggravated person will quiet down, an anxious person will show restraint, et cetera) but, in the case of his excessive temperament, it would end up dispelling them completely. The anger of the second night dissipated until it became a vulgar idealization of the first; that which began as an unrestrained desire for dominance ended as a simple exercise in nostalgia. He was falling in love with the memory. He even said, in one of the soliloquies with which he would distract himself, “If she came back, I could forgive her.” Moments later, aroused and picturing the liberties he would take, he imagined the details of a struggle rewarded in the end with the violence of possession. He thought of roughness as the most perfect form of forgiveness, in that it was its portent. He talked to himself during the day, as well, trying to understand the force that made him a captive of that place.

In the meantime, the neighborhood had begun to see him as just another resident of the tracks, one of the individuals who set themselves up there, candidates for the voluntary ostracism of the vagabond. Along the stretch of those few kilometers, delimited by the storehouses erected near Palermo Station, on one side, and the shops of La Paternal on the other, his wanderings would achieve, for him at least, a global scale; the space, though limited, could have an infinite scope. The depth upon which he stumbled from time to time, as he committed a rape, mingled with his instinctive knowledge of the place: he knew all its invisible coordinates, both temporal and spatial; what is more, he felt them as part of his body, a perception independent of the senses. At night, or with his eyes closed, he could predict the approach of a train in the distance; a faint buzzing in his ears told him that someone, hidden behind the walls of their house, was about to turn on the faucet and take a bath; a twitch in his eyelid alerted him that he was being watched; he could predict the weather with just a glance. This connection with his surroundings was so evident that it suggested — if not in its scope, at least in its intensity — a precise understanding of the world. This world existed behind the mask of the visual, allowing only its besieged surface — striated, perforated, mutilated, halting — to be seen. The landscape of the tracks, the sight of the storehouses with the cargo containers scattered off to the side; all this remained as a portrait of minute differences. Things rarely changed; at the most, a man might enter his field of vision, cross it, and leave it again on the other side at exactly the same pace. These minute differences also included the vegetation: the length and shade of the grass, the indeterminate height of the stalks and their color, a pale green due to lack of care. Neglect had arrived and would remain, though this formulation is not entirely accurate, as it was clear that it had been there for some time. It all seemed to be consuming itself in an unusual series of death throes, imperceptible because of their pervasiveness. The train cars, like the rest of the picture, continued to wait with tireless resolve. The inveterate rapist could not have asked for anything more: an expansive, almost infinite, space that was invisible to the rest of the city. To occupy those places unseen by others is to conquer privacy, he repeated to himself, not understanding the full meaning of his words.

Several months later, a chance encounter disrupted this harmony late one misty afternoon: on the corner of Corrientes and calle Bonpland, the rapist raised his eyes from a pair of feet that were blocking his way and recognized the face of his victim. The long, feverish wait did not give way to surprise, but rather reverted to bitterness; rapists tend to think they can mitigate their crime by reacting to it in a sentimental way. And so he did: “You didn’t come,” he said dejectedly, barely hiding his agitation. The victim looked at him, not understanding. “You must have me mistaken for someone else,” she said eventually, and walked away.

The shot extinguished its own sound. The fact that, at the end of the day, silence can be chimerical, but that one will nonetheless be surprised by the exceptional weakness of certain noises, is another of the exemplary truths of Greater Buenos Aires. The three believed they were witnessing the first moments after an exodus, when decay begins its impassive conquest. Noises were not only muffled by the time they reached them, they also took the form of forgetting; of a void, even. And yet those slight hollows, those surfaces extending without end, were still occupied — very much so — although some sort of acoustic reticence or a singular effect of the air on the structures made them appear deserted. The scene with the rapist was behind them. When they heard the blast, the three were passing in front of a house typical of the area (there, almost everything seemed typical). It was low to the ground and had a sparse, dejected-looking garden out front. The shot, they imagined, was a kind of void, the mechanism by which matter was stirred and made to vanish. For a moment, they looked at the street as though it were made of nothingness (paradoxically, it was similar to the sensation caused by an abstract silence); this forced them to pause. They did not think of the danger; they were aware only of the din that had sought to dominate the calm of the afternoon. All of a sudden a man appeared, crossing the garden from the depths of the house, his body thrust forward with an urgency that might have seemed theatrical but which proved to be real: agony and trajectory. The last of his strength could take him no further; the simple act of opening the front door had defeated him, and he collapsed. The body that had pulsed with life moments ago was nothing more than a weight drawn toward the earth. There he stayed, slumped over the gate, which held him up like one of those impassive horses in the movies. At that moment, the three all had the same thought: the man that someone had just, as they say, sent into the next life, had made it to the threshold by his own means. (The scene thus had a greater symbolic density: gate and agony, the instruments and disposition par excellence of the threshold coming together in a way that coincidence rendered particularly elegant.) It is not every day that reality unfolds according to chance in such a way that proves how a world plagued by insipid — and unconnected — events can organize itself along the lines of coincidence.