The parents cannot believe it; they have been swindled in the most absurd way imaginable. They get angry and blame the boy: suddenly, at the most innocent hour of the day, that moment between sunset and dinner when nothing ever happens, they have been reduced to nothing, to the most crushing poverty; they had lost years of work and were facing years of privation. The mother cries in silence and the father broods: this is what they get for being honest. The effects of poverty come quickly: the portions at dinner are immediately reduced. The future is different now; it is longer. M’s mother says that his father measures time by money: the less there is, the less frequent and longer lasting everything has to be — and there was no end in sight. The three of them are trying to find ways to get the most out of their food when someone knocks on the door. They all go to the entryway, but imagine their surprise when they see that the man standing there is a stranger. He is not the grocer, though he is to M: that’s the person who had been helping him from across the counter all afternoon, he insists. The man, before launching into the explanation that all were eager to receive, asks if they would be so kind as to offer him a drink. The parents tell M to fetch the bottle of honey wine and three glasses while they get settled. When he comes back, M realizes that the grocer is already telling his story. The mother serves the wine; they toast, take a quick sip and the other continues: He is a millionaire who amassed a fortune that would take five people more than a year to calculate, but he has made so many mistakes — he calls them errors and hopes to have time to recount them one by one and thereby repent them anew — after so many mistakes and being unable to make peace with his conscience, God, through an angel, promised to absolve him if he distributed his fortune among poor and honest families. Saying this, he takes a bag full of money out from behind him and puts it on the table, on the one condition that they set a place for him at the table that night. And so, while the father and the man drink and converse, the mother sets about preparing a meal, the likes of which they had not seen for a long time. Off in a corner, M empties his pocket and watches his coin — as big, heavy, and brilliant as a talisman — spin.

FIVE

Despite the hazy origin of our friendship, which lacked a precise moment in my memory and was, like so many other adventures, mixed up in a bundle of circumstances in which very little is clear, I retain a vivid image of the gradual approach or affinity that, following the involuntary and somnolent rhythm of schoolchildren, would grow into a relatively close relationship. And yet sometimes I give in to a false notion: that our friendship began when I received his photo and M mine, not before. I convince myself of this. This conviction is so vivid that it veils all thought in one single color; I am unable to think otherwise until a while later, when I realize my error — that is, when I remember. Like any ceremony, the exchange was meant to inaugurate a new time, to divide a before from an after. Yet instead of indicating a beginning, I see now that it left one behind, forgot it, or something more: that private ritual, which was somehow innocent in that it did not attempt to engage anything beyond the people involved in it, that is, the two of us, set an ending in motion; its culmination was excessive in relation to its trivial beginning. By that time, Argentina was already filling up with the dead. If it had been normal before for them to show up in ditches and vacant lots, they now rejected all sense of measure and took on, in the form of corpses, a central role as the dead (but also as anonymous corpses, which in turn heightened the sinister hierarchy of the whole) in the verist theater that politics had become. When death is common, corpses become commonplace; there is nothing new to them. These corpses, because they were disturbing, seemed more numerous than the dead; thanks to their tragic nature, they also acquired a greater significance. This progression shows how fully their meaning could be inverted; not long before, the dead had exceeded corpses in number and significance. It seemed that there were more dead than living and more corpses than dead.

I am going to recount, as I remember it, something that happened on the night of June 20, 1973, while I walked with M in the early hours of the 21^st. Public transportation was not running; nothing moved, in general. The few signs that indicated that the city had not been abandoned spoke of a recent tragedy, or worse, of some kind of catastrophe, incomprehensible and not yet over. Half a block from the avenida del Trabajo, a woman waited for her son, in tears. She was sitting in a doorway and strangely, despite the shadows, I remember her face as being illuminated. She repeated the boy’s name; it wasn’t enough for her to wait, we thought, she also had to call to him. But there was no reaction, not from the boy or from the people shut away in the neighboring homes, despite the fact that they had probably been listening to her for quite some time. We drew closer. M and I wanted to imagine the interior of the house from which she voiced her living warning and her absent need, though this may sound contradictory. The woman took no notice of us, but we could sense the silence of the home, the objects that, from that night on, would be redundant, useless. A nightstand, a bed, a shelf, a brush.

We walked from Mataderos to Villa Crespo; the same funereal silence inhabited every neighborhood, every block. We met with a dual intimation and an ambiguous beauty in the dark streets. A few hours earlier Perón, the political leader, had returned to Argentina; a throng of people had gathered to wait for him, but the desert around us brought to mind a city that had obliterated its inhabitants. The great mass of porteños slept, protected by walls and roofs, on beds tucked behind the façades of their houses, as we walked. Like ships, M and I floated along a surface composed of silence, the rough and the smooth of things, with the disciplined fatigue of the traveler. The shipwrecks were the others, the ones who waited, like the woman with the illuminated face.

That night, M and I talked about virginity. Not about our experience with it — it was still of longstanding relevance to one of us, though I will not say which — but rather, in anticipation of the truth, about the false promise hidden in its loss. One of us attempted to deny any change, and to this end alluded to a number of impossible absolutes. Experience, as the different pressures, sensations, and temperatures to which our skin is submitted, did not matter; the memories that could be etched into the mind on the basis of these circumstances mattered even less. Their triviality was absolute. The moments of a life, which, by the same mystery that allows it to unfold can take on significance despite being the pinnacle of superfluity, cannot be compared with the importance of “that” moment, despite the fact that it is the one truly fated to wane. The millions dispersed after waiting for the leader. Some had gotten there days in advance, but everyone wanted to leave at the same time. They turned and began to walk toward their homes, lost and disillusioned. As is well known, many remained where the bullets found them.

M and I sensed an abyss that divided us from the masses; this might have been due to our natural condition as members of the minority. Of all possible emotions, the masses inspired in us more sympathy than mistrust, more disbelief than fascination. The majority, overwhelmed by its own numbers, was unable to recognize the same essence from which it drew its own strength in the scarce, the brief, and the scattered. Yet one dreamed of joining those vital swells, the very identity of which pulsated in the form of a crowd, because they offered the possibility of giving in to the current and floating along without a care for the truth. Now, as I have been saying, the sea that had been swelling at the outskirts of the city to the southwest of Buenos Aires had dispersed in all directions.