One might say that time passed and the friends grew up, but even something as straightforward as that would be complicated by the circumstances: time did not pass and they did not grow up, in the true sense of the word, despite the fact that the years advanced and before they knew it they were adults. The misunderstanding they created had opened the gates to a darker nature, with its own rules and conditions (just as natural as any others, but different). This fact, their being at the mercy of something and knowing what it meant but not what it was or how it worked, led them to wander around in a state of absolute confusion, impervious, despite their physical maturity, to events and experiences. One was the origin of the other, the source of his identity and the proof of a deviation. They were sensible enough to admit how deeply they relied on their mutual friendship and did all they could to maintain it, but were slow to notice the mystery that, though created by them, existed independent of their feelings, their will, and their intelligence, and threatened to make them indistinguishable from one another. They were tired of being themselves, but also of being each other. Identity — which, as they both knew, was one of the most difficult things to discover, obey, preserve, and understand — pulsed erratically within them, moving from one body to the other, shuffled in among names, memories, and beliefs: a commingling only heightened by the friendship. They were equivalents. Sergio, for example, meant one and the other at the same time; so did Miguel. Experience was shared. The four parents, relegated to a diabolical world by the adult memories of their children, became increasingly diffuse, distant, and imprecise figures. Had they existed? On the other hand, both — each imperceptibly puritanical — had their own theories and conclusions about certain memories of family get-togethers.
They looked back over the past and found only one essential moment. By baptizing themselves in jest, by exclaiming in the sharp and unwitting voice of a child, Ciao, Sergio and Ciao, Miguel as they left the schoolhouse, a ritual whose outcome their immature minds were unable to grasp, Miguel and Sergio did nothing less than create themselves. Everything that followed would be secondary to this. Yesterday, when everything was positive, black and white, didn’t matter; what mattered was today, the invisible present in which differences were erased and everything seemed unreal. Like those charmed lives which were able to mitigate failures and thereby free themselves from a precipitous downfall, Miguel and Sergio held on to the hope of restoring the plenitude they had lost in the prehistory of their youth. But they were unable to resist the slow collapse — the true operation of time — that added a sense of ambiguity to their mutual indistinguishability.
In the end they took to walking. They would choose a street and follow it from one end to the other, navigating changes in its name, and even changes to the street (if the one they had chosen came to an end, they would follow the nearest one that ran in the same direction). To return, they would cross the street and follow the same route all the way back. Seeing them together one would almost think they were siblings, yet something did not quite fit. In their movements, in the distance they kept between themselves, and in the monosyllables they used to communicate, one could sense an unfulfilled promise; a promise that sustained them, yet did not unite them completely. As though they were indeed siblings, but were brother and sister. That was their problem: a slight but radical difference. What could they do now to regain their autonomy? The streets offered no solution: it was only the truly desperate, those given over to the mercy of God, who searched for answers in the streets. Still, they had no choice. The solution was neither in their homes nor inside them, nor could it be found in the past; in fact, that was where the drama began.
Sad, bewildered, and powerless against their luck, as they walked along avenida Garay one day waiting for the afternoon to end, they would come across a beggar resting against a wall that surrounded a municipal building. From far away he looked like a bundle of clothes; drawing nearer, he appeared to be asleep. It was only from within a few meters that his alert stillness became visible. Before, in the past, the human form used to be more clearly defined, thought Miguel and Sergio; heaps like that were never thought to be anything but people, due in part to the fact that one didn’t tend to find bundles of clothing or fabric left out in the street. (The mass of cloth only appeared to be defenseless, within it breathed a life on guard within its nest.) It was an old man with pale skin and thick eyebrows, into the shadow of which his eyes, gazing out as though from the greatest depths, seemed to recede. Miguel and Sergio froze at the sight of his face, which was veiled by short, sparse stubble discolored by tiny flecks of silver that caught the light. One of them realized that he was not asleep and immediately thought that it was not only poverty or indigence that had put the old man in their path. This old man was one of those whose age is concentrated in their eyes, suggesting a wisdom that transcends experience. He might have had poor vision; perhaps this was the reason for the intensity of his gaze, but the eyes themselves were enough: they would have been wise at any time or in any circumstance. He looked at them, they stopped. A casual remark about a distant street and a bitter one about the state of his back did the rest; they served as a pretext to start a conversation with Miguel and Sergio who, as tends to happen, found themselves under his spell before they knew it.
They found that the words of the old man transcended their literal meaning. Colors, for example, became sharper when he spoke of them; they took on a shine that was able to stand out through the quality of his speech. At one point Miguel and Sergio felt the same shudder run through them both: it occurred to them that perhaps this old man could help them. And as though the air were condensing in an unusual way — unusual for the climate and circumstance, somewhat theatrical — they noticed a rough incandescence surrounding his shadowy figure (the nimbus of intelligence). And so they started to recount their whole misadventure from the beginning. The old man kept silent as he listened. Voices, saying more or less incomprehensible things, could occasionally be heard from the other side of the wall. When someone spoke really loudly, Miguel and Sergio would stop talking and look up to see that the wall was only a bit taller than they were, and that there was probably an expanse on the other side, an enclosed area, perhaps a garden, where the voices and the people to whom they belonged could walk around. Seen from the street, Miguel and Sergio probably seemed to be talking to a pile of clothes; whoever came a bit closer would think that they were conversing with someone who was asleep. They alone could see the attention with which the old man listened to them, deaf to all other voices and sounds. They went on like that for a long time. The encounter took on such meaning for them that Miguel and Sergio forgot that it might only be a coincidence; they imagined that someone or something — even they themselves, though they found it hard to believe — had guided their steps toward that place. When they finished their story, they waited for the old man’s verdict. The noise of the street returned, distant but vital. While the man reflected, they gave themselves over to the gradual diffusion of their surroundings: the plastic bags and bits of cloth, the dirty wall on which he leaned, the municipal building and its complex, the dilapidated neighborhood and the city as a whole, with all its flattened expanses, were held in suspense. But it was not that the scene was actually dissolving; it simply was not of interest. What mattered was the two of them, after so many years, finally being understood for the very first time. Perhaps the old man had the answer. After talking for a long time, mostly about a few strange moral episodes that he had experienced in own life, he made his decree: “Go to the river. If one of you catches something, come back right away, but if three hours go by without a bite, you won’t have anything to worry about anymore.” Miguel and Sergio looked at each other. They were disappointed by the enigmatic nature of the task; having expected a solution, even if only a bit of advice, they found themselves confronted with an order. They gathered from the words of their maestro that it would be preferable not to catch anything, so they chose to go at night, when they thought there would be less chance of landing a fish.