I asked myself, on the corner of Rodríguez Peña, off to one side of the Education Library, how it could be that, having managed to find my justification and having garnered some degree of support, I would abandon the endeavor and want to forget about the whole thing. This might all be highly paradoxical, but faced with the real possibility of changing my name, I became aware of my own fear — not of what might happen to me, since, as is well known and easy to imagine, one never knows what is going to happen; the future is a true unknown, and it is precisely because of this that one resigns oneself to its mystery and actually prefers it — not of what might happen to me, but of what might happen to the memory of M that I held inside me. And so it becomes clear why one sometimes chooses inaction over change, though there are risks — the degeneration into futility, in this case — things dwindle and come to an end; it happens to everything.

And so, with the passage of time and the unavoidable changes to people and things, it was inevitable that I began to lose track of the traces left by M. Fewer and fewer things remind me of him. They remain only as memories, but there comes a time we can no longer be sure of the real value of what we retain because, just as we can mean so many things when we say forgetting, many of which are contradictory and some of which are complementary, it is also true that we should not be overly credulous when we say things like recollection, memory, or simply evocation: there, too, a cave of shadows lies hidden. At the time, as I have mentioned, my encounter with Sito snapped me into the present. But the flash caused by that impact illuminated the impossible; the truth is, there comes a time when the recovery of memories becomes a path riddled with obstacles.

I recently began walking along avenida Dorrego again, the way I did right after the abduction. Sometimes I would start out from Corrientes and other times from Warnes, or Martínez Rozas. I’ve even stopped by his block, where, as Sito would say, time has stood still. Each time I sensed a waning nostalgia, the echo of an increasingly tenuous presence. The walls might remain the same, as is the case on his street, but the heat or the cold we felt as we leaned against them, the sideways glances we used to cast at them, the way they absorbed the sweat of our bodies year after year, the thickness of our voices and the meaning behind our looks: all that has faded away. It exists only in the form of traces that grow more and more faint. If this is the future of all things, if this is the future of the past, to mingle with the many forms of forgetting, distort recollections until we wear away the very traces we leave and are left on us, the ones that keep us on our feet, I can’t help but wonder what our role really is. I am not complaining about the withdrawal or disintegration of bodies or memories, of ourselves and of the part of us that lives in others; these are operations to which we all are condemned and there is no reason to address them. Still, it seems to me that if this all belongs to the natural order of things, as it appears to, it should be challenged by means of a new position, different proofs, and another kind of action.

SEVEN

“Of all invisible countries, the present is the most vast.” For some time, this statement seemed more accurate than misguided; then something changed and it seemed more clever than accurate. Now I have returned to my original opinion: Of all invisible countries, the present is the most vast. We cannot think about an idea without modifying it; though this is, in part, the essence of an opinion, I would like to distance myself from it. We inhabit different countries at the same time, lands of such crystalline transparency that they are invisible, all but the most luminous one. The present moment is the longest, the most lasting, sentence passed on us. Since M has been gone, not only I, but several others as well, have lived in a dimensionless present uncoupled from reality, within a territory whose borders, if they exist at all, are undefined and rely on our movements, yet within which stillness is the only viable option. Our place advances with progress and recedes with retreat. We cleave the air without moving, wrapped in our enclosure as by a skin. It has been impossible to free myself from this smooth and transparent time; I wander, I walk within it, remembering and sensing M as a figure fossilized by memory, transformed into a purely temporal substance, until I return to wakefulness and discover the mark of his body on mine. Then I see him, sitting up in bed. He has just woken up and is leaning on his hands, which are open behind him: tensed arms, ash-colored skin, a smooth chest, and a few drops of sweat on his forehead as he opens his eyes wide, not understanding his restlessness.

The mark of his body on mine. A few nights ago I had a dream that we were on a train headed for Moreno. As nearly always happens, the closer we get to the end of the line, the fewer people there are; after Merlo, there is practically no one left in our car. Someone comes from up front, walking carefully because of the movements of the train, and sits four seats ahead of us. Immediately, someone comes from the back, walking carefully because of the movements of the train, and sits four seats behind us. M and I are sitting across from one another, but we have the impression that the same things are happening outside the window on his left that are happening outside of mine, though this is impossible; the houses are the same, the cars are the same, to say nothing of the streets. We have identical landscapes to our left. A while later, once we leave Paso del Rey behind us, someone comes from up front, walks past us, and sits three seats behind us; right away, someone comes from the back, passes by us, and sits three seats in front of us. After that, when someone walks past us toward the front, someone else immediately walks past us toward the back. M and I do not speak but, in the memory of the dream, this silence is the expression of a truth. With just a bit of imagination, one could infer that if reality as a whole were symmetrical for several meters around, with us at the center, there was no reason that the rest of the planet should not be symmetrical, too. This idea, which was certainly the culmination of many of our aspirations, insinuations, and beliefs, pleased us, because it allowed us to imagine that we were the same. The importance of this equality was not the establishment of an equivalency, but in the revelation of a new identity. For the short time it would take the train to go a few station — short compared to the normal span of a life — we would be conjoined in mutual indistinguishability.

After a while, as the train slows before reaching Moreno station, the last on the route — the deceleration more obvious than at the ones before it, due, as M and I agreed, to the fact that the passengers all know it is the last stop and this makes it all seem more conclusive — the dream comes to an end. But Moreno is not Moreno. We are actually arriving at Palomar station. This confusion is not disconcerting in the least; there is no need to retreat from any mystery. It is El Palomar, under the name Moreno. As we approach we hear birds squawking in the trees near both platforms, even the one by the freight line, and from the thousands that surround the station; this masks the sound of the slow-moving train for a moment. Then, as soon as we come to a stop, once the motionless car has turned into the promise of the next journey, I look at his profile as he stares out the window and say, “This has been our greatest adventure.” At which M turns and answers, smiling, “Yes, our greatest adventure.”