No one is immune to deceit, not even their own; take Sito, for example, who I think still believes he fooled me, as I wrote earlier. His mistake was not controlling his impulse to say more than I expected. Excess, in such cases, either reveals the deceit or becomes a falsehood itself, in one way or another. I talked too much, as well, and because of that we both clung to the tiny bit of truth at the mottled nucleus of the stories we told, but at least I can honestly say, as I do now, that I didn’t tell him that or I only told him half the story. Despite his misdirection, he would have had a hard time not telling me something, no matter how minor. Sito has probably drawn his own conclusions, inferred things based on my words and my silences, and thinks that I am much more transparent than my reticence would suggest. In any event, it is important to say this because, though it may seem obvious, certain events remain unknown if they are not brought out into the open. I am referring to something I did not tell Sito, something I was careful to conceal due, in truth, to my own weakness and shame.

I don’t know how it might seem — strange, ridiculous, foolish — but I know what it was: futile. To put it concretely, there was a time when I tried to change my name; I wanted to take M’s. Perhaps tried is too strong a word, and I should say that I was “inclined” to change my name to his. Since he had the misfortune of being killed, since it was he who had suffered martyrdom, it seemed fair to me that, being the one to have survived, I would compensate for his absence by imposing his name over mine. I didn’t think of it only as a compensation; it was something more profound or superficial, depending on how you look at it: a balance that needed to be restored. I felt that M and I had achieved an unprecedented and varied sense of unity that should be recovered, if only in a purely verbal or even strictly figurative form. Yet despite the simplicity and precision of the reasoning, and setting aside the justice and dignity of the cause, some things are just impossible.

One day I went to a government office on calle Uruguay, the civil registry. That morning marked the beginning of the final episode, until today, of an adventure that has involved M as an intangible companion. I waited in line for a long time with people who needed to file certificates of birth, death, marriage, or adoption, or who needed to correct errors that appeared in the same, or several of these things at once. (There I learned something I had not known before: that there are errors that can just appear, that may not exist as such at first but can all of a sudden abandon the realm of the correct, moving to another and never being discovered, but rather simply materializing at some point as errors.) Aside from ours, there was another, much longer, line of foreigners waiting to do things with their residency; it seemed as though they had been there all night, with friends and relatives along to relieve them from time to time. I’ll say one thing about calle Uruguay: that morning, its wide sidewalk was constantly full.

Inside the building, the line took on a different shape: it zigzagged. When my turn finally came, I said to the clerk, “I’d like to change my name.” “What name?” she asked, not understanding. “Mine,” I said, “I want to change it.” “And may I ask why?” she retorted. “The reason is personal. I want to change it.” “But that’s a public request and we need to know why. If you don’t want to declare your reason, keep your own name.” Those words seemed to end the conversation. She was not a beautiful woman, that is, her expression, which had become her features, hid a prior, perhaps more lively, face. “Wait,” I said. “If I tell you, is there a chance?” “That depends,” she asserted. “Depends on what?” “Depends on the reason.” “What sort of reason could it be?” I asked. “Oh, I can’t tell you that,” she said. “But I need to know if I can do it or not,” I insisted. “All right, tell me your reason, and I’ll tell you if you can. But not the other way around, because if I tell you, you’ll just pick one.” According to the card she wore clipped to the pocket of her uniform, her name was Mirta del Soto. “Listen,” I said, emphasizing my porteño accent and leaning in as though I were about to tell her a secret, “I want to change my name, and don’t care what reason I give. What I want is to do it quickly.” “All right,” she replied, in a weary voice, “tell them that you discovered that your parents aren’t your parents. We’ll verify it and you can have it changed.” “No, that won’t work.” “Oh, you don’t say,” she snapped. “It can’t be just any name. It has to be a specific one,” I explained. “In order to do that, we need to know the reason,” she raised her voice, “it’s the reason that justifies taking that specific name instead of any other.” “But what are the reasons?” “I can’t tell you that.” “There must be some sort of code, some rule book, where they’re all written down.” “Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know where it is.” “So how do you know if a reason is valid or not?” “I don’t worry about that; I just take the forms. But I’m telling you: without a reason, it won’t get looked at.” She seemed agitated, but she wasn’t; it was just her way of doing her job. She would probably forget all this right away, but I tried to make sure that didn’t happen.

When I try to remember Mirta del Soto’s face now, it is as though it had dissolved, leaving only the indifferent recollection of an equally unassuming ugliness. Her features, barely defined, appeared to be subject to the order of weariness that had imposed itself on her other traits — traits that, at one time, might have flattered her — flattening, for example, the intonation of her voice or repressing any lively movement of her eyes. Her smock, the identification card, the counter at chest height, and, behind it in the half light, rows of desks, many of which were empty: all these things made her, in my moment of need, seem like a vaguely liturgical figure placed there to perform the ritual of changing my name. But she also appeared to me, more and more tangibly, as an individual, precisely because of her negative traits. (Features, a face: a mystery. I say this in general, beyond the case of Mirta del Soto. A person’s face is something brutish, a landscape waiting to be revealed with neither a before nor an after, only what is there in the moment of its discovery, overlooking its enigmas.)

Her way of speaking, inseparable from her foreign-sounding voice and the way her reflexive common sense did away with people’s — or, in this case, my — urgency, or at least the importance of their reasons: in her, all of this spoke to me of a sound and self-sufficient universe in which there was no doubt about names, colors, or memories. The unwavering simplicity embodied by Mirta del Soto did not reveal the advantages of a simple truth, nor did it possess the power of minor wisdom, but I was affected by the efficacy of her even, uncomplicated logic that worked like a portable magic kit, turning something complex into something simple and making the obscure transparent. Over the course of two weeks, I went to see her three more times, and on the fourth she let me wait for her near the exit of the registry.

I saw her without her uniform. She dressed carelessly, wearing a brown rain jacket over a red sweater. She wanted to go somewhere far from there, where her co-workers wouldn’t see her (she said colleagues: “where my colleagues won’t see me”). We walked along Uruguay toward Rivadavia. On the way, Mirta talked about her family, or what had become of it. She lived alone with her mother, who was bedridden. She had no husband and no children; her father, who had abandoned them in the distant past, was just a hazy memory. (Right away, I could tell she was lying; something indefinable, impossible to calculate, convinced me of it.) For some time, Mirta had wondered whether her mother might not have been pleased to have her, the daughter, all to herself after her father left. What is more, she could be two, like during the stretches of time when her mother would call her Mirto, as though she were a boy. “So you see,” she said, making a gesture in the air, “there are always reasons to want to change your name,” alluding to my reticence to give my own. Once we got to Corrientes, it became harder for us to talk — I should admit that it didn’t really seem necessary, either — we could not walk next to one another on the narrow sidewalks, so instead we walked with her in front and me behind, our way often blocked by people waiting for buses or leaving stores and buildings.