The marriage could not take place; everyone knew it, though no one said anything. Everyone — apart from Rosenfeld, that is — except Rosemberg who, surprisingly as pusillanimous as always, tried to be accommodating, saying that everything could be sorted out and that the ceremony should go on. Then Rosemberg’s wife spoke, saying that she would not allow it, for her only daughter never to give her grandchildren. The husband fell silent: it was not a comfortable situation for him. Everything was one generalized, collective murmur peppered with shouts here and there. That is, until Rosenfeld, pulling a thick bundle of papers from his pants with a flourish and a look in his eye that consolidated all the ire of which a person is capable, said that if the marriage was not celebrated, Rosemberg had to pay back all the promissory notes he owed. Raquel let out a shriek of terror; her mother fainted, Rosenbaum and Rosenstein would rather not have been there, but Rosenblum kept his calm and, consoling Raquel and attending to her mother, he found time to turn and curse Rosenfeld. This is how the scene ends.

The following morning, Rosenfeld turns up dead. There are so many people under suspicion that it does not occur to anyone that his death might have been a natural one. The manager of the tenement arrives to announce that the police are on their way. A little while later a patrolman walks in — the same actor, dressed in a uniform — who means well but has trouble understanding the situation. He writes in a notebook and says to leave Rosenfeld where he is, that he needs to notify the judge. When the judge arrives, it is the same person as the manager and the patrolman. He closes himself in an empty room in the house with each of the suspects and the guests at the gathering. The judge also means well, but he does not have trouble understanding. In the end he concludes that it is a complex case, and that they should know the cause of Rosenfeld’s death before coming to any decision. And so Rosenblum calls the most respected doctor in the community, Doctor Rosenblat, a man of simple yet distinguished stature, behind whose affability one could sense an extensive knowledge of both tenements and palaces, as well as a genuine interest in all Jews, even the most impoverished. When he arrives, Rosenblat greets Rosemberg — they actually know one another — and asks about Resie, his wife. “Resie is Resie,” Rosemberg says as an answer to all questions, and leads the doctor into the bedroom.

Rosenblat carefully examines Rosenfeld’s body; he asks Raquel, Rosemberg, and his wife, and especially Rosenblum, what he ate and drank the day before. Nothing out of the ordinary, they answered, nothing that they themselves had not eaten or drunk. Rosenthal intervenes once again. He knows a secret: a certain disease, slow and merciless, had been eating away at Rosenfeld for years. That explains the death, Rosenblat ventures; the effects of the illness could be seen on the corpse. Everyone looked at one another, relieved. The judge had the doctor sign the death certificate, wrote a few notes in his folio, and withdrew, though he was not able to resist a glass of honey wine offered to him by Raquel’s mother. Raquel and Rosenblum ran to each other and embraced: as the only two young people in the group, the violent tension had, naturally, brought them together. Rosenblum broke into song, Rosenbaum and Rosenstein immediately returned to the stage and all the actors began to dance with joy and contagious fervor.

This was how the play ended, with a resolution that did not demonstrate Rosenfeld’s cruelty, but — on the contrary — refuted it: aware of his imminent death, he had decided to marry Raquel in order to leave her his fortune. All the way from far-off Vienna, to benefit a girl in Argentina. It was strange, how distance made certain episodes more enigmatic. If Raquel had lived in Vienna, Galizia or anywhere else in Europe, Rosenfeld’s gesture would have seemed like a forgettable eccentricity. But to cross the ocean and go to the ends of the earth to leave his inheritance to a girl he hardly knew! Those thousands of kilometers made of the decision a disquieting mix of chance and goodness, as though the souls of millionaires floated through the air until finding, with a quick and accidental glance, one lucky individual. Everyone dreams of getting rich, M continued; words in which I recognized the echo of similar, but different ones often spoken by his father.

Thanks to Rosenfeld, the new arrival, the insurmountable distance that separates Buenos Aires from Galizia vanished in the minds of the characters, representing itself instead in just a few meters, or in the delicate thickness of the partition that divided the rooms of the Rosemberg home; seeing the play, it was evident that those who were not in one room were in the other (listening). They may also sometimes have felt that they were in the same one, since Rosenfeld was the one who most fully represented the past and, along with it, the diffuse territory from which they all came. Despite the simplicity of his intentions, Rosenfeld appeared to the audience and to the other characters as an enigmatic figure, at once despicable and attractive. The mystery of Rosenfeld. The mystery of Rosenfeld, arising neither from his actions nor his appearance, relied upon something that was impossible to conceal: his status as a traveler. In a manner that was simple and slight, rapid, stealthy, and vaguely heroic, Rosenfeld came from everywhere to end up in one place, but the journey had done little for him and he began to wander again. It would be easy to say that death, had it held off a little, would have allowed him to marry and follow through on his intentions, but the truth is that Rosenfeld lacked absolute time: he was condemned not to finish, to meet his end before achieving anything. He would not have been able to avoid failure, even if he had twenty years. I know this chimerical time, the one that stands still while the other, as the saying goes, slips through one’s fingers; I know it well. I know this broken half, explained M, in different words — the real turned to solipsism: Rosenfeld the individual aspiring to attain a totality made impossible by the fact that the search itself was behind him, in a forsaken time and place.

SIX

It was like a solar eclipse, but in reverse. He pictured the night turned to day without prologue or intervention, the urgent din of the animals and then the return of darkness. This is what it would be like not to wake up, to fall asleep like on any other day, but with the knowledge that there would be no dawn. Bad thoughts are replaced by worse ones, he ventured, resting the empty bottle on the floor. Face down on his mattress, his arms hanging to either side, Grino selected from among the few “scenes of abundance” that helped him tolerate his unfortunate situation. It was the sea, the far end of an elongated bay flanked on both sides by mountains that were higher and more uneven on the right than on the left. According to his memory of the photographs, waves appeared like uniform reproductions of the horizon, that remarkable plane from which they emerged, by virtue of a complex mechanism of constant repositioning. They were spread evenly apart and their height was the same; their crests, crowned with airy foam, seemed more like embellishments than crests. Thanks to the photo, the natural world — there is nothing more natural than the sea, with its unchanging horizon — showed its artificial, even mechanical, condition. To Grino’s mind, this was the source of the bewildering abundance of the scene. Simple people like him cannot help but feel overwhelmed by nature; yet in a strange, compensatory turn of intelligence and perception, the supernatural appears straightforward to them. This is how the urge to travel that torments so many begins, thought Grino, pinned to the bed by the weight of his bottle of rum and the semen he had freed earlier, caught somewhere between confusion and sleep. Despite the difficulties, he was someone who felt capable of getting up at any moment and setting out on foot in search of that photographic landscape, though in reality it might be impossible to find. Anyone could see that, just as the photo was a partial — and, in its way, false — depiction of an imprecise model, the sea, too, and the waves and the beach that bordered the water like a ring of ash, were nothing more than metaphors of freedom. It is in this second or supplementary nature that, paradoxically, simple souls find their proof, the landscape: anything able to bear multiplication and use, like waves and especially photos, holds a truth that transcends the simple and mundane deep within it. And so, Grino understood, his devotions converged in relocation and religion. The machine that moved the waves was the same one that made photos and guided both planets and people.