The intermediate beings (English version)

 

THE INTERMEDIATE BEINGS

 

Ricardo Gabriel Curci

 

 

 

PROLOGUE by Walter Iannelli

 

When my first daughter was born, that day, when I went outside, I felt like the world was hanging by a thread. That he was fragile and violently small, and that fragility was almost always hidden like a hunter on the prowl in the absence of the light that illuminated him at that moment.

 

Some other episodes in my life led me and would lead me to repeat the experience.

 

Ricardo Curci's first book, and this second, for example. And it is not strange that I started talking about my daughter, given that in this second book it is largely the boys who are in charge of illuminating that ultimate skeleton, which in exchange for imagining themselves solid and stable as one sometimes assumes divine creations, It is glimpsed in writing as mutant but paradoxically indefectible.

 

Halfway between Greek tragedy and Kafkaesque impossibility, Ricardo Curci, a doctor for more information, surely accustomed to humors and tumors, to the arbitrariness of the body in relation to nature, to dealing with God more than would be appropriate , puts us in the place of their fears, but does not name them. It is there, I consider, its literary art and its ontology to put it into practice.

 

That which is not named appears, as for example death appears in our consciousness, and when it becomes real we are going to deny it as we will deny death until the day when something that underlies reality tells us that we are going to die. That is why here in "The Intermediate Beings" there is nothing to accept, and this is how the centaurs, children and death become a void that can barely be touched and is as ephemeral as the remora of a dream. In this way, it is almost impossible to tell the arguments of these stories: what bases them is so intertwined with the words that to alter or alliterate it would be to believe that the world and reality are made of words; that which writes these arguments is so mixed with the universe that to state it would be to believe that the universe is made only of actions.

 

We are left with hunger, which aesthetically satisfies the unity of these stories, but like the catoblepas, that mythical character who eats himself in a novel by Flaubert, this book will devour us and devour itself and we will be left with the questions that We will never be able to

formulate it with words or gestures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 "Certain things are sometimes what others are: that telephone that calls in an empty room is the face of winter, or the smell of gloves where there were hands that today grind their dust."

 

Julio Cortazar

 

 

 

 

TWO CHILDREN FIGHTING

 

When I left the clinic, I only knew that the vertigo of my life was over. I got into the car and accelerated until I found the first object that stood in my way. I don't know how they rescued me; I do remember, before seeing myself in bed, having had a dream that was repeated later. It was about someone running from a room until they reached the door of a sanatorium and faced the street. Then, I opened my eyes, and the room was dark. When I touched myself, I felt the sutures on my forehead and the IV line on my arm.

 

In the morning, I didn't want to look at my wife. She knew what I had tried to do, so she got close to my ear while the nurse was still in the room, and insulted me like she had never done before. It was enough to realize that she had also tried to kill herself; Not for nothing was she the wife of a man who once a year left his family and his job at the bank to go hunting. Then I was able to look at her without shame, and I noticed on her face the after- effects of all those days spent in the clinic taking care of Martín.

 

My son had been in a bed two floors above. We spent almost three months there, taking turns at night. Gabriela had lost weight, and her hair was disheveled most of the time.

Sometimes I found her lying next to Martín, so asleep that our own son asked those who entered for silence. But the doctors couldn't do anything. And it was that same word that I uttered so many times in front of the corpse of a prey next to the river, when pushing it with the barrel of the rifle to ensure its death. I knew that nothing, in all that delta overflowing with life, would make her revive.

 

Gabriela did not want to go to the funeral. I begged him not to stay in the room with me either. All morning I felt intense burning in my legs. I heard the doctor's voice from the hallway, indicating something to keep me sedated. In the afternoon, Gabriela did not want to tell me where she had been.

 

"Walking around," he answered.

 

But I noticed a renewed protectiveness in his voice, and since then I discovered changes in it. He had lunch in the sanatorium's dining room, when he didn't before so as not to leave

 

Martín alone. On another occasion she arrived with a new hairstyle, and more groomed than usual. It was clear that she felt calm because I was improving. Juan, on the other hand, had always suffered despite having begged him a thousand times, sitting next to his bed, not to give up, to fight as if he had a rifle in his hands.

 

She now smiled when she spoke to me, and spent a lot of time talking to the other patients.

 

In the afternoon she went alone to some place she didn't dare tell me about. When she finally did, the nurse in the room turned to look at her, then left quickly, as if she had heard something she shouldn't have.

 

"I don't understand," I told my wife.

 

-I see him every afternoon in the park.

 

Despite my disbelief and grief, I also thought that she looked as beautiful as she had fifteen years before. She had her hair tied up and pearl earrings. She hadn't put on makeup, but I liked her that way.

 

-I don't know what to say...

 

"Don't say anything, Luis." He stood up to cover my lips. "I'm going to tell you what Martín tells me." Sends you a kiss.

 

Over the next few days, I woke up scared by the same dream I'd had the first night.

Someone running through the hallways of a place different from this one, who stopped at the door and stood facing the street, deciding where to continue. Then I recognized the face of a child, but it was not Martín's face.

 

Gabriela did not stop talking to me about our son for a single afternoon. He told me that he couldn't come in to see me, although he didn't mention the reason. I asked him about his appearance, and he told me that I was going to see him very soon. He only described his somewhat haggard face. I didn't know what to do, but in the end I didn't dare destroy what my wife had clung to.

 

Two days later, I noticed one of the nurses looking out the window very curiously. "What's wrong?" I asked him.

She hesitated before answering.

 

 

-I don't want to get involved in family matters, but I think you should know that your poor wife is walking around the garden with a child she found on the street. Everyone comments on it and feels sorry for him.

 

She fell silent, embarrassed, and left. That week I had no desire to eat and I lost more weight than because of the crash. One day the doctors came in to remove my stitches. I felt like I was lying in the leaves of the delta, looking at the sky between the trees, while the beasts ripped off my skin with their metal teeth. If I had a rifle at that time, I would have stood up to defend myself.

My wife was so strangely unconcerned during the last few days I spent at the clinic that I didn't find the courage to expose her madness to her face to face. She had never tried to convince me either. He recounted his meetings with Martín in a simple way, as if there were nothing peculiar in those meetings, as if the past or its events had not existed. One afternoon she told me that he had told her about our camps before he got sick. She stayed at home, she didn't like the countryside or weapons, so it was not possible that she could describe to me with such precision what we had hunted and how we had done it.

-Martín misses your excursions, Luis, the strategy that you gave him. You taught to catch prey off guard. That's why he decided to fight.-Then his eyes focused on the light from the window.

That night I entered my dream without resistance. I saw the boy again, on the streets that I now recognized: they were the ones that led to this clinic. He had the relieved expression of someone who discovers a familiar path after having lost his way.

 I was discharged in the third week. A nurse took me in a wheelchair to the door, where my wife was waiting for me in a taxi. He had gone to buy new clothes for Martín, he told me. When we got home, a boy came out to greet me. He hugged my legs, and I lifted his chin to see his face. He had a fresh scar on his forehead and another under his lower lip.

It wasn't my son. I think at that moment I felt my sanity returning, and that my skepticism was not unfounded. But I felt weak, and I let routine take over the order of the house until I could regain my strength. The boy was twelve years old, one younger than Martín, and he knew everything about us. He treated me affectionately despite appearing indifferent. The people who saw us together didn't ask anything; Gabriela had told them that we had adopted him.

 "They wouldn't understand the truth," she said. We never had any friends in the neighborhood anyway.

Each day that passed, the boy described to me a small detail about life with Martín, things that no one could have told him, not even my wife, because they had happened to us in the camps.

One morning I got up to do my exercises, the boy was at school and Gabriela was at the market. I walked around the house looking at the things that I had neglected for several months. I found Martín's rifle leaning in the corner of his room, in the same position in which he had left it before entering the hospital. I took it in my hands. The freshness of the delta and the hum of insects returned

as if I were in those places. I thought of Martín next to me, looking at me, eager to receive the rifle. I remembered the afternoon I taught him how to shoot. He already knew how to operate the safety and the firing pin with an ease that did not surprise me given his intelligence, but he continued looking at me for a while, as if he was expecting something more than technique. Then I told him about the only thing I had learned in all those years besides sharpening my aim.

     "Fear is weakness," I told him. "It is the feeling that we must bring forth in the other."

 

Walking around the room, I found a school notebook forgotten on the desk. On the first page there was a name crossed out and corrected. A name now illegible, but on the side it said: Martín. Then I remembered what Gabriela had told me about a fight, and I imagined my son fighting with another child to write his name.

 

Two trying to control the hand that wrote.

 

I felt confused and decided to arrange my work papers to distract myself. I thought about my office, about the routine abandoned for so long. Among old newspapers I found the copy from the same day of Martín's death. Gabriela had saved it.

 

A train had run over a school bus at a level crossing. When they did not expect to find survivors, they found a child on whom they performed resuscitation maneuvers. Two minutes later he had woken up, and was taken to the hospital on the other side of town. But then the boy had gotten up and fled among the confusion of parents, police officers and journalists in the hallways.

 

Maybe that's when he started running towards me. I read the time of the accident. It was the same one in which my son had begun his agony.

 

I stayed thinking all afternoon, with the diary in my hand and my eyes fixed on the notebook with his name.

 

Before nightfall, the street door opened and I heard them enter. My wife went to the kitchen and he entered the room.

 

I think that when he saw me he didn't need to ask me anything. He approached me. I

 

can't say that I heard it with my ears, but rather the words sounded directly in my brain. He asked me not to be surprised if he looked different, his body was already useless after the illness, and it had been difficult for him to get used to a new one.

 

It was Martín's voice, the same warm intonation lost on the day of his death. He had different eyes and another skin, and one more year to live again, but his voice, I now realized, was still intact.

 

"Then I found that child," he told me. "His body was whole and served me well." And I smelled your fear, dad. There were two of us, but I had to live.

 

 

 

 

 

THE PILGRIMAGE

 

People moved like a mystical body along the route, towards the main square in front of the cathedral, under the incandescent reflection of the sun breaking through the storm clouds. A reflection so intense that it blinded and exhausted the sight of the pilgrims.

 

Most were young, tired but still firm in the final steps of their walk. The old men walked slowly, dragging their canes over the asphalt. Some cars tried to get ahead by honking insistently, as if that would speed up the pace of the walkers.

 

"A step that not even God himself could speed up," commented Mariela.

 

We were almost ashamed not to be part of those pious men, so I continued driving on the shoulder, slowly so as not to kick up dust on them. Everyone seemed uneasy. We had seen several times, along the way, that the pilgrims approached the cars and shouted a series of insults typical of possessed people at the motorists.

 

The radio comments also mentioned these events, but attributed them to the sum of the fatigue and social unrest of the previous months. The same discontent that had caused that demonstration, greater than any in recent years.

 

"I don't think it's that," said my brother-in-law Ariel from the back seat, between my two children. "People are fanaticized by an anger that is not so much social as religious."

 

"Did you notice how they look at us?" I pointed out to them, and I closed the windows.

Some men carried stones in their hands.

 

-I'm scared-Mariela grabbed my arm tightly, then put the inhaler for my asthma in my shirt pocket.

 

"They hate us because we have a car..." said one of my boys.

 

"No, Agustín," Ariel interrupted. "It seems to me that they hate us because we don't do what they do."

 

We were still very far from the cathedral, but we could already see the spire of the main tower, rising towards the sky like an arrow destined for God. The men and women of the large caravan did not leave the road, directing suspicious glances at the cars. They seemed to be the owners of the route.

"They are the owners of the idea of God," I commented.

 

"But it is only the concept that we love," answered my brother-in-law. "The idea, nothing more."

 

The journalists managed to push their way through the walkers with their equipment and cameras. From time to time they did a short interview, which we listened to on the live radio, but the tone of the voices and the pilgrims' comments had changed during the day. In the morning the comments were long and serene, full of idealistic optimism, but the sun was shining then, and the shadow of God seemed to protect the crowd. The caravan had traveled through the streets and neighboring towns until reaching the countryside, then walking along the river bank to the provincial route. But in the afternoon the first incidents occurred. Almost hysterical screams from the women towards the journalists, whom they accused of being skeptics and propagators of atheism.

 

"Heresiarchs!" they shouted.

 

People took water and food from food stalls without paying. If anyone dared to stop them or even say something to them, they would come back in groups and beat them. Cars were attacked with stones thrown from the grasslands. The injured had been picked up by ambulances, but they were also attacked.

 

-No Red Cross!-the fanatics proclaimed.-The cross of Christ is the only true one! "Those wounded in God's crusade are sacred, they must die to reach Him!" others shouted.

 

At first we didn't know whether to believe what the news said. We were used to them exaggerating the already common signs of violence that had begun five years earlier.

 

As we advanced among resentful looks from men and women who came from our same

 

city, we saw a group, fifty meters ahead, attacking several journalists. Television cameras crashed on the asphalt, reporters fell to the ground under sticks and kicks. When the people dispersed, we saw the bodies on the yellow line of the road, motionless and with blood stains.

 

I couldn't continue driving and stopped the car. The radio intermittently shrilled and the transmission ceased. Mariela wanted to tune it again, but I saw her clumsy attempts to control her fingers when she saw that some men were leaning on the trunk of the car. They made obscene gestures at me when I turned around, and then continued on their way.

 

"Do you still want to go to mass?" Ariel asked her sister. He was trying to calm the boys with his joking tone, but I noticed the fear in his eyes.

 

Mariela looked scared, although she wasn't going to show it in front of the children. He looked at them, trying to smile, and said that these were inevitable occurrences in large crowds.

 

-Men become animals in the crowd.

 

-That's the thing! -I interrupted her.-These people lost, at some point, the logical reasoning that gives human behavior the idea of individuality.

"Saint Augustine said that," Ariel intervened. "He believed that the Judeo-Christian

doctrine provided individualism, the salvation of each soul as if it were the only and most important one." But this brought a contradiction: men, when they believe in one God, also unify their minds.

 

We gave sidelong glances at those who were watching us from outside. The children had their noses pressed to the windows.

 

-And we know that many minds together cancel out the moral thinking of each one.

 

-But the individual I'm talking about...-I defended myself-...is the one who, after the first unifying impulse, considers the shortcomings, the errors. "Reason saves us," I think Kant said, and he admired St. Augustine, didn't he?

 

Agustín, my youngest son, watched us carefully. He looked at the people at times, perhaps wondering the reason for such strange events. If the cathedral was there, I would think, why so much delay in getting there, what was the reason for stopping on the way to fight with the pilgrims.

 

Suddenly, they began to attack us with stones, which echoed like thunder against the sheet metal of the car. We crouched against the seats as much as we could, covering the children, who had started crying loudly. But the glass exploded on our backs.

 

Arms and hands penetrated the car. I tried to push them away, to hurt them with the knife I kept in the glove compartment. But the hands kept entering, more and more numerous, and began to brutally caress Mariela's back. Then they started beating Ariel and me.

 

Then they opened the door.

 

First they tried to lift my oldest son, but they gave up. Not because I could have stopped them, others already had me by the arms, but because when they looked at him they knew, for some reason still unknown to me, that it was not him they were looking for.

 

Then they grabbed Agustín, whose face was full of panic and was crying with all his might. They dragged him away. And before I could react, I remembered, as if in a dream, what had seemed strange to me while we were talking stopped on the shoulder, illuminated by the scarce light of seven in the afternoon sneaking behind the cathedral. It was only now that I realized how people had been watching us too closely since we had entered the road, but then they didn't catch my attention because they did the same with the other cars. As if they were looking for something. The appropriate victim, perhaps. The child whose virgin blood was a guarantee of innocence.

 

Even through the dirty windows of a dust-filled car on a provincial highway, the pilgrims had discovered the purity in Augustine's eyes, the invaluable naiveté necessary to honor the gods.

 

My son's small body was lifted like a trophy between slimy, nervous hands, while the rest followed, extending their arms and shouting towards the treasured prey.

 

My wife was crying. Ariel stayed to console her, and I ran towards the group that was escaping towards the square. Dozens of people behind me interrupted my path, looking at me with hatred but without touching me. I had lost sight of my son, but Agustín's crying continued to resonate in my ears despite the noise. I listened to him far away, sad, without being able to reach him. The only thing I could think of, in desperation, was to continue along the same path that led to the square, where the altar was prepared for mass.

 

It was hot. The stormy sky had brought gusts that brought more chill than coolness. A suffocating wind raised the dust from the road from time to time and blinded us.

 

I took off my shirt and glasses and threw them on the floor. I heard the creak of glasses under the feet of the men who followed me, like an army of ancient machines.

 

I rolled up my pants, they were heavy; the shoes had started to hurt me; My back was sweating, as if I were carrying rocks. The others looked at me, telling me something that I couldn't understand. They also had bent backs and shuffled their feet. Their torsos were naked, and a wide line crossed their backs like the mark of a piece of wood.

 

The clouds began to form indefinite cumulus clouds, sometimes monstrous, over the cathedral tower. The sun looked intensely red, like coagulated blood that had been poured against the background of the twilight sky.

 

Those in front stopped as they reached the square. The journalists had disappeared.

Police helicopters flew over the area. Suddenly, several shots were heard. Someone had shot at one of them, and black smoke was coming out of the engine. The device began to spin like a top, until it fell into the field next to the road amidst flares and explosions.

 

But the loudspeaker announced, in a calm voice, the beginning of the mass.

 

-Brothers, in fifteen minutes the ceremony will begin.

 

There were no traces of police, perhaps they would come later, I thought, with tanks and armed platoons. Maybe they were hoping to see us all together and shoot us in front of the altar. I would never know.

 

I only realized with terrifying certainty that the crowd now had absolute power.

 

They were the owners of the world, at least of that moment in the world, to the point of having God in their fists to show him to anyone who did not want to believe them.

 

I made my way slowly, it was starting to be difficult to breathe, but I had lost my inhaler along the way. He felt the fatigue of many years in his flesh. The sweat and smells of people made me nauseous. The men looked like beasts standing on their hind legs contemplating the altar.

 

Where is the bishop? I thought, because it was a different one from the one we knew who emerged from the presbytery. I wondered if the other one was gagged, perhaps dead.

Then I noticed the whiteness of the tablecloth on the altar, which stood out only because

 

of the presence of the child's body for sacrifice.

 

Agustín was naked, open with his arms and legs on the virgin fabric, the exquisite lace that the weavers of some convent had made as an offering to God. The reflection of the dagger shone and ran like a light, a bright flicker, over the crowd in the square.

 

The dagger illuminated my son's face, swinging over his body. Agustín's eyes were crying, but they remained open looking at the hand that descended towards him as if it came from heaven.

 

"No!" I shouted.

 

I ran, hitting the men who tried to stop me. I dodged the stones that were thrown at me.

But above all, I tried to overcome the endless distance that separated me from the altar.

 

Because the air was my enemy now. Not the fanatics, nor the rigid stones of the cathedral with its merciless image of immortality. But the air that God made, and yet it was not enough for a man to save his son.

 

 

 

 

THE FAIR

 

Nicolás Dávila arrived with his son by the hand, walking between the food and game stalls. The mechanical hammocks shook people in the heights. Children ran through the crowd, lost or just agitated and happy. The floor, practically covered with remains of ice cream, candy and paper, nevertheless shone with the sun right above the roller coaster.

 

The boy's hand began to detach from his father's hand. The eight-year-old fingers loosened slowly, without violence, while the child directed his astonished gaze toward the target shooting stands, the carts that sold candy apples, and the merry-go-round that turned over and over again. Dávila smelled a strange smell in the air, a musty aroma that contrasted with the dry climate that summer. Maybe it was the sweat of the people accumulated during all those days. But it wasn't that, he told himself, but something that gave the impression of being old, remotely ancient, coming from the attics of memory.

 

They walked down the narrow, cobbled path that led to the ticket office, and the salesman surprised them with a jubilant shout.

 

"Congratulations!" he said behind the barred window, and a clown appeared next to them, handing them a golden ticket.

 

"You are our anniversary clients, you will receive many surprises," the employee continued saying, while the clown picked up Dávila's son and began to dance with him in his arms.

 

People came closer, forming a semicircle around him.

 

-Will the surprise ticket be for your son, sir?

 

The salesman's voice brought Dávila out of his abstraction. He seemed distracted, but he was actually focused on the curious and abrupt need to get the boy away from that place as quickly as possible. The overwhelming desire to compensate the boy for the loss of his mother, to console him and spoil him, had now been replaced by an uncertain fear.

 

But Javier was laughing like he had rarely done before, and his shirt was coming off his pants as he twirled around in the clown's arms.

 

"Yes, of course," answered Dávila. "What do we have to do?"

 

-Nothing, sir, the surprises will appear in due time. They have all the games free.

Absolutely free! The boy returned to his side, still agitated and holding the clown's hand.

 

-Daddy, where are we going first? Look at that tent, what is it? The three of them looked at the brightly colored store.

"The Witch's tent, the baddest in the entire province," the clown told them. "Be careful with it, and never look it in the eye."

 

Dávila remembered the pamphlet that had been handed to him on the street a few days before. The photo of a witch stood out on the paper, cavernous and sad, but very beautiful. And as he looked at the tent, he knew what he had felt when he saw that face: the same thing that made him stop in the street to look closely at that new and old face at the same time. A woman's face is the face of all of them, he thought at that moment.

 

As soon as they entered the store, the bustle of the crowd died down, and the woman was looking at them, sitting at a table with a red corduroy tablecloth. Dávila was attracted by the white breasts that protruded from the witch's neckline, by the black hair that fell on her shoulders barely covered by a lace shawl. She noticed that Javier was also looking at her ecstatically, without taking his eyes off her big, violet eyes.

 

-So this is the little winner of the lucky ticket. "Very well, little gentleman, come closer to me." The voice was even more sensual than his appearance, and it seemed to come not from his lips, but as a guttural moan. Dávila looked at her, and despite keeping the clown's warning in mind, he let himself be carried away by the voice and eyes of the witch. He was not a man, not even a child now, he was a fragile element in her hands. He would only remember, later, that he had seen her grab the child and sit him on her lap.

 

"Do you want to know your future?" she had asked, and Javier nodded his head.

 

-Well. Once upon a time there was a boy who arrived at the fair one Sunday at noon, and went straight to where a giant rag bear was waiting for him. It was a bear like the one he always wanted and was never given as a gift.

 

Dávila woke up from the dream he had fallen into, and his son was no longer there. I hadn't seen him come out of the tent. When he asked the witch, she just made a disgusted look with her eyes.

 

-Look for it, or you'll miss the rest of the surprises.

 

He left the store and a sadness overwhelmed him like the noise and the blinding light of the afternoon. He had lost the child and it was his fault.

 

"Oh my God, they stole my wallet!" a woman shouted, while he tried to decide where to look. People surrounded her, looking towards the thief who was fleeing through the crowd. Some men tried to chase him, but gave up after a few meters.

 

"A boy, can you believe it?" said two old women next to him.

 

Then he saw, in the distance, the figure of a bear on the roof of a stand.

 

"Javier!" he shouted, making his way to the toy bear, giant and beautiful, placed on top of the shooting stand, and which was the main prize. But the people crowded around did not let him advance. He stood on his tiptoes to see better.

 

"What's wrong?" he asked.

 

"A boy is hitting all the shots, it's incredible," they told him.

 

He heard the shots, infallible, accurate, one after another, and the applause that celebrated them.

 

He managed to see, next to the counter, a group of more than twenty people surrounding a space that seemed empty, but from which a red-haired head appeared over the sights of a rifle. Javier's freckled hands held the gun, and with one finger on the trigger he fired again and again in a display of incomprehensible skill.

 

-Javier, Javier! But the people had gotten in the way again, and when the view cleared, the bear was gone.

 

A hand must have grabbed him by the paw to hand him to the child. And then he saw the doll stagger among the people, hiding his son's red-haired head. Dávila tried to follow him, but the boy ran, sneaking along the legs of the passers-by.

 

It was two in the afternoon, the sun was still high, tireless. He walked through the streets of the park, going around the same places and stalls many times. The boy had never behaved like this, he told himself. Only that time in the country, when he had disappeared all afternoon, and they found him asleep next to a stream with the dead cat on his chest. The animal's entrails were open, and Javier's hands were full of blood. But that had happened almost two years before, and Dávila tried to forget it.

 

The security guards appeared and disappeared between the stalls, perhaps looking for the pickpocket, who had acted again during that hour. People talked about him as if he were different men, because the witnesses did not agree on their ages.

 

-Excuse me, officer, I'm looking for my son who was lost. He's eight years old and he's that tall... maybe he still carries a toy bear.

 

The policeman and his partner looked at each other as if their thoughts suddenly collided and were one.

 

"How was he dressed?" they asked.

 

-With blue shorts and a white t-shirt. He has very bright red hair. The agents looked at each other again.

-What age did you tell me?

 

He repeated his age, and they said they would notify him over the loudspeakers if they found him. As he started to walk away, he saw the police officers following him.

 

He passed by the fortune teller's tent, just in case Javier had returned. The entrance was

 

closed, and he tried to try the target shooting stand, which was almost empty.

 

"Did you see the bear boy come back?" he asked the man in the green romper. But the other looked at him with anger.

 

-That little thief is not going to come again, and if he does I will grab him by the ear and cut it off. But first I make him give me back the rifle he stole from me.

 

"You're wrong, my son doesn't steal," he said without even thinking, as a natural, defensive reflex.

 

-His son? -The guy grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. -Your little son is a fucking thief, you understand?

 

The tip of a rifle barrel appeared in the side mirror. They both turned around and heard the shot. They saw the long red hair of a boy perhaps twenty years old. Not too tall but slim, wearing a white t-shirt. Then people began to run towards the body that was collapsing in the dust and crushed grass around the burn.

 

The police arrived and separated the crowd.

 

The man had released Dávila and was running towards where the others were. He stood still, looking at the mirror where he had seen the boy who looked like his eight-year-old son.

 

"He aimed directly at the woman!" people said. The ice cream and apples that had fallen to the ground were trampled and mixed with the mud. The merry-go-round music continued to sound discordant and lonely. But only Dávila had seen the face of the murderer, who had fled towards the limits of the fair, fast and agile like an athlete.

 

He remembered Javier's races on the school field. His son always won, and the trophies accumulated in his room until they saturated the closet shelves. That desire for racing began one day when the boy was six years old, and his mother had left them.

 

Before leaving, she gave him that cat as a farewell gift. Javier ran after the bus that was taking her to a place from which he would never receive a letter.

 

The only thing he had of her was a photo he had found in a drawer in the bedroom. When Dávila got rid of what had belonged to his wife, even the portraits of her family, whose parents were so young, Dávila thought he was getting rid of everything.

 

But the boy sometimes mentioned that photo that he didn't remember taking of his wife.

 

       It's in black and white, in a port," Javier said.

 

-It can't be, all the photos I took of your mother are in color. Let's see, show it to me...

 

-No, if I give it to you you're going to throw it away like the others, and I don't remember what mom was like anymore.

 

Now a murderer was on the loose at the fair, and he had to find his son as soon as possible.

 

He noticed that the police had stopped following him. Two doctors arrived in an ambulance and took the body away in a black bag.

-The public is asked to remain in place. The park gates will be closed, the loudspeakers announced.

 

It was five in the afternoon. The sun was beginning to set behind some early storm clouds.

 

Dávila no longer knew where to look.

 

-An eight year old boy? Let me think...I saw him on the carousel around two, I think.

 

-Redhead? One like that, but about fifteen years old, he knocked me to the ground to steal my wallet. It was four o'clock, yes, a while before the crime.

 

-Fifteen?-said another woman-No! The one who attacked me was an adult, and I saw him just enter the hall of mirrors. I was desperate, I even felt sorry for him. He had the face of someone looking for his home.

 

Dávila ran to the entrance, but half of the lights were off and there was no one guarding the place. He crossed the glass-covered hallway and entered the hall of distorting mirrors. As he advanced he saw his body grow tall or short, young or old, with two heads or one leg.

 

The red-haired image appeared to him again, duplicated hundreds of times, but he could not find the original figure in the darkness. He couldn't have been more than twenty years old, he was freckled, with messy red hair, looking like a child who has grown up too quickly. Then, she watched him move a few steps, and in the mirrors his figure was transforming. First tall and skinny, then short and fat. Two mirrors away, the man's face became young and old at

 

the same time, but a new mirror separated them again. Then he saw Javier's unmistakable face and body in the mirror next to the one that reflected the murderer.

     Dávila shouted:

-Son! But the boy and the man were now fleeing towards the door, reflecting themselves in the successive mirrors in an absurd chain of images of children and adults, of the innocent and the evil. Over and over again until they completely disappeared into the darkness of the night.

 

Dávila went out into the street, saturated by the perfume that came from the witch's tent.

 

Then he heard a gunshot, and two more a few seconds later. He reached where the fleeting lights of the weapons had illuminated the street.

 

Three police officers were pointing towards the body fallen on the sandy ground. He had his arms extended toward the fortune teller's tent.

 

Then he knelt beside the dead murderer. The face was that of his son, but the expression was that of a sunken man. And while Dávila cried, wetting his blood-soaked shirt, he saw a paper sticking out of the pocket of his blue pants. It was the photo that Javier had found among his mother's things. The portrait of the grandmother taken in her youth in the port on a Sunday. So similar to her daughter, that many others had confused them before.

 

 

 

 

 

THE GUARDIAN

Leticia liked to hunt insects on the beach. Every summer the ants, butterflies or beetles that she managed to catch would die between her fingers. But it was the dragonflies, which she called four-winged airplanes, to which she offered her special attention.

      Waiting on the shore, when the dark clouds formed towards the south over the sea and the beach, she saw them arrive, fleeing the storm to take shelter among the bushes. She would then let the dragonflies brush her face with their soft wings, and then she would chase them to the dunes to hunt them.

     She would catch them by the tail, watching their futile effort to escape from her, and she would put them in jars with other insects, because she liked to watch them devour each other. But if they were still alive, in her house she would prick them with a pin on a sheet of cork, and she would contemplate their death, the fluttering of their wings or the soft crackling of the scab that covered them.

      But there was a summer without a single afternoon of rain. Leticia and her parents had spent ten days on the beach with an unwavering sun overhead, and one morning they decided to get away from busy areas. The coastal avenue was a narrow road in that area, open between the dunes, where only a bus passed three times a day. The heat was conducive to insects coming out of their hiding places. Leticia had seen large beehives hanging from the branches of the pine trees on the sides of the road.

      The warmth of the sun penetrated between the plants, passing through the fabric of the umbrella and the hats. They had lain down in the shadow of the car. Leticia took out her collection of sea turtles and released them onto the sand. With a stone she broke the shells, leaving the bodies naked, and covered them with salt to see them swell while they oozed a foam that dried until leaving the shrunken remains.

      Her father watched her from her lounge chair. Leticia knew that he was going to challenge her like she had done in the car, when she was playing with the window breaking the snails that she had found the day before. The windows were dirty with trickles of a thick, green liquid. Her father had stopped the car, and after getting out he stood in front of the back door, but without saying anything, because many times before he had verified the uselessness of words when she did such things. Leticia looked at him with hatred, hoping that her mother would come out to defend her, but she didn't. She then couldn't stand her father's eyes any longer, and she started screaming, raising and lowering the window until the handle had finally broken.

    

      "Put on your cap..." her mother told her on the beach. But this time she did not seem attentive to her daughter's game with the dead turtles, but instead she looked towards the south, with a hand on her forehead protecting herself from the sun.

      A large black cloud was approaching. Leticia also looked there, and she thought: dragonflies, and she ran towards the shore.

      "Leti, be careful!" Her mother shouted, but she ignored her and continued until she stopped at the edge of the water, watching the cloud approach with unusual speed.

      The growing hum surpassed the sound of the sea. The great cloud grew larger and larger, until it covered the silhouette of the sun, and the entire sky became an iridescent shadow over the beach.

      Leticia heard her mother calling her with a scared tone in her voice. She turned around and saw his panicked expression.

      -Wasps! Hide, Leti, get in the water!

      She looked there again. A black mountain traveled through the air, held up by invisible threads. The hum had become deafening, he covered his ears and ran to the water. She sank below her nose, but she did not want to close her eyes as she saw the swarm passing above her. The cloud of wasps, compact and black, began to cover her parents' car.

      They had entered, but in vain they tried to close all the windows. Leticia remembered that that morning she had broken one of her handles. Her parents' hands and arms shook inside her.

      They screamed, she could hear them, and she buried her head in the water.

      Then the languid luminosity dissolved and the clear stridency of the sun returned. She broke the surface. She waited a long time, until she was sure there was not a single insect. The sea was dirty, thousands of dead wasps clouded the water like black spots that changed shape.

      She walked to the car slowly, shivering. The air had become thin, a smell of dust and humidity was stagnant on the beach.

      There were more dead wasps in the sand, and others still alive that took flight when they saw her arrive. She leaned her forehead against the windshield. Her parents' clothes were covered in small blood stains. Her mother's face was red and swollen. Several stingers remained stuck in the center of each sting. Her father's hands surrounded his wife's body. er, covered with blisters, distilling a purulent liquid. But her hands still moved with irregular spasms, and her eyes suddenly opened.

      Is she looking at me? Leticia wondered, but her eyelids definitively drooped again. Her parents had died, she thought at that moment, as had the insects locked in her jars.

      She looked around her. Not even a bit of breeze relieved the unbearable heat. Only the sound of the waves, like a residue of the plague. And she started screaming. And in the middle of her scream she heard an engine, a sign of artificial life on that lonely beach. The five o'clock bus, the last one that would pass by that day, was approaching.

      Leticia ran towards the street through the burning dunes that burned her feet. The bus was coming too fast, kicking up dust and sand above the bushes like the tail of a comet.

      She arrived almost suffocated and waving her arms around. The bus stopped right in front of her. The door opened and Leticia began to cry, leaning on the step.

      "For God's sake, daughter, what happened to you?" the driver asked.

      But she continued crying, with her skin unscathed, healthy, like a survivor.

 

      At the age of twenty, Leticia left her grandmother's house to move to the coast.

      "There is the murderer," he said to the old woman. "It is time for him to return to warn people of his presence." And he left with a suitcase almost empty of clothes, but full of newspaper clippings that commented on the plague of wasps that had hit the coast more than ten years earlier.

      Her grandmother didn't tell her anything, she knew that it was useless to keep her when Leticia had proposed something about her. All those years of acting like an obedient teenager had been a backwater, a transition, perhaps. She saw her leave with her scrapbook under her arm, as if it were a book of acts in which to record her good and bad actions. The result was red, her granddaughter had told her many times.

      During the winters she stayed in her small house, with mossy walls, with the blinds always closed. The months and her cold came and went without her almost showing her face through the door.

      She was blonde, she had long, messy hair. Sometimes the neighbors saw her sitting under a tree in the dark garden, subjected to the wind and the pine needles that fell on her shoulders. She went into the forests of the area with her loose and somewhat dirty clothes, always looking for wasp nests.

      In the summers she went to the beach, but away from the tourists, secluded among the dunes, never undressing, sweating in the sun. At five in the afternoon she took the bus, with the same driver who had rescued her, now in a newer vehicle.

      But one day another was the man driving it.

      "Where is Raúl?" she asked.

      -He died last week. He was sick with a bad flu, I think, and the man touched his chest.

       Leticia got into her first seat, the usual one, and she didn't speak for a long time until she asked the new driver's name.

      "Cristian," he said. "They told me about you at the company, they say I got used to seeing you...

      "I do live here!" she answered, angry. That rude tone was unusual, but the death of her friend had startled her. -Raúl saved my life, he knows?

      "That's what they told me," the boy agreed, without taking his eyes off the road.

      The sea peeked out in each of the corners, through the entrances to the beach. The clouds grew rapidly, and dragonflies crossed in front of the bus and died against the windshield.

      -Poor things! They are harmless. Try not to kill them, please.

      The driver looked at her, without hiding the mockery in her eyes.

      "You don't have to be insolent," Leticia said. She had made a reputation to care for, and a task to fulfill. Both were part of the same mission. Everyone believed her to be a harmless crazy person, she was aware of that, and for that reason they left her alone throughout all those summers.

      -Do you know why they call me the “guardian”? -She began to tell. -Do you remember the sinking of the fishing boat two years ago? I warned them not to sail that night, and they didn't listen to me. The coast guard later came to ask me how he had known about it, if not even the meteorologists could have foreseen it. They looked at me like a witch, and I couldn't answer them.

      During the following trips to the bus terminal, Leticia also told him about the time she had guessed where to find the body of a drowned woman, about the time she anticipated the murder of a family in a small house on the beach, and about the many times she warned people of the arrival of the wasps.

      -This clothing protects me from them. It's so thick because I knitted it myself with a very tight stitch that I invented.

      Leticia noticed the boy's disinterested and averted look. If she had at least laughed, she would have tolerated it, but not that indifference, as if she to be nothing and his presence did not fulfill the mission that had been entrusted to him. He never knew how he guessed such things, but it was something that had been born in her on that same beach a long time before.

      -I save you... -she said, resting a hand on the driver's shoulder.- What is in the sea was in me, it still is and I must continue to remove it, cell by cell, like a cyst that grows again over time. It has a thousand forms, countless in fact, and it is out there on the beach. I've seen some of his costumes. That black shadow in the sky, which I saw when I was nine years old, is the one that most resembles his true face.

      "We're here, ma'am," he interrupted, turning off the engine.

      "See you tomorrow," she greeted, and walked away from her with her arms crossed under her thick shawl, while the wind ruffled her blonde hair.

      She walked slowly through the streets populated with tanned tourists, thinking about the family she had seen arrive two days before, and whom she was going to protect. They went down to the beach at ten in the morning, and stayed until nightfall. The boys ran tirelessly, and then lay down in the shade of the tent during their nap. His wife was very beautiful, and her husband was a man in his early thirties, who at five in the afternoon began to prepare the rod for fishing. Burying the support in the wet sand, he waded into the sea with water up to his chest. He would then throw the hook with the enormous and powerful gesture of his arms, conquering the turbulent waves as if he were carrying a mast that a legendary hero moved in victory.

      The man returned to the beach giving up the line, a little loose at first and more tense later. He left the rod on the stand and sat on the sand next to his wife, watching, pending that single task, the most important one that had to occupy the universe of his mind at that moment.

      Leticia, at first she didn't know why she had paid so much attention to that family. But the day after seeing them for the first time, she had crossed paths with the man at the entrance to the beach, and she saw his eyes, so similar to those of her father. To that last look he had offered her from her car. Then she couldn't help but follow him to observe every movement or gesture of his face under the sun that tanned him. If the man remained still or lay in the sand, she continued to watch for his blinking and expression of sublime anxiety with him watching the rod.

      Ella Leticia was determined to protect him from everything that could harm him.

 

      By the third afternoon, nothing had changed. It was seven o'clock, and it was beginning to get dark. The man and his wife were sitting looking at the sea, while the boys were playing on the shore.

      Suddenly the line tightened and he began to reel it in with the slow calm of an expert. The woman also stood up as she looked at him, and the children joined her. The rod was bending as the man tried to pull back. Maybe the fish was bigger than he expected.

      He must be thinking about the dinner he will prepare for his children tonight, Leticia said to herself, admiring him from afar.

      The man had begun to go into the sea. The waves already reached his chest, then up to his neck, while he raised the rod so that the waves would not take it away from him. But the waves began to cover it for moments. The man's face turned towards the beach for the only time, and in his face, before a wave completely covered it, Leticia discovered what she had seen so long before.

      The man disappeared under the water, while the rod floated.

      "Dad!" the children shouted. The woman had remained still, her lower lip trembling.

      Ten, thirty seconds, maybe a minute passed, but her head did not emerge again. Then some arms moved with desperate gestures on the surface, and Leticia knew that the same thing that she had taken her parents, she was taking to the bottom of the sea. Warnings or omens would be of no use, because she was back to avoid the flimsy barriers that Leticia had managed to build in those years.

       That's why she ran, not paying attention to the woman and her children who were looking at her in amazement. She got into the water with those thick clothes, heavy like an anchor when it got wet. She swam as best she could, precariously, swallowing and spitting out the brackish foam. Her long hair floated in the waves, enveloping her face like a trap of seaweed, sea silk.

      She saw the man's arms continuing to move, already weak. She was a few meters away from him, but the distance increased with each intervening wave, with the water pushing her back, always a little further back.

      The sky had darkened, it seemed wet from the waves. An isolated scream encouraged her to continue. It was the man's voice, and then she heard the thunderous sound of the deep surf. The sound of an immense amount of water swirling, like clouds

formed by countless columns of wasps, columns of water rising from the seabed. The clouds were gray like the waves.

      There was nothing around. Only the distant beach with people watching them, as if the two were in a huge jar with water and air.

      A wave began to be born a few meters away. The water was rising and forming a cylinder, a large curl of foam, and a hole in the center. Like a huge fist of salt and foam.

      "Not him!" Leticia shouted.

      But the wave collapsed on the man and his guardian.

 

 

 

 

THE INVENTOR

I learned about Gregorio Ansaldi when reading an old text about the Italian Renaissance. He was an important man in Florence, owner of a sawmill that supplied almost the entire region. He was a builder and architect, and his treatises on new materials were among the most respected of the time.

      When he was commissioned to design a palazzo in Milan, he must have been around twenty-five years old. Already at that time he had enough fortune to last the rest of his life. However, as soon as his intelligence began to be valued, he sank into shame to remain hidden for several centuries. And it all began upon his arrival in the city, when he met Alice of Trieste, who seduced him with the peculiar beauty of his nineteen-year-old self.

      Looking for her portrait, I found a reproduction that shows her looking to the right of the painting, wearing a velvety red dress, a necklace of black and white pearls, and an emerald on her forehead. Her hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, a light brown color, and her face had an expression of exciting tenderness. The reputation of his beauty and disregard for customs had reached Ansaldi through his friends. He had been told that she was a very unusual woman, too restless and with strange habits. They saw each other for the first time, perhaps, at a party in Milan, and since then they could not be separated.

      But here I run out of references, and I am forced to resort to an unrecognized, although certainly illuminating, text. An anonymous author, in his book on the sciences in Europe, opens an extensive chapter on Ansaldi. According to this story, he married Alicia a few months after meeting her, and perhaps it did not take them too long to become the most admired couple in the city. A couple of irresistible attraction who entered the rooms with their arms linked, receiving reverent and admiring greetings amid the crackling noise of the loose dresses and the monotonous music of the string quartet.

      It was around that same time that rumors began to spread describing them as wild and violent in bed, screaming that the servants couldn't stop hearing. One of them must have also started that other, even more disturbing comment. It was said that every night, at three in the morning, Ansaldi would get up after playing tirelessly with his wife, and almost naked he would go to his workshop at the back of the house. He invariably stayed there until noon.

      His friends visited him in the afternoons, eager to see the inventions designed during the night. Plans and models that hung from the walls and ceiling, like ideas suspended in space.

      "He won't have enough life to build all this," they told him, flattering and skeptical at the same time. But for him that was not what was important, but the way in which things sprang from his mind as if from nothing.

      The rumors grew without anyone being able to specify where or why they arose. They became increasingly cruel, it was even said that when he worked in his workshop, his wife would leave the house to meet her lovers. The city then did not let a day pass without new news being reported about them, and the people began to lose respect for them, laughing behind their backs when they saw them passing by in his carriage. But every time they attended a party arm in arm, actually or apparently reconciled, everyone remained silent and looked at them with hidden envy.

      One night the usual moans of their love games transformed into screams similar to that of enraged animals.

      "Sick beast!" They heard Ansaldi shout, banging on the bedroom door and running towards the workshop, where he locked himself in for the rest of the night.

      The next morning, the doctor arrived very early, went to Alicia's room and left two hours later. Ansaldi and the doctor spoke in the locked room. There were knocks and broken sentences.

      "Damn soulless beast!" he could be heard shouting through the thick door.

      When the doctor left that morning, the servants were sure they had seen him carrying with him a container with a blood-stained lid.

 

      Alicia remained in bed for two weeks, and by then everyone in the city knew that she had contracted an incurable illness, perhaps some venereal disease that she was going to regret for the rest of her life. Because the doctor returned frequently, sometimes every two or three months, and later every week. But this was at the end.

      Ansaldi continued working every night. During the afternoons he received his employees, controlling the construction of the palazzo that was never completed. Sometimes they saw him leave in the morning and return at the end of the day with large white bags that, when dropped, gave off a gray dust similar to that of broken bones. When the servants brought him lunch or dinner, he shouted goodbye to them, demanding

asking them to leave him alone.

      They became accustomed to the idea that his employer was obsessed or possessed by a job from which he would not part until it was completed. Through the workshop window you could see the brightness of the candles, and he was crouched over the desk, with a long beard and dirty dark hair, making indecipherable calculations on his papers.

      The drawings that the author reproduces in the text date from this period. His name appears at the bottom and the handwriting agrees with the Milan archives, but please allow me reasonable doubt, without this representing underestimating his discovery.

      These are preparatory studies for a human figure. The curious thing is that behind the sketches there are a series of numbers and formulas, I suppose measurements for another definitive drawing or for an experimental model. Even more strange is that from the arms and legs of this figure, there are points drawn following the possible path to be followed by a moving man. All of this was only found after his death and were archived without anyone studying them. The undignified death of his wife perhaps encouraged oblivion, the necessary dose of indifference and derision that was common.

      Alicia continued to go in and out of convalescence. Nobody visited them anymore, the house looked too much like a hospital. She never heard them argue again since that night, but he treated her like someone caring for an animal that hates her. He protected her from danger, she granted her wishes, but her resentment was growing. Some nights he gave in to her requests and went to bed in the same room, because she said she was afraid of dying alone.

 

      One morning he left the workshop very early. He had worked all night, and he crossed the yard with slow steps, his clothes loose and sweaty on a slightly fatter, disheveled body with a graying beard. He walked with difficulty, dragging a doll towards the house. During the night he had heard his wife scream more than usual, and not even the arrival of the doctor with new doses of opium had been able to lessen his pain. Then Ansaldi decided it was time to start his project. Now that her child was ready, he would give it to her, to the almost unknown remains of the Alice of Trieste that he had loved in a time that was also now unrecognizable.

      He placed the doll, heavy, the size and shape of a man, with a skeletal and somewhat graceful figure, in front of the bed. Alicia couldn't contain her laughter, because the most curious thing was that the puppet's head looked like that of a child on the body of a man.

      "What is it made of?" She asked him, sitting up in bed for the first time in many weeks. Without answering him, he brought the oil lamp to the doll's back and poured the fuel. His baby-faced puppet began to move convulsively, then a little slower, until his legs moved harmoniously around the bed. His arms made clown gestures and his face contorted into grimaces that caused Alicia to laugh uncontrollably.

      "It's a beauty, a wonderful toy!" she said with renewed naivety.

      Ansaldi remained standing and silent. Maybe he thought he had achieved what he hoped for, or just the first step. We don't know if it was satisfaction or some hidden resentment. The truth is that the doll made of such a strange material caused her to prolong her life. The puppet danced to the rhythm of the clapping that Alicia clapped with enthusiasm, but also with weakness. Every day she begged him to bring the doll, and he poured the oil, not forgetting to see every morning that there was always some leftover in the tanks.

       He kicked the doctor out of his wife's room, while the doctor warned him that she wasn't going to live much more than a week. She spent those nights screaming in pain, anxiously waiting for the puppet to be brought to her in the morning. But the period that the servants had awaited with hope of relief was behind them.

      A month later, Alicia no longer enjoyed the doll thinking about the agony she would suffer in her absence, so she asked her husband to take it at night as well. She would then fall asleep watching the puppet spin around her.

      "What a dance, what a dance!" She asked every hour, and he continued to renew the oil with the tireless will of someone who expects something more.

 

      Two or three months passed after that week in which his death was expected.

      One night, Ansaldi had fallen asleep watching the movements of his child in Alicia's room, and he woke up startled by the crying of one of her old maids. He saw her two centimeters from her face, insulting him until she ended up spitting on his cheek.

      "Leave her alone, free her!" He heard her say as she ran away from the fury of her boss. He closed the door, and cursed under his breath at the woman. He heard the servant's footsteps as she walked away from the house along the paths of dry leaves, probably and looking for help. There was no more time, she knew.

      Alicia continued watching the movement of the doll, as if she were consuming opium through her eyes. As if in that child's head he saw something that her husband had forgotten to tell him.

      It must have been a night very similar to that one years ago, when the doctor came to take the deformed child that she had expelled in the bloody bed; when he also had to listen to the doctor's pathetic story about his wife's infamous illness, the scabby and purulent disease that entered through the sex, destroying what was generated. That's why it was inevitable that anger would arise again, the intolerable memory of knowing that that morning the doctor had taken away, with exquisite coldness, the corpse of the dead child who was her son.

     Then, sleep and the exhaustion of the hours spent awake in the last few months overcame him, even against the need to watch the doll so that it could continue revealing the stinging torture of his wife. In the fragile sleep into which she sank again, she perhaps thought of shovels and cemeteries, of the desperate fury with which she had had to dig in search of the skull of her son.

      The small head that would crown his creation.

      The puppet continued dancing while he dozed. Ansaldi could not see the doll wave her clumsy arms and stretch them toward Alicia, as if he wanted to caress her. She may have tried to hug him too, standing up a little to bring him closer to the bed. But Ansaldi continued sleeping.

      We only know with certainty that when he woke up, the doctor and the maid were there, screaming hysterically.

      "He killed her!" she said, pointing to the bed.

      Then he discovered that the creature had destroyed his plans. Alicia was now far from her fury, with half of her body off the bed, and the doll's hands, like three-fingered pincers, still closed over her neck.

 

 

 

THE DARK

 

When I got home, a group of kids came out carrying boxes of tempera paints and  drawing folders. It was an old house in the Quilmes neighborhood, with a balcony over the arch of the main door and a very short roof that shaded the porch.

 

The children walked away along the path, and on the threshold, extremely beautiful while the midday sun shone on her face with faint freckles, was Graciela, alone, looking at me as if distracted.

 

Then he seemed to remember why he had called me, and opened the door a little more.

The bell rang with each of his hesitant movements. "Are you the carpet layer?" she asked, shy.

 

-Yes, Miss. I come to take measurements.

 

He showed me into a small room, full of objects and furniture, with almost no free space or anything that at first glance seemed useless. But as I got used to the place, I discovered how many absurd decorations occupied spaces that would have screamed of desolation if they were empty.

 

Porcelain and tow dolls, ceramic plates and cups, plastic flowers, wooden and bronze antiques, glass animals.

 

We went up to the room on the top floor, which had the balcony in front. It was the only messy room.

 

-Until now I use it as a storage for work material.

 

-Are you a painter?

 

-Well, I am a drawing and painting teacher. But I want to decorate this room to put my paintings.

 

I tripped several times over wood, remains of frames, fabrics, paint cans. Next to the window, there were paintings leaning on the wall. Then I looked at her, illuminated by the midday sun, and her reddish hair looked like a flame about to go out. He couldn't have been more than thirty years old. She was wearing a blue summer solero, her hair tied in braids at the nape of her neck.

 

We talked for a while about a little bit of everything, he didn't talk too much, but little by little he overcame his distrust. I leaned back against the window frame with my arms crossed. I felt like kissing her.

 

"They are very pretty," I decided to tell him, looking at his paintings. "If you want, I can hang them as soon as the covering is ready."

 

"That's what I was going to ask you..." she said enthusiastically, and seemed happier than perhaps she had been in a long time.

 

The next day I brought the rugs. Graciela held the door open while I carried the rolls from the truck. This time her hair was down, and her red eyebrows shone in the morning sun. The same kids from the day before entered making a noise to which the house was already accustomed. A vital noise of voices that appeared and then disappeared at predetermined times.

 

I remember that that was the first time I realized that something was missing in the little room, some of the hundreds of objects were no longer there and made the decoration different, but it was impossible to specify which one, and I overlooked it. After his classes, he came up to accompany me.

 

-Do you need something, Ricardo?

 

-No, thanks.

 

"Yes, I'll make you a coffee," he insisted.

 

Graciela always found a new job to take on for me. Three weeks later, the carpets had been laid and the siding almost finished.

 

"Tell me how you want me to put the paintings," I then suggested.

 

He chose the location of each one, while I, standing on the ladder, supported them on the wall. She watched from afar how they looked. We worked on this one afternoon after another, and the lunches and coffees followed each other at a pace that neither of us dared to stop.

 

Only after hanging several paintings did I realize that a drawing was repeated in all of them.

 

-What do they mean? "I'm referring to these figures," I asked him.

 

He looked at what I was pointing out, hesitating before answering me.

 

-They are the Dark Ones. Beings from another world very far away. They come every night to visit me, and they told me that they watch us, they control us. In some way we live thanks to them. If they wanted to, they could kill us.

 

I thought it was a joke or some kind of artistic fantasy that he used as inspiration.

 

Three male shadows were repeated in each painting, with different backgrounds or landscapes, but always dark and indecipherable silhouettes of robust men walking in the center of the painting. In front was the main figure, behind and on the sides were followed by two other identical shadows.

 

"It's true," he continued telling me. "They visit me." You're the first person I've told this to, and they could kill me for it. So don't tell anyone, please.

 

The bell rang and his students interrupted us. During the hours he was downstairs teaching his classes, I couldn't stop thinking about what he had told me. I looked out the window, and saw two neighbors watching me from the sidewalk, murmuring.

 

I'm leaving early today, I thought, and I don't know if I'll come back.

 

Two days later, I found out that he had called me at the business to come finish the job.

 

I hoped with complete sincerity, and almost desperately, that he would tell me that it had all been a joke. But he wasn't that kind of person. Graciela always spoke seriously, with a confidence that bordered on petulance or extreme insecurity, I don't know.

 

"What are you going to do with that crazy woman?" my friends advised me when I told them. They were right. No matter how beautiful she was, I didn't need to complicate my life.

 

But I had to do my job. When I got back, we didn't talk for a while. It was Saturday, and she stayed in the kitchen, making noises with the plates and pots, banging things to show me her resentment. I responded in the same way, abruptly dropping the tools on the floor. Then he went up and looked at me from the door.

 

-The Dark Ones would be proud of the room I have prepared for them. I couldn't believe it myself, but I felt jealous.

-And they are better lovers than men?

 

He didn't answer me, but I didn't expect him to either. All those afternoons in which I was incubating an indefinite feeling, exploded into a fight that seemed to come from my pants and disturb my head until I went crazy. I went towards her, tripping over the ladder, got up and saw her laughing an angelic laugh. I hugged her and we kissed with the desperation of two beings who have been alone and incommunicado for a long time.

 

"That's what the Dark Ones are like," he told me the first morning we woke up together. "Shady and sterile beings, brutal too." They make you feel exhausted and hopeless. They're going to end the world, you know? I know it, even though they say they won't do it if we are obedient. They're going to kill me at the end of it all.

 

My God, I thought, how crazy this woman is. But I agreed with him and let him continue talking about them.

 

Graciela no longer painted, however the images she had captured of her visitors stuck in

 

my memory until I could no longer get rid of their influence. We took the bed to the new room. The mercury light entering through the window illuminated the walls covered by the paintings of the dark ones. Sometimes I wanted me to go sleep at my house.

 

"For the independence of each one," she said.

 

Those nights I would go with my friends and talk to them about all this.

 

-Listen, is it possible that I'm going crazy too?

 

I then told them that the first night I slept with her, someone had banged on the door several times with a deafening noise. When I looked out from the balcony, some shadows quickly disappeared along the sidewalk. They were gone so quickly that I wasn't sure if I had really seen them. But I did hear the footsteps receding, as if the shadows were wearing shoes.

 

"The Dark Ones, it's them, and they're jealous," I heard her say, curled up between the sheets, trembling with fear.

 

-I told you, that mine is going to make you end badly.-But I didn't want to listen to my friends anymore.

 

I went home thinking about those noises of shoes, and the click of a revolver that I had also heard and did not dare to confess to them.

 

Two months later, the room was finished. We didn't find much else to decorate it with, and that's when we realized how many objects were missing from the little room.

 

"They take them," he answered, pointing to the figures in the paintings, calmly and resignedly.

 

Our bed was finally in the center of the room, surrounded by his paintings, and the shadow of the Dark Ones. We entered that room like a tunnel in which we saw nothing but that place of confinement, similar to a temple prepared for our atonement or our condemnation.

 

One morning the television news announced that a train had hit a school bus at a level crossing, and two of its students were dead. She began to cry on the tablecloth, and while I stroked her hair, not knowing how to console her, she began to say that the

 

Dark ones had killed them.

 

That afternoon we went to the wake, and I saw her hug the boys' parents as desperately as if she had been responsible. We said goodbye with silent gestures of regret and despair. It was dark, and the coolness of the night relieved me from the heavy anguish of that place.

 

Graciela was trembling, and asked me to stay. She believed the Dark Ones were enraged.

 

That night I looked out on the balcony before we went to bed. The street light in front of the house had gone out, and the other one, half a block away, sent out a precarious luminosity. I heard approaching footsteps again, and three parallel shadows grew towards us. Graciela got up and stood behind me. I felt their nails digging into my shoulders as I watched them pass.

 

"They are going to kill me, they are going to take revenge for my happiness with you!" he said, crying.

 

The shadows turned their heads unrecognizable, they passed right in front of the balcony, but always protected by the darkness. Their tapping slowed for a few moments, and then they continued without stopping.

 

"Drunk," I said. "This neighborhood is getting worse and worse." And I tried to console her.

 

-You do not believe me?

 

"I think the police should monitor the neighborhood more," I answered simply.

 

By the end of our three months together, she was nervous and irritable. I didn't leave her alone for the last few weeks, and I think she came to hate me, even though she begged me every night not to leave. She continued to insist on her madness, without however losing her warm and naive beauty.

 

On the last day of November I had to do a job far from the city, and I told him I would sleep outside. But that morning Graciela had read the news of several women murdered in La Boca and thrown into the Riachuelo, and she insisted that the Dark Ones would come that night to look for her.

 

I didn't wait this time for him to continue talking and move me with his crying and his clear eyes.

 

"You're crazy!" I yelled at her without thinking, without realizing that I had never called her that before.

 

Then he closed the door without looking at me, as a farewell.

 

I spent the whole day reproaching myself for my attitude, and decided to go see her. I returned at three in the morning. A few meters from the entrance I saw two shadows fleeing towards the corner. I ran after that familiar clicking of heels, but I didn't catch up with them. I went to the house shouting Graciela's name.

 

She was in our room, sitting on the floor with her back against the bed, illuminated only by the light coming in from the street. His underwear was torn, dirty with saliva and cigarette ashes. Skin full of burns, and hair cut and sticky.

 

Groaning, with his left hand he formed the shape of a revolver pointed over his head.

 

-We will kill you, they told me, if you don't stay still we will kill you. They are jealous of you, dear... - He wiped the blood that fell from his nose and with his other hand he caressed my cheek.

 

At that moment I heard the click of a firing pin from the back of the room. Something was moving with very slow steps.

 

Only two men fled, I thought. The third was still there. Suddenly, before I could even get up, I felt a strong and soft impact at the same time, as only a man and his shadow could do simultaneously, knocking me to the ground next to the bed. The balcony window opened, and the mercury light moved from one side of the room to the other, interrupted by the fugitive shadow. Then he jumped off the balcony and the branches of the tree shook.

When I got up, I turned on the light. But I didn't focus for a long time on the room, the blood on the bed, Graciela's body, her torn and dirty black bra, nor on that desolate panorama so similar to that of her paintings, but on the great absence.

 

 

 

 

THE MINISTER OF HEALTH

 

Farías woke up with a start. His wife shook him by the shoulder. She saw his frowning face and his swollen body writhing in pain. A suffering especially concentrated in his belly, grown by pregnancy, peeking out from under the white sheets like a trembling mountain of dark earth. He did not expect it to happen that night, just the early morning before the day he would receive confirmation of the decree. For three weeks before, he had been waiting for the arrival of the paper with the presidential seal.

      He got dressed, stumbling over his pants, as his screams went through the house to call the guards. She could hardly move, the contractions were too frequent and painful. He covered her with a coat and carried her to the car. The two men from official custody were waiting with the doors open and the engine running, their eyes were sleepy and there was a smell of cigarettes on their wrinkled suits. It was five in the morning, they walked through the deserted streets towards the clinic.

      They took his wife on a stretcher through the sterile hallways of the building, under the white light of fluorescent tubes. They needed time to know if it was a false alarm or not, the doctors told him. He filled out the forms and made a few calls to the office.

      -Something new?

      -The same, Mr. Minister, the Secretary is coming today, surely.

      -Okay, I'll go as soon as he can.

      He went to the newsstand and looked impatiently for the same news that he had been waiting for three weeks. The press was already aware of the rumors about the decree, but he wanted to get rid of the responsibility of announcing it publicly. It was impossible for him to evade the call from Government House the previous afternoon, much less argue with that unbribable servant who did not even let him speak with the president.

      "Allow me to send my advisors to the President, the situation of the ministry is desperate and the decree is going to ruin us..." he had pleaded, without a response.

 

       At eight in the morning they told him that it had been a false alarm, but his wife needed to remain hospitalized. She went to the room to say goodbye to her.

      "Can't you stay a little longer?" she asked him.

      "I have a meeting," he answered, but he realized that in reality another type of concern was making him flee from there.

      That clinic reminded him of the time he went in, when he was twelve years old, to admit his father. The entire family was waiting in the hallway, near the door to the room. Even his paternal grandfather was there, although a little far away in the entrance hall, surrounded by government employees. Grandfather was an old man at that time, but he kept his political friends from his time as minister. The grandmother was the only one absent. She had never seen them together. They had been separated since their son was born, that strange child who came into the world with an inexplicable wound on his skin. A circular hole several centimeters in diameter, always hidden by clothing, growing persistently over the years.

      "That old man is to blame..." her grandmother said every time she referred to her ex-husband.

      The boy, however, later married and had his own son, if only to give the grandfather a political heir.

 

      Farías ordered one of the guards to stay at the clinic, and the other took him to the Ministry. In the parking lot, his spot was occupied by journalists. The lights came on and cameras surrounded the car.

      "As soon as I have confirmation, I will let you know, gentlemen... please allow me to pass," he told them through the open window.

      Every morning he had to say the same thing, and the reporters wrote it down in his notebook like the first time. Someone hit him on the lower lip with a microphone as he got out of the car, and he felt a trickle of blood on his chin. In the midst of the bustle he made clumsy attempts to make his way to the elevator. He closed the door and a new silence appeared that demanded nothing from him other than immobility and more silence. The blood tickled his trimmed beard. The brief and illogical image of the wound on his father's skin came to mind.

      Upon reaching his office floor, he continued walking along the corridor of the old building so many times saved from demolition. The office was at the end of the hallway, where the moldy ceilings and peeling paint gave a peculiarly sad look to the afternoons, and made him think of those years when Grandfather occupied it. His father had rarely visited the place, and the times he did it was at dusk, to see the sun setting over the damp walls.

      The day the grandfather, who had outlived his own son by almost twenty years, welcomed his grandson to the official match, he stood up from his chair, corpulent, already gray-haired and somewhat bald, and placed one of his immense hands on his shoulders. Then he spoke to him:

      -Your grandmother always He has accused me of your father's death. But am I to blame for what I have been condemned to do since I was born? This way of life that she doesn't like is permeated here.-And she brought one of her hands to a point lower on her chest.

      There was no remorse in her words, but an absolute certainty in duty and its inevitability. Perhaps she was referring to that time when he had been forced to close almost half of the public hospitals, and social works had gone bankrupt. It was only six months, only half a year in which the situation in the country had to be readjusted, but for grandfather it was a political condemnation, and also the beginning of his atonement. Because after that time, opponents and reporters harassed him until they almost drove him to suicide. That same year, his wife gave birth prematurely, and when she saw the child's shapeless wound, she abandoned her husband forever.

 

      Farías could still smell the aroma of the cigarette from the day before, enclosed in the office by the oak paneling, the wooden door and the faded glass. While she was cleaning her injured lip in the bathroom, the phone rang.

      -The Presidential Secretary has arrived, Mr. Minister.

      He did not answer. The voice repeated the message. He asked her to come in and hung up. He was surprised by his clumsiness, so far from his usual calm, from the security that he had put him in that position so young, always doing what his grandfather had taught him. But now something was wrong, as if that place were a concession, a favor.

      -Good morning Doctor. "Here I bring you confirmation of the decree," the Secretary told him.

      -Mr. Secretary, with all due respect I inform you of my disagreement....

      The man heard him but did not seem to pay attention.

      -Doctor, you know that the tragedy of the pilgrimage last summer put the president in a less than accommodating mood. Dissent always abounds, but obedience does not.

      Farías nodded without responding. When the other left, almost immediately the screams in the street began to increase. From the window he saw the protesters in front of the main door, carrying signs against the decree. There were thin women, with high-pitched, strident voices, showing the unmistakable signs of the disease. He recognized some renowned journalists who were looking for the group's spokespersons. There were more than a hundred people preventing entry and exit from the building. They spun in circles with their signs held high, simple, passive people going about their daily lives, who now moved clumsily. Above them all was the clear, indifferent, impartial sky of Friday morning.

      Just on a Friday, he thought, the whole weekend ahead to think. Grandfather said that it was not like the family to doubt so much. His father, on the other hand, had always carefully reflected on each act, to the point of inaction. Perhaps he thought only and nothing more than his wound, growing with the years, brought from an uncertain place of inheritance.

      "With that hole in the body you don't get anywhere," his grandfather had said when his son was born, according to what his grandmother always said.

      Farías remembered his father like that, submissive, subordinate to the old man's wishes, and still very young when he died. The grandmother had died more than thirty years later, and with her went her reproaches as well. The old man perhaps began to feel guilty only then, when there was no longer anyone who could accuse him. As if at that moment the ghosts of those six months appeared in which dozens of sick people wrote obscene legends on the walls of his house, threatening him and destroying his property.

    

      It was one in the afternoon. He called the clinic.

      -There is still no news, Mr. Minister, her wife is resting.

      Then he ordered the secretary to prepare the press conference for seven. He had no desire to do anything until that hour, so he put his head in his arms, pushing aside the row of pending documents, and leaned back on the desk. Biting his wounded lip, he remembered the last day he saw his father.

       He had smelled the smell of the bandages, an aroma of putrefaction, even before entering the room.

      "Come closer," he had told her, covering his body with the sheets.

       He looked extremely thin. The dark mustaches stood out too much on his haggard face. He asked her to rest her head on his frizzy chest. The smell was nauseating, but little Farías made an effort to hold on, he didn't want to move away.

      His father did not speak, she only held him against his body until his last moan.

 

      The secretary's voice startled him.

      "I will not receive anyone until the conference," she replied firmly.

      They called him several more times, but he only paid attention to the screams of the people who continued demonstrating in the streets. He fell asleep again. When he woke up, there were two secretaries next to him.

      -Doctor Farías, how do you feel?

      -Remember your quote with the press.

      She looked at the clock. It was six o'clock in the afternoon. She went to the bathroom after ordering everything to be prepared to leave. In the mirror he saw himself pale, disheveled and with his shirt wrinkled. Like every time he changed his clothes, the image of his father's wound returned to his memory and he no longer wanted to leave it.

      When he reached the conference room, the lights hurt his sleepy eyes. Then he saw, behind the spotlights, the shadows of the journalists with their arms raised waiting for his turn to ask a question. He had no idea what he was going to say. All the years that had led him to that moment seemed to him like a succession of moments that he had never controlled, like the fall of a waterfall, or perhaps the desperate repetition of human genes. And without understanding where it could have come from, he felt in the air of that room full of tobacco smoke, a familiar and old smell, an ancestral aroma of decomposed bodies.

      -Gentlemen, I have the unpleasant task... - I don't want to say it, for God's sake, I don't want to do it or I will condemn myself- ...of announcing to you the decree that the President has signed today. Through this legal instrument, and for budgetary reasons, the delivery of medications is suspended for an indefinite period of time.

      He stood up without waiting for the audience's response. Someone held him by the arm, they whispered in his ear that they had called him from the clinic.

      Groups of angry protesters were waiting for him in the parking lot. The security men helped him make his way to the car. Farías did not want to wait for the driver, and he took off as fast as he could, but he was shaking, and it was difficult for him to keep his foot firmly on the accelerator. As he ascended the ramp toward the street, he heard the last screams and the hitting of stones against the car's sheet metal.

      When he arrived at the clinic, the custodian met him at the door. They walked down the halls to the maternity ward. A doctor stopped them.

      -Mr Minister, there is something you should know before...

      But he didn't pay attention, and he continued until he stopped in front of the nursery. The children rested in their white cribs, arranged in a row like numbered objects. The doctor pointed to a solitary incubator at the back of the room, where a baby, too quiet next to the vital cries of the other children, was surrounded by wires and probes. The small body lacked skin, and the intestines glistened, like restless vipers.

 

 

 

 

THE ELECTRIC DOVE

 

Dad and I saw the last flock of pigeons one summer day many years ago. I cannot forget it because at that moment, I would learn later, their destiny was decided, if not the end of each one was not already written from the beginning of the world. We drove to the outskirts of the city on the northwest highway, toward fields that are flooded most of the year, except in summer. The roads were almost useless and only mud was walked on. We had tried to sell that land to no avail, and now Dad was going to try again.

      We parked several meters from the neighboring forest, which this time seemed more lush and impenetrable; In the previous winter it had rained as much as it had in the last five years. The mud road continued until there and we stopped the car. We nailed the for sale sign into the soft earth. I started splashing in the puddles, I was still ten years old, and I remember my father's smile when he looked at me. When he started the engine to leave, we saw the pigeons get scared out of the forest, flying until they were out of sight to the north.

      "There are few left," he said, and he told me the countless amount that could be seen just ten years before.

      At that moment his idea must have been born, although I think he only became aware of it when reading the article in the newspaper a year later, where they announced that the last hundred pigeons had become extinct. Then we looked at each other, and I thought that rarely something unites men as much as the common memories that arrive at the exact moment.

       Dad worked selling tools, and he used to keep samples for his own workshop. When he was newly married, he had begun to invent things by imitating well-known objects, lamps or frames for wall clocks. Years later, he had already managed to give movement to his work, and so he manufactured washing machines, clock machines for their hitherto inert frames, fans and many other things. It's not that we didn't have any of this, but that he took apart the purchased ones, put the remains in the basement and replaced them with his own. At first they were untidy, but some time later he had learned to polish the exterior of each device, and then my mother and I could not find any difference.

      Later he began to build his own ideas. First he would draw them on any piece of paper, sometimes while we were having dinner, setting aside a napkin to write with the pencil that he always carried with him. I don't know how many times I saw that pencil emerge from a shirt pocket, bulging with keys, cigarettes or folded papers. I remember the unmistakable act of her right hand groping his chest, while his gaze remained fixed on the blank paper.

      My mother sometimes argued with him, because she didn't understand all that well. Tools piled up in the warehouse unsold, and the things he built were useless after a while. But finally he no longer needed to convince her; One day she found herself surrounded by strange objects, some useless but fascinating in their originality. From that day on, I discovered in my mother a new look, like the one women have when they recognize something that surprises them.

      One afternoon when I returned from school, I heard noises from the shed, and upon entering the yard I saw my father dragging a sheet of metal. Many more were leaning on the wall. He said he had bought them for a new project, but he didn't tell me which one; I think he considered himself unable to accurately describe to me the image he had in mind. It was like distorting her if he tried to put her into words. That's why I sat next to him, in the chair in which I had sat since my early years to watch him work, and he asked me to hand him the tools that were hanging on the walls of the workshop. There were also objects scattered on the floor, shapeless things or half-made inventions, which he liked to call temporary failures.

      Many in his family had invented things. He said that we Ansaldis came from a family of inventors, that his grandfather's grandfather had created the first known automaton. So I imagined those times, while he watched him cut the thin sheets of steel, shiny and warmed by the afternoon sun. Each one was four meters on a side, and he reduced them to thirty-centimeter fragments. His face was behind the metal mask, sparks from the chainsaw flying around. Then I heard Brown barking, and Mom called us to dinner.

      The next day, he dedicated himself to more delicate work. He unrolled the plans and placed them on the desk. I tried to get closer several times, but he asked me for one tool after another and I kept coming and going from the shed. When after a few hours the tiny motor was ready, I approached the desk. There was, finally, the dove and

electrical.

 

      The afternoon of the first flight, five months later, Dad looked nervous. He had built twenty-five doves. I had the opportunity to hold them between my fingers when they were still lifeless, and I was also the first to press the remote control to give it to them. Then, one afternoon I don't know how long after we saw the pigeons from the last flock, we flew the first group of electric pigeons. We placed them on the muddy ground of our fields, a few centimeters from each other and walked away to the car, where mom was waiting for us. When I turned around, they had already taken flight, spinning in a wide circle. They were more beautiful than we had imagined. My mother had polished the silver-colored metal. When one day she entered the workshop and saw them for the first time, she stood still and we feared her disapproval, but she only said that they were ugly and opaque. A day later we found out that she had cleaned them during the night.

      With the scope we checked the movement of their wings, just an aesthetic artifice that had nothing to do with their functioning, but made them more beautiful. In the place of the eyes we place glass bottles of various colors. We were sitting on the trunk of the car, watching them, and I noticed that Dad was not as happy as he had been a few minutes before.

      "We replaced them," I said enthusiastically.

      -No- he answered me.- We created something different, just a curious object.

      We were in the place for two hours. Many people had approached from the road, and at their request we made the pigeons fly over the forest, the most dangerous place due to the height of the trees. The engines overheated, collided with branches and fell with a hollow sound between the trunks.

       On the return trip, Dad talked only about his failure. But at night, while we were having dinner, he started talking about new ideas to improve the pigeons, and we resigned ourselves to the certainty that until this problem was solved, he would not feel calm. A blindfold seemed to cover his eyes every time he projected something, and he moved away like a frightened animal to settle in the shadows. When he returned from those dark places in his mind and paid attention to us again, a part of him had disappeared, a gesture, an attitude or a word that he never used again. He was one of those men who spend their lives, in plain sight, doing nothing but surviving. But there was another man inside him, or many others, very similar to pain or sadness, I'm not sure.

 

      A week after the first flight, he started working on a big engine, and I realized it was the one in our car. Outside was the skeleton of the car, and I couldn't think of any other word than “dead” to name it. Brown had sat next to me, howling just like he did when my grandfather died and we couldn't get him away from the side of the bed.

      At night, I heard my parents arguing. He said that the car thing was temporary, a simple test for his project. I know mom was tired; My father was losing more and more clients and the money he earned was insufficient. That was when I sensed that he was planning something much more important, because despite so much daydreaming he had always had his practical limits, and this letting go of everything little by little seemed like a sign of irreversible departure.

      The engine was only a model of the first of the three machines. He built them all with spare parts that he was getting from old co-workers. His previous inventions had always been a transformation of other objects, but this time he had created something new, just as one imagines God made the world.

      One morning I entered the shed and saw the engines almost finished. He had that beautiful smile that since then I never dared to forget. It was that of a man who has united all the inner men of him into one. The clear sky let light in through the open gate, coloring the air in which particles of dust and sawdust danced. Dad washed his hands and we went to town to look for new steel sheets. They had cut us off, but Mom didn't even seem worried now. Time had brought us into balance, I think. Like a triangle, like a number three.

      My father was a genius, people said so when his work was finished. Neighbors, former customers and friends came to visit us to see the machines. The attractive thing was the exterior of the giant pigeons. Three birds fifty times the size of a normal one, enough to carry the size and weight of a man. The metal sheets were light but resistant, made with an alloy that had just come onto the market and had wiped out our savings. The only solution, we were advised, was to register the invention, and we have no doubt of success.

      "Imagine the day..." Dad said to his friends, while he caressed the shiny metal of the pigeons. -…in which each one or can go from one place to another without being limited to a single geometric plane. The earth's surface will be freed from so much chaos.

      The machines were short, no more than three meters, and that gave them the appearance of fat beings, like the old airships. That night, while we were having dinner, I knew that his obsession had finally been erased, because the objective was specified in those devices in the patio of the house. It was as if he took off the blindfold that covered his eyes and looked at us carefully after a long time.

      Then, like an omen, that same night we lost Brown. We heard him barking from outside, but we never opened it until we finished dinner. Half an hour later he was no longer barking, and we heard a car stop loudly on the street. When we came out, we saw the body covered in blood, and with two final moans it expired. The driver offered us apologies that we did not know how to respond to. While we were burying Brown, Dad lost his enthusiasm and said that he never gets to the place we choose undefeated, if we ever go there. All I could think about was what a strange, unknown world this would be without my dog.

 

      We rented the airfield for an afternoon with the money they had lent us. We loaded one of the machines onto the truck and drove there. There was a group of ten or fifteen people, including friends and curious people. Dad was wearing the outfit that Mom had made him for that occasion, a festive and classic design. High boots and wide pants, a leather jacket, a silk scarf and a black hat. Then, he put on his goggles and got on the plane.

      I took photos from all possible angles. I felt like he couldn't stop me, that he needed to delay the exit somehow. Mom's arm pulled me away from the track, and she whispered in my ear that we had to let him go. The pigeon made almost no noise, just a soft sound as it circled the track. It was funny how short and bulky his figure was, his head held high, just in front of the cockpit. Dad smiled and waved at us as he took flight.

      Maybe my old man was also a bird at that time. He looked small in height, silent on his way to the blinding point of the sun. He passed over us, and turned again two or three times. I watched him through the lens and caught him laughing as he seemed to contemplate the sky around him. I thought about the unexpected and rare moments in which we are like gods, in which men are gods because they laugh.

      Fifteen minutes later, we saw the column of smoke coming from the engine. A black stripe wrapped around the dove, hiding it. When he emerged from the dark cloud, he was falling to earth. Dad tried to glide, the wings began to move uselessly. He didn't want to look anymore, although he could have done so many times before the end. It is strange how time is prolonged at the last second, it is curious the cruelty, or perhaps the mercy, with which time delays the announced death. He fell into some unpopulated fields, very similar to the fields where we saw the last pigeons almost two years before. What was left of my father's body had to wait in the funeral home for the burial the next day.

      We returned home and mom went to bed crying. I was never good at comforting, Dad was. I am half of what he was.

      I went out to the patio, where the other two pigeons were waiting, the ones he had designed for mom and me. I stroked them, trembling, and the metal gave me chills. The world that awaited me suddenly appeared to me as rigid and frozen as the material of those machines. So similar to the one in which I now live, that it does not seem strange to me to think, sometimes, that children are also prophets.

 

 

 

 

THE INTERMEDIATE BEINGS

 

He had practiced medicine for a long time, and his name had reached every town. But when he could no longer go to all the places where he was called, he began to send his students. They had become as wise as his teacher, and they dispersed to practice his art, founding hospital temples throughout the world until then explored.

      If they asked him about his origin, he responded that he had never met his real parents. The gods abandoned him in the care of a human couple. He then had the centaur Chiron as his teacher, to whom he owed his wisdom.

      As a child he would go to the lake to wait for him, even before dawn. And as the darkness and fog cleared, Chiron appeared crossing the waters from the opposite shore. The townspeople thought that he did not live alone, but no one could ever find out with whom. He spent his life in the forests, searching for medicinal plants. There was no man or animal at that time that knew better the diseases or the remedies that the forest held.

      They saw each other for the first time one morning when the centaur was walking through the meadows around the lake. Like all beings intermediate between gods and men, Chiron was easily angered when a human dared to speak to him without first being granted the floor. But when he saw the young man, timid, looking anxiously at him among the trees, he allowed him to approach. The boy began to tell what his parents had told him about his ancestors. Although at first he was incredulous, the centaur realized that the young man was different from other humans. His vulgar habits dazzled him, but they were an inevitable part of his coexistence with men. From that day he decided to take him as an apprentice and teach him the secrets of medicine.

      The boy arrived early at the lake beach to review the lessons of the previous day. His master emerged from the fog with her human torso uncovered, her hair curled on her back and chest, thick and confused with the equine fur, intensely black, always wet. He noticed that Chiron looked at him with pity when he saw him so thin and barefoot, with that dirty white tunic that his mother had made for him. But as he strove to learn, he felt that he was gaining her affection.

       The centaur made him spend more and more time at his side, and he moved away from his father's house almost without realizing it. Each year he lived there less time, sometimes only during the summer, until one day his parents died and he found himself facing their rigid bodies. Ordinary and unrecognizable beings like the corpses he found while walking in the forests.

      Then he went out into the field to dig the graves, and as he did so, he looked at the cultivated and now lonely land around him. He had the feeling that this place no longer belonged to him, a place that he had moved away from and that he no longer loved. He wrapped the bodies in their shrouds, and buried them, returning the excavated earth to the graves. He wasn't sure if it was his duty to cry for him.

      He left the field and returned to the lake. The thought that his parents' illness could perhaps have been cured tormented him all the way. Chiron had once told him that life had its natural course. Nothing was capable of preventing the progressive deterioration. It was only necessary to cure the evils that kept her from that path, those that stopped human tasks or led to early death. When he met with his teacher he told her what had happened, and Chiron agreed that he should bury them away from the lake.

      "They are rot," he told her. "In life they fed you, but nothing else they did."

      He believed in his teacher and put aside the memory of his parents.

 

      Years later he became tall, a reddish beard covered his face with a reflective look. He was gaining renown among humans, and Chiron seemed to feel satisfied. The teacher still did not reveal anything to him about his life, so he asked in each house he visited. They told him that centuries before Chiron had been the favorite of the gods, but then he had turned away from them to remain alone in the forest. Everyone thought it must be impossible for him to endure loneliness, and pride in his past was growing in him again. But I already knew this, in recent times it was easy to see the sudden change in his mood, as if an indefinable impatience was dominating him.

       Chiron questioned him about his progress, but above all he wanted to know if men were grateful to the gods. On rare occasions he spoke to her about when he was part of Olympus and had known divine favors. He bent his torso to get closer to the ear of his student, and with his hair standing on end, he told libidinous stories. Then, his gaze seemed to get lost in the memory, and he remained silent until the arrival of night.

 

      He was now a man who had entered the second half of his life, and was teaching his own students. One day I will talk to him n of a man whose existence was not assured with certainty, but who many claimed to have seen. He went to the island where he supposedly lived, because if it was true, he was an exceptional being. He also had to cross several mountains, from whose height he could see the sea and the continental coast from which he had started.

      The man he was looking for appeared to him from behind a tree, almost naked except for a dark cloth wrapped around his skinny pelvis, with the pointed bones that seemed to want to escape from his body.

      "What are you looking for?" He asked her, with a weak voice, similar to the breeze that swept the mountain.

      They talked until nightfall and throughout the next day, and before leaving, he felt a taste in his mouth and nose, a strange smell, like the sensation of talking to a dead person. Because someone over three hundred years old had to have come back from the dead to justify his presence. But it was not like that. The old man told events that had happened a long time ago, anecdotes that no one else could know if they had not witnessed them. He had done all kinds of jobs, raised a family of ten children and outlived them and their descendants. His skin was deeply tanned, the soles of his feet hard as rocks. When the master's hands felt that thrice-century-old body, he found nothing wrong with the old man, only slight pains that were to be expected at his age. Then they said goodbye, while the scorching sun continued to shine on the unprotected peak.

      Upon leaving the island, he thought of the words that the old man had told him when he wanted to know how to survive the mortal fatigue of daily work, the daily illnesses, so frequent that it was impossible to expel them, like unwanted visitors stronger than us. The old man did not know how to answer him, he just let himself be carried away, he told him, by the unknown impulse of life.

      That's why he was going to ask Chiron.

      When the centaur heard all this, he began to run and buck up and down the beach, furious. He had never seen him like this, even less so in recent times, immersed in a state of intimate melancholy. He took cover among the plants while he heard him shout in the language of the centaurs. Then Chiron stood before him, still agitated, shouting angrily that the old man's life was inconceivable. Just as he had once told her that it was his duty to combat the evils that diverted life from its natural course, it was also essential to do so with those that prolonged it unnecessarily.

      "It is forbidden for men to imitate the immortals," he finally said.

      The young man had learned this when his parents died, but now he realized what had worried him ever since: the idea that they could still be alive if he had taken care of them with his knowledge. But nothing could be done now, and it was painful for him.

      He spoke to Chiron as he had never dared to before.

      -If it is evil to approach immortality, it is also evil for the demigods. You are not gods, nor men, nor animals, but a part of each.

      Chiron heard the challenge of his disciple, but answered nothing. He turned to return to the lake, and sank into the waters towards the dark edge of the forest.

 

      The intermediate beings were becoming extinct. Men no longer had confidence in divine power either. They were different times than the golden age. He knew that despite the benefits of his art, men had stopped worshiping the gods. They lived attentively to their own lives, and isolated themselves with their families after being cured. They were grateful to him and his students, but they rarely went to the temples.

      Some time later, during which he did not see Chiron again, he was called from the old man's island. The messengers told him that the old man was very sick and they sent for him. When he arrived, he found him with a wound in his chest.

       "My soul is leaving through this hole in my body," the old man moaned when he arrived. He rested his head on his arm and said that Chiron had hurt him. Because of the loyalty that united the doctor with the centaur, he had wanted to tell him himself.

      Chiron climbed the mountain one night, with his back covered in sweat and a look of hatred. He had reared up on his hind legs, rampaging and screaming with an unmistakable air of heightened anger. He then took out a dagger that he had strapped to his back, and threw it at the old man. The old man claimed to have felt no pain at first, while he saw the centaur's desolate expression, and hearing him say, before leaving, that no one could challenge the immortals.

      "He seems to have a desperate need to regain divine favor," said the old man, just before dying.

      Although he tried to heal the wound, with all the methods he knew, that body, despite its countless years, had also turned out to be mortal.

  

      He let his assistants take care of the old man. and returned to the valley. It was getting dark, and she went straight towards the forest where the centaur lived. The fog had become dense in the middle of the lake, but he continued paddling without trembling until he reached the other shore. He had never been there. The forest seemed more impenetrable when the moon set. There were twinkling eyes in the shadows, a cold breeze moved the leaves and brushed his neck. Looking up at the moon, he could see it filtering through the high branches.

       Shortly afterward he discovered the hut. It seemed strange to him that Chiron lived in a human construction, where one could see bait light and smell the aroma of recent food. Approaching cautiously, he looked out of one of the windows.

      He didn't have time to wonder what he was seeing before he felt the centaur's arms around his neck. He thought he lost consciousness for a moment, but he was immediately freed. Chiron did not scream or seem enraged. He only fixed his condemning gaze on him, asking why he was in his domain without his permission.

      The teacher told him harshly that the old man had died. Then the centaur, as his only response, looked towards the window, and once again the old expression of sadness darkened his face. His front legs began to limp, and his human torso bent over the equine body. His tail was hidden between his haunches, his hair shining in the moonlight.

      -I did everything to please the Gods, but they have not returned me to the one I wanted most.

      His voice dissolved like the wind against the trees. He made his disciple sit on a rock, and began to talk to her about his lover, about her beauty, about how she, in distant times, accompanied him in the forest looking for spices. Between them they had cured the diseases of lower beings. The gods had been pleased to see themselves more worshiped by humans. But it was at that time that they found a strange substance in the sap of old extinct trees in other forests, which had a reversible effect on death. He had brought some men back to life. When the gods found out, they destroyed the ancient trees and killed his lover to punish Chiron's defiance. They drowned her in the lake, from where he rescued her body.

      And even then he could do nothing but continue to defy them.

      "They took her life," said Chiron. "But I interrupted the process of her death."

      For days he tried to revive her, and when she finally began to move, her body stopped to repeat the same gestures over and over again. But she had learned nothing new since that day, something different that at least offered him the feeling that everything was not over. This was the only thing Chiron was still waiting for.

      The old centaur entered the hut. He looked out the window one last time, and saw the corpse of a human, eaten away by insects buzzing around her, carrying in her bone hands a platter of fresh fruits for Chiron.

 

 

 

 

MARA IN THE SQUARE

 

Mara opens the window. She sees her son run behind the bus for three blocks, almost at the same pace because downtown traffic and traffic lights delay leaving the city.

      She is smoking, nervous. The woman next to her watches her with a searching gaze. She turns to avoid her. She sees the boy again, who is now falling behind on the road. He's finally behind her, and Mara is relieved.

      Her problems always follow her, she thinks, while the faster she escapes from them, they search for her until they reach her. That's how it had happened when she met Nicolás. One day she found out that she was pregnant, and she didn't want that, she hated the fact of being tied to someone for the rest of her life. She was going to leave her boyfriend soon. The problem was the baby, and everyone had found out. Her family had begun to watch her day and night, while she continued to think, undecided, about what to do.

      "I know a doctor..." a friend had told her. "If you don't hurry, it's going to be too late." And Mara went to see him.

      When she arrived at that house on the outskirts of the city, she was afraid. It was a low house, with tiles on the eaves covering the unpainted wooden door, with a garden full of old things.

      The doctor opened the door.

      -You are Mara, right? They gave me your message. Happens.

      She had a beard, her hair was a little long, and her hands—My God, she thought when she saw them—had small spots of dried blood.

      Two more girls were waiting in a small room. She sat next to them, but they didn't even look at her. The ceiling leaked in the corners, and photos of landscapes hung on the walls, already yellowed and torn. In the air there was a smell of medicines, alcohol and ferments. The scent of blood, Mara knew it. Although if she escaped now, her future was not going to be better. In that way she tried to console herself, gathering strength to stay with the other poor fools who had made the same mistake. She at least she wasn't alone.

      The man appeared again from the back room accompanying another girl, who came out with her hands on her lower abdomen and an expression of pain in her eyes. Then she came in next.

      Mara waited almost two hours, and she would not remember afterwards how she had been able to endure all that time. On one occasion she got up and went to the door, she tried to open it but it was locked. She heard a soft little scream coming from the room.

      I'll be able to endure it, she told herself, I'm braver than the others.

      Then it was her turn to enter. The room was simple. A tall stretcher, like her mother's gynecologist's, but old, with rusty iron and loose screws. She lay down and spread her legs.

      "It's going to be a little more painful for you, you're almost two months old, but don't worry," the doctor told her while he placed his bare hands on her.

      She felt the cold of the instruments. A cold that reached her bones, brutal, fast. Then, a slight fainting that relieved the pain. That was the first time she had that dream that would no longer abandon her. She saw a merry-go-round turning very slowly, as if it were having a hard time starting, in the middle of an empty square surrounded by mist.

      When she woke up, the man's dark face was next to her.

      "That's it," she told him.

      Mara stood up with her help, and a torrent of blood seemed to suddenly fall from his head to her feet. But she was dry. She put on her pants and went out. Her hands brushed his fingers as she gave him the money. She had touched many objects in that house, but those fingers of hers were the only thing that made her nauseous.

    

      Mara checks her hands. Her right hand holds the almost unlit cigarette, the other is covered by a wool glove. Almost six years have passed, she thinks, as she looks out the window at the poor houses on the side of the road. Places similar to the one she had gone to get rid of her son.

      And two hours after leaving that house, she had gone to bed in her room.

      "I'm not well, mom," she said when she returned. But she didn't want anyone to come in to see her, not even José, who had returned several times during the afternoon asking about her.

      Her heat suffocated her. If she raised her head a little, the vertigo would plunge her into the abyss opened next to her bed. She looked at her pale hands, almost bloodless, and suddenly she discovered that her body was deformed, swollen as if ready to burst. She was dying, she knew it, and she screamed.

      She had to stay three weeks in the hospital, in the midst of a fever that she did not want to give up and enduring injections every day. Shadows passed around her, she heard the whispers of her family commenting that the police had asked questions. In her dreams, Mara remembered Minister Farías' speech on television condemning abortions. But she was free of all that now, she sensed it, because something continued to grow inside her. That same nightmare, that of the merry-go-round that went round and round until it made it dizzy, among the mist of the square available eroding little by little. No one lived, however, in that place of his dream.

      Nicolás was next to her in her room, holding her hand while she, asleep, hummed the melody of the merry-go-round.

      "Go away, I don't want to see you, it's your fault," she told him when he woke up. But he didn't leave.

      When he took her home, he saw a parade right in front of the door. They had everything prepared. The wedding was going to be a month later, and she had to give a surname to the child, who after all had managed to survive.

 

      -Does she feel okay? -Asks the woman next to her. -She is so distracted that she is going to forget to get off in her town.

      "Don't worry," she answers.

      The driver announces the arrival in Junín. Mara grabs his suitcase and descends into the mud of the bus station. The sun has already risen after the overnight rain.

      She remembers Javier running after the microphone. Enough, it is said, now I am free. The boy had tied her tightly, after all, and that's why she hates him. And he also saw her, he had been able to see it hundreds of times in those small, dark eyes like her father's. Every time he hugged her, it was like he put chains around her neck.

      The city seems calm. Few cars, low buildings on wide sidewalks. In the distance you can hear the clatter of the train; The aroma of the nearby field, full of eucalyptus trees, produces a delicious burning sensation in your nose.

      She takes a deep breath and prepares to look for the hair salon she is going to hire her for.

      "Do you know this place?" She asks someone on the street, showing the paper with the address. An old woman shows him the place. The woman's voice sticks to his ears like a promise of unconditional well-being. She feels like another, a stranger without ties or past, in the middle of that sleepy afternoon. The sun falls on the warehouses and the square. Mara hears a tinkling, just like in her dreams.

      She now knows that in the nearby square there is a merry-go-round, and she must avoid it. For the past four years her dream had worried her. The merry-go-round had acquired increasingly perfect details. The figures of horses and seahorses with their own peculiar distinction of shapes and colors, rising and falling to the rhythm of the tinkling, out-of-tune music, spinning in the void. But there were never children in the buggy of her nightmares.

      That's why she never wanted to take Javier to the amusement park.

      "No!" She told him, and ended the discussion with a slap on the boy's cheek. He didn't cry. On the face reddened by the blow, a hatred seemed to grow that relieved her of the old guilt.

    

      Bad luck, she thinks. The hairdresser is facing the square. The music enters with her when she opens the door.

      -Good morning- she greets.- I spoke with you from Buenos Aires.

      -Yes, I remember- the owner answers in a slightly effeminate tone.- Sit down, we'll talk in a little while.- And he continues serving a client.

      The place is nice, she thinks. She looks at the mirrors, artificial plants, and toiletries on the shelves. I'm going to be happy here for a while, if I don't get tired before, she insists on convincing herself. She looks askance at the street, at the square that she hides, between benches and trees, the object of the dream.

      "My clients like blonde girls with well-groomed hair," her boss tells her a while later. "So I'm going to dye you a little, if you allow me."

      -No problem, I like to change.

      The next day she stands at the door of the hair salon, with her new color in straight hair, gathered in a braid over her right shoulder, and a white apron with the label “Coiffeur”. She feels happy, and since it is morning she doesn't even remember that there is a carousel in the square. The children go to school, but she pays no attention to them when she sees them walking down the sidewalk. She intentionally avoids looking at them.

      Javier's father took him to kindergarten, but one time she had to go look for him. The bustle of the children and her mothers made her dizzy. She couldn't help it, it was her body that rejected those things. That day she took Javier by the hand and took him away abruptly, to leave school as soon as possible. She hated the disqualifying looks of the other mothers.

      Now, however, women like those—those perfect mothers—leave the kids in the square and go in to comb their hair. She must attend to them without misgivings, listen to their conversations about diapers and school problems without flinching.

      "Do you have boys?" They ask her, and she feels threatened. But an old woman saves her from answering.

      -What is she going to have if she is still a girl! -Mara smiles angelically, as if her thoughts had never existed.

      Listening to them hour after hour, seeing her happy eyes in the midst of everyday disappointment, she feels like they blame her. They know it, I'm sure. Women guess everything about each other. It makes her want to cut their hair to the roots, ruin the heads of those conceited ones for a while, but she restrains herself. Nonsense like that was l so many problems they have caused him.

      When the door opens, she hears the music of the merry-go-round.

      -Mom, give me money!- the boys shout, as they run into the living room. The women look for coins in their purses and laugh.

      "Don't spend on candy," they yell at them when they leave.

      They leave the door open. The music continues to make Mara's ears hurt. She remembers her dream. She tries to imagine a carousel full of children. Perhaps thus formed, complete, the image would disappear. But she can't. She turns to look outside.

      Noon has already passed. The afternoon sun shines splendidly. She follows with her eyes the races of the children crossing the street beyond the bushes. She only sees the roof of the carousel. She knows that that afternoon she will go to the plaza.

 

      At seven thirty she says goodbye and leaves the hair salon. She crosses the street. The lantern lights have turned on, illuminating the games and candy carts. People walk with their children and walk under the crepe paper garlands. The music is loud from the loudspeakers. Street vendors shout their offers.

      Mara sits on a bench, startled by her bravery, perhaps amazed that she doesn't feel the typical nausea. The carousel starts. It is full of happy children running on and around the almost eternal spinning wheel. All eager to steal the ring from the man who holds it like a priceless treasure in weak hands.

      The afternoon light has already given way to the artificial and sparkling luminosity of the merry-go-round. This is what seems to give meaning to the square. The center around which the children and their mothers, the grandparents with their hands behind their backs, the parents greeting their children, the vendors and the caretakers of the plaza govern their lives. Everything comes together in that enveloping music that sways the souls of the inhabitants like a waltz.

      She sees a woman carrying a child with one arm and the grocery bags with the other, apparently tired but with an expression of ineffable satisfaction. I hate that smugness, Mara thinks. I wish that smile would suddenly disappear.

      Mara hums, and she falls asleep on the bench. It has been a tiring day, her first at work. The merry-go-round spins without stopping, however this time there are children. Time passes, the twists and turns continue, and she sinks deeper.

      A child grabs the ring, but it slips out of his hands and rolls across the floor to under the platform. The boy shows his body and stretches out his arm to pick her up.

     -No! -Screams the woman with her bags, which break when she drops them. Other women also scream and go towards her.

      The boy has put his arm under the wheel, between the cement floor and the iron. The force of a chain, perhaps a rope caught in the internal mechanism drags it towards the center of it. To the heart of the machine that no one but a few men with oiled faces know in depth. They are the ones who run now, who scream.

      -Stop the machine!

      The parents join them, some women stand still and burst into tears. The merry-go-round continues to spin.

      -It got stuck, the body got between the rails! - say the mechanics.

      The child's mother has listened.

      The merry-go-round shakes a little in its structure. Then he overcomes the obstacle, you hear the creaking of wood, of bones, and a muffled scream.

      The music doesn't stop either. It is the musical background of Mara's nightmare.

      The merry-go-round continues to spin with the children on it. Some jump, and when they fall, the momentum and inertia of the spins makes them roll towards the same gap through which the other has disappeared. The merry-go-round makes sudden jumps, derails and becomes embedded in the ground.

      Mara wakes up. But she wonders if she has really woken up, because everything is still the same. The machine tilted and the children lying motionless around it. The mothers who run and pass by her, without looking at her. The mothers who lift the bodies and cry.

 

 

 

 

THE DETACHMENT

 

Marcos started working at the bank at the beginning of the year, and he approached us not with shyness, but with indifference. When he saw that we were a calm and melancholic group, he accompanied us more frequently to the bar on the corner of Paraguay and Esmeralda. One day we decided to invite him to a fishing trip on the coast.

      He was tall, very thin, with gray hair and mustaches like ash stains. He was maybe forty years old or a little younger. He told us that he was single, and that he had driven a taxi for almost ten years to earn a living, until that accident with a truck that hit him head-on. He spent several months in the hospital, with broken ribs and a ventilator. He described to us the state of the car after the impact, reduced to half, contracted like a dead spider, and he was inside, embedded in the seat with the steering wheel tucked into his chest. It was difficult to believe in his survival, even seeing him somewhat bent over and having strong and frequent coughing spells. But I never found signs of sadness on his face, only a serene, unwavering confidence in his gestures, his words, in that body that seemed to have defied the laws of logic.

 

      He was driving through General Paz after giving a ride to a passenger. He was getting dark. Suddenly a truck came down from the bridge at more than fifty miles per hour, and as it entered the crossroads it turned in the opposite direction, right towards me. The driver was waving his arms and I realized that the brakes and the steering wheel were not responding. Everything happened in an instant. The pain came later, when he woke up in the hospital. It was only there where I felt my bones broken. The doctors surrounded me with nervous faces. Then I raised my head and saw the blood, the protruding ribs in my chest, and a huge hole that seemed to lead to an abyss.

 

      We had to meet at Marcos's at nine on Friday night. When we arrived, he was putting the rods in the luggage rack, and we saw a boy of about five years old come out of the house. As he approached the lights of the car, I noticed that he looked exactly like Marcos. A resemblance that surprised me at first, because it gave me the feeling of seeing the same person. The boy, however, had darker eyes, with a fearful look. I think I was most impressed by his thin, pale appearance, almost gloomy, perhaps unreal. I asked Marcos why he had hidden his son from him all that time.

      "They didn't ask me," he said, laughing. His response was so simple and offensive that I felt mocked, but when I looked at him I was afraid of his eyes.

      He got in front of the wheel and put the boy in the seat between him and me. Behind were Nicolás and Luis, with blankets and loose clothes on their knees, both had lost their children and did not mind carrying the child. Marcos wanted to take the first turn to drive.

 

      When I woke up, I had no idea how much time had passed. He was wrapped in bandages, in pain, numb. They had put an oxygen mask on me connected to a tube standing next to the bed like a metal guard. The nurses poked my arms every other day, looking for the veins that were still healthy. I couldn't speak, and I didn't dare try for fear of destroying the patches that had been sewn onto my chest and around my mouth. I was always certain that the voice is life, and listening to myself would have been like recognizing myself alive. That's why I didn't speak. That state of semi-death satisfied me. And it was then that I saw the boy in a chair in the corner by the door. They told me he had been there from day one.

      "He didn't want to leave you since he arrived," a nurse told me. "I don't know how he found out, because no one answered the phone at his house."

      I looked at him with so much curiosity and confusion that I felt my injured face contort with pain from the sutures. But I was not able to tell them that it was a mistake, a regrettable mistake.

 

      We had been traveling for two hours when the child moved into the back seat. The lights of the road and the headlights of the cars dazzled us. Marcos drove well, although fast in the curves and overtook with great risk. I told him to be careful.

      "You're a shit, Ricardo," he replied, still laughing when he saw me scared.

      When I was getting used to his skill, we saw a truck about fifty meters away enter our lane. The headlights blinded me and I looked away, I felt like we were turning right and suddenly everything went dark. We left the road, the mud and water from the shoulder splashing on the windshield, and we crossed the grassland that disappeared under the passing of the car. I think I said my God and several curse words until we stopped. Then Marcos, looking at the truck that was disappearing in the fog, got out of the car and made an obscene gesture that we couldn't help but laugh like crazy for a long time. That was preferable, I thought, to let go. ar for nerves and not for death.

      No one had remembered the boy, and we just thought about him when we heard, among the chirping of the crickets that had gotten into the car, a moan. The child was crying with his face on his knees and his legs drawn up, with a tremor that did not stop until half an hour later. By that time, we had already resumed the trip, without convincing Marcos to let us drive and calm him down.

      "Stop crying once and for all, don't be a faggot," was the only thing he told him, and we took care of him the rest of the night.

      It's wrong for me to say it, I know, but Marcos looked happy, as if that episode had been a kind of revenge for him. I found his strange laughter, almost uncontrollable for the next few hours of the trip, irritating. We arrived at the interspa route and contemplated the reflection of the sea in the newborn sky of that Saturday. He asked me to wake up the child in case he wanted to urinate. He said it with a less sarcastic expression than that night; what had arisen in him seemed to have subsided.

      The boy was still sleeping. In the morning light I could see better his thin face and reddened nose. He was a kid like any other, except for the fact that he hadn't said a word or smiled all night. He just cried, as if his body were constituted by an irrevocable state of mind.

 

      They came to treat my wounds once a day. They took the boy out of the room and removed the bandages. One day I asked them to let me see the wound. I don't think a clean word has come out of my mouth since then. They tried to calm me down, they said it was necessary to face the facts calmly because they did not want to keep me always sedated.

      The steering wheel had embedded itself in my chest and split my sternum into so many pieces that it had been impossible to reconstruct it. They were going to operate on me to place a prosthesis, but I didn't listen to them. My mind only had eyes for the gap in which a red and gray membrane moved with the rhythm of the heart. They covered me again and left the room. Then I felt a fury that I needed to put into something or someone. The boy opened the door and approached.

      "You can't miss the circus freak," I told him, and I took off the bandages again. He started crying and wanted to escape, but I held him by the arm, I made him smell the recently disinfected wounds, almost beautiful because they were so strange. When I let him go, he didn't run away. He stayed by my side holding my hand, as if he had already gotten used to it, and he looked at my chest with some nostalgia, perhaps.

 

      Nicolás's house was in Aguas Verdes. We arrived at six in the morning and went to bed. At around twelve noon we ate something and went to spend the afternoon on the almost deserted beach. The boy seemed more confident that afternoon, but with Marcos he always acted shy and afraid. The strange thing was that she very rarely left him.

      When the sun began to hide behind the dunes, our eyes were red from so many hours of heat. I looked towards the water, Marcos was taking a dive. His bare torso looked like a single scar, his back was hunched, covered by milky white skin that highlighted his ribs with jagged edges, like anomalously welded bones. In front of him, he had a prosthesis attached or sutured not long before, the ridges of the sutures were still noticeable. I felt sorry, but also disconcerted, because that afternoon he had taken off his shirt without even looking at us to see if we were observing him. As if his body was the same as anyone else's and the deformity was only in our gaze.

      More people began to arrive. Leticia, the strange crazy woman whom we saw every year, waved from afar and left. We approach a pair of lonely women, beautiful but sadly unfriendly. I was sick of distant women after my experience with my girlfriend, so we split up to set up camp. Some other fishermen arrived with their nets and settled far away. The boy had spent most of the afternoon in the water or rolling in the sand. We changed his underwear two or three times, and most of the time Marcos or Luis took care of him. I never saw him play with enthusiasm, but rather with a strange slowness in his movements. He talked to himself, and when someone tried to approach him he would shut up. The wind blew some clouds over the sea in the late afternoon, as calm as a sick creature watching us.

      He sat next to me with the same expression that he always touched the nurses with. When we were alone, he would ask him questions that he never deigned to answer despite my many vain attempts. Seeing him was like looking at myself in a mirror, almost like a part of myself that was now there in front of me, looking at me.

      "You have to do something with your son," the doctor asked me. "He comes early in the morning, stays here all day and starts crying." Doesn't he have anyone

 

more than take care of him? Live alone?

      -No, doctor, actually...- I tried to rehearse an explanation, to know why he said that if I saw the boy every night in the same corner of the room. Part of me said I should get rid of that kid. But the same annoyance that caused me to see him always sad filled my chest with a strange satisfaction.

      During all that time in the hospital I was not bored, because Ramiro, that's what I called him when he said he had no name, entertained me with his fear. For example, the fear he had of the doctors' hands, my coughing spells, or the idea of my possible death. Then I felt liberated and began to speak like I had never done before. I swore obscenities at the nurses while groping them, and insulted everyone I had made friends with at the hospital. They no longer wanted to speak to me except for what was strictly necessary, and they treated me with fearful respect.

 

      The fish bit that night, and I had to get into the cold water to cast the hooks again. The others prepared the fire and a large pot of coffee. I returned to the beach and put the fish in the basket. I covered myself with the leather jacket. A flashlight light appeared near us and we saw the women from that same afternoon. They were cold, they told us, and we invited them to come closer. It was eleven o'clock at night. The six of us were talking and telling jokes when I saw Ramiro playing in the sand a little further from the circle of firelight. I warned him not to stray too far. It seemed grotesque to me to see in the child the absolute lack of that part, as indefinable as it is human, that makes men a fragment of time. In Ramiro's face I could not find a single trace of a woman's heritage.

      We had to insist several times that he not leave the group. But each time I saw him closer to the shore, practically indistinguishable in the darkness. Marcos went to look for him and brought him by the arm, without the boy's trembling feet touching the sand. They laughed, but avoided approaching Marcos since they had seen his deformed body while bathing that afternoon. He, however, sat with the child on his lap, indifferent to his gaze.

      Then I was the one who had to look for the boy, and I tried to keep him by talking to him about anything. Without answering me, he looked insistently at the darkness of the sea. When it was after midnight, Marcos sat next to me drinking coffee in front of the fire, and he began to tell me, in a low voice, the story of the accident.

 

      A few months later I had surgery. Now I am half man and half doll. Like those rag toys we had as children. I remember losing mine one day when I went into the sea and the current dragged me into the deep.

      The waves covered me one after another, without giving me time to breathe. I was sinking, the water flooding my nose and mouth. Then I thought about my life, that I would no longer see everything I loved: my house, my room, my father's face. The world was so far away that it seemed like a dark point disappearing at the bottom of the water. I knew I would never be able to get rid of that tightness in my chest. Because despite my father's saving arm in rescuing me, I didn't stop feeling that weight until the day I crashed.

      When I was discharged, I had to take Ramiro with me. How was I going to explain to everyone that that child was not my son.

 

      At first the story seemed absurd to me, almost a bad joke.

      "We have to take care of him," he told me at the end of his story, as serious as he had ever seen him. "I think he wants to come back."

      "Where?" I asked him.

      It was then that I realized that Ramiro was no longer there, and I saw him in the water, too far away to call him. I shouted to the others, as I tried to make out the boy in the darkness among the waves. Marcos immediately ran towards him, and I followed him. It was difficult for me to move against the tide, my legs stiffened and for a moment I stopped feeling them. I was cold and extremely desolate as I found myself dragged through the black mass of water that I couldn't even see, under that dark, cloudy sky.

      At times I could see them both. His heads protruded from the surface, or perhaps it was just the foam of the waves. But then I was able to see Marcos approach the boy, and I even think he managed to hold his arms for a moment. Then the child's desperate gestures sank and I never saw him emerge again. The darkness became complete as the moon set again. I couldn't tell how much time passed. I was already turning to return to the beach, when Marcos grabbed me by the arm.

      We swam a few meters, without letting go. When we stood up, they had to help us the rest of the way to the sand. The women were waiting for us, nervous, with towels. I was shivering from the cold, but Marcos had a different shiver. There was fear on his face again.

      He tried to cover his body with wet clothes, but when I wanted to console him and get closer, I saw the boy under his open shirt. He was looking at me from his father's hollow chest.

 

 

 

 

THE MEASURE OF THE SOUL

 

I believe it was Herophilus who said that the soul is contained somewhere in the brain, an area perhaps inaccessible to any trepanation technique. I read this when I was twelve years old in an anatomy book in my father's library, and I couldn't forget it.

      At the age of fifteen, I verified that hypothesis: I could see the liberation of the soul. The breaking of the biological walls that retain and oppress her. And it all happened that summer, on a lonely road, next to a food court and service station. We arrived there at three in the afternoon on a Saturday, in our rural '62 Fiat.

      It was an impoverished restaurant, where the huge grills were only used on weekends. My parents and I were finishing eating the barbecue made by the friendly guy in the dining room.

       "A little coffee, bosses?" His wife offered us, an old lady with a northern accent, very dark and with long, white, braided hair.

      Afterwards we went to sit under the shade of a century-old ombú. We dozed off, and when we came out we still felt sleepy. It was that and the treacherous afternoon sun. The deceptive silence of the desolate route. The sound of birds and the gas pump. Innocent noises of masterful and peaceful beauty.

      Then, the engine starting, the clutch and first gear.

      I know that my old man still had the aroma of beer running through his blood in an endless circle of sun and peace. We entered the road, and the bus, coming out of nowhere, from a non-existent or forgotten curve, at one hundred or one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour, it doesn't matter anymore, hit the front of the car first. Then we started to turn and the rear end hit the bus, which was beginning to stop. We continued to turn two or three more times, and almost capsized. We fell on the shoulder, the car a horrible mess of hot iron and torn leather. I had glass between my hair and clothes, and the doors were stuck to my arms. I heard mom's voice and felt relief.

      Dad, I thought later.

      "Da...da," I said, stuttering for the first time in my life, in the shadow of his head in front of me, in his blood-stained light blue shirt. The door had stuck in his stomach, and he was leaning against the steering wheel. His head, beyond the windshield, on the engine cover. His skull shattered and splintered, open like a book of miscellaneous knowledge.

      Then I saw his soul, if that was that light, or fog, or unruly and disturbing mist that came out of his head while the blood ran over the sheet metal of the car. An imprecise and untouchable something that condensed in the air until it evaded the ceiling through the windows.

      From that day on, my soul had the shape and size of a car, of a green, old and endearing rural area.

 

      It was Herophilus who believed he discovered the center of the soul at the base of the skull, close to the exit of the spinal cord. A quadrangular region, or more precisely rhomboidal. A place bathed in the liquid of life, the overflowing effluvia of excitement or serenity.

      At eighteen years old, the obsession with verifying the origin of the soul separated me from everyone. From my mother, from the world, and I immersed myself in the oldest books that came into my hands. That's why the only profession that should have taken me to that place was medicine, and I studied until I was hated by those who knew me. Because anyone who speaks only about the essential, no one can understand.

      I stayed up very late in the college dissection room. The ethereal light from the spotlights on the marble table damaged my eyes irreparably. Contact with the formaldehyde created roughness on my fingers, but its baleful aroma no longer bothered me.

      The night watchman stayed with me to talk, and together we looked out the windows at the street traffic. That other, different life that ran parallel to our daily dealings with the dead, with the fragmented specimens of beings that were now just that, pieces of human anatomy. Then he would leave and leave me alone. Sometimes I fell asleep on the tables; the morning caretaker would wake me up angry.

      -Doctor, he left the doors open all night...- But I didn't answer him.

      I dissected almost two hundred skulls in those years, I kept only twenty-five. I don't know if they are still kept in the faculty museum. Only two of them interested me, they made me proud because they were indelible steps in my approach to the teacher's theory.

      In that rhomboid region I found a very small organ, almost a corpuscle of fat. I opened it and it was empty. Hollow as if it contained liquid. It is known that virtual spaces do not exist as such, so I wondered what internal element maintained its external shape of a tiny inflated balloon.

      In the second corpse I saw something similar, but open in a similar way to what happens after an explosion. The walls of the organ were elastic and weak. s, the edges of the opening were broken. In both cases they were elderly men. The first had died of natural causes, the second had committed suicide. I then hypothesized that only violent deaths, torn away souls, destroyed the limits of their space.

      The logical evolution of my studies encouraged me to continue, but I was never able to find the soul like that first time. I realized that I was in the wrong field of study, because the soul had already abandoned the dead.

 

      Herophilus spoke about the location of the soul, however it was Levi-Strauss who taught us about field work. That's why I decided to test my theory on the street, in the lives of men who simply live.

      I was thirty years old when I left my job and started observing accidents. I looked for the terrace of a low building, from which I could clearly see the six corners where two streets and a dangerous diagonal intersected. “The deadly corner,” the neighbors called it.

      Every morning I brought food for the day, and sometimes the porter came to visit me.

       "Your job must be interesting, doctor," he told me one morning.

      -Yes, a job for the ministry- was what I invented. All that equipment installed on the terrace, cameras and tripods, folders of notes, film rolls and an umbrella to provide shade, must have impressed him.

      On the third day he became more confident, he was friendly and I asked him if it was possible to leave the equipment overnight as well.

      -Yes doctor, God help me. In this shitty building it's the first important thing that happens to us.

      I leaned against the railing and offered him my sandwiches.

      "Ha... ham or salami?" I offered him, and he started laughing.

      -Yes, it comes prepared. If I may ask you, why do you stutter?

      I stayed looking at him. It was the first time in a long time that it had happened to me and I hadn't realized it.

      -People make me nervous. I like this job because I am alone.

      The guy chewed almost drooling, then he became half thoughtful. Seeing him there, with his brown work shirt and dirty hands, I had a feeling very similar to what the dead gave me.

      "The way he sees me, I live alone," he began to tell me. "But the people in the building keep me busy." My wife died of breast cancer, she knows? They call her breast cancer. And why am I going to lie to you, I was afraid of doing something crazy, do you understand me? Grab the gun and shoot me.

 

      After two weeks I had enough photographic material to catalogue. Two serious accidents and fifteen insignificant ones. There was only one death and I didn't see anything like he expected. I witnessed the arrival of the ambulance, the rescue of the injured.

      "Look," the doorman told me, pointing to the ambulance stretcher. The nurses had stopped because a woman was having seizures, but then she abruptly went still. A doctor hit her chest to revive her. They were minutes of useless efforts. The woman died before my sight, and nothing happened. Not a shadow or light that would reveal to me the liberation of the soul. The cameras didn't capture anything either.

      The other morning, the doorman told me about an accident at a level crossing. Several children had died, he told me, taking out the rolled up diary under his arm. I read the news and saw the photos of the destroyed school bus and the bodies scattered around, but all I thought about was regretting not having been there.

 

      Two days later I returned to the terrace. My place was clean and painted.

      "I knew you were coming back, doctor." While he greeted me effusively, he cleared his throat. "Does a question bother you?" They took an x-ray, they took blood, and well... - he scratched his head, as if hesitating to tell me everything -... they tell me I have cancer, even my bones are taken. Could it be, doc? Right after what happened to my wife...

      His eyes and way of speaking were very similar to what I imagined my old man would have if he had reached that age.

      "Her soul of hers..." I murmured without thinking.

      -My soul? It's going to hell. It would be too much to ask that he go with my good lady. If you want, I'll bring you the studies. But prepare her things. Look, do you like the little place I made for you?

      I settled into the now neat and tidy place when he left me alone. I set the camera to record, lying on the floor, looking at the clear sky and the other buildings with their balconies full of plants. The terrace was not large, it barely fit the stairwell, the television antennas, the incinerator outlet and the clotheslines. Below, cars continued to crash or be saved by the unpredictable touch of providence.

      I continued to think about the goalkeeper and his soul, and I had the same overflowing enthusiasm as several years before. The obsession to discover that light again when freed. I walked over the worn tiles from one railing to the next, trying to resist what I knew was going to end long ago. going sooner or later.

      The porter went up at dusk. He brought me an envelope with the tests.

      "Then you check them," he told me. "First, have a few glasses of this." My deceased did it one day before she died, sick as she was and everything...

      It was an old Coca-Cola bottle filled with homemade liquor. He poured two glasses and we drank. He drank two for each of mine. The night came upon us, cool, surrounded by the lights of the city and the horns of the cars. The clatter of the train in the distance came as an intermittent vibration. He was a little drunk and raised his voice, hugging me.

      -My little doctor!-He said. The poor guy must have felt too alone, he started crying. Then he opened his shirt and showed me the revolver.

      -Do you know why I brought it? He was planning to kill me tonight if you confirmed what the other doctors said. But don't worry, I'm not going to do it because today I'm happy. - He sat on the wall, turning his back to the void.

      Then I thought about my theory. This was the only and exceptional opportunity to corroborate it.

      He had his eyes on his little bottle of liquor, and I pushed him with a quick movement, but the old man waved his arms to maintain his balance and managed to hold on to my shirt.

      He was sweating while he made efforts not to fall. I smelled the aroma of sweat, the same one that had emerged from my father's skin under the sun on the road. But the fabric tore, and he fell with his fists still clenched towards the merciless asphalt.

      Five floors and a single gasp.

      I looked, I shouldn't forget to do it because that was the objective of my study. The research that took me a lifetime.

      A rumble was the first thing I heard.

      Then I saw the shadow, emerging from the sidewalk broken by the weight of the body until it covered all the corners. I saw her enter through the doors and windows, through the smallest cracks in the building. It took the exact shape of the construction, like a monster that grew taller and taller.

      And when the shadow reached the terrace through the stairwell, it stopped before me, as if it were waiting for something, perhaps an answer. But I looked back, and suddenly the street lights seemed so white, so beautiful, that I had to go towards them.

 

 

 

 

THE BEACH

 

It was winter. The sun warmed the breeze that came from the sea. Cristian had completed half of his journey, and at that time, five in the afternoon, the school kids were the majority in the bus. The bustle of their voices gave the afternoon a caressing and faint placidity.

       The promenade showed at every corner the exit to the beach, lonely at that time of year. The cold waters were only tolerated by fishermen and weekend tourists.

      "See you tomorrow," he told them, and the children went down.

      But this time he didn't start. His right foot continued to step on the accelerator, without having made the shift, and the bus seemed to snort like an ox. The passengers began to look around, where there was only sand flying in the wind, dragonflies and flies in the bushes.

      Cristian looked attentively towards the beach. His eyebrows furrowed, and he abruptly stood up, as quickly as if his soul were in danger. They saw him get out of the vehicle, shouting:

      -A drowned man!

      Everyone looked out the windows. Cristian ran to the beach. It was almost deserted, except for a man playing with a dog he called Max. When he got to where he had seen the body, he could not find it. He walked several meters with his hands on his forehead to protect himself from the sun.

He had seen it, he was almost sure. He always boasted to his classmates about having obtained the best vision score in the exams. That's why it had been easy for him to discover the body shaken by the small waves on the shore.

      People were calling him from the bus.

      "I'm coming!" he shouted.

      Not knowing where to look, he decided to return. Perhaps the sea had carried him away at some point between his run from the street, although he was sure he had not lost sight of him.

      "I was wrong," he told the passengers. "I think it was a pile of dry branches."

      Upon arriving at the terminal, he entered the warehouse to deliver the collection. He waved and walked home. It was almost nine at night. Roxana had probably already gone to bed, not forgetting to leave the hot food in the oven first. She got up very early to go to school. The new teaching position had her excited.

      Everything was going so well, Cristian thought, walking under the mercury lights. From time to time he kicked the little piles of sand accumulated on the sidewalks of the wastelands.

      "And now this," he murmured softly.

      He looked for the letter in his jean pocket.

      It was cold, the company vest did not warm him enough, and he felt his hands tremble as he took them out of his pockets. But the letter called him. It was a nuisance rubbing against his thigh, tickling him. He read it again, as he had done that morning when he got out of the mail.

      He fixed his gaze on the white paper with logos and electric typeface, so serious and formal, so governmental, that it gave an irremediable certainty to the content. He said nothing specifically, in the end, he was only postulating conjectures and the very remote possibility of finding his parents.

      When he got home, he started eating, absentmindedly watching television. It was almost ten thirty. Roxi must have been asleep. He went to the room and undressed. His letter fell out of his pants, and when he tried to pick it up, he hit the leg of the bed with his foot. His wife, upon waking up, saw him with the paper in her hand.

      "What is that?" She asked, with her eyes half closed.

      -Letter from the Commission.

       He got between the sheets, propped the pillow on the back of the bed, and began to reread it as if she found a new word each time, a phrase that wasn't there before. She continued looking at him, in silence.

      -They found a mass grave in Madariaga, Roxi. They say that maybe the bodies of my parents are there.

      Roxana grabbed his arm, clinging to him, and she remained silent. She knew him well. A single extra word would have been enough to destroy that almost perfect harmony that he had achieved all day, and make him cry.

      "Turn off the light," she only told him.

       Cristian left the letter on the nightstand table.

    

      At noon, bank employees filled the streets on their way to restaurants or pizzerias. When people got on the bus, they greeted Cristian like an old and dear acquaintance.

      "How was the drowned man?" they asked him, and he decided to laugh too. But when they were approaching the same place and he looked towards the pine trees that separated the forest and the beach, he thought he saw another body thrown by the waves onto the wet sand between the trunks. He felt himself blush, his heart beat faster, and he told himself that it was stupid to behave like that.

      He was already very close to the next drop when he saw the body clearly. She was a blonde woman, with long hair stuck to her shoulders by the water. Her body shook with the sway of the waves that died on the coast.

      He stopped without saying anything, pretending to be confused. ct. He raised the engine cover and delayed a few minutes in case the passengers noticed, but they were talking calmly without looking at the beach. Another mistake, he thought. He got on the bus and continued the journey.

     That night, however, as he watched Roxana put on her nightgown and go to bed, he suddenly remembered the woman on the beach. He couldn't have said what prompted him to leave his bed in the middle of the night and go out without giving any explanation. He didn't even pay attention to his wife, who called him two, three times, and then gave up.

      The sky had begun to cloud over that afternoon, and it was now a night without moon or stars. The beach looked like a dark wasteland. I only had a small flashlight, with which I could barely make out the foam of the waves. He took off his shoes, the contact with the sand made him feel a little safer. What did he hope to discover, he wondered, and reproached himself for the way he had left Roxana.

      He tripped over something. They were old, loose clothes, and he began to look through them. Next to him he saw long black hair. The woman's body should have been a few centimeters away, but after searching in vain for two hours, the battery had run out and he had to return home.

 

      The next day, he saw the body of a child lying on the sand and beaten by the waves. His skin was torn, perhaps from the salt and the fish.

      Cristian stopped the bus, empty, he had deliberately ignored the people at the stops. He knew that that day he was going to find something, and he didn't want obstacles this time. There was no sun that afternoon, only a thick mass of clouds covering the gray sea.

      He ran towards the beach. He was five meters away, one meter away, then barely twenty centimeters away, and the child's body disappeared. He literally vanished before his eyes. The rest of the world there was still standing, the sea and the sand, the rainy sky, the cold, the trees and his car still waiting for him with the engine running. Then he squatted down and began throwing handfuls of sand into the water.

 

      "I'm going crazy," he said to his friends at the bar where they met on Friday nights.

      They all laughed, and he realized that no one had taken him seriously. Roxana went in to look for him, and they left together. They walked arm in arm, and she handed him another letter.

      -I've had it since this morning, but I didn't want you to worry at work.

      Cristian opened it, leaning on a traffic light.

      -Another fucking summons to court.- And he threw her into the street.- Do you know that today I saw a boy drowned on the beach? He disappeared suddenly, I couldn't even touch him. I was crying like a fool.

      Roxana looked at him scared.

      -Are you sure you don't want to see the social work doctor? -She asked him.

      Cristian refused to look at her or answer her.

 

      He was punished with a week's suspension. He knew he couldn't afford to risk his job, but he realized he didn't care much about him anymore.

       He got up late, and without breakfast he went to the beach after seeing Roxana leave for school.

      -How are you, Cristian?- the men who came from the dock with buckets full of fish greeted him.

      Those dead fish looked like the visions of him. That's what he called them, illusions of a man who was going through a crisis. Not much, he thought, for someone whose parents had been kidnapped and disappeared when he was twelve.

      He could allow himself that gesture, those outbursts sometimes. Like when one night he confronted a police officer outside a dance, and he had almost gotten himself killed. But now they were minks, and they hurt no one more than him.

      The beach was empty. The sky and water were gray, confused on the horizon. Some seagulls hovered over the surface of the sea, others descended to the beach and hovered over lumps in the sand. And he saw that they were the bodies of two men and a girl. The small corpse swayed with the waves of the shore, until finally it stopped due to the weight of the water on the clothing. The three of them were wearing old, elegant fabrics, despite being dirty and torn. He didn't come closer to see them better, she was afraid they would disappear. He waited several hours, but the bodies remained there.

      At two in the afternoon the bodies of an elderly couple appeared among the waves. They rolled at the mercy of the tide again and again, until they were still.

       The clouds continued their slow pilgrimage from the southwest.

      As evening fell, an old woman joined the group. Her arms seemed to move, weighed down by the wide sleeves of a dress of delicate and now torn lace. Then she was face down, with her arms folded next to her head.

      Cristian didn't touch them. He turned and left the beach, letting the darkness cover them.

      At home he endured recrimination and crying from his wife. But he could only think of his dead abandoned on the sand.

    

      Two days later,

His wife brought him another letter.

      "Next week you have to go to the Capital," she told him dryly. "It seems they have the results of the dental identification."

      Cristian approached Roxana, and spoke in her ear with a voice that managed to disarm her anger.

      -I'm scared, Roxi. What if it's not them?

      Throughout the week she returned to the beach. The bodies from the previous day always disappeared. The sea brought them when the tide went out and took them away again at night. He saw, thrown on the sand, bodies of shipwrecked people, of suicidal women, of old people with marks on their faces. Children stolen by water. Deformed.

      Very old bodies, as if the sea were counting the dead of all the centuries, and that beach was the final record. Cristian's beach looked like a costume ball, a great hall where the dead danced on the sand and foam.

      And on the Sunday before the Monday when he was to travel to Buenos Aires, the bodies did not disappear as was his custom. They were still there in the afternoon, and Cristian was sure that this time he was going to touch them. If his vision, always so accurate, had been deceived, he would not allow the same to happen to his touch.

      The pads of his fingers were the only ones capable of distinguishing the truth, the most sensitive weapon of verisimilitude. He approached with hesitant steps, until he was at a distance no greater than the length of his arms.

      He touched them.

      A chill ran down his spine as he felt the wet clothes, the icy skin. He brushed the hair away from the purple faces. He lifted the bodies away from each other, lining them up, arranging their clothes, hair, and covered those who were naked. He closed the eyelids of those who had died looking at the face of the water. The rain fell on them all now, softly, thoughtfully, mercifully.

      Cristian returned to the house and took a shovel. Back on the beach, he leaned on the mango tree and looked at the sea. Waiting like a gravedigger awaiting his work.

 

 

 

 

GREGORY THE MAGICIAN

 

Lorenzo believed that his art was in decline. The work he had written for that mediocre composer was not worthy of his talent. But he had been successful, the theater had been full for weeks. He, however, continued to dream of the old days, when he premiered operas for the Emperor and his court. He remembered the nights when the theater was covered with applause and joy, with music and lyrics resonating in the minds of the nobles; the parties in the halls of the imperial palace, where the ladies' skirts danced in the candlelight.

      Now the public was vulgar, he was content with crude and explicitly obscene scenes. That was the new dogma of the theater, which is why Lorenzo Pintos wrote so little lately. Only when the story to tell was worth telling, did he tell it to his friends at night when they played cards, under the yellowish lights of the candles and the snuff flying over their powdered noses. But everyone knew that they were mediocre works that paid for nights like that, and for women.

      Sometimes people came to his meetings that Lorenzo barely knew, and that the next morning he no longer remembered. Young people came to ask for help, they looked for names and hands to shake at those evenings where excellent artists gathered. Lorenzo listened to their praise, but then rarely did anything for them. He felt old, and he did not see very far the time when he would be pushed aside like an old-fashioned book, to be left alone in his room by the fire, waiting to die. And all because he had not spent time searching for anything other than dreams, rejecting the reality that would never be as beautiful as the worlds he imagined.

      After reciting fragments of new works, he sat down to receive praise from lips that concealed sarcasm. But even if he had had to be exposed to misery, the memory of the old days and those words would have nourished him like the frugal dinner of any of those evenings.

      One night, a stranger took him aside, away from the string quartet playing a scherzo.

      -I have not heard more beautiful words in more than forty years of theater, maestro.

      -And who are you? - Lorenzo asked.

      -Gregorio Ansaldi, teacher Pintos. Decorator and set designer.-And he extended his hand to him.-This new work of his leaves me perplexed. It's pure magic. How do you plan to present it?

      Actually, Lorenzo hadn't thought about that. The new story excited him more than the last ones he had written, but he did not feel sure that he had achieved what he was looking for: the representation of a dream within the theater itself, which would atone for the guilt of men who live apart from society. reality. But that stranger seemed ecstatic with the story, with the protagonists' flow towards a state of redemptive mysticism.

      "My characters," Lorenzo explained, "are condemned for seeking happiness in fallacies, in impossible panaceas, and they are redeemed only at the end of life, when they can no longer enjoy it."

      -Sublime and sad- said Ansaldi.- I think I know the way to do it. His characters try all kinds of magic, and are in a continuous dream state. You need the audience to imagine more than what we can offer them. Light management is the best for that.

      As he spoke, he moved his large hands like unfurled fans. He was burly, with a thick beard and dressed casually. He contrasted greatly with the exquisite lightness of the shirts, the silk ruffles of the other guests. Above all, that heavy dark cloak that he did not remove seemed to contain a body that, if left free, would flood the room.

 

      From that night on, Lorenzo began to come at any time of the day or night. Pintos' thin paleness was accentuated under the low light and the ethereal effect of the snuff on his movements. He read each fragment over and over again, because Gregorio needed to hear the torn tones and inflections of his voice to imagine what the characters were experiencing.

      "I've got it!" He then shouted, and began to make new sketches, several of them for each scene. Until there were hundreds of drawings scattered throughout Lorenzo's house.

      "I want more meat!" Ansaldi demanded, and Pintos's maid and cook continued to please him, resigned to seeing his teacher spending the money on that strange man.

      Gregorio gained a little more and more weight over time. At least that's how it seemed when he loosened his cloak, releasing part of his robust body and the sweaty smell of old clothes.

But the drawings were masterful. His exalted imagination created scenes that Lorenzo had judged inconceivable, events where the magical created more beautiful or more horrendous fantasies with each new sketch.

      -But how are we going to get the theater to finance all this? -He lamented.

      "You will convince them, teacher, I'm sure," Gregorio answered, while he continued believing.

viewing images.

       Lorenzo's old desire for glory was increasing, his hunger to achieve the most perfect work. But at other times he felt incredulous. He was aware of the exasperating vulgarity of the plays on the bill, of the tendency of theater entrepreneurs towards obscene and futile fun. Walking the streets of the city, he thought that not even in a hundred years would he be able to convince them to finance his work.

      "You must give me a sample of his art, Gregorio, a sample of what he promised me," he begged him one day.

   

       So they rented the Comedy room for one night. Gregorio left three hours early to install his equipment. When Lorenzo arrived, the room was almost dark and ready for rehearsal. He found it strange to see that the drawings had not been painted on the curtains. There was only a curtain spread at the back, with pulleys and ropes hanging carelessly. There were also many wooden boxes of various sizes, with lids that opened to reveal cogwheels rotating at different speeds. A peculiar smell came from the strange furniture. Then Gregorio emerged from the darkness behind the boxes, and seemed to understand the question on Pintos's face.

      "It's gear oil, the indigenous people of South America make it with a plant similar to rubber," Ansaldi told him. It was a sweet aroma, not unpleasant, but as he approached he felt it penetrate his head like small needles puncturing the membranes of smell. A pain, at first very faint, grew on the right side of his brain.

      Ansaldi held a candle to the main wick of the instruments, and a flame spread throughout the device. Two minutes later, the gear began to raise a series of mirrors onto different panels. The light was no longer single, but multicolored, creating a clean and clear image when it converged on the white curtain. Then he passed the drawings of him, transcribed on transparent paper, in front of the lights. Each leaf fell from panel to panel faster than Lorenzo's eyes could follow. The characters were there, moving without the help of actors, without their whims and bodies infected with vanity, only their voices would be heard later reciting the text. Characters in their purest form, living the strange dreams that Pintos had imagined for them.

      He was so amazed, that he forgot for a moment the pain that still afflicted him.

      "What did you think, teacher?" Ansaldi asked.

      -He Divine, as if he were in heaven witnessing the acts of the angels.- He could not help but then put his hands to his head.- But this pain is killing me.

      "It's hard to get used to this oil," Gregorio told him while he disassembled his equipment.

       Lorenzo sat in an armchair, trying to concentrate on the interview with the theater director the next day.

       -We will give you a sample tomorrow.

      -No, teacher. This demo was for you only. Nobody will see it until the premiere. They have stolen my inventions so many times, that I am not going to allow it this time.-Ansaldi's face darkened, and with the peculiar agility of his heavy body he continued disassembling and putting away in the boxes the various parts of the magical toy of he.

 

      The next afternoon, Lorenzo left the theater offices wondering how he was going to tell his friend that he had failed.

      "We are not interested in your work, Pintos," the director had told him. "It is pure fantasy impossible to represent." I don't know who put those ideas in his head.

      -But Gregorio Ansaldi has a special machine...

      -That man is a fake, and beware of him. Since he returned from South America he has not stopped causing problems. Several men died in rehearsals for his plays. Nobody wants to hire him.-And getting closer to Pintos' ear, he said: -They say that he killed his wife a few years ago and that's why he fled.

      Pintos made a gesture of offended superiority.

      -I don't need you! "We will do the show in public squares!" He said shouting from the office door.

      The truth was that he had no desire to become a street artist. But he liked the idea as he walked through the streets towards the house, looking at the children and the simple women sitting on the benches in the squares. If I make my show a success, I will have obtained the favor of the people that until now I lacked, he said to himself.

      "We will be a great traveling theater, Gregorio," he announced upon arriving, overwhelmed by his new passion. "Without walls, the greatness of our company will be unfathomable." "We will have the world begging to be entertained." And he embraced him with an enthusiasm he had rarely shown before.

      Ansaldi turned away from him abruptly, as if protecting his cloak and his body.

      "And what do I get from all this?" He simply asked.

      -Money, my friend, and many people at your feet. Above all, my eternal gratitude.

       -It's funny that you say that, teacher. I heard of a custom on my visit to the Indians, who says that a debt is never completely paid, because then there would be no meaning for that relationship.

      Lorenzo was too excited to think about the man's strange ideas. The guy was like that, an eccentric. Always closed and apathetic, sometimes impulsive or violent.

      The next day rehearsals began in the square. Ansaldi protected his light boxes with jealous modesty, but decided to accompany Lorenzo and his group to distribute the posters announcing the first performance in the streets and businesses.

 

      On opening night, Lorenzo ran from one place to another giving directions, climbing stairs and platforms, organizing the audience. Until the last minute, people arrived with their entire families, settling in the few places that were empty. Then the lights went out, and as the moon was hidden by clouds, the darkness became almost complete.

      A spark exploded, and the flame of the magical device began to burn. The actors' voices recited the preamble. The mirrors came out of their boxes and reflected the original flame in multiple lights that converged on the stage.

      The smell of the oil became stronger. Lorenzo's headache grew again, slowly, until he could no longer follow the dialogues of the play.

      "And the people, don't they feel it?" He asked quietly in Ansaldi's ear.

      "Their own bodies are even more nauseating, my friend," he replied, laughing. "There in America, the natives say that those who are going to die feel it more intensely, they let themselves be carried away by the aroma and do not fight."

      -But I can't take it anymore, I can't take it!- Lorenzo grabbed his head in his hands.

      The play continued to be performed with the music that the orchestra played with strident brass sounds, imitating the high-pitched screams of the characters. They were suffering the last of their punishments.

      The orchestra then began to play martially. Ansaldi's drawings floated in the air like the demons that tormented the protagonists of the work.

      -Calm down, teacher. You, who have sought perfection and greatness in your art so much, who have suffered like your characters in search of utopias and fictional worlds, enjoy success. We have them in our hands, we handle them like puppets.

      Pintos looked at him, but he didn't seem to hear him. A deafening hum had invaded his mind. He could only observe the women crying, the children in the audience immersed in tears and sadness. The men got up from their seats, nervous, ready to save these poor fictional beings.

      Never has one of his works achieved such adhesion, such commitment from the people. It didn't seem like a theater performance, but supernatural life transported to the everyday world. As if people saw on stage the ghosts that had been watching over their dreams all their lives.

      Lorenzo suddenly felt something break in his head. The aroma now freely crossed the membranes and veins of his exhausted brain. Something was coming out of him, maybe his life, he wasn't sure. A transparent wall was slowly forming around him. He felt isolated and floating in the incandescent mist of nauseating oil.

      He screamed, but no one seemed to pay attention to him. His own body was no longer weightless, and he was spinning on the stage. He opened his mouth to scream, but his cries were inaudible. His face was distorted in a cry for help. He could see his own body still sitting in front of the stage, clutching his head in despair. But it was not him, but the other part of his soul that exuded vanity. His mind no longer belonged to him, it was less than paper and ink, less than music lost in the wind, it was just air enclosed in gas capsules.

      He looked at Ansaldi.

      But the face of Gregory the magician was only a rigid mask.

 

 

 

THE ZEPPELINES

 

I stood for a long time looking at the fleet of airships. They covered the sky beyond what the eye could see, traveling at a very slow, almost imperceptible speed. At night they formed endless columns of white lights, resembling enormous flying beetles. And among them flew the electric pigeons, individual ships among those immense conglomerates of hydrogen and helium, carrying people fleeing towards safe regions.

 

Below, flooding my feet, was the water. Rusty liquids flowing from saturated drains. This was the threat we were fleeing from, the announced end of the city. Ten centimeters of nauseating water occupied the highest streets, because the others no longer existed.

 

I walked to the corner, splashing around, accustomed to the incessant humidity. The shadow of the airships hid the sun even more, which could have somewhat cushioned the pain of bodies with rheumatism.

 

I looked, from the corner, at the end of the line to get seats in the aisles. They had always been expensive, but now the prices had risen to an unaffordable figure. Fights to get tickets

 

were a daily routine, and several deaths interrupted the long lines for many hours, until the police process ended.

 

My father had decided to stand in line even though he had no money.

 

"They can't leave us," he said. "We will die with water in our noses if we don't leave, so they are obliged to take us."

 

But we never knew of anyone traveling for free. People filled the airports, invaded the runways looking for a place on the machines, and then the soldiers appeared with their fast trot and weapons to suppress them. The ships took off day and night towards higher lands. Those who stayed watched them ascend with a resentful look that seemed to grow in proportion to the height they took as they rose.

 

Dad greeted me from his position, from which no one could have convinced him to leave even for a moment.

 

"Mom sent you this," I said, handing her the package of food. "Why don't you go home for a few hours?"

 

-If you take my place...

 

-I already told you that I'm not going to beg them.

 

I was ashamed, as always when I met my father. Shame at feeling young and letting the old man humiliate himself for three passages. I stayed next to him for a few minutes, with my hands in my pockets while I watched him chew slowly. He was so different from how I remembered him as a young man, with his strong and tall body, always walking upright with his elegant step, that I liked to compare, or imagine, with that of a centaur. He was thin now, his arm muscles limp, and he was increasingly hunched over.

 

-Mom continues preparing the suitcases.

 

But he looked at me without saying anything. She did the same thing every weekend, and took them apart again two days later. This was her routine, the task necessary to save her from the anxiety that led us all, in the flooded city, to madness or suicide.

 

He had seen her many times leaning out the window, looking at the airships, uttering an obscene word for those who were lucky enough to leave.

 

"If they listened to you..." I told him one day, laughing.

 

 

She looked at me harshly.

 

-Go get tickets, instead of wandering around...

 

There was no work anywhere, no money either. The paper money went with the people in the airships. And even if I had gotten a job, I don't know if at that stage of the circumstances I would have taken the effort to wait so many months for my first salary. The known world was disappearing underwater, and what could lie beyond the walls. Only the beach cemetery, then the sea, and far away the mountain lands.

 

I heard my friends calling me. I said goodbye to the old man.

 

"We have a business for you," they told me. We gathered in a corner and began to draw with wet coals on a wall. We made several plans, some aborted and others that were born to die later. Until above the loose granite dust, the final project appeared.

 

-Everyone does their own thing, so we distract the police with minor assaults, then we meet on this corner.

 

We were four friends who had grown up in the same neighborhood, looking at the same women, surrounded by the incorruptible limits of the city. Under that sky that, like a prison, crushed us on the pavement, and seemed to want to put our heads in the water until we drowned. The weight and shadow of the airships overwhelmed us.

 

"This is the future we imagine," I heard my mother say once.

 

She was like that, resigned and apocalyptic. Too harsh in its conclusions. And thinking of my mother I returned home and went to my room to prepare things. Mom watched me from the kitchen. I put the revolver attached to my belt, that day I wasn't going to get bored walking through the streets until I was sick.

"See you at night," I said goodbye, without looking at her. He didn't answer me, or maybe

he did. The noise of the machines up there was a hum that had made us almost deaf. "Do you think we're going to drown?" I asked my friends when we met in the square.

We sat on the wall to look at the city that was slowly sinking, the trees and monuments eaten away by sewage acids, and the ruins of the old asylum looming like the masts of a sunken ship. The always dark sky gave us the answer.

 

-They leave, they abandon us. "That's what your father doesn't want to understand, and your old lady knows too well," a friend told me.

 

I didn't answer him, I didn't talk to him about the fear I had at the moment when the ships would run out, and the only perceptible sound would be the murmur of water gushing from the bowels of the city.

 

Then we separated and I ran to the food warehouse. The owner had put the cans on the highest shelves, almost touching the ceiling. Bags of flour and legs of hams hung from the hooks. I took my gun and took aim.

 

"Don't shoot!" the owner begged me.

 

-The money or I'll kill you! The guy opened the box with exasperating slowness, and resigned himself to handing me the few, damp bills. Then I ran away, while listening to the sirens of the patrol cars that raised waves on the sidewalks and the facades of the houses. I met the others in the corner. The shadow of the airships continued passing, it was cold and humid, and I felt a sting on my skin as I thought about the already erased map on the wall.

 

Then one of my friends went between two walls, where garbage and dead dogs were usually thrown. He removed the sheet metal that covered the entrance and a nauseating vapor of corpses came out. We watched it disappear for a minute, and covered the opening with our bodies.

 

Then he came out with the carbine wrapped in its leather case. We formed a circle, lit cigarettes one after another to hide our faces with the smoke, we made noise with broken bottles and some shouts that distracted the attention of those passing by. Only one patrol car crossed the avenue, that wide stream that cars traveled like boats, but it went straight towards one of the robbed businesses.

 

My friend took out the gun, let the wrapper fall, then carried away by the current. He prepared the firing pin, some bullets fell with a splash into the water. Then he raised the carbine and rested it on his shoulder. The cigarette smoke hid the barrel of the gun like a fog. But suddenly I saw the long, narrow barrel of the carbine rise with the circular sight at the end, projecting into the sky, straight at the airships.

"I'll take care of it," I said, without even thinking about it, sure of my ex-soldier's

marksmanship, of the cold blood that I had been taught during military training. The others

 

looked at me suspiciously.

 

"I'll take care of it," I repeated, thinking of my old man somewhere in those streets, standing in a long line to save his life and ours. Always uncompromising in his honesty, proud and severe as a centaur.

 

I pulled the trigger. Maybe my fingers had a little brain and a soul of their own that suddenly felt afraid. Because I never remembered the exact moment of the decision, the reflective thought that I assumed always had to be had when killing. The sky seemed to suddenly explode, falling like a piece of the sun would fall if it were possible. The water in the streets was covered with pieces of burnt fabric, with iron that continued to fall when I finally raised my eyes to the sky. Two aircraft were dying, deflating in flames, obliquely and tilting more and more towards the vertical, until they touched the ground of the city beyond where we were. First one, then the other collapsed with a deafening noise that was joined by screams and sirens.

 

My friends looked at me, rather our eyes crossed as they grabbed my arm to make me run away. I was alive, I told myself, mine were alive too. I hid in a blocked street and crouched down to wash my hands in the water, the same one that hid other crimes or simple deaths of abandoned men. Like my father, standing in line many blocks away, begging for a ticket to the future.

 

The water had the smell of burned bodies that had fallen. The police and doctors witnessed the disaster, which my friends and I witnessed from afar, almost without actually seeing it, except for the columns of smoke, the red lights confused with the flames, and the dead remains of the airships that lay stuck in the ground. the streets, on the crushed houses. The fire brigade's water jets were almost dry, the pressurized water fountains had been decompressed after the flood. People were running, we saw several of the passengers still alive pass by with their clothes and faces charred.

 

But I had the money in my hands to buy tickets for my family. It was the only thing I thought about at that moment. I returned home and found Mom leaning out the window, looking at the large hemisphere of the two fallen devices.

 

"Prepare your suitcases!" I told him. "I have the money, we're leaving tomorrow."

 

I didn't wait for a response. I ran out in search of dad. I found him sitting on the sidewalk, with his eyelids closed. The people, who without leaving their place in line, looked ecstatically towards the disaster area, turned their attention to us and made me silence.

 

-He's very tired. Your mother came today to bother him with I don't know what nonsense.

 

 

I paid them no attention, and shook him by the shoulders.

 

-Dad dad! "I have the money," I murmured in his ear. "I have the money for the tickets." Come on...

 

I helped him up. I don't know if he understood, he seemed asleep and had teary eyes. I took it out of there. Everyone was looking at us.

 

"He will lose his place..." people said.

 

I grabbed his arm and we walked towards the ticket office. I had the need to show them my money and pay them three or ten times the value of the ticket if necessary. But Dad stopped suddenly and asked me what was happening. I showed him my wallet.

 

-Where did you get it from?

 

-It doesn't matter. Don't you realize we're not losers anymore? We are not going to stay in this city to die.

 

"But where did you get them from?" he insisted.

 

-Enough, old man! -If you don't want to tell me, it doesn't matter.

 

Looking at the sky for a second, as if to check that the airships had not disappeared, he returned to the line. He passed by his place, people called him, but he wanted to start from the last place once again.

 

-No no. I left my place and lost the right. I don't want privileges.

 

"For God's sake, dad..." I squeezed his wrist, very hard, and he looked at me with pain in his eyes. I realized that my hands were shaking, and I felt the heat of the carbine on my fingers. His palms were black and burned. I eased up a little, without letting go, while I forced him to accompany me.

 

We walked slowly through the streets, sinking our boots into the dirty water. In the background, I thought I saw, for a moment, pieces of bodies scattering in my path, while the small waves hit the walls of the houses. We reached the city walls and sat on the edge. From there I could see the skeletons of the dead airships better. They stood like two large half-built buildings, abandoned long before. And by the dozens of streams that occupied the streets, around the fallen walls, were those who must have already been far away, in safe regions beyond the high sky, if it had not been for my hands.

 

My father looked disconsolate, dejected by that stubborn and particular old age. That beautiful stubbornness of clean and immaculate souls. Weak as he was, he put his arm over my back and began to talk to me about the future.

 

He pointed out the cemetery with its underwater crosses and tombstones. The sea in the distance, always growing until it flooded the tunnels, and that sooner or later would also overflow the walls.

 

He pointed out to me the immovable flight of the airships that continued to pass above our heads, ignoring us. The endless transit of old machines.

 

"Do you think they will find something, that they won't kill each other there?" he asked me.

 

Then I looked at him. He always knew what I had turned my life into, but this time in his eyes were the faces of those he had seen passing by, blind and silent. And I wished, with 84 desperation, as if in this way I would save my soul, as if in this way he would rescue me from the bottom of the water, that my father would raise his hand against me for the first and only time.

 

But he limited himself to saying, with his sweet old man's voice on his stone face:

 

-Your mother came to see me in line, scared, because she saw you take the revolver from home. Then I heard the sirens, the disaster. And I sat down to wait for you.

 

It was at that moment when I decided to stay. Abandoning myself, in reality, to the cruelty of the climate and the sinking of the city. I grabbed my father's hand, and I started crying with my head on his legs.

 

 

 

 

 

THE BARBLE

 

 

The first time Nicanor Espinoza clearly saw the animal was the day his wife left the house to go with another man.

      "Go to hell!" he yelled at her, after pushing her and throwing the suitcases into the front yard. He then grabbed her by her hair, and he held her like that for a while that seemed as long as all the years they had lived together, because at that moment he saw the beast among the other animals in the corral.

      Still small, it had a head similar to that of a rabbit, short legs, and a long snout that moved when it sniffed the manure in the pigsty. The ears swayed like weathervanes in a storm. The body was skinny, almost dog-shaped, as was the hairless tail. It was all white, and surprisingly clean in that desert of dust and mud melting into a single mass over its lands.

      He, who was punishing her wife for the impudence with which he had dared to deceive him, dropped her once and for all on the ground, while she insulted him. A woman deceived Nicanor, he thought with contempt, as if he had not cared for her all those years like a queen. If she hadn't even forgotten to bring him flowers from time to time, even after Gonzalo died.

      After crying for three months over the death of her son, one night he gave her the first carnations that she liked so much, and they began to cry together, with their elbows on the blue and white checkered oilcloth tablecloth. He didn't remember ever crying like that before, except when he and his brothers buried his father. But the night was confusing, the moon rose and set with the mad passage of clouds submissive to the whim of the southeast. It was cold outside. The shadow of the oak tree swayed like a latent threat on the roof of the house. The dust rose from the road, forming an opaque curtain. The road, much further away, looked deserted of lights and cars.

     It was that night that he thought he saw, because he was not sure of anything among the dust and darkness, a white movement. A gesture of the earth, or of the night, which in itself implied a color. Something that emerged to disappear instantly. But even without seeing it, Nicanor knew that this something was not common. If he left the window, he had said to his wife:

      -Look, look!-However, he couldn't point out anything with certainty.

    

      Now, she stood with her hands resting on the dirt in front of the entrance, her back twisted, and looking at him with compassion.

      -Treating me like this is not going to give you back your son.

      "And you have no shame," he shouted, putting one foot forward to kick her, but he regretted it.

      -I haven't had a husband for more than a year, so don't come telling me about your guilt. You know very well what you did...

      And these words stabbed Nicanor with a knife. But the pain was relieved when he saw the animal that appeared in broad daylight, as calm as if he had always been there. He moved among the others with serenity. He went from one place to another, from the pig pen to the duck pond or the chicken coop. No one seemed to fear him, nor to be aware of his presence.

      He stood watching him, standing under the midday sun, which shone squarely on the threshold. The trucks passed along the road, leaving their trail of dust and gas in the air.

      -What's the matter? "Help me get up," his wife told him.

     But he didn't pay attention to her, he let her lift her weak body alone. The pink dress that she had bought to please him or the other one more, was torn at the sleeves. But then he grabbed her suitcases and helped her carry them to the road, silently, turning to look at the yard every so often.

      -You didn't see the new animal, did you?

      -Which new one? Don't tell me you brought another one from town, because I don't care anymore.

      He knew that she was tired of taking care of so many animals that he and Gonzalo raised. Nicanor had transmitted that same passion to his son, and until the boy died, that affinity had grown over time. Sometimes the boy spoke to the animals, and the curious thing was that they obeyed him silently and faithfully.

      The bus arrived ten minutes later, the woman climbed the step with effort, and she disappeared among the passengers. He took a part of Nicanor's life, too, although not the memory of Gonzalo.

      He returned to the house. The creature was still there. That afternoon he did not go to work in the field. He pulled a chair out to the patio, prepared a table, and started heating water for the mate. She had left nothing in the oven, but she wasn't hungry.

      The animal moved, leaving small footprints, without being bothered by the strong sun at two in the afternoon. Nicanor stood up to approach. The bug stared at him for the first time.

      Those eyes, he thought, are not those of a beast. When he was less than thirty centimeters away - if I catch him, I'll take him to town and become famous, it was said - the animal jumped on his face. Nicanor put his hands over his eyes, scared. The eyelids s burned, but he only had a few scratches. The creature had wandered to the edge of the lagoon, and was chasing snakes in the grasslands. Nicanor followed her. The animal's teeth shone in the sun, and he realized that they were too large for the size of the body. It devoured snakes more easily than any bird of prey he had ever seen. He then returned to the yard and washed his wounds in a basin.

      At the end of the day, his scratches were still painful, and his face remained swollen. The animal did not stop to look at him, and he continued with his routine task of sniffing and recognizing the place. When the moon rose, he hid in an empty chicken coop, and Nicanor fell asleep in a chair, in the patio, under the stars.

 

      -Nicanor, wake up, old man!

      "It was Gonzalo..." he said in his sleep. When he opened his eyes, he saw the neighbor who came to pick him up for work.

      "I'm coming," he answered. He put his head in the pool of cold water, drank some warm mates and they left together in the truck. He had had a vehicle like that before the accident, and even better, because he was newer, and even had a radio. Every time his friend picked him up, he remembered the day he and Gonzalo left for the town to pick up the refrigerator.

      Nicanor had seen the ads in magazines at the doctor's office or on signs on the side of the road: “Frigidaire Refrigerators,” and he thought about the advantages of having fresh food and cold drinks all year round. Now that they had electricity in the area, it was not possible for them to live without a refrigerator. So he had decided to spend almost six months' savings, and the device was already in town, waiting for them. Gonzalo jumped excitedly when he found out, running again and again from the door of the house to the truck. With each jump he said:

      -Come on, dad, come on!

      Even his wife, so faithful at that time, had said goodbye to them with a kiss and a smile that he never had again, like an unrepeatable jewel.

      The feeling of the wheels on the dirt road was the same as today. A letting oneself walk on clouds of dust towards the luminous era of modernity.

 

      -Che! What's wrong with you? -His friend asked him.

      -I told her to fuck off, you know? And I am alone.

      He spent almost the entire day working in the field, and thinking about the animal. His body sweating, he returned home at the end of the afternoon. As he crossed the patio he noticed that it was too quiet for that hour, when the rooster always crowed and the ducks splashed in the lagoon. The dogs were the only ones who came to receive him, but they looked tired. In the distance, the silence of the lagoon distressed him. A smell of blood came from the chicken coop. Then, upon entering, he saw the chickens and ducks eaten away or destroyed.

      The creature was still in a corner of the stable. Bigger and taller. With his mouth and snout covered in blood, his tongue licking the dirty fur. His eyes looked at him, and he left, barring the door.

      He went to the house, grabbed the shotgun and returned in search of the animal. He looked in every corner, but it was gone, there were many mouseholes and openings between the boards of the walls. He resigned himself to giving up, hoping that he was gone forever. He began shoveling and piling up the bodies. The smell of blood had exacerbated the spirits of the dogs and horses. The foxes of the region were going to arrive soon, if he didn't bury them quickly, and he dug a grave.

      At night, a roar of screams and barking woke him up. The dogs were barking towards the pigsty corral. Nicanor hurriedly put on his pants and came out barefoot. He aimed the shotgun at the white shadow the beast seemed to become during the night. But that shadow covered her face, briefly feeling the heat of his strange fur on her eyelids again.

       The gun fell into the mud, and he knelt down to look for it. It wasn't just mud that he touched, but mud mixed with blood. The pigs that had cost him so much to raise, ready and fat for sale, were lying with their entrails open.

      "I'm going to kill you, son of a bitch, I swear!" Nicanor muttered between his teeth.

 

      Two days later, he stopped by the vet's office before returning home. He was a Frenchman who had settled in the town almost twenty years before. No one ever knew if he was qualified or not. Since the morning he had arrived from Buenos Aires, he had started curing animals, and from then on everyone consulted him.

      "There is a beast, Doc, that is killing the others," Nicanor told him.

      -They told me...-And he put his hands on Nicanor's shoulders, as if consoling him.- But I also know from experience that sometimes we, men, get very angry when a woman abandons us...

      -Nothing of that. The beast is around the house, and it is getting bigger.

      "Come on," said the Frenchman, while he closed his office. "I'll buy you something at the bar." They went out into the street, and the veterinarian took Nicanor by the arm. In the bar, they met the young Valverde, who knew about strange animals, according to what they said.

      "You know," the Frenchman began to say, "in my country we have legends about beasts with which we scare children." Some say that they are wandering souls, with the true appearance that we all have once stripped of the body.

      "Here too," Valverde intervened. -We have the Yaracusá, a type of viper with the face of an owl, and the Curasán, a half-man dog, but this is a legend that they brought from Brazil.

      The doctor nodded, drank another glass of wine, and continued counting.

      -They are given many names depending on the town. In my city we called it “le Barble”. On the eve of the Day of the Dead, we would go out in search of him, shouting: “Barble, Barble!”

      The doctor's voice echoed in the bar as if he were coming from miles away, in the middle of the desolate plain on a moonless night.

      -And what is it like?- Valverde asked.

      -It has the legs of a goat, the tail and body of a dog, and the head of a rabbit. But what does it matter? The only thing everyone agrees on is that eyes are human...

      The Frenchman remained silent. Nicanor was absorbed in his own thoughts. Then he said goodbye, hearing the doctor say:

      -Clean those wounds.

     Nicanor was drunk, but with a faint, languid feeling of happiness. He planned to sleep well that night in his warm bed. Upon arriving home, the horse began to buck without being able to contain it. The more he held the reins, the more he tried to run. He had to get off to avoid being thrown.

      "Something is happening here," he said to himself.

      He went to the stable, and discovered the other horse dead and chewed by the beast's unmistakable teeth. Gonzalo's horse, the foal that he had given him and grew up with the boy. He remembered his son's joy when he brought it to her, jumping with joy just like when they went in the truck to look for the refrigerator.

 

      They had left his mother far away, while they walked the dirt road towards the main road. When they reached the river, they saw that the torrent was agitated and carrying mounds of hard mud and tangled roots. He knew the depth from having crossed it hundreds of times, most of them always dry or serving as a bed for a narrow trickle of water. Sitting in the truck not knowing what to do, they watched as the dirty water formed whirlwinds around the edges.

      "Fuck it, let's cross!" Nicanor said, determined. They knew they would have to wait three more months to receive the refrigerator in the next order, and summer would already have passed. He felt too happy, too much of a man in front of his son to be scared by the river that had betrayed him by placing that obstacle.

      He took off, and the wheels went into the water at full speed. The faster the better, he thought. But the truck got stuck halfway. The water hit the door, while the passage of stones echoed under the chassis.

      "I'll get off and push, you'll grab the steering wheel and hold it steady," he told Gonzalo.

      The water was stronger than it seemed. An enveloping whirlwind had formed around the truck, and it was difficult for him to move forward to get behind it and push. But the truck didn't move. Maybe if he turned the front wheels, the mud they were buried in would give way.

      "Turn the wheel!" He shouted at his son.

      The vehicle began to move a little, but suddenly he heard a roar, a dull explosion of metal sheets under the water, and saw that a drifting log had hit the front of the truck until it twisted in the direction of the current.

     -Stop, brake!-But he realized that it was absurd that the brakes were of any use. The water continued to hit the side of the truck, and began to drag it away. Nicanor grabbed onto the bumper, but his hands bled from multiple cuts on the sheet metal, and he had unintentionally let go. The last thing he saw, while he held on to the long roots of the reeds, was the face of his son looking out the window, his torn gaze crying out for help.

      "I killed him," he muttered many times at the funeral to everyone who came to give him their condolences, until this motto was repeated for months.

 

      Nicanor was crying now, a year later, over the body of his son's horse, which the beast had destroyed. The next morning, he was woken up by the screams of his neighbor.

      -The crops are destroyed!-He told him.

      Nicanor opened his eyes as if he had woken up from a nightmare. Before they knew it, they were already on their way to the field. And as they approached, he could see the gray color of the dried corn, smell the nauseating smell of saliva and excrement. The stems were cut from the roots.

      "Lobsters, old man, bad luck," the man told him.

      -No. It was him, the animal that is chasing me. He is going to destroy everything.

      Since then ces spread the warning among the people about the beast, which no one had seen, and they believed him crazy. The old gossips began to talk in the warehouse about Nicanor and his delirium. They saw him walking the streets at night, announcing the invasion of that disconcerting animal. When they asked him what he was like, the description of his strange and implausible shape provoked laughter from his neighbors.

     "Poor Nicanor," they said, patting him on the back.

      Then he would return home. No more animals, because they were all buried, even his dogs.

      The Barble, as he had decided to call him, was now the size and height of a man. At night he heard the footsteps of his hooves on the ground, prowling around the house and stalking him.

    

      One morning he was woken up by the creaking of wood. The sun was barely showing. When he got out of bed, he saw through the window the silhouette of the beast destroying the vegetation around the house. All the bushes and grass up to the road were gone. The animal was busily devouring the last tree that gave shade to the patio, the same one under which he and his family had rested, and from whose branches hung the hammock in which Gonzalo swung every afternoon. The tree fell with a crash onto the remains of the empty corral. The beast's gaze turned to Nicanor.

      The Barble's eyes were so similar to his that he thought he was seeing something familiar and endearing. A fleeting desire for mercy stopped him for a moment, and then he ran in search of the weapon, the shotgun that he sensed was going to be useless. He fired many times from the door, reloaded the weapon many more times, until the error and miss on target seemed inconceivable to him. The Barble dodged the shots, and seemed to laugh at his helplessness.

      Nicanor tossed the shotgun aside and grabbed an axe. He went after the animal, which was escaping too quickly. He chased it for most of the day, stopping to rest when he saw the Barble also stopping to drink at the lagoon. He didn't even expect anyone to come help him, and few visited him.

      He threw stones and struck with an axe, but the animal scurried behind the clouds of dust raised by its paws. The chase was interrupted at times so that Nicanor could rest, drink water or soak his head in the lagoon, around which the Barble circled, turning its head from time to time towards him, as if mocking.

       And night came, without Nicanor being able to control it.

      He went into the house and closed the door. He lay down on the bed after a long, tedious hour of respite and silence. The moon seemed to have calmed the Barble. He took off his clothes and hung them on the chair, as neatly as he had not done since his wife had left. He took a drink to replenish the lost sweat, and clear his throat parched by the dust. As he left the bottle on the table, he felt a pain in his chest, as if the Barble had attacked him at that moment, taking advantage of his rest. However, the house and the night were empty. Afterwards he felt a welcoming and serene relief, sleep and the soft skin of the summer murmur entering through the cracks of the door caressed his face.

      And suddenly he woke up with a start. He didn't know how long he had slept, but around him the house had disappeared, devoured or destroyed by the Barble. The stable and the corral, the tree and the piles of earth marking the graves of the animals did not exist either. The sky was almost white, and the ancient land of it was gray and desolate.

      A great wasteland, a space of unbreakable emptiness, separated it from the asphalt road. From there, someone greeted him by raising their arms.

      -Gonzalo, wait for me!- Nicanor shouted

      He wanted to get up from the creaky bed, the only thing left of his old life. But when he put his hands to his face, he couldn't see them.

 

 

 

THE FOREST

 

 

"Do not aim your arrows at men!" Chiron said to the Huntress.

      -They are not murderous arrows, but justice arrows- she answered.- Men are cruel, they cause pain with each of their actions.

      They say that this is how the last and darkest stage of their battle began. For centuries men were afraid to approach the forest. Behind some tree, among the greenish or brownish thickness of the bushes, hidden under the perennial shadow of the dry branches, the Huntress hid.

      The undisturbed darkness into which the sun did not penetrate through the roof of the leafy trees, was her home. She then became a shadow. Her lithe and slender body gave her the appearance of a malicious gazelle, carrying the bow and arrows on her back. She raised her right arm like a delicate bird that touches its back with its wings, and she chose an arrow for her future victim. She then ran away, sneaking between the screams of the frightened birds for another, more bitter scream, that of the wounded man crying on the mattress of dead leaves.

      The stronger ones sometimes tore off the poisoned tips, but some fragment always persisted until they were killed shortly afterwards. When not even the pale sunlight was able to save them, because the night came with its loneliness and absolute silence. Some, however, were rescued by Chiron on his rides before being devoured by animals.

      Those who knew him have spoken of the beauty of the centaur, of the superb appearance with which he walked through the forest in that early period. His reddish beard thinned on his neck, and grew again on his naked, human torso. Then it was made of a darker color, matted and smooth on the equine back.

      When he encountered a victim of the Huntress, he would carry them to her hut. And there she gave him life with her redeeming medicine. Chiron knew all the spices in the forest, the secret hidden in every plant of his ancestral home. He flooded the peasant's mouth with the saving liquid, and then covered the worn-out body with the same fluid. Until the man revived, and he walked to meet his family, without remembering that he had been dead.

      This is how the shepherds, the peasants or the men of the town never approached the forest again. They sent their women in search of what they needed, because they came out unscathed.

      -The Huntress protects the females- people said.

      Sometimes the children escaped into the heart of the forest while playing, and none had been seen returning alive.

      But one of them did.

      The night it happened, people had surrounded the first trees, waiting for the messengers to return with the child's body. The gravediggers were waiting not far away, with the small box open next to them. You could hear the calls of women walking through the forest, old women walking slowly, young people and mothers with dirty dresses, who had left their chores to go in search of the lost child.

      The men watched the trees in silence, sitting on the ground, breaking thin branches with their hands to try to calm themselves. Others held torches that faintly cleared the blackness of the falling night.

      -Son!- said the distant screams.

      "Hunter, may the child live!" the old women begged on their restless pilgrimage among the trunks.

      Then those who were waiting saw a group of women appear surrounding another who was carrying something in her arms. They had found the child, shivering with cold and fear, but alive.

      The next day, the boy no longer had any signs of sadness or fear. He became the center of attention of the entire town. He recounted his adventure in a different way each time, more complicated and adorned with details. And for the next few years he settled at the entrance to the forest, describing its rugged interior to men who would never dare enter.

      -I went there, walking through the bushes for a long time, and suddenly an arrow hit me in the chest.- And he pointed out the scar in the center of the body.

      -Afterwards I hardly remember anything else, only Chiron's face when I woke up. His saving smile, the kiss he gave me on the cheek, and the sweet taste of the liquid that brought me back to life.

      -What is the Kingdom of Death like?- they asked him, but he couldn't remember.

      Maybe that's why one day, a long time later, he decided to return, or maybe it was the fear lost forever that drove him to find something that would make him tremble again. Nothing could stop him and there was no one who could convince him from that moment on.

      The young man believed himself immortal.

 

      The afternoon he entered the forest again, he didn't recognize anything at first. He was looking for places, sites or trees without finding them. Without knowing if they existed or if he had imagined them.

      The light was scarce, the fog hid the paths between the trunks. The isolated sound of a bird was born only to go out a while later. She heard Chiron's unmistakable gallop, and the centaur stopped before him for an instant, then disappeared just as quickly.

      "Don't play with your luck!" He heard him say as he walked away.

      But the boy learned repentance too late. An arrow stuck in the same place as when he was a child, as exactly like a peculiar physical reminder of what he had suffered. The blood gushed again, and he knew that life was slipping away as he closed his eyes.

      When he opened them again, he was in another place, in a hut heated by fire and inhabited by an animal smell. A neigh and footsteps caught his attention. Chiron's long shadow began to cover him.

      -This is the second time. Do not tempt the Huntress, her challenges infuriate her.

      The young man was confused. A vague feeling of heaviness kept him drowsy.

      "The first time I felt happy," he said. "Now I don't know, something I don't remember distresses me."

      The centaur looked at him without answering. They went together to the exit of the forest, sensing the watchful shadow of the Huntress.

 

      The dreams began to bother the young man years later. He saw faces and figures of unknown beings, friends and neighbors of his town, motionless and lying on the ground. He told them all this, and they began to fear him. His story had spread throughout the region and people came from far away to hear it. But as soon as he told them the only thing he was able to guess, they left irritated, shouting insults. The young man could only announce the day they were going to die.

      His parents kicked him out of their home and forbade him to return. He had to leave the town, go to a place halfway between the forest and his native village. Only the desperate dared to travel the path that led to it, the men who wanted the death of their neighbors, the vengeful.

      The man continued to suffer for many years. Under the incessant rain of winter, with the merciless roof of a sad and prophetic gray, his hut stood alone like the home of a sorcerer. Every morning he looked out the door to look at the forest, and his return seemed inevitable.

      The night he decided to do it, he walked along the mud path, until he passed between the same trees as him the first time. The trunks were old, they had seen the death of many men who now, from the bark and the leaves, seemed to be watching him.

      "Chiron!" he shouted.

      He could see nothing but the fleeting figure of the Huntress running through the branches. He realized that he had missed her. This time he felt no pain, only the feel of an arrow stuck in his chest again, and the almost insensible flow of blood. Afterwards everything was oblivion and unconsciousness.

      When he woke up, Chiron had already covered him with the cloying aroma of the liquid of life. The man knew that he had once again brought, from that dark and unknown place where he had been, a feeling of extreme restlessness. But this time he took the form of anger. He stood up.

      The Huntress was in front of the centaur's campfire. Everything in the world had sunk into the darkness and silence of the forest around the fire.

      The centaur raised her hands high toward her. But the Huntress had prepared her bow, and the arrow shot out. The man fell dead once again. The demigods glared at each other, perhaps eager to destroy each other. But the fight they had been fighting for centuries gave reasons to their long lives. Finishing the game was dying.

      Then they heard the man's voice. Although the man was still dead.

      "They will know the anger they have provoked," they heard him say.

      The dead man rose from his bed next to the fire. He walked away with his chest thrice wounded and bloody, staggering naked into the darkness.

      They heard him utter cursed words.

      From the silence beyond the center of the forest, outside the comforting flames of the centaur's hut, came strange sounds, like moans hidden beneath the earth. They saw flashing lights, small dots like eyes that had been waiting a long time to open again. Countless eyes that continued to grow.

      The branches shook with a strong wind that was not wind. The night birds screamed with an exhale of fear, because they felt the presence of the others.

      Shadows of human figures. Debris that dragged between the trees.

 

 

 

 

 

THE OLD WOMEN

 

My friend César had decided every detail of his funeral, and those of us who had known him were at his house in Belgrano, at ten o'clock on a cold May morning.

 

Upon arriving, I crossed the garden and greeted the custodian who was guarding the house. César never had money worries. His family had left him the surname Gonzaga as an inheritance from the high and respected Buenos Aires bourgeoisie. I think he only left that neighborhood to spend his vacations in Europe. Perhaps because of that, or despite it, a slight touch of eccentricity appeared from time to time in their attitudes. A gesture or a phrase, but nothing more.

 

One day, however, he called me on the phone to tell me:

 

-I'm dying.

 

Thus, as a banal comment between his speeches on theater or politics, he announced to me his death sentence, given for an illness with which he had struggled for almost three months, getting worse in the last two weeks. He only allowed one doctor from his mother's family to visit him, and he did not want to be hospitalized.

 

A few days before his death, he had told me that he wanted something big for his wake. Something that people would remember and know what it was like to die at thirty-nine years old. Later I forgot about it until I saw the group of family and friends, all dressed in black, gathered in the winter garden with glasses of white wine or mineral water in their hands, chatting.

 

At that moment, while the sun was shining on the roof of the house, I noticed, under the shadow of the gallery, a rapid movement between my feet, on the gray flagstones of the path. I didn't pay much attention to it, although I thought I discovered a mouse running towards the steps of the house and entering through the open door.

 

-Mario!-they greeted me when I approached.

 

We embraced each other with futile gestures of resigned and serene regret. I gave my condolences to the mother, an old invalid who had been locked in the upstairs room since her son's illness. I don't know if he heard me in his deranged conscience. He just looked at me when I gave him my condolences, and he started crying. The nurse who was caring for her handed her a tissue. I had seen her several times before, but with that black dress instead of the apron and starched cap, she seemed more beautiful. His eyes looked at me with pity. The four old women, small and short, wiry, with thin bodies and brown skin, entered in two rows, forming a picture of perfect harmony in their slow movements towards the coffin. The steps were short and studied. They wore long suits that reached their ankles.

 

On top of them they wore shawls with beautiful lace, their hair gathered in a neat bun.

The eyes, uncovered, looked like small gray balls, blinking slightly. Their faces, the shape and structure of those physiognomies, reminded me of something familiar, but I couldn't discover what at that moment.

 

I was now entranced by the dark ritual that was taking place. It was hard to think that the sun was shining outside at midday. In that room it was night, and the darkness was conducive to a cemetery setting. I imagined being inside a vault, even more so when they approached the coffin, and with strength drawn I don't know how from their weak arms, between the four of them they placed the lid.

 

I was surprised again, to the point of approaching to say what I had seen, when everyone suddenly looked at me with disapproving eyes. A mouse got into the coffin before closing it, I wanted to warn them. But how was I going to utter such nonsense, I told myself. I was wrong, the whiskey I had drunk last night when I found out about César's death was causing me these visions. There couldn't be rats in such an aristocratic house.

 

The men who accompanied the old women carried the coffin on their shoulders.

 

We left the house, the sun hurt our eyes. The old women stood in front of the hearse, beginning to walk in the direction of the cemetery.

 

"You're not going to walk the whole way, are you?" I asked the nurse, who had decided not

to leave my side during those last minutes. "I think so," he answered.

Since that was going to last all day, the distance was several kilometers, we got into the cars and followed them. After two hours, the engines overheated due to the slow speed at which we were forced to travel. People looked at us curious and amazed, the kids from the schools laughed. But the old women continued walking with their backs bent, their hands clasped on their chests, and their gazes low but firm. We had to stop several times at traffic lights, and the spectacle of that strange caravan in the midst of the signs of modernity was pathetic. That's how I felt, and I told my partner.

 

-Caesar is doing this to laugh at us, the son of a bitch...

 

She looked at me as if scolding me for speaking ill of the dead. Then he took a newspaper clipping out of his pocket. "Funeral processions with the quality of ancient times," I read. Only one address was listed at the bottom of the ad.

 

-So this was what attracted Caesar. Does Monica know? Tomorrow I'm going to find out a little about these old ladies.

 

She grabbed my arm, and feeling her warmth, I hugged her close to me. Thus we continued at the slow pace of a cart. The sun was high in the sky. Caesar's body was beginning to decompose inside the coffin, perhaps accompanied by that mouse he had seen. In my car, Monica and I were carefree, with the radio on but the windows closed, so that the others wouldn't be shocked.

 

They say that death, or the rituals that surround it, usually provoke contradictory moods in people. In my case, a rare joy at being alive led me to sleep with Monica that same night, in César's house, who had already left forever. And I felt no remorse.

 

When I got up, I saw the newspaper clipping on the nightstand, deliberately placed there by her, lying naked next to me. I got dressed and kissed her without waking her. César's mother was still sleeping in her attic room. I found the cook preparing breakfast while listening to television.

 

"Minister Farías says that it will take a long time to combat the rats," he commented while serving breakfast. "You are going to come more often, aren't you, sir?" he asked later, with a smile not without mischief.

 

When I went out onto the street, even the custodian greeted me with a handshake, as if I were now his new boss. The world outside was still the same, coldly indifferent, but I preferred it, I don't know why, to the atmosphere so full of cloying pomposity in that house.

 

The address on the advertisement was that of a dark stained glass business, with four names written in gold letters: "Martins, Gonçalves, Aranguren and Arriaga."

I opened the door and a bell rang quietly. The old woman at the reception, one of those

who had formed the procession, greeted me with her "good morning." That's how she began her speech about the humanitarian goals of the company she led, and convinced me to hire her services for the day - hopefully very far away, she stressed - when I died.

 

-We must have everything prepared, and the world will perhaps remember us more justly for how we died than how we lived.

 

His voice was so faint that I fell asleep for seconds on the soft sofa. The aroma of Irish coffee, with a faint taste of cinnamon and vodka, helped envelop me in a state of slight intoxication. At the back of the room, a high-pitched percussive noise increased from time to time. She looked there from time to time, observing the time on the wall clock, and began to cut my visit short.

 

-I hope you are satisfied with everything, sir...-His voice, interrupted by an acting and embarrassing cough, became shrill, similar to the sound that came from the back door.

 

Then, coinciding with that tone, that woman's face reminded me of what I had not been able to decipher the day I saw her for the first time. The eyes, body shape and face had the physiognomy of a rat. He got up to say goodbye. His own short steps resembled the faint tapping of small paws on a wooden floor. I looked at the floor, in the corners, almost without wanting to.

 

"Did you lose something?" he asked me.

-Nothing, it's just that lately the epidemic and the rats in the city have me a little paranoid. "That's how we are," he said as if he regretted the current neglect of the world, and shook

my hand.

 

I left thinking, with sarcasm, that behind that business there was a laboratory full of

 

experimental rats. I let myself be carried away by my imagination, it's true, but the obtuse face of that old woman seemed comical and suitable for ridicule.

 

Monica and I laughed about my visit to that place.

"I wish I had accompanied you," he told me.

 

I moved to César's house to live with Mónica. Three weeks later, at the lawyer's office, I received the news that César had bequeathed his property to me. I began to get used to that way of life, and it was as if I had replaced César, or that he had chosen me to do so. I was happy for a while, until I saw the rats again.

 

The first appeared in the kitchen, during breakfast. I chased her with a broom, hitting things that got in my way.

 

-Stop it, Mario!-Mónica shouted when she saw the kitchen in a mess.

 

-I'm going to kill the damn thing! I don't know why I got so excited. I turned red with fury, my hands trembled. Twice more that day I saw rats in the backyard and in the library.

Especially here, the books that belonged to my friend, and the fatal aroma of the withered flowers, which Monica had left since the funeral, plunged me into a restlessness from which I did not recover until I left the room.

 

That's why I never had the strength to chase them there, and they began to appear more and more often.

 

I stayed away from the library. He closed the door and locked it, listening uneasily to the rattling of the rats on the shelves. They ate away the wallpaper on the desk and the wallpaper, destroyed the books and the carpets.

 

"I'm going to call the exterminator," I told Monica one morning. "I'm going to finish them off." In the years of the bubonic plague, rats walked among the decimated crowds of the streets.

 

Men fell in corners under the weight of the rain in their lungs. The dogs chased the rats, and they died spreading the plague as their bodies rotted in the gutters and drains.

 

A group of old women began to take the dead from each house in the village, putting more respect into that task than the paid gravediggers. The people knew them long before

 

because of their strange behavior. They said they had seen them gather every night in the forest to practice rituals, praying in unknown dialects. That's why they called them "witches" and got out of their way when they crossed paths with them. However, they were, in the end, the only ones who dared to expose themselves without fear to the plague, and tolerated it with a fearful and servile respect.

 

They arrived mid-morning to collect the bodies from the night before. They loaded them into the cart, covering them with lime and dirt, and walked away in silence, facing the fetid breath of the wind on their faces like rocks.

 

I returned home with my mind full of images of the past. In every street I seemed to see again the procession of old women at my friend's funeral. I found this society that rescued ancient rituals so fascinating that I told Monica, when we went to bed, what I had discovered.

 

-It's a shame that the old woman can't speak to tell me why she left the company. She stayed looking at me.

"I didn't think you were so curious," he told me. "People in general are so lazy to think...

 

A minute later I saw a rat crossing the room. I got up and chased her with a shoe until she saw her disappear under the bed. I tried to get under it, lifting the mattress on which Monica continued impassively.

 

"You are never going to kill her, neither you nor any exterminator," he said, and it was the first time I heard something horrible in his tone. The fight against rats had become an obsessive matter for me; That's why, when I sensed for the first time in her voice that she was right, I felt like crying.

 

"Go look at the library!" I shouted. "They're going to kill us!" But a part of me, the still sensible one, told me I was going crazy. The desire for survival told me to fight, but Monica didn't seem to support me at all.

 

A few days later, I went to César's lawyer's office. I asked him about his mother and that society to which he had belonged almost secretly.

-Look, Mario. When César found out that he was sick, his mother left the business the same day. It is easy to assume that he wanted nothing to do with death, having his son

 

terminally ill.

 

Reasonable, I thought. That explained it, but I wasn't entirely convinced. I returned to the public library and continued searching. The employees, the doormen, the people on the street appeared to my eyes with the features of little snooping rats, and my bad mood increased.

 

The following findings were in books on police matters of the time. One day someone had opened the stables next to the old wives' house. There they found hundreds of rats locked in cages, and others free running along the walls and ceilings. Whoever opened the door for the first time must have been crushed by an avalanche of infected animals, which scattered throughout the city. Only the bones of the corpses they had collected remained in the sheds, naked and dry. The old women did not return for a long time, but the epidemic slowly subsided. Some claimed to have seen them a few months later in neighboring towns, when the plague moved to those areas.

 

"Maria," I asked the old cook who had worked in the house since before she was born. Caesar: Do you remember when rats started appearing here?

-You came very occasionally, sir, that's why you didn't see them, but there have been at least since Mr. César got sick.

The people of the neighborhood denied to me that they had found any in their homes. "It must have been when the truckers came in," one of the neighbors told me. "You

weren't there, but one day a truck parked at the door all day, and it seemed strange to me in this neighborhood." I thought they were waste collectors, but César opened the door as if he knew them, and they gave him a black bag. I remember well because that day Caesar came back drunk, scandalizing everyone with his screams.

 

The day he found out about his illness, I told myself. "What company was the truck from?" I asked.

-My God, how am I going to remember! But yes, let me think...it was a Portuguese name...that's what I remember.

 

-Gonçalvez?

 

"Yes, it could be, but I can't say for sure," he answered.

 

I thought of the old women of ancient history. In his faltering steps as he carried the bodies to his rickety cart, while his white hair tied at the nape of his neck came loose with the wind and effort. The skinny hands dragging the corpses, the same hands that fed the rats as they unloaded the bodies and let them fall inside the old stable. And the doors kept opening from time to time, and the rats spread the plague from house to house.

"Messengers," I murmured. I realized the reason for Caesar's mother's anger. Her own companions had condemned her son.

 

I stared at the black bags next to the trees, in front of each door. It was getting dark. The light decreased and the sun formed reflections on the surface of the bags. I thought I saw them moving, but I would never have the courage to touch them.

 

Monica opened the door to our house at that moment.

 

"Have you already found out, dear?" he said to me, looking out. Its entire thin body resembled a huge rat that looked at me with greedy eyes.

 

-You knew it from the beginning... -I am Miss Martins's great-niece, my love.-And she put her hand on my arm.-Think of us now, of our strength, dear. Remember the library.

 

We enter. The door to the room was no longer enough to stop the noise of the rats. I looked at Monica and she nodded.

"Don't make me do it, please," I begged. But I saw so much age on his face, the marks of fatigue from the routine task of delivering and collecting dead breaths, that I turned my eyes again toward the door.

 

As soon as I opened it, I smelled the intense nauseating smell of rats. The hundreds of creatures covered each sector of the library, procreating and fighting for space, one on top of the other until they formed piles that moved like dunes in the wind. But it was not wind, but the smell and force of the plague.

 

I slammed it shut, and the door began to move from the inside, pushed by the avalanche of rats that had discovered the exit.

 

I looked again at Monica, who was watching me anxiously, with a glow that I had never seen until then. In his eyes I read not a request or a plea, but an order that did not conceive of

 

disobedience.

 

Then I opened the bedroom door again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE TOWERS

 

Alejandro looked at the grazing fields on the sides of the road, almost dry from the hot summer sun. Only a few cows seemed stubborn in searching for the scarce grass. The towers were still nothing more than that, shiny, steely structures holding up the high-tension cables. The wind blew with a suffocating, hot breath.

 

I was thinking about the plans for the house, which was going to be finished soon. There had been too many trips along those provincial routes, destroyed, sometimes unfinished. At first, when Mara went with him, they talked and the night stopped them in a hotel. But when she suddenly returned to Buenos Aires, as if she were sick or had discovered that he was sick, he found himself the sole owner of that half-built house in San Juan, far from any town, surrounded by the desert and invaded by that smell. that the dry wind brought from the west.

 

The reason for Mara's departure was never clear, only perhaps predictable if she remembered certain signs. Like the way she had seduced him in the Ancient History class they both attended. Still a stranger, she had taken him in a short time from the conversations in the cafes to her apartment and to her bed. She was the first woman who dragged him from one place to another like this, changing feelings abruptly and without commitment to the immediate past, which she did not like to mention. He also did not forget his own sleepy life before meeting her, as if those around him until then had kept him subject to the dark and routine world around him. Upon finding Mara, he had begun to imagine other, more reckless lives, and then another man emerged, more similar to the vitality of the flesh than to the infertile mind he had always been feeding.

 

But on one of the last trips to the construction site, Mara was nervous, looking out at the field.

 

Then he had closed the window on his side and started to smoke, because he said he could no longer stand the nauseating smell that was in that entire area. Alejandro could only smell the gasoline and the aroma of overheated tires on the asphalt, so he laughed at her with a boast that he had not intended to demonstrate. That was the first time Mara looked at him in surprise.

 

"King..." she said out loud, and in her gaze there was a shudder, a fear of being close to him, as if she saw something in his face that he didn't think he was expressing. Maybe it was that rhetorical and contemptuous gleam in his eyes that sometimes he couldn't help. She

 

then compared it to the faces of the leaders of brutal hordes that had plagued the Asian deserts twenty 105 centuries before. Mara fled the next day, with those words that both considered fleeting, but that lingered in their minds almost with a sense of eternity.

 

When he arrived at the construction, the laborers had already left and the night was just beginning. He went to the terrace and looked at the towers along the route, illuminated, shining with the humidity of the night dew. For a few weeks he had barely been able to pay off the debts on the project, and he had even had to write to Mara to thank her for giving up her part of the investment. All this was strange, even more so when he remembered the enthusiasm she had had for that house and their life together, and he felt convinced that her abandonment was actually an escape.

 

Alejandro stayed on the terrace, lying among the dust and the half-placed tiles.

 

On Saturday at noon, the heat rose from the asphalt and seemed to make the towers languish. However, they resisted. A rancid aroma filled the area. He assumed there were dead animals in the deep shoulders. He stopped at the inn where he usually had lunch before continuing on his way. He asked the waiter where that smell came from.

 

The boy hesitated before answering.

 

-The boss's dog fell into the old cistern three nights ago. The boys throw stones at it to cover it up.

 

A boy appeared running and approached the young man. When they both walked away from the table, Alejandro saw the boy groping the boy next to the counter. He didn't say anything, he just watched more carefully from then on.

 

The smell continued throughout the afternoon and for miles from that place. Then he remembered that Mara had once told him about that same smell, as if she had had the ability to anticipate events and flee.

 

Even after arriving at the house I could feel it, and the unfinished roofs, just as they gave way to the dawning darkness of the sky, were unable to stop the smell. Lying on the terrace, he calculated that once the ceilings were finished, the house would be ready to be inhabited. Without Mara, it was true, but he didn't miss her too much anymore. He had become accustomed to the feeling of quiet solitude in the same way that he now became accustomed to the nauseating, rising mist.

 

A week later, it hardly bothered him anymore, tired of other people denying they felt it when he asked them where it came from. That's why the following Saturday he opened the

 

car windows and kept them open the entire way. At the inn, the usual boy received him dressed in his usual boots and field pants.

 

Alejandro wanted to eat outside, in the shade of the eaves, where he could smell the aroma without it mixing with the smells of the kitchen. He needed to think about why it looked so familiar.

 

"And the dead dog?" he asked.

-He's still there in the well. The smell will still last a few days. Don't you want to sit in the dining room?

 

"No, I'm fine here," he said.

 

When the boy had walked away, Alejandro approached the cistern. The flies came and went through the opening. With a handkerchief he wiped the sweat from his neck and his growing beard. He looked down, but saw nothing but darkness.

 

He arrived home earlier than usual, and leaving the car in the garage, he looked for the plans. He began to walk through the rooms, insulting the workers, with a somewhat different voice, with the same tone as always but worn and hoarse, for the mistakes they had made. Two hours later, the men left protesting that they had received half their weekly salary.

 

When he was alone, listening to the latest protests from the night bus stop on the route, Alejandro put the papers aside and made an obscene gesture at them from a distance.

 

Now calmer, he looked at the house from the outside. It would take another two or three weeks, however he was satisfied, and he thought about Mara's words before leaving. It was no longer strange to imagine that place as a kingdom, and the house as a fortress. It was a peculiar idea, painful in a way, but also comforting, because by being alone, only feeling like a king, an autonomous and powerful being, could he survive.

 

The next Saturday, while driving, an itch on his head bothered him throughout the trip. It was the sensation that something was landing on his hair, and he tried to scare it away like an insect. At the inn, the boy took out the table when he saw him arrive, greeting him with a respect that was very similar to fear. The boy was sweating when speaking to him, and his gaze was constantly directed towards the cistern.

 

"How much do you earn?" Alejandro asked.

 

-Enough, sir.

 

-Would you like to work for me as an assistant?

 

-Yes sir. When I send.

 

Alejandro began to eat the leg of lamb that he had ordered barely cooked.

 

He arrived at the job site with his hands and beard still dirty with grease. He shouted again at the remaining workers, with that voice now definitely dry, with a look of fury and sadness at the same time. His breath had the smell of fermented meat, and a snort came from his mouth like a dying wind. Afterwards he took a bath to get rid of the sweat, but the discomfort in his head continued.

 

He went out to the terrace on that summer Saturday. A few months had passed since Mara left. He felt excited and missed her, remembering how many times it was she who had had to convince him to sleep together, while she told him amazing stories of legendary heroes.

And while he was thinking about this, Alejandro discovered the transformation of the tower, the one closest to the house. They were always illuminated at night, but at the end of this afternoon, when the others had turned on their lights and silhouetted their figure in the pale sky, the first tower remained in darkness, and was no longer the same.

 

It looked like a chalice, a wide-stemmed cup with a container at the end, like those wooden vessels from twenty or thirty centuries ago. Some trucks passed by, but they didn't stop or even slow down to look. He went to get the binoculars. He put one foot on the railing. Upon locating the tower, he raised his eyebrows in surprise, because he saw that it was no longer holding the electricity cables. Now it was made of mud and logs, but as tall as the others. He watched her all night, standing on the terrace, with the binoculars an almost infinite extension of his eyes.

 

At dawn, leaving the house among the piles of sand, lime and bricks, he walked towards the road. The morning was uninhabited, with the road like a useless strip of asphalt in the desert. As he approached, he noticed that not only one tower had transformed into that kind of giant cup, but also the others. They were exactly the same in shape and height, but different in construction, the position of the trunks and the patterns of dried mud on the surface. It seemed as if the builders had been there just minutes before, needing only the hours of the night to replace the old ones with the new ones. But against this idea, the towers

 

insisted on suggesting an age of centuries. He felt the roughness of the cracked mud and petrified wood.

 

The smell was back. The stench came from the end of the towers. That was the reason why I felt it all along the way, even though before they had another form. Perhaps this was what Mara had seen the day they argued, when she looked out over the field with fear.

 

He returned to the house, looking at the two or three kilometers of towers that stood out along the route under the strident luminosity of the sun. The sky was still clear and the dust from the road was beginning to rise. He had no desire to return to the city, the tall buildings and streets suffocated him. The car remained in the garage to be forgotten.

 

In the afternoon, he contemplated the expanse of the desert, and imagined submitting it to his will. If the towers had transformed upon his arrival, if they welcomed him in this way, it was obvious that the land had to be his. This thought seemed to be formed with the very substance of the flesh, and wanted to escape with pain from his head to settle in the world.

 

On Monday he controlled the laborers all day. He insulted them when he saw them make the smallest mistake, and two of the men left with threats to return to kill him. The others agreed to continue if their salary increased.

He was tired and decided to ask the boy at the inn for help. On Tuesday morning he went there very early. He found him sleepy, thinner and weaker, but it was only necessary to look at his eyes to recognize that darkness that he had discovered when he spoke of the cistern and the dead dog.

 

-I'm coming to look for you for work.

 

-But...

 

-Get dressed and let's go, if you don't want me to tell your boss what you're doing to his

son.

 

The boy looked at him as if he were imploring a god, and said his name was Joseph. "And your car, sir?" he asked.

-From now on there will be no cars. I want you to come get two horses tonight.

 

Alejandro was going to light a cigarette but threw it on the floor. His face looked thicker, the muscles in his neck had tightened. He was tanned with a coppery tint, and his clothes had begun to tear from construction work.

 

José became his personal assistant. He was also the conciliator between Alexander and the fury of the workers. On Wednesday they lost two more men. The dust raised by the cars hid their figures as they walked along the shoulder. Alejandro did not listen to the engines, he stayed looking at them, with his hands on his waist and challenging them with his gaze. Under the profile of the towers and the scent of death in his nose, they were the perfect prey. The inhabitants who would be dominated or exterminated.

 

Then he turned and looked up at the house. He looked at the plans once more. The architect had designed an American colonial style, but the castle was built there to refute it. Although the workers had persisted in not understanding the orders and insisted that the house was not what Alejandro told them it was going to be, the fortress was finally finished. It had square outlines, with high walls and four towers at the ends. He saw José walking around the construction site confused, and knew that he also saw the castle.

 

"But I still don't see the towers, sir," he said, worried. Alejandro rested his hands on the boy's shoulders, comforting him. He also still saw remnants of the other world, but they would soon disappear. He knew it because the pain in his head continued. Building a kingdom produced effort in his mind, in the arms and legs of his mind, which were also capable of sweating.

 

On Friday night, the last five workers were forced to stay late, receiving confusing orders from two men who seemed crazy. They simply obeyed, but before leaving they were threatened. That night Alejandro stayed awake guarding while Joseph slept.

 

Looking out at the dark desert from the terrace, next to a campfire, it was curious to think that everything had happened in one summer. The sun with its excessive intensity, the desert that had raised more dust than other years. He longed for those nights with Mara, when a part of him had begun to awaken, one that didn't care about discretion or intellect. It was inevitable that he would miss the way she made love and then lay next to him talking about history and its leaders. He admired those ancient men about whose lives he read tirelessly. I spoke to him about the Asian conquerors, and he imagined them riding over distances so enormous that they would never travel again in their lifetime. All because of the incorruptible need for conquest, the imperious goal that justified his coming into the world.

 

She could have been my queen, Alexander thought.

 

At midnight, the laborers arrived. Joseph got up to prepare the trap. It didn't appear on

 

the plans, and the men didn't remember having built it either, but the moat was there, surrounding the castle. The men walked in the darkness guided by the fire in the fireplace, certain that they were going towards the room where Alejandro was sleeping. But they fell into the ditch and onto the stakes driven into the bottom. Their screams were heard like an echo in the middle of the desert. Their moans persisted, confused with the howling of the distant dogs.

 

When Joseph approached the edge with the torch, he fell to his knees, and the flames stirred.

 

He looked down the road. Then he approached Alejandro and kissed his feet. He could also see now, he told her, the towers of wood and clay.

They loaded the bodies at dawn. Joseph climbed the towers. They tied the dead and raised them with ropes until they placed them in the clay chalices. The sun looked different, as if it had been rejuvenated by twenty centuries. They walked away from the silent towers, looking towards the top.

 

The crows had begun to arrive, settling one after the other on the edges of the towers.

Then they heard the crackling of dead tissue between the peaks, the sound of bones breaking, and the dull bubbling of blood under the hot sun.

 

Alejandro's memory had brief strange memories of a route, of an inn that could no longer be found, and he was not even sure that these names meant anything. I could only see, in the distance, beyond the savanna of dust and sand, the pale strip of a wide river, from which came the bustle of a people washing their clothes on the banks.

 

 

 Ilustration: Electrical substation (Timo Salakevi)