Barco’s familiar and skillful fingers unscrewed the chrome top of the saltshaker, dumped the salt onto the tablecloth and then, under Tomatis’ tranquil but astonished gaze, began to scatter it, his fingertips pressing onto the grains and turning slowly to fully spread out that little white mountain on the blue cloth. Barco’s fingertips had an extraordinarily peculiar shape: they were oval and tapered—they looked like the classical representation of a teardrop. In the whole world there couldn’t have been another pair of hands with fingertips like that, and Tomatis would have recognized them immediately from anywhere.
“Probably,” said Barco, “in many of these grains of salt there are Ancient Greeces where Heraclitus is thinking that the events of the world are the product of a game of dice played by children.”
“Probably,” said Tomatis.
“Last night on television I saw the latest mission to the moon,” said Barco. “No one cares about those missions to the moon anymore. The whole world is convinced that the moon is already a thing of the past, and that science fiction is becoming an anachronism. Fiction can’t keep up with science anymore. Probably, in fifty years everyone will be a scientist, the way that nowadays everybody drives a car.”
“Probably,” said Tomatis, without taking his eyes off of Barco’s fingers, which were now resting on the scattered salt and remained motionless.
“Something strange happened,” Barco said. “Everything was going fine when they were showing the inside of the spaceship and the crew working on the screen. But suddenly they began showing pictures of the Earth as it got farther and farther away, getting smaller every minute, and then everyone watching the television in the bar stopped what they were doing, or started to sit up slowly in their chairs, or to strain their necks, all this trying to keep the Earth closer, contorting themselves to help the Earth stop in its tracks, like when you’re bowling and you twist yourself around so that the ball will follow the imaginary path you’ve laid out for it, you know? We all tried to get this obscene distancing to stop, so that the Earth wouldn’t be erased and disappear forever. I was frozen stiff. And when the voice of the narrator announced that the astronauts could still make out Mexico, we all felt a moment of relief and for a moment we all felt as if we were Mexican: Mexico was the final crest, the highest, mounted by the wave of nothingness that pushed up from behind, the wave of nothingness that, when we could no longer make out Mexico, flooded everything and left it smoother and more uniform than this wall here. Then we all felt sad and confused, a bit frightened, and I don’t think we felt any better when the program about the mission to the moon ended and they cut to the live game at Chacarita Stadium. I’m convinced that last night we broke the identity barrier. Breaking the speed of light or the sound barrier is nothing compared to breaking the barrier of identity. We kept on being erased, until we totally disappeared. We thought that things would stop at some point before they got out of hand, at some point from which we could still make out Mexico, for example, but no, nothing like that, we totally disappeared. And I felt something even more vertiginous: sitting in the chair at the bar, the screen showed me how the Earth had been shrinking, that is, I, the chair, the bar, the screen and the earth on the screen, shrinking, how we were being squeezed by the fist of the cosmos that closed upon us, vertiginously, macerating our bodies and turning them into hardened lava. And I felt it so intensely that I closed my eyes and waited for the walls of the bar to start closing in, subtly, molding the four into a single wall with us inside, in an inconceivable contraction, until the whole Earth had shrunken to the size of little dice with which little children would play out the destiny of the world. Probably, these grilled fish the waiter is bringing are ours.”
“Probably,” said Tomatis, seeing Barco’s familiar fingertips press into the salt and then lift to his thick lips, fingertips that, like no others in the world—and now also because of their flavor—made him think of the solid form of tears.
One rainy morning in November I slept in until after it was light. The murmur of the water was audible, both complex and monotonous—that’s been said so many times of water! Greenish light came into the room through the blinds. I lay in bed with my eyes open, staring at the semidarkness that was growing ever weaker, but that gathered against the ceiling. The dream I’d just had remained in my mind, persistent, a dream in which I had seen my uncle Pedro, my mother’s brother, who worked for a long time in the factory and then afterward struck out on his own and opened a bakery. My uncle had died the month before. In the dream he seemed to be mourning his own death.
Dreams scare me, and sleep even more so. Am I afraid of what I dream or am I simply afraid of dreaming? I was sad that morning, thinking about my uncle Pedro who ended up dying just as his bakery was starting to do all right, but then, fortunately, curiosity overcame my sadness and I began to meditate on the meaning of the dream until almost nine. All this time it rained without stopping, and the noise of the rain lulled me almost to sleep, so that now I’m not sure whether at times I didn’t dream up the meaning of what I had dreamed. A female friend of mine, a school teacher who later married a professor of mathematics and moved to Peru, told me that she had always dreamed of mourning over her own coffin. That she saw herself dead and mourned. Do we always mourn for ourselves when we mourn in dreams? Only the mourner knows that. Looking into this fount of tears is a difficult task, and curiosity’s quiet gaze cannot see so deep. To see that pain, we have to be inside it. But what is even more surprising is that he who mourns himself, the one who sees his cadaver or offers condolences to himself over his own death, stands at such a singular point in the great plain of pain that his cry is at the same time a memory and an anticipation. In the great plains the horizon is always a circle, identical, empty and monotonous.
The sun in April doesn’t sink, it slims. We go out walking after dinner, avoiding the cold shade and stopping every once in a while to look at a yellowing frond, the ornamentation on a façade. We argue over sex and politics. For me, they are siestas full of statues and delicate sun; after several blocks, my temples begin to throb. We pass through the Plaza de las Palomas, head to the promenade, lean over the rail, and look at the river. As I see it, it is at that hour that cities flatten and stretch out. It has seemed to me, at times, that I know everything about statues, about the urine that disfigures and stains them, about the old houses that bear witness to more perfect lives.
Even finer, the dusty sunlight—at a certain hour—is smooth and omnipresent. We sit on a wooden bench, on powdered brick paths, to warm our heads. Suddenly we are silent. What we call the murmur, the soft sound of years of life, the sound of what we remember, is passing by, bit by bit, until it falls utterly silent. Then we begin to hear sounds outside: a car, far off, the shouts of two boys calling to one another beyond the park and the rotunda of the promenade, even the clicks of women’s heels as they tap against the powdered brick. I know of nothing more real. Within my heart—could you call it that?—the empty echo of those whispers resounds. I’ve surprised myself in those moments, asking with a sudden dread “Who am I and what am I doing here?”
Afterward, when we are walking again and we go into the first bar, the feeling disappears, I have worked out a theory that the April sun flowing slowly downward onto the city is unhealthy, and that its effects are like those of marijuana, but more diffuse.
Angel Leto, an old friend of Barco and Tomatis’s whom they hadn’t heard from in years, was alone in a house waiting for the appointed moment to kill a man. It was a winter morning, green and rainy, and Leto, who had just gotten up, came from the kitchen through the semidarkness of the hallway into the light of the living room, carrying with him a cup of coffee. If he followed through with the plan, by the next day at half past eight in the morning the man would already be dead and