This idea had just taken shape when they heard a scream: a woman coming from the house. When she saw the man, she turned her expression of shock on M, his father, and the other, then ran to embrace the motionless body. And so the three saw a second person cross the garden at full speed. The woman beat at his back as though she wanted to wake him from a dream, restore him to life, re-animate the indifferent matter hanging from the gate like ballast. They, for their part, did not know how to react. One spends one’s life waiting for something to happen, and then when it finally does, confusion clouds the mind. On top of this, the chain of events was of such a flexible simplicity that it was rendered abstract: they were not events but rather seemed like the actions of a tragedy, a drama enacted in real time and space. The idea of chance in general and the belief that, around there, chance had a logic all its own — the laws of which had been ignored, or at least unknown, until that moment — set before them an inconceivable scene, with neither neighbors or onlookers to free them from the obligation of approaching. Yet it would be a mistake to think that their hesitancy was grounded in fear; it was instead due to the distance with which some events are perceived. People die, but rarely in front of us; people kill, but there are rarely many witnesses. When there are many onlookers, all can approach without worry, but when there is no one else there, one would prefer not to be there, either, or at least to escape quickly, to evaporate.

There is no need to spell out what happened next: the chaos of emergencies, threats, demands, and mistrust. The nature of what had transpired was completely clear and yet, for many, anything at all could have occurred. No one believed M, his father, or the other, each time accepting as true the complete opposite of what they had said. None of it was worth a thing; the situation, though real, was weighed down by a hypothetical significance that preceded the truth of any one of its elements. So reasonable were the reservations of the skeptics that even the three, despite being privileged witnesses to the events, began to question what had happened, though it had been as clear to their eyes as the air.

Of the many types of contact between things, a car crash is the most jarring. It has been said that nothing in the area deserved the name of transportation; it is likely that nothing there deserved known names or words. Though it may seem redundant, things seemed as if they were there for the first time. It should be said that everything appeared to be continually reborn, beginning and beginning with an inexhaustible rhythm. Of that constant peacefulness, the cyclical days on the streets of Greater Buenos Aires — not only on those which he spent walking with M and his father, but also the many others experienced every day, and forever — of that tranquility, the other remembers the people of the neighborhood sitting by their front doors and the surprise that would lift their heads, their eyes captivated by that rare apparition: a car. How movement captivates. They turned their heads less rapidly at cyclists and neighbors; on the lowest tier, there were pedestrians — the three of them, for example — and animals, like stray dogs or horses pulling carts. Those required such a slow rotation of the head that it was barely a movement at all: the perfect state for enjoying a bit of fresh air. This general sense of calm was interrupted by the collision: a car backing out of a garage hit another one, which was parked on the street. It was a stupid accident, but one with unforeseeable consequences. One could walk for blocks on end without seeing a car, yet the only two around gravitated toward one another with the innocence of magnets. They could not believe it: they approached as the car backed up. It was a familiar maneuver that, under other circumstances, would have been completely predictable; circumstances other than these, in which the driver forgot to brake — another idea ran through their minds: the driver might be blind, or drunk, or maybe he was just distracted. In any case, he was unable to anticipate the danger. The collision had not yet occurred (this “yet” means that it was inevitable); shortly thereafter, M’s father would tell the brief, though only partial, story of an alcoholic.

THE SECOND STORY TOLD BY M’S FATHER

The man had been out of work for years. The routine of a job is one that is sorely missed; it is also the most obvious and invisible of all. This is because the routine of a job imposes itself upon that of thinking, taking its form and adopting its syntax. People think when they work; outside of work they do not think. This is the nature of the mental drama of the unemployed, on top of all the others. When the man thought of this, the fear of losing his job would send him into a panic before he experienced the loss itself. For some time now, he had adopted the search as a supplementary routine, a substitute, the sort of activity that might rescue him from the blankness of his mind. But it was no use: there was nothing out there to free him from the tedium. Looking for work was a simulacrum that suited the beliefs of the others, but not his own; it was also directed at them. It meant resorting to an exercise in probability until the moment someone appeared who would pay closer attention, would take an interest and ultimately believe the simulacrum, that is, someone who would take it as an expression of truth. In that moment, he would leave the ranks of the unemployed; that person would give him a job and the theater of the mundane would be turned into work. Now, this simulacrum had the same problem as all other games: sooner or later it would find itself subjected to the rule of temporality. It was an order that, though it aspired to symbolic autonomy, had the insurmountable limits of a beginning and an end, moments in which a temporal norm both ceded and imposed itself: the return to normalcy.

It was difficult to fall into step with this simulacrum, precisely because it imposed a false routine; as such, the man wanted to cut it short in any way he could, which meant finding work as quickly as possible. To this end, he promised to change his behavior, even his thoughts. Every morning, each new sacrifice he had been prepared to make in exchange for work seemed trivial and so, at night, alone and without anything to show for it, he doubled his promises. A restricted diet, a fast, self-imposed penance, a vague sense of discipline, et cetera; an entire series of ascetic states was considered. He decided to spend a few nights in the plazas, on the wood or hard stone of the park benches and at the mercy of the police. These gestures of penitence were intended to set a price — that was really what it was all about: paying, compensating for a hypothetical job located hypothetically in the future. In order for the mechanism to function correctly and for the man to remain as one with the simulacrum, these payments had to be intangible. “You don’t understand — at least, you can’t imagine it,” the father explained. Being pinned against the wall with no way out, the streets turning into a space that is not only external and foreign but also, and above all, inimical. That’s how it was for Grino until he found a job. Just as the three did now, he would walk around during the day, hoping that something would appear, that someone would believe the simulacrum; they were squalid walks from which he would return at nightfall, overwhelmed by discouragement. He went out every morning without a destination, wandering without a plan but with a great deal of anxiety, and returned in a daze, unable to differentiate that day’s travels with those of the day before. A routine, but one that impeded thought. His house lost all the qualities of a house, and turned into something else: a joint, or a hole. It no longer represented a place of his own, but rather the wait before his walk the following morning; it no longer housed a person, but rather someone who, like an animal, traversed the same space day after day, looking for the same prey along different paths. First, his house was no longer a house, then Grino gradually found himself abandoned by the idea of house. (And an idea, once it is gone, cannot be recovered; its new place exceeds the word forgetting.)