Years later that same place, a mixture of neighborhood and suburb, a few blocks crossed by tracks, fatigued by trucks, saturated with stores, family shops, and modest homes joined together in clusters; that same place would contain M’s sudden absence as it had once contained his body, as contradictory as this might sound. What had been present until that moment was now gone. M wasn’t taken from his home; they took him from a friend’s house. It could have been mine or anyone else’s, but that day it was his. This element of chance would color his disappearance with a sense of gratuitousness, which in a way undermined the dramatic quality of the circumstances. Many would say that the abduction of a political militant was unjustified but that causality, however cruel and murderous, was still at work. What happened to M, on the other hand, had been pure chance: an unlucky presence that had allowed happenstance to restore death to its final and inalienable place. The combination of political innocence and the coercive force of fate endowed M’s disappearance with a sense of error or the failure of destiny, making his innocence seem to reflect back on his abductors, who one could, hypothetically, imagine blaming chance for putting M in their path.

The abduction was followed by a drama that was at once silent, private, and confidential. M’s parents, unable to take even the slightest initiative to search for their son or to find out what happened to him, were left in a stupor. Eaten away by passivity, in the end they obeyed their fear, the conviction that it might be possible to save the rest of the family if they did nothing. To this day I am astonished not to have found M’s name written anywhere; not in the lists made by organizations or in the press. I say to this day because right after the abduction I, like many others, threw myself into reading legal appeals, denouncements, documents, the testimony of the victims, et cetera. This lasted for years; after that, I simply waited for him to appear in some list or press announcement. I now find myself feeling a combination of fear and adoration: the effect turned back into the cause, M’s name was set apart by silence and in this way was able to return to the state of pure incantation in which all names float until we claim them through use, assigning them to an individual. As is well known, it is a fine line that separates this from sorcery.

I am unable to break this pact between absence and reality, made with no one and among all, into which ambiguous words like memory, oblivion, name, and individual insert themselves, as though only half of M had lived on in me. The names of many of the victims are unknown; still, for those of us who knew him, his absence from the lists suggests an emptiness that calls into question his very existence. It is not as though seeing him in some index were necessary to confirm his time on earth, but it would have increased the density of his memory; no one has written his name or read it since. And there you have the anomaly, since this tends to happen with people who have been dead a long time, not with recent deaths. Around the time of that first conversation about Club Atlanta’s stadium, about noise and distance, I remember the realm of ambiguity a student would enter if he were not included in the class list. Seeing your name there was not only a confirmation of registration, but a magnification of existence: it meant being something more or, occasionally, something different. The anxiety that would set in on those who did not appear on the list was the most convincing evidence of the hypothetical nature of their person. They had to make inquiries, change rooms, come back with signed papers. They passed into a limbo from which they could only be rescued, once they got their papers in order, by their appearance on the list.

It is also true that while many of us may have felt powerless or indignant at his omission from the lists of the abducted (first his body disappeared, then his name), his parents may have seen this absence as natural or even necessary. After all, it was clear how little could be done about it. The accusations, investigations, and protests contributed to the collective reaction through which the victims were reborn and claimed their right to have gone on living. They also allowed the people to touch the horrific medium into which they had sunk. In the meantime, most Argentines, thrilled with questionable accomplishments like the 1978 World Cup and the 1982 war in the Falkland Islands, noticed too late that the flood of kidnappings, torture, and murder had unequivocally renewed its campaign against frivolity and barbarity; in the face of this, they chose to forget.

It is natural that, when confronted with this panorama, the complexity and meaning of which were beyond the average family, so many would choose resignation. M’s parents did the same; on one hand because death was natural to them and, on the other, because their meager resources and particular lack of aptitude and personal connections left them not only without tools, but also without the reflexes to deal with the hardship that had been imposed upon them. What is more, at the time, political violence and death hovered in the air; they were recognized as an everyday occurrence toward which many or few could feel aversion or horror — this did little to reduce its power; in fact, it had the opposite effect, preserving it as part of the normal order of things. This acceptance could have been a result of detachment, consent, or debasement, but either way it meant that death had proliferated through its use; a use that was sanctioned by endowing politics with a functional dimension, turning its morals back into action.

There is the incident that took place a few months after M was abducted. I was about to cross one of the typical, cramped avenues of Greater Buenos Aires, which were roads in the days before the area was populated and only later, with the spread of urbanization, ended up as very narrow avenues. There was no curb; the simulacrum of a sidewalk angled slightly toward the pavement, creating a formless space in which a bit of earth ate away at a fine layer of asphalt. The cars kept coming; I was waiting to let them pass before I crossed, when a hand holding a cigarette emerged from a car window, trying to burn me. I did not jump back, but managed to lean away and watched the bandaged hand, still holding the cigarette, return to the car a few meters down the road. There was a military base a few blocks from there; it was clear, despite its lack of markings, that the car belonged to the so-called security forces. I was not afraid, nor was I angry; again, typically, I felt nothing. Nonetheless, I saw how the coincidence of my crossing as they passed created, momentarily, the setting of a game, of order, organized with ease and pleasure to which the rest of us submitted with a certain natural acquiescence, at the dramatic and even more organized core of which M had met his end. That hand was accustomed to burning, and it found diverse, even incidental, opportunities to exercise the habit. Afterward, I crossed, but I did not forget what had happened. Once more it had become clear that chance is a condition of tragedy.

The relationship between M and the other was based on a mutual — though not always shared — time, within which certain topics, interspersed with actions and events, were advanced through both conversation and silence. As I have written, the railroad was discussed throughout their friendship, but there were other recurrent topics that became more central over time, signs of harmony or danger, the marks of a shared identity. One Saturday morning, as they were going to the house of a classmate, M and the other saw a group of Orthodox Jews; all were male, men and boys, and they walked without any particular hurry. M said, pointing, that they were genuine, real Jews. “They’re authentic,” he murmured. “Who?” asked the other. “Them, the Orthodox Jews. Don’t you think they’re more authentic?” M replied. “Why would they be more authentic than us?” retorted the other. He made a gesture to signal his reproach; he felt slighted at his exclusion from a group to which he had been certain he belonged. “I don’t mean that they are more Jewish,” M continued; only that their condition has retained qualities that speak of a truth and not only of constraint, as in our case. Our nature is marked by loss, by absence; what is left of an abundance that is slowly becoming more remote and somehow exotic: the Yiddish language, the religious holidays, the dances, the food. They, on the other hand, signal a confirmation, affirm a continuity with every step; they operate in time, within the diffuse time in which sons are, in the future, mistaken for their fathers like a convergence of the self, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their lives find meaning in repetition, turning it into constancy. “But,” the other said, “what does repetition have to do with authenticity? It’s true that repetition ends up becoming authentic, but that’s not just a matter of repetition. On the other hand, how can you turn authenticity into a collective category? Yes, an observant Jew has an image that is easier to assimilate to Judaism than one who is not religious. One aspect of this is appearance (we are talking about them now because we were able to recognize them); no one would recognize us, though in some cases, like yours, certain features do help,” the other asserted, avenging himself for M’s earlier exclusion. “Every trait, whether visible or spiritual, shows its condition; a condition that is not necessarily religious,” he continued. “The truth is, one could say someone is — for example — a gaucho, when he lives the life of a gaucho; when his experience aligns with the model, generally speaking. Still, it is possible to say that the further he gets from that model the less of a gaucho he is, and just as there may be a moment in which he is no longer a gaucho, there may be a moment in which one is no longer a Jew or an Indian or a homosexual. One simply isn’t, or one is in a complete and absolute way one moment, only to find that one isn’t, the next. There are also moments in which one is so little, when one is at the mercy of the slight pulse that keeps our hearts beating. Perhaps, then, Jews have a more flexible threshold of identity; more accommodating in one sense, but more implacable in another, since someone might no longer belong to a congregation, without knowing it, or the congregation might include someone among its ranks who sees himself as an outsider.” “I hadn’t thought of all that,” answered M, emphasizing the all, “but it doesn’t seem like you disagree.” At that moment the other got distracted: the bus lurched forward and the sidewalks, filled with pedestrians, slipped into the distance with the sole objective of avoiding scrutiny; he saw vague colors and reflections, neither whole nor essential; the side streets opened up to him only to close in on themselves like dark little wells. After a while M, noticing the silence, asked, “What were you be thinking about?” “When?” the other wanted to know. “Now,” said M, “what do you mean, when?” “What should I be thinking about? Nothing,” he answered. “The street.” So M told a story that the appearance of the authentic Jews had helped him remember. It was an adventure plagued by imprecision, like all fables; or rather, it was a collection of precise imprecisions. This fairy-tale quality extended further still: M did not know how he came to know the story, which seemed not to have an author. At some point he heard it for the first time, yet he already knew all its principal details — just as he already knew its outrageous conclusion.