Sito’s silences were always unique, always his own. He had learned to live with drama early on, hence the combination of reserve and surliness that emanated from him, particularly from his eyes, when he fell silent. There was a reason that Sito had not stopped talking during our entire encounter; he had even found a way to correct those inevitable silences, when one thinks back or before going on, by coughing or making noise with something or another. As a boy he had been completely withdrawn and his friends had experienced his mortal silence as a burden; he could remain mute and impassive, answering in sporadic monosyllables that only served to underscore his solitude, for hours at a time. But now, with the weight of memory threatening to crash down upon his truth, a moment’s hesitation alluded to those past silences, making a fraction of a second seem intolerable; it was in this delicate and simple net that Sito had been caught. As such, despite their difference from the earlier ones in both their duration — these were nonexistent compared to those others — and their nature, Sito found that the value of his silences remained the same: reality seemed to shrink and objects to stretch out as long as the silence lasted. Everything seemed more ominous, there was nowhere to conceal a secret, because everything was brought into focus with clarity and immediacy. (If it had been concealed in the depths before, the truth was now right out on the surface.) It seemed to me that Sito also possessed a mineral obstinacy that equaled his verbal compulsion. The quieter the person, the less stubborn they tend to be. Sito spent much of the afternoon insisting that he couldn’t believe I was a writer, until he ended up admitting that he had always thought that the writer would be M. This opinion was so common on the block that his mother — irritated by the silent reproach of her son, whose sadness did not stop her from adding to the growing mountain of empty bottles — would order him, as a way of getting him off her back and as a kind of insult, “Go, go see that writer of yours,” meaning M. Sito would go see him, though they would never so much as touch on the subject of writers, or anything related to them. M was never interested in anything of the sort and yet, from early on, he had a reputation as a writer: a partial recognition, of course, but an emphatic one. More recently, after they lost the bond of free time, when they ran into each other every day or nearly every day, as I have said, M and Sito would exchange a few words. Usually when Sito would take the empty bottles out to the tracks at night, to leave them for drifters and vagrants to pick up later.

When we reached calle Esmeralda, Sito asked me to wait; he had to pick something up nearby — it wouldn’t be more than two minutes, and then we could keep walking, he said. I stood on the corner, as he asked, and watched him walk toward Lavalle and go into a storefront that was both a hair salon and a candy shop where they also sold fountain pens, almost in the middle of the block. There was traffic on Esmeralda, and the cars took part in a game of patient waiting that could easily last hours; they seemed prepared for that. Thanks to the narrowness of the sidewalk, I could hear the conversation two women were having in the back of a taxi that had stopped in front of me. One said, “I swear, it didn’t turn up.” “It can’t be,” answered the other. “But it is. They looked for half an hour, and not a trace.” “But it was such a large ashtray, it couldn’t have just disappeared.” “It didn’t all disappear, only half.” “Which half?” “Half. It broke when it fell. They looked everywhere, and one half is missing.” “That’s not possible.” “It is. They put the half on the table and stared at it. No one notices an ashtray, but when half of one is missing, everyone is paralyzed with fear.” “Why fear?” “Because they didn’t see anything supernatural, only its effects.” “What effects are those?”

At that moment, Sito left the shop and the cars moved up a meter. He walked toward me with a piece of flimsy pink paper in his hand, on the center of which the number 435 had been quickly scribbled. “It’s my lucky number. I always play it, but only sometimes win,” he said. Then Sito surprised me further still: he turned the paper over and showed me another number, 733. He was radiant: “El Pajarito and el Uruguayo, and the two of us meeting, to boot. You’d better believe I’m going to win today!” As we crossed Esmeralda it occurred to me that Sito might be the cause of every bad thing that had happened, particularly and most obviously M’s death. It was a ridiculous idea, but I was surprised that nothing kept me from thinking it. Sito talked about the prime sales periods for mattresses; when they sell more, it’s not that the prices go up, but rather that there are no discounts. He said: It’s our policy. So I changed the subject; I asked him to imagine that he is in a café, having a coffee, when a false move knocks the glass ashtray off the table. He hears the noise — it has broken — but when he bends down he finds only half there on the floor; the other is gone. I asked Sito how he would react if, after looking again and again, he could not find the other half. “I wouldn’t believe it,” he answered. “But if that’s how it was — if you were there and the ashtray had fallen from your own hands,” I insisted. “In that case, I would think it had disappeared, but that the part I couldn’t see had to be somewhere — that it must still exist in one form or another, that there must be some reason for it.”

As I have already said, Corrientes slowly took on a horizontal light, compressing all visual perspective. At the far end, in the west, the sun gradually set. The curves of the street hardly mattered; it was as though the rays of light were traveling straight through the buildings. Sito continued explaining, much more interested in his response than I was — I had immediately gotten distracted: I would look in all four directions, and if there was nothing to catch my attention, nothing that something could be hidden under, and if there was no one who could have hidden it or seen anything, then I would say to myself, it’s lost. It was an unobjectionable piece of common sense. As I walked a while later along Bernardo de Irigoyen toward Constitución, I would think about the different types of tragedy. Nothing stands in the way of taking the disappearance of half an ashtray as a sign, an omen, an effect, a cause, a proof, or a reminiscence. It might also be that the women, aware that someone was listening, had invented the dialogue in order to trick me, referring to a completely false event. But I was not interested in its degree of truth, only the scale of what I had heard. Perhaps it had not happened to either of them, but rather to someone who had then told them about it, or one of them might even have read it, or it might have been part of a movie. In that case, the enigma would be of a secondary nature, like the final echo produced by a clap of thunder, in whose resonance the singular moment of truth that generated it becomes unclear.

There I was, wondering about the nature of an impossible event and, not only that, trying to find some explanation for its appearance along my path. This might seem ridiculous — all of life’s events are certainly interruptions, providential obstacles eternalized later by the course of events itself, and we know that to wonder about chance is to deny the power of destiny. Yet there is something in life that accustoms us to looking for the hidden meaning in things. We see and we touch surfaces, until something suggests a truth oriented in a different way, one inclined to hide its meaning. Sito, for example, told me that he worked as a waiter and, another time, as a mattress salesman, offering proofs that inspired confidence in his being, or being able to be, both those things. Yet without being mutually exclusive, the two activities were incompatible in his case, though not for any reason other than that he had mentioned each as a unique proposition. This compulsive theatricality, I thought to myself as I walked along Bernardo de Irigoyen, seems to be a family curse. The alcoholic is a theatrical individual: he organizes his life around certain prototypical scenes, giving himself over to the habit and immersing himself in a realm of appearances and indirect intentions. Nonetheless, the mother played only one character — her own, though it suffered from great swings — unlike Sito, who felt called upon to play several at a time.