The Absent City Read online

  Junior thought about his father, another Englishman lost in the Pampas who collected radio devices and built high-power receivers so he could follow the broadcasts of the BBC. English inventors, railroad engineers, European scientists exiled after the war. Junior went back to the story about Richter, the German physicist who had been invited to come to Argentina by Perón. He was not the only one to whom the story might refer. Many scientists had been working in Argentina since the turn of the century. In the third volume of the Dictionary of Scientific Biographies he found the German track he was looking for: “The National University of La Plata, sixty kilometers south of Buenos Aires, has received a large number of European researchers of the highest level since the first decades of the century. Among them, Emil Bosse, the old editor in chief of the journal Physikalische Zeitschrift; Bosse’s wife, Margrete Heiberg, who undertook her graduate studies at Gotinga; Konrad Simons, a physicist who worked with Planck and Richard Gans, at that time an authority in the field of terrestrial magnetism.” He was sure one of them had been Stevensen, he was sure that was the secret name of the Engineer who had worked with Macedonio in the programming of the machine. Junior walked to the window and opened the blinds. Outside, the city. The empty streets, the lights, the subway entrance across the way. He could talk to Hannah. She would help him. When her father had died she had decided to leave behind the academic world — she had once taught philosophy — and transform the bookstore that her grandfather had founded in 1940 into the main center of documentation and reproductions of the Museum of the Novel in Buenos Aires. She had all the series, all the variations, the different editions, and she sold tapes and original stories.

  A few suspected that Hannah herself had secret connections with the machine. That she distributed apocryphal stories and false versions, that she was part of the counterinformation groups who sold replicas, copies made in labs mounted in clandestine suburban garages. They had never been able to pin anything on her, but they kept a watch over her and occasionally closed down her business. They wanted to intimidate her, but she continued to fight, because she was proud and rebellious, a queen in the secret court of the city. Junior knew her from before. She was the kind of woman he had always liked, incredibly intelligent and up-front. To see her meant that they would open a file on you, but they already had a file on Junior, and he could not count on receiving legal protection from the newspaper anyway. Better not to let them know he was going to see her, he preferred to move freely as long as he could.

  He got out at the Nueve de Julio exit. The corridors were filled with stands and kiosks that sold miniatures and war magazines. Young draftees stopped at the porno shops and the micromovies, the shooting galleries, the cheap bars with pictures of half-naked blondes, the lottery booths. Toward the back there were rickety sheds and locales bunched up along the corridors that took advantage of the continuous traffic of the many people who traveled by subway. With their spiked hair and their torn Levi’s, their knives sheathed inside their boots, the youth had invaded the bars. Dressed in tight black city jackets, they made them play heavy metal over the loudspeakers. One of the lateral passages led to a hall that connected directly to an exit. It was like a cone of silence, with a cloudy glare coming down from the street. To one side there was a watchmaker’s shop and, across from it, Hannah Lidia’s shop. He knocked on the glass door and shortly afterward a light came on inside, in the back. She opened the door in her usual state of relaxed fatalism. She was wearing velvet pants, a man’s vest, anticancer bracelets. This time she had her hair up like Prince Valiant, everything was very New Age, total snob mask. She cultivated a slightly psychotic look and was never surprised to see him, even if he had not come by in months. The place had a very tall ceiling and was connected to the subway. It was cold inside. The books were piled up in no particular order whatsoever, and the place gave him an instantaneous feeling of well being. A large photograph of Macedonio Fernández covered the back wall. The room was on the other side of a beaded curtain. A TV on the night table, piles of dirty dishes in a circle around the bed. Two bottles of Black & White on a footstool. She sat on the floor and kept watching TV. She never seemed to grow older. She wore blue contact lenses and had a Museum tattoo on her arm. Junior was glad that she went on living her life without pretending to be interested in him. That she did not ask him what he had been doing, nor how he was, nor where he had been. The last time they saw each other they had kissed next to the stairs, but Hannah had suddenly told him to let go. You’re sinking, Junior, she had said to him. He worked at the newspaper, he wrote trash, he was getting cynical. She had not wanted to see him anymore. He had laughed. Who do you think I am? The Titanic? he had answered. We’re all sinking, kid. He remembered the woman in the Majestic. It was the same thing. Hannah never left her haunt, either. She went on eating from her plate of ravioli and watching the Mexican channel on TV.

  “I read your reports,” she said to him. “You’re blind.”

  “Why? It’s bait,” Junior said. “I print everything. They want to make a little bit of noise at the paper to see if they react.”

  “They won’t react,” she said. “They want to take her out of circulation. They are going to close down the Museum.” She raised her face from the plate and looked at him with her blue eyes. “Do you know what they are about to do?”

  Junior slid his finger across his throat.

  “Zip,” she said. “They want to stow her away, send her to the museum in Luján. Anything, to get people to forget.”

  “And they will forget.”

  “Don’t believe it. I’ve seen several xeroxes of stories from the fifties, versions from the war, science fiction stories. Pure realism.”

  “Many are apocryphal.”

  “You’re starting to believe what you write,” Hannah said.

  She was drinking whisky from a small plastic cup. It was three in the afternoon.

  “I’ve been receiving some pretty strange phone calls,” Junior said. “I met with a woman at the Hotel Majestic, the other day. Fuyita, you know him? He works in the Museum. A kind of head of security. I went to see him,” Junior said. “He passed some material on to me.”

  “Aha,” Hannah said. “You’re going to publish it?”

  “I don’t know,” Junior said. “Someone is selling false copies in a shop in Avellaneda. It’s a garage on Av. Mitre, they fix TV’s, but they’re working on the political series.”

  “I know it,” she said.

  “Peronists. Ex-Peronists, guys from the Resistance. I’m trying to follow the track that leads to the Engineer.”

  “Is it true that you’re from Bolívar?” she asked suddenly.

  “No, I’m not,” Junior said. “I lived there for a while, when I was little. Near there, in Del Valle, there was a convent and a school there.”

  “Aha,” Hannah said. “Many are running away to the countryside now. No longer to the south, to the valley, but to the Pampas itself. They put up a shack and plant something, hook up by radio. They move from one place to another. They go around in those shabby old cars and use shortwave receivers. It’s hard to find a guy hiding out in the middle of the barren plains. The old vagrants used to do that. Anarchists, philosophers, mystics, when the going got tough and they tried to come down on them, they’d jump a freight car. Vagrants,” she continued. “Macedonio was also out in those plains. He carried around a little notebook and was always jotting things down.”

  She paused and walked to the window. The inside of the bookstore was in the shadows, the bookshelves stood out in the semi-darkness like rusted excavations.

  “They want to disactivate her,” Hannah said. “They say that they are going to call in the Japanese.”

  “Japanese technicians, just what we need,” Junior said. He imagined them going into the Museum, cutting off the lines of communication, isolating the white hall. They had published a few pictures taken with photoelectric cells. All the tissues were okay. But still, something was dying.


  “She has started talking about herself. That is why they want to stop her. We are not dealing with a machine, but with a more complex organism. A system of pure energy. In one of the last stories there is an island, at the end of the world, a kind of linguistic utopia about life in the future. It’s a myth,” Hannah said, “a fantastic story circulating from hand to hand. A man is shipwrecked and survives and builds an artificial woman with parts that the river washes up on shore. And she stays on the island after he dies, waiting on the shore, mad with loneliness, like a new Robinson Crusoe.”

  On the screen of the muted TV there was a street with glass buildings, in a city that looked like Tokyo, or perhaps São Paulo. Junior saw billboards written in Spanish and a newspaper stand on a corner. It was Mexico City. Apparently it was a documentary on earthquakes on the west coast.

  “Do you know what Macedonio did when Elena died?” Hannah asked after a pause.

  “He retired,” Junior said.

  “Yes, he retired,” she said. She would not have told him if he had not said it first.

  “I have been following this story for two months, I came here because I want you to help me,” Junior said.

  “When she got sick, Macedonio decided that he would save her. There are several unaccounted days where no one knows where he was. Apparently he went to a large cattle ranch, in Bolívar. There was an Engineer around there, Russian. You have to follow that track,” Hannah told him. “A Hungarian Engineer who had worked with Moholy-Nagy and was one of the major collectors of automatons in Europe. He came here to get away from the Nazis and to look for a mechanical bird. They start pursuing him when Perón falls. That’s one track. Look,” she said to him, and turned on the projector. Junior saw the portrait of a man with an honest face and small round glasses working in a lab.

  “That’s him,” Hannah said. “The story begins in 1956, in a small town in the province of Buenos Aires.”

  They say he was seen arriving in town one afternoon in a cart, and that right away they called him the Russian, although he was apparently Hungarian or Czechoslovakian, and when he was drunk he swore that he was born in Montevideo. To make things simpler and not have any problems, people from the countryside call anyone who speaks unusually Russian. He was Russian and his son was named the Russian when he was born. But we are not there yet. First they saw this stranger arrive in the cart and cross the railroad tracks. It was July and the frost was beginning to lift, but he walked around in short sleeves as if it were spring. Around here the Basque Usandivaras used to go out barefoot to milk the cows, winter or summer, but the Russian was unequaled, he never wore winter clothes, he was made for the polar cold, and the frosts of the Province of Buenos Aires did not affect him at all. He was always hot and everyone felt sorry for him, because a man who clashes with the weather looks like he is mad. He had a letter for the intendant, and a long time went by before we learned that he had stolen the letter and the cart from a dead man. The intendant around that time was Ángel Obarrio. He had been appointed by the so-called Liberating Revolution of 1955, and had placed half of the Peronists in Bolívar under arrest, but a week later he had to let them go because there was nobody to look after the animals. It was the winter of ’56, the worst one ever. The white air, the puddles in the street like glass. Around then is when the Russian’s cart showed up. “Come on. You stupid ass. Shit,” he said, but in his language, and shook the reigns, one in each hand, like a gringo. They gave him work at the Federal Shooting Range, and he lived there in a small room out back, near the tub where they cooked up the paste to put up the targets. He mowed the lawn and opened up on weekends when the idiots went down to shoot at the targets. Hardly anybody went during the week, except for the draftees, who came sometimes from Azul, and Doctor Ríos, who had been an Olympic champion in Helsinki and came to train on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Russian would wait for him, and open the cat-holes of the hall just for him, and watch him prepare his weapons and then raise his left arm and take aim.

  They became friends, if you can call it that. Ríos explained to him what the town was like and what he needed to do in order to survive. “Practice target shooting,” Ríos would laugh. He did not know that the Russian had killed a man by crushing his skull against the train rails. They had locked him up in the insane asylum because he was unable to make himself understood. He said he had killed the man because of the heat, because it was siesta time and the glare from the sun had blinded him along the railroad tracks. He spent five years at Melchor Romero. Every once in a while he would escape and take off for the hills around Gonnet, but sooner or later he returned to the asylum, thin as a corpse and sick from eating raw birds. Finally he came to this part of the province, following the crops. He was very good with his hands, he was always inventing little devices and taking clocks apart. Ríos was the first one who realized that the Russian was an extraordinary man. Then he wanted to know. He went to the intendant’s office and asked to see the letter that the Russian had brought with him. It was a handwritten note from Videla Balaguer, guaranteeing that the man carrying the letter had rendered invaluable services toward the cause of the Liberating Revolution in the glorious days of September 1955. He must have been in the paramilitary units, and that is why Obarrio had assigned him to the Federal Shooting Range. He assumed that he was a man of action and knew his way around weapons. He made a few inquiries. All the facts checked out.

  No one told him that the Russian was not Russian, but Hungarian, that he was an engineer who had studied with Moholy-Nagy, that he had come to get away from the Nazis, that he had killed a man, that he had stolen the letter and the cart from a dead man. Ríos had investigated the wrong life. All the facts were true, but it was the wrong man. Ríos laughed, afterward, when he saw all the noise he had stirred up. You can’t be a shooting champion and put the bullet right where you put your eye if you don’t have the absolute certainty that you are going to hit the bull’s-eye every time. Sometimes he missed. But if he missed he would tell himself he had missed on purpose. When events had proved him wrong, and it was already too late, he simply altered the angle of his shot and concentrated on the museum and on Carola Lugo.

  “This is a small town,” Ríos said. “You always see the same people going around the same places, and yet the hardest thing to understand is precisely what everyone knows. The secret is out in the light and that is why we don’t see it. It’s like target shooting. It has to do with extreme visibility.”

  There was a mechanical bird in the town museum. They brought it with the railroads in 1870. It worked to anticipate storms. It would go around in the air, flying out in wider and wider circles, and then head straight toward the water. Even now, when the rain is approaching, it begins to move its wings and jump slightly up and down in the glass cabinet where it is chained up. They have come from Germany to look at it, and they claimed that it was German (that it could not be anything other than a German bird). There is a very old tradition of automatons in the Black Forest, Ríos said. They wanted to buy it, but the bird is a historical piece that belongs to the province, and it is not for sale. The chief of the station, the Englishman McKinley, had lived in the large house where it is kept. His wife abandoned him a week after they got there, and he lived alone ever since. When she saw the Argentine plains, the low weeds, the gauchos with their Japanese faces, the woman went back to Lomas de Zamora, disillusioned. It was McKinley, as strange as it may sound, who became interested in the history of the area, and started gathering mementos. He had belonged to the Royal Geographic Academy in London, and was an honorary member of the British Museum, and would occasionally send them reports about the region. He bought the bird for two hundred pesos from Paul Veterinary’s representative. It had been kept for decoration purposes in a cage between the fox terrier puppies and the house parrots. It was invented by a French engineer and used in Argentina to measure the plains when they laid out the tracks of the Ferrocarril del Sur. They would set it free and the animal would fly off, flapping its wi
ngs, and disappear into the horizon. When it returned, all they had to do was open a hinge in its chest and take out the clock with the measurements. The Englishman was crazy, he came to build a Museum in this lost little town, in the middle of everybody’s indifference. No one was interested in the past here, we all live in the present. If everything has always been the same, forever, what is the use of saving things from a time that has not changed. But McKinley left everything arranged in his will. The municipality took over the house, put a flag above the door, and sometimes, on June 13, which was the anniversary of its foundation, they took the children from the elementary school and performed a ceremony on the sidewalk in front of the building. The Lugos were appointed caretakers, and Carola grew up in that house, playing with all the replicas of the Indian tents and the manes of the embalmed horses when she was a little girl. Sometimes, when some foreign visitor would appear (which occurred every two or three years), they would take the bird out and have it fly and head out toward the rains. One afternoon Ríos took the Russian to visit the museum. The Russian went crazy over the animal. Carola Lugo opened the door for them. She was blond and small and fragile, with a harelip. She showed them the house and the galleries. A different era was represented in each room. There were skeletons and drawings. “The professor was a photographer and could also draw. He made several explorations of the region. In this field that we see over here, near Quequén, he found a cattle ranch in which the gates and the tie beams of the house were made out of whalebone. They probably found the animal on the beach, dead, and thought it would look luxurious to use the skeleton to decorate the countryside. One can just about imagine a country-man, who has never seen a whale in his entire life, go as far as the sea on his horse and find that large mass lying on the sand and think that it is a fish from Hell.” The afternoon was freezing and overcast. “Here we see a typical tent. The Indians used this kind of leather to protect themselves against the southern winds.” Finally they went through a hallway with photographs and paintings from the laying of the railroad tracks. The bird was displayed in the center room, inside a glass cabinet. It looked like a vulture and had a fierce gaze and its wings moved as if it were breathing. It was attached by a small chain. Carola opened the glass case and handed it to him. The Russian held it in his two hands, amazed at how little it weighed. Light as the air, he said, and Carola smiled. They went outside to the back patio among the trees. There was nothing but plains and the sky extending endlessly in every direction. The Russian lifted the bird and gently let it go. At first it flew low to the ground, in circles, with a heavy flapping of its wings. Then, suddenly, it faced the storm and took off. It returned after a while, flying back to the patio, moving slowly, and perched itself on Carola’s shoulder. The Russian opened its chest and started to explain the clock mechanism that made it work. From that day on the Russian began to go to the museum after he got off work at the Federal Shooting Range. He would stroll through the Indian tents and always end up in the room with the bird. Carola went with him, quietly, peacefully. One night he stayed there, and after that they began living together. He set up a small workshop and started working on a replica of the bird. One morning she was sitting by the door when she saw someone pull up in a Buick. He was looking for the Russian, who had escaped from the insane asylum. He did not resist, he let himself get taken away by the man in the brown suit. The replica of the bird was only halfdone. Now it is on display in a smaller glass cabinet. Its chest is open and the gears and the little clock wheels look like the drawings of a soul. Sometimes it opens its beak, as if it needed more air, and turns its head toward the window. What it has not found is its form, Ríos says, it is suffering from a lack of truth.