The Absent City Read online

  3

  Junior traveled all night. When he got there he recognized the house as if he had seen it in a dream. The white facade, the tall entranceway, the endless succession of transparent windows. He called at the front door with the bear-claw knocker. The town was empty, the only person he saw was a girl who raised an embroidered curtain and spied out to look at him from behind a window. The old woman who opened the door was Carola Lugo. She looked fragile, and her eyes were hesitant, as if she were blind. She stood to the side, without opening the door all the way. Through the crack Junior saw the long hallway that led to the back of the house. “I have been waiting for you,” she said, “Hannah told me you’d be coming.” As he entered the thought crossed Junior’s mind that he would never be able to leave there, that he would become lost in that woman’s story. They walked down a long hallway and into the first room. The tall ceiling and the thin windows gave the house a remote feel to it. Carola gestured as a way of showing him the place, and asked him to take a seat. Junior settled into a long divan while she sat with her back to the window and to an old grandfather’s clock.

  “The Russian used to live here,” she said. “But that is not his name anymore, now he is somebody else, he uses a European name. You have to protect yourself in this country. They come after you because of your past here. I will show you the house now,” she said then. “So you can see it.”

  An empty lot and a wire fence could be seen on the other side of the window. Junior realized that the architecture of the place was strange, as if all the rooms faced a single spot, or as if they were circular. The afternoon was freezing and overcast. At the far end of the room, in a glass cage, there was a monstrous reconstruction of what could be assumed had once been a bird. It was nearly one meter tall and it moved its neck with slow movements. “The bird’s madness will stake us out and that will be the last of us,” Carola said. The animal was moving around, fluttering, bumping into the bars of the cage. “It’s blind,” she said. To a side a doll was moving its arms and trying to smile. Junior had the impression that he had seen it before and that it was far too sinister to be artificial. “The Russian was the most important expert in automatons in all of Europe. Look,” she said, and opened a wardrobe. They looked like wire insects. “He made them for me, they are the fruits of love. I have spent hours at the train station hoping to see him go by,” she said, and smiled. “Me, a seventy-year-old woman.”

  It was moving to hear her talk. She seemed to be in love with a shadow, with a man who had entered her life for an instant and left her in the past. There was a telescope at one of the windows. Through it you could see the endless plains and the reflection of the small Carhué lake. “The young one moved to Buenos Aires,” Carola said, “and I have lived here, alone, in this house, ever since. My brother comes to visit every once in a while, but he is very upset because of everything that has happened.” She spoke to him calmly, in a friendly tone, as if Junior were her confidant, the first one who had finally gone there to hear the truth. “They keep me in here by myself because I know the Russian’s story. He married me and now I am paying the consequences. They came to get him and he escaped. They wanted him for no reason at all. But he is not dead,” Carola said, “he is just hiding on an island in the Tigre Delta. Now he has another name. He is no longer the Russian, or perhaps he is the Russian now and he used a different name before. In any case, the man who came to get him in the Buick was an undercover police agent. In plainclothes, dressed in brown. We have everything recorded. The past lives on. Look, see this map, if you follow this branch of the river here, you will find the island. Do not tell him that you have seen me. You must find him. Macedonio Fernández was always interested in the story of the automatons. That is how they met, when his wife died.”

  Junior saw the bird in the glass cage again and imagined it flying with a stiff flapping of its wings in the distance. She lived in the middle of all those replicas. A world of madness and mechanical images. “Underneath this room, several hundred feet down, I have discovered two large subterranean caves, old cemeteries of the Indian tribes that lived in this part of the Pampas last century. Those kinds of burial grounds are not that rare in this province, especially in Bolívar. There were large massacres around here. A few old men out in the country still remember.” To a side there was a stairwell that led to a basement, illuminated by a dim light. It was a hole reflected in a kaleidoscope, and from there you could see the plains and all the items in the house and the small Carhué lake again. “See that ray of sunlight,” Carola said. “It is the eye of the machine. Look,” she said to him. In the circle of light he saw the Museum, and in the Museum he saw the machine on the black platform. “Do you know what is going on?”

  “Yes,” Junior said, “they’re replicas.”

  “They were replicas,” she said, “but they have destroyed them.” The bird was moving its wings and rubbing its beak. It sounded like dry leaves crackling.

  “So then nothing is for certain,” Junior said.

  She smiled. “Macedonio came to this house, running from the pain of the loss of his wife. Elena died and Macedonio abandoned everything. He joined the Russian and spent some time here. The Russian had a lot of difficulties with the language, his dream was to return to Europe. Macedonio was the only person who understood and spoke to him. They spent many days in this house because Macedonio wanted to be convinced. They walked down a hallway and into a room full of small beveled windows that blocked the outside view. He thought that if he went out to the plains at night, and looked in through the lighted windows, he would see scenes that would help him recover his lost wife. The Russian wanted to build him a world at the level of that illusion, so that he could slowly return to the past. To build him a reality as if it were a house, so that Macedonio could live there. He was so desperate that he had abandoned everything, even his dear little kids, and had come out to the country. He jumped the freight trains heading south with the other vagrants. He lived for a time in the Carril cattle ranch, in the town of 25 de Mayo, and finally came down to Bolívar. He drove a hired car out to the house. They finished the machine out there,” she said, and shook her hand toward a shack in the patio.

  “At first it was about automatons. The automaton outlasts time, the worst of plagues, the water that wears down stones. Then they discovered the white nodes, the live matter where words were recorded. In the bones the language does not die, it persists through all transformations. I will show you the place where the white nodes have been opened, it is on an island, on a branch of the river, it is inhabited by English and Irish and Russians and other people who have gone there from everywhere in the world, pursued by the authorities, political exiles, their lives threatened. They have been hiding there for years and years, they have built cities and roads along the shores of the island, they have explored the world following the course of the river, and now all the languages of the world have mixed together there, every voice can be heard, no one ever arrives, and if someone does, they do not ever want to leave. Because the dead have taken refuge there. Only one person has come back alive, Boas. He came to report what he had seen in that lost kingdom. Here,” she said to him. “Listen, now you will see. Perhaps this story is the road that will take you to the Russian.”

  THE ISLAND

  1

  We yearn for a more primitive language than our own. Our ancestors speak of an age in which words unfolded with the serenity of the plains. It was possible to follow a course and roam for hours without losing one’s way, because language had not yet split and expanded and branched off, to become this river with all the riverbeds of the world, where it is impossible to live because nobody has a homeland. Insomnia is the nation’s most serious disease. The rumbling of the voices is continuous, its permutations can be heard night and day. It sounds like a turbine running on the souls of the dead, Old-Man Berenson says. Not wailing, but interminable mutations and lost meanings. Microscopic turns in the heart of the words. Everyone’s memory is
empty, because everyone always forgets the language in which remembrances are recorded.

  2

  When we say that language is unstable, we do not mean to imply that there is an awareness of the modifications. You have to leave in order to notice the changes. If you are inside, you think that language is always the same, a kind of living organism that undergoes periodic metamorphoses. The best-known image is of a white bird that changes colors as it flies. The rhythmic flapping of the bird’s wings in the transparent air gives off the false illusion of unity in the changing of the hues. The saying is that the bird flies forever in circles because it has lost its left eye and is trying to see the other half of the world. That is why it will never be able to land, Old-Man Berenson says, and laughs with the mug of beer at his mustache again, because it can’t find a piece of land on which to set down its right leg. It had to be one-eyed, a tero-bird, to end up on this shitty island. Don’t start up, Shem, Tennyson says to him, trying to make himself heard in the noisy bar, between the piano and the voices singing Three quarks for Muster Mark!; we still have to go to Pat Duncan’s burial, and I don’t want to have to take you in a wheelbarrow. That is the meaning of the content of the dialogue — it is repeated like an inside joke every time they are about to leave, but not always in the same language. The scene is repeated, but without realizing it they talk about the one-eyed bird and Pat’s burial sometimes in Russian, other times in eighteenth-century French. They say what they want to and they say it again, without the slightest idea that they have used nearly seven languages through the years to laugh at the same joke.

  That is how things are on the island.

  3

  “Language is transformed according to discontinuous cycles that are reproduced in the majority of known languages [Turnbull notes]. The inhabitants can instantaneously talk and understand the new language, but they forget the previous one. The languages that have been identified so far are English, German, Danish, Spanish, Norwegian, Italian, French, Greek, Sanskrit, Gaelic, Latin, Saxon, Russian, Flemish, Polish, Slovenian, and Hungarian. Two of the languages that have appeared are unknown. They shift from one to the other, but are not conceived of as distinct languages, but rather as successive stages of one single language.” The duration is variable. Sometimes a language lasts for weeks, sometimes just one day. The case of a language that remained still for two years is also remembered. But it was then followed by fifteen modifications within twelve days. We have forgotten the lyrics to all the songs, Berenson said, but not the melodies. Still, there was no way to sing a song. You would see people in the pubs whistling together like Scottish guards, everyone drunk and happy, marking time with mugs of beer while they searched their memories for any words that might go with the music. Melody has survived, it is a breeze that has blown across the island since the beginning of time, but what good is music to us if we can’t sing on a Saturday night, in Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’s bar, when we’re all drunk and have forgotten that we have to go back to work on Monday.

  4

  On the island they believe that when old people die they are reincarnated into their grandchildren, this being the reason why one can never find both alive at the same time. However, since, despite everything, it does occur at times, when an old person sees his grandchild, he has to give him a coin before he can talk to him. Historical linguistics is based on this theory of reincarnation. Language is how it is because it accumulates the remnants of the past with each generation and renews the memory of all the dead languages and all the lost ones. He who receives this inheritance can no longer forget the meaning that words had in the days of his ancestors. The explanation is simple, but does not solve the problems posed by reality.

  5

  The unstable character of language defines life on the island. One never knows what words will be used in the future to name present states. Sometimes letters arrive addressed with symbols that are no longer understood. Sometimes a man and a woman are passionate lovers in one language, and in another they are hostile and barely know each other. Great poets cease being so and see other classics emerge in their own lifetime (which in turn are also forgotten). Every masterpiece lasts only as long as the language in which it is written. Silence is the only thing that persists, clear as water, ever the same.

  6

  The day’s activities begin at sunrise, but if the moon has been out until dawn, the yelling of the youths can be heard from the hillside even before then. Restless in those nights full of spirits, they scream to each other, trying to guess what will happen when the sun rises. Tradition has it that language is modified when there is a full moon, but this belief is belied by the facts. Scientific linguistics holds that there is no correlation between natural phenomena, such as the tide or the winds, and the mutations of language. The men in the town, however, still observe the old rituals, and every night that the moon is full they stay up, waiting for their mother tongue to finally arrive.

  7

  On the island they cannot picture, they cannot imagine, what is outside. The category of a “foreigner” is unstable. How they conceive of their homeland depends on the language spoken at any given point in time. (“The nation is a linguistic concept.”) Individuals belong to the language that everyone spoke when they were born, but no one knows when that particular language will return again. “That is how something emerges in the world [Boas has been told] that appears to everyone in childhood, but where no one has ever been: the homeland.” They define space in relation to the Liffey River that runs through the island from north to south. But Liffey is also the name of the language, and all the rivers of the world are in the Liffey River. The concept of borders is temporal, their limits conjugated like the tenses of a verb.

  8

  We are now in Edemberry Dubblenn DC, the guide said, the capital that combines three cities in one. Currently the city runs from east to west, following the left bank of the Liffey through the Japanese and West Indian neighborhoods and ghettos, from the origin of the river in Wiclow to Island Bridge, a little below Chapelizod, where it continues its course. The next city appears as if it were built out of potentiality, always in the future, with iron streets and solar energy lights and disactivated androids in the cells of Scotland Yard. The buildings emerge from the fog, without any set shape, sharp, shifting, almost exclusively populated by women and mutants.

  On the other side, to the west, above the area of the port, is the old city. When you look at the map you have to keep in mind that the scale is drawn according to the average speed of walking a kilometer and a half per hour on foot. A man comes out of 7 Eccles Street at eight in the morning, goes up Westland Row. On each side of the cobblestones are the gutters that lead to the shores of the river, where the singing of the washerwomen can be heard. A man going up the steep street toward Baerney Kiernam’s tavern tries not to hear the singing, hits the gratings of the cellars with his walking stick. Every time he turns onto a new street, the voices grow older. It is as if the ancient words were engraved on the walls of the buildings in ruins. The mutation has overwhelmed the exterior shapes of reality. “That which still isn’t defines the architecture of the world,” the man thinks, and goes down to the beach around the bay. “You see it there, on the edge of language, like the memory of one’s house from childhood.”

  9

  Linguistics is the most advanced science on the island. For generations scholars and researchers have worked on a project to develop a dictionary that would include future variations of known words. They would need to establish a bilingual lexicon that would allow for the comparison of one language with another. Imagine (Boas’s report says) an English traveler who arrives in a new country. In the hall of the train station, lost in the middle of a foreign crowd, he stops to check a small pocket dictionary for the right phrase. But translation is impossible, because the only thing that defines meaning is usage, and on the island they never know more than one language at a time. By now, those who still persist in trying to develop the d
ictionary think of it as a divination manual. A new Book of Mutations, Boas explained, conceived as an etymological dictionary containing the history of the future of the language.