That afternoon we were walking along streets that had been on the verge of flooding. For days, all we had talked about was the weather. The rain had erased avenues, evacuated neighborhoods, and besieged cities. The television still showed people standing on their rooftops with the few things they had been able to save, waiting for help to arrive. A small, rigid splotch was visible on a roof nearly hidden under the water: it was a dog, paralyzed with fear. A fireman arrived right away and climbed up a short ladder onto the roof to catch hold of it, then dropped it, shivering, into the boat. There were also scenes of the rescued: sleeping in schools or meeting houses, living in freight cars. The images seemed to speak of a new foundation for the city; everything had a touch of the provisional to it, the feeling of camping, a leveled landscape. M and I expounded upon things that might have been platitudes, for example, that tiempo—in its most enigmatic sense, that is, when it refers to the weather — is hard to predict, and that even when one can predict it, there is rarely anything that can be done to change it. There was something supernatural in the ability to anticipate the vicissitudes of the weather, not so much for the possibility of foreseeing them, but for the tendency to adapt them to a human scale in order that they might always unfold according to this order, even when they did so in the form of catastrophes. M explained a theory to which he had subscribed throughout his childhood and that even now, nearly an adult, he was unable to discount. This idea postulated the existence of an invisible human race on a microscopic scale. Their time passed much more quickly; a life did not last as long, but to them it was just as long or as short as ours is to us (they could do more or less the same things, M explained); they reproduced at an extraordinary rate. This civilization lived on the surface of the planet and could share our buildings, though no one would know it. The space of a room would be like the entire solar system, of an inconceivable magnitude. Just like us, they would be subjected to catastrophes: the most common, though they would not know the cause, was a phenomenon not unlike an earthquake. These disasters would be produced by people, by us, walking. Megalopolises razed, the countryside damaged beyond repair, roads and channels of communication destroyed. But the lapse between one footfall and the next might represent two generations, or three, meaning that the memory of the disaster would have already faded by the time we stepped down again. It was different when we stood or sat in one place, or where the furniture took up part of the floor: those places were the outer confines, the places where the world ended and things brimmed with mystery and danger. The various forms of cleaning, with their disastrous consequences, translated to something akin to the end of an era. Perhaps, thought M, the weather might end up adapting to the scale of this world; all appearances, however, seemed to indicate that this would be more difficult to achieve. Take an ant in the lightest drizzle: it’s not a catastrophe, but it is a greater quantity of water, proportionately.

The two of us walked along an avenue whose sidewalks were covered with tables and whose cafés bore signs that had been made to look like marquees. In front of one of these — passing through meant walking between tables, even though one was still in the street — four men were talking about the weather. They seemed relaxed, having stretched out to fill their seats completely; the table was cluttered with coffee cups, beer bottles, and whiskey glasses. Everything was empty, consumed; there were ashes and cigarette butts. A typical afternoon chat, M and I thought, without needing to say anything. Nothing seemed worthy of our attention, except what we heard. A man with ruddy skin said, “I don’t want to know the future, I just want to know what the weather will be like.” “Why?” asked another. “So you can lose again?” “Lose what?” “I don’t know. Lose. You must have lost something.” “I won what I lost before. I don’t lose. I pay.” “If you want to know what the weather is going to be, you have to learn to read its signs, like the gauchos do,” interjected another. “Signs of what?” they asked. “The signs of the weather,” he said. “And what are those?” asked a few. “The smell of the air, the color of the sunset, the clouds, the direction of the wind.” “But the gauchos don’t do any of that,” the fourth intervened, “they just know.” Yes, but that’s no guarantee,” specified the one who had asked. “I knew a guy once who had been living in the country for a long time. He was used to predicting the weather, and he bragged about it. He wanted to be asked about it, to show off his unusual skill. But no one said anything to him. In the country he had been a normal person who knew the same thing as everyone else; here, too, he was just a normal person. Until he went back. The first few times it went well: just like at the beginning, he predicted the same thing as everyone else. They would get together at the bar and talk about the weather — and then the errors began. He stopped being normal. The radar he used to detect the weather seemed to be broken; it seemed to be working in reverse. If he predicted heat, it would be cold; if he announced a drought, it would rain for weeks; the skies never cleared when he thought they would. He finally asked himself, What good is this skill if I’m always wrong? I’ll draw the opposite conclusions. And so he did, and he was right again, by interpreting the signs as their opposites. He was happy to be normal; the weather once again fell under his purview, if not as an object of knowledge, then at least as one of intuition. One morning a few months later, though, he found himself unable to tell the difference between sign and interpretation: the inversion to which he had grown accustomed had been incorporated by nature, which meant that if he chose the opposite, he ran the risk of being wrong again, though he ran the same risk if he didn’t.” That was the last thing M and I heard as we passed, before the voices began to grow faint. The coincidence between what we had been discussing and the topic at the table did not surprise us as much as what would happen a few hours later, when the two of us, having forgotten what had happened, experienced a greater mystery than those usually created by the weather.

There was a convergence. A few blocks past the café, M and I said our goodbyes: each was headed a different way. I remember walking along treeless streets that were startlingly quiet, and ending up in a park that seemed to go on forever. I wandered deep into a neighborhood filled with workshops and enormous warehouses, where labor was something certain, tangible. I felt a foolish emotion, as has happened on other occasions, when I saw the rolling cobblestones of a few of its streets, their crests and folds like the workings of geology on a human scale, the effect of the tireless passage of trucks. I kept walking, thinking of things I no longer remember, when, on a corner of avenida Caseros, I unexpectedly ran into M. We stood there, amazed and confused, fearing that the other might have a secret. For a moment, we surrendered to the most painful anxiety. Could there be something to confess? we wondered, for a fraction of a second. Something similar had happened on another occasion, as I mentioned, when we backed into each other a few meters from a newsstand, but the coincidence was greater in this instance, because it had happened again. And unlike before, neither of us was able to justify his presence. Neither was lost, though we realized that each had an urgent engagement somewhere far away at that moment. Guided by mysterious forces, we had wandered for hours and hours until we ended up meeting on a forgettable corner, next to a mailbox. These forces, we saw, formed a point of convergence to which we gravitated, always.