Books, drink, music, tobacco, and television would all be free. Meals would always be regional, just like restaurants, consequently, would be; along with literature, these would be the two principal allusions to the former age of nations. Eating, drinking, and reading — which was the same as sitting and listening — the people would feel the indistinct reminiscences of a lost and vaguely luminous past. This would obviously be a world without nationalities, but it would have towns and families. Religion could go on being collective but would not likely be global, as the idea of the world, the universe, thus materialized, would prove paradoxically imprecise. There would be religions of two or three hundred people, not likely more, and nearly all would adhere to their own private, fragmentary, and often accidental — when not vague or contradictory — cosmovisions. Indigenous tribes, denominated as naturals, would be protected. His father asked if there would be a maximum period of residence in any one place, after which a person would be forced to move himself out — his exact words. M brushed the idea off, that would not be necessary, no one would want to stay on forever; it would be boring and eccentric, practically immoral. The most sedentary would be the elderly and the students, but always for a reasonable time, six or seven years at the most; on the other hand, few in either state would put up with as much.

And yet, the father asserted, in different words, there is a need, a pleasure, or a virtue in living in one’s place, where one was born. He was alluding not only to a feeling of loyalty toward one’s homeland, but also to the fact that it is necessary to see the world as a mystery in order to be part of it. The earth is a planet that looks a great deal like itself. As such, knowing different places meant noticing the similarities among them; on the contrary, knowing none meant being unique. Between the homogenous and the singular, he preferred the singular. One travels in order to see those who do not as part of the landscape, because they are the ones who possess the unique traits of the region. M did not know whether to agree with his father or not, so he said, “But I’m not talking about the world being different, I’m talking about it being other.” They were the same thing, replied his father, and said if he kept on like that, they were going to lock him up. “If you keep talking like that, they’re going to lock you up.”

It was at these words that I wanted to arrive. In an obvious way, in spite of himself and though it was said with a degree of irony, the father’s warning called attention to the violent and trivial substitution produced by so-called historical meaning, the ideological persecution of those years and, a little while later, death. That day, as on many others during the search, we would eat sandwiches in a plaza. We would buy bread, cold cuts, and water or soda, and go eat. Except for the big ones, no one really went to the few plazas there were in the suburbs. Since open space is all around — in the houses and the streets alike — it is unusual to see children playing, the elderly talking, or couples waiting for nightfall in them. Vagrants sometimes wind up there and spend the day; in the afternoons, workers from the production plants nearby prefer them to sitting on the pavement out front. That day we ate on the patchy grass of one of those plazas. We sat there and, though it was not true, we felt as though we ruled the area from on high. The streets seemed to flow downward like the rooftops and façades of the houses. Normally during lunch M’s father would announce his sales route, but he preferred listening to our conversations about school, the subjects we studied, our professors and classmates. He felt deep pride and, ironically, curiosity about the scholastic experience of his son, an experience he himself had lacked; any reference made to it, even an allusion to a flaw or an outright failure, sounded to him like a praise or commendation. Evaluations, in all their forms, roll call, “group work,” the ways students would cheat off one another, disciplinary measures — the world of the schoolhouse represented a universe that was of a juvenile yet essential complexity, too brief to be taken seriously, given the normal duration of a life, yet too important to be ignored. It was the generous world that kept us occupied and whose routine provided us with a provisional identity (of which, as years go by, only fragments remain).

Sometimes I think about the path my photo is likely to have taken, obviously a variation on the question of M’s fate. His is in a box, mixed in with clippings, papers, and objects whose colors supposedly conserve some sort of essence. I usually find the photo hidden and turned over; always intrigued by that piece of cardboard encrusted with dirt, I realize it is M a fraction of a second before reading the half-faded inscription, “Buffeted by the wind.” With a turn of my wrist, I examine it. I am going to avoid a second description of the photo — I will add only that M is looking at the camera. If photos say little when one looks at them, there is even less to be extracted from a commentary on them. The truth is, like M, I don’t believe in photos — I should say that this forgotten one is one of the few that I have. “Let’s keep these photos as talismans, but not as proofs,” was what he said, to avoid committing. As inhabitants of that infinite country that is the present, they were both suitable and true; in this sense, assigning them the value of talismans, M allotted them a power that no proof could attain. We often joked about the properties of our photos, which, though removed from the realm of magic, nonetheless frequently immersed us in states of mystery. This mystery, according to M, derived from our belonging to an absent time, that is, either a time long past or one that hadn’t yet arrived.

This time belonged to the itinerant past of humanity and the itinerant future of civilization, according to his idea of the society of tomorrow, as he sometimes called it. Jews, gypsies, the nomadic peoples of the Amazon or the Pacific, and the tribes of Mauritania, the Sahara, or Africa in general, existed between these two like floating bridges. M and I, as individuals exiled from reality and transplanted into the pure present, retained (and anticipated) the moral and emotional condition of both our precursors and our descendants. This was why, for example, when he and his father would search the outskirts of the city for the car, I would receive signals, vague but definite, from their travels kilometers away. The noises they heard would reach me — I would actually hear them — despite the distance. Smells would emerge in a jumble but would define themselves, little by little. Distance was not an obstacle; on the contrary, it was a stimulus. There was something powerful at work, I have no doubt, that broke down the restrictions of geography. I obviously could not know, and certainly could not see, what was keeping M occupied at the moment, yet an invisible bond connected us, despite our being spread across a vast territory. The simultaneous, which is unknown, and the visible mixed together in a bundle of partial, intermittent, and accurate impressions. More than once, one of us surprised himself by knowing about a supposedly unknown event, being privy to even the most intimate convictions or feelings of the other. Nothing could explain such knowledge, nothing but affinity, that particular form of communion, the relation of subtle similarity that joined us across space. I would be walking, for example, along San Martín when another me, a second consciousness, drew near to offer me blurred images: hazy embankments, low-set houses, empty lots, deserted streets, cement walls, factories, fences. The trees, identical, accentuated the realness of this dream world; there, the hand of man had settled upon something living. (Because the same mystery that moves the planets also impels people.) This other me would let me know that M was walking with his father in search of the car. On some occasions, this mental communication would be less evident, even imperceptible, though it would still be active, that is, it would be gathering strength. Telepathy exerts the greatest control over the unconscious, though, in those cases, it cannot be proven. One afternoon, however, these two circumstances converged: we were subject to a powerful telepathic influence, the force of which was, in fact, verified.