The Absent City Page 7

“I don’t use a walking stick,” the jockey said affectedly as he crossed the circular room where the machine was displayed, “because I believe that medicine will be able to cure me, and I don’t want to get used to being an invalid.” Junior thought the jockey had a smooth gracefulness that was accentuated by his limp. When they stopped at the ramp that led to the exit he tried to clear his mind and not think of anything.

  “A woman sent me to see you,” he said then.

  “She calls you, too?” Fuyita asked. “At night? And talks to you about her son?”

  “Her husband,” Junior said.

  “It’s the same thing,” Fuyita said.

  “You know her?” Junior asked, showing him the photograph of the young woman.

  “That’s Elena,” Fuyita said. “She was the girl of his dreams. These women,” he said, “we follow them around and chase after them as if we were dumbstruck cops.” He turned toward the Museum entrance. All the lights were on, people were waiting in line to get in. “Take this,” he said, “be careful.” He handed him a manila envelope, then smiled and flagged a taxi. Junior got into the car, but after he had settled in he thought Fuyita had wanted to say something else to him, because he saw him gesturing with his arms and his lips moving. He stuck his head out the window, but the jockey waved him off because the roar of the city drowned out his voice. Besides, the cab took off down the avenue just then, and disappeared along the park heading west.

  Junior laid down in the backseat. The Museum clock read three P.M. He opened the envelope. The story was called “The White Nodes.” An explosive story, the paranoid ramifications of life in the city. That’s why there’s so much control, Junior thought, they’re trying to erase what’s recorded in the streets. A light bright as a flash on the ashen faces of innocent people in the photographs of police dossiers.

  THE WHITE NODES

  She knew the Clinic was a sinister place. When Doctor Arana came in, he confirmed her worst fears. He seemed to be there just to make every single paranoid delirium come true. A glass skull, the red windows facing out, white bones shining in the artificial light. Elena thought the man was a magnet that attracted and drew the iron shavings of the soul to itself. She was already thinking like a madwoman. She felt her skin release a metal dust. That is why her body was completely covered, including gloves and a long-sleeved blouse. The only part exposed was her face, the rusted skin of her external gears. It made her sick to think about the metal container from which they would put the drops of oil on her. She closed her eyes so she would not see anything, and began to go over what she knew about the doctor. Arana, Raúl, Ph.D. in Psychiatry. Disciple of Carl Jung. Studies undertaken in Germany and Switzerland. The treatment consisted in converting psychotics into addicts. The drugs were administered every three hours. The only way to normalize a delirium was to create an extreme dependency. He had just returned from giving a seminar at MIT on “Hypochondria and the Fantasies of Pregnancy.” Elena had herself committed with the double purpose of carrying out an investigation and of controlling her hallucinations. She was sure that she had died and that someone had transferred her brain (sometimes she said her soul) into a machine. She felt she was completely alone in a white room full of tubes and cables. It was not a nightmare, it was the certainty that the man who loved her had saved her from death and had incorporated her into an apparatus that transmitted her thoughts. She was eternal and cursed. (You cannot have one without the other.) That is why the judge had chosen her to infiltrate the Clinic. A male nurse met her at the entrance. As soon as she walked through the bars she decided she would tell them the truth. She was a madwoman who believed she was a policewoman who was forced to be hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic; and she was a policewoman trained to pretend that she was in a machine exhibited in a room of a Museum. (The only thing she had to do was not reveal the name of a certain man, whom she would call Mac from now on. Anything else, including the truth, would be an invention in which to hide and keep him safe.)

  “That is why you say that you never lie,” Doctor Arana said, smiling.

  “I did not say that,” Elena said, “do not play dumb. I have been asked to investigate you, doctor, that is why I am here.”

  He turned around and smiled again.

  “Very well,” he said, “come with me.”

  The hallway led to the operating rooms. The rubber carpets prevented all electrical contact and negated the friction from the aluminum wheels. The trees in the garden could be seen through the tall windows.

  “And who gave you this assignment?”

  “A judge,” she answered.

  There were bars in front of the windows, and a portrait of Doctor Arana on the wall. Many of his patients were painters who paid him with their own work.

  “They are going to flatten this pigsty.”

  “What does it mean to be a machine?” Doctor Arana asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “A machine does not exist, a machine functions.”

  “Very ingenious,” Arana replied.

  The Clinic was a large rectangular construction, divided into zones and pavilions, like a jail.

  “In this first room you have the catatonics. They are completely gone,” Arana explained; “technically, they have gone over to the other side and cannot return.”

  The beds looked as if they held embalmed bodies, a series of white mummies wrapped in sheets and blankets. A woman sitting in a metal chair was staring at the light in the window. Elena tried to take note of the layout of the alarms and the side doors. She was going to escape as soon as she managed to see Mac, she thought they had him locked up in one of the wings by the end of the garden. She had drawn up a map in her memory and was completing the diagram as they went along. She worked with a scale of 100 to 2, to make the information easier to transmit. Each zone had its own control unit and surveillance system. The small cameras were mounted on the ceilings. Elena imagined the closed-circuit and the control room. She had once seen the intelligence center for Penn Station in New York. All the passengers were recorded in the hallways and the platforms, and a policewoman (a real policewoman) — fat, with makeup, black glasses, and dressed in blue — sat on a rotating chair, alone in a white basement, surrounded by TV screens, watching the images that covered the walls. She had a microphone attached to her blouse that captured her voice and her breathing. In the bathrooms, men addicted to vices pursued those vices. She spied on them and relayed the information to the patrols working on the surface. Three policemen were kicking a junkie on the floor of the hallway that led to platform number six (the exit toward Jamaica Station, in Long Island). They were in the section of the Clinic that contained the Carson Café. A bar that looked as if it were from the fifties, with dim lights and tables against the walls. A place where expatriates, spies, foreign journalists, and married women looking to hook up spent their time.

  “They call it the Bar of the Lost Souls,” Arana explained.

  Elena found a place at the bar. She wanted a beer. The bartender smiled. Perhaps they had already given her the injection. Imaginary landscapes had been fully explored by Doctor Arana. Reality was made up of personal visions. The Clinic was the inner city and each person saw what they wanted to. No one seemed to have their own personal memories. The bartender treated her as if she were a friend of his. In the mirror, Elena saw her mother’s face in her house in Olavarría. Everyone was an addict, submerged in their own deliriums and ghettos, using their own personal hermetic metaphors. The guy next to her at the bar introduced himself by raising his glass.

  “My name is Luca Lombardo,” he said. “I’m from Rosario, they call me the Tano, they locked me up here for my own protection. What took place in the province of Santa Fe is a tragedy, they killed children, women, the men had to show the palms of their hands and if they saw that they were laborers they’d shoot them right there on the spot. The only thing left is the desert and the river. Many escaped to the islands and are living in the middle of the tall bamboo plants. They live lik
e Indians, in the Lechiguanas Islands, wherever they can, they heat water in little pans to make mate. They’re waiting for the soldiers to leave.”

  The Tano stared at the bottles behind the counter as he spoke. The bar was packed. A disc jockey put on an album by The Hunger. Mobs of people were roaming through the place. They all looked alike, sallow and dressed in fringed shirts and leather. Lumpen from the surrounding hotels and tense solitary tourists in search of pleasures not indicated in Michelin Guides. Very old or very young men walked in discontinuous waves in opposite directions. The attractive women, on the other hand, with their prostheses and their melancholy eyes, stood to the side, in the corners, or sat at the bar, like Elena. At that time of day the halls with the games of logic were already open. In the place across the way Elena saw a very young super-D with eight-diopter glasses solving syllogisms at supersonic speeds. He caught them in the air and ran up points with the elegance of a bird. His opponent was a shy and smiling youth with a dark complexion who spoke with a sing-songy Paraguayan accent and was the best Frege semanticist in the city. He read a comic book calmly as he waited his turn, sneaking glances out the side of his magazine at the rising scores of the super-D youngster.

  “So you are willing to collaborate with us,” Doctor Arana asked her.

  “In exchange for what?” Elena asked.

  She was trying to buy time and put together a line of defense. She was afraid of betraying herself and being forced to inform. She knew about the ones who went out into the streets and sold out everyone they knew. They wore masks made of synthetic skins and rode for hours in patrol cars through the center of the city.

  “In exchange for curing you,” Arana said.

  “I am not interested in being cured, I just want to change hallucinations. Is that possible?”

  Arana served himself some mineral water in a plastic cup.

  “We could disconnect you,” he said, “but that is very expensive.”

  “Money is not an issue with me,” she said.

  “It will be necessary to work on your memory,” Arana said. “There are areas of condensation, white nodes, which can be untied, opened up. They are like myths,” he said; “they define the grammar of experience. Everything the linguists have taught us about language also applies to the core of living matter. The genetic code and the verbal code present us with the same characteristics. That is what we call the white nodes. The clinic neurologists can attempt an intervention. It will be necessary to work on your brain.”

  They were going to operate on her. She felt sluggish and empty, she was afraid they had disconnected her.

  She thought about the Tano, running away from Rosario, saying he belonged to the PRA, the People’s Revolutionary Army, but the PRA no longer existed. She pictured him going in and out of detox clinics, lost in a virtual reality, hidden in clandestine houses and getting caught again, evading the controls, living in subways. He was a rebel and she was the heroine, a Mata Hari, a double agent, a confidant for anyone in dire straits. She had to get out, return to the streets. She saw the Tano’s room in the Bajo, near the port. She was going to contact him, he was the only one who could plan an escape for her. But she had to forget, she could not compromise the plans. She destroyed the meeting on the platform at Retiro Station, the bums toasting stale bread over a small fire, the Tano and her getting on the train. She knew how to erase her thoughts, like someone forgetting a word they were about to say. They would not be able to make her talk about what she did not know. A navy officer appeared, and she thought she saw armed men in the hallway behind him.

  “See, captain,” Arana said, “this woman says that she is a machine.”

  “Very beautiful,” said the man dressed in white.

  Elena looked at him with scorn and hatred.

  “You’re an ex, there are only patients here.”

  Arana smiled as the light slid down his skin. He had aluminum teeth, a very expensive ultralight crown of the kind only made by Gucci, the artist, in the clinics in Belgrano R neighborhood.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “If you want to be cured, you have to collaborate with us. The captain will help you remember. He is a specialist in artificial memory.”

  “Madam,” the officer said, “we would like to know who Mac is.”

  They knew everything. She had to escape. She had fallen asleep, but now she was awake and made an effort to keep going. It was getting dark, the light from the large billboards was starting to fill the air with bright faces and images. The Tano came out of the subway and up an escalator at Diagonal Station. The pleasant spring breeze and the smell of the lime trees in the avenue produced a sudden happiness in her. Elena leaned against the window of the Trust Jeweler shop. Multiple clocks read 3 P.M. They had merged the time zones everywhere in the world so they could coordinate the eight o’clock news. They had to live at night while the sun rose in Tokyo. It was better this way, the endless darkness worked to their benefit, they had nearly fifteen hours to get across the city and out to the open country. She pictured the still Pampas, the last towns like hills in the distance. They had already decided they would go live with the Irish, the Tano knew how to get into the Delta and meet up with the rebel ghettos. She had heard about Finnegans Isle, far up the Paraná River, on the other side of the Liffey, perhaps they could make it that far. It was populated by anarchists, the children and grandchildren of British settlers from Santa Cruz and Chubut Provinces. The Tano walked toward her among the crowd of workers and policemen and Bolivian immigrants heading south on Cerrito, downtown. She could make out his set, massive figure in the sea of anonymous faces. All of them, and perhaps she as well, in a hospital bed.

  “Then,” Arana said, “where did you meet him?”

  “In a boardinghouse in Tribunales, near the courthouse,” she said.

  She was afraid. They were getting closer to the truth, as if they could follow the road of the memories of her life on a map. They seemed to know more about her than she did. She was lying on an iron bed, she had the sensation of being opened up and felt the freezing air from the fan on her bones. The amphetamines were making her hallucinate, her thoughts were racing much faster than she could articulate them, ideas transformed into real images. She could not stop, she would awake from one dream and into another reality, she would find herself in a different room, in another life, she did not want to fall asleep again. If she could only live in an eternal state of insomnia. He never slept. He would rest, but he did not sleep, he watched over her while she was in the hospital, not daring to enter her room, he looked in from the outside, through the windows that faced the patio. He stayed awake through the nights, sitting on the cretonne couches in the waiting room. He was afraid that the doctors would inject her with anesthesia and take her to the operating rooms. Then they would be able to process her memory and unrecord the information. As long as she was in the machine, she could overcome matter and resist. “A body,” Mac said, “does not mean anything, the soul is the only thing that is alive, and it takes the shape of the word.” She knew that the anarchs had infiltrated several men into the Clinic. They had given her the name of a contact to use in case of a desperate situation. Reyes. A woman in the Majestic. For the time being she did not want to think about him. But it seemed to her that everywhere around her there were letters forming the word “Reyes.” Mr. Reyes, a dealer and a gangster and a professor of English literature. The crowd was getting thicker, making it more and more difficult for her to move forward. The Tano stood there, pale, taciturn, more melancholy than usual. He had run out of money, had spent the last of what he had on a taxi. He was the best explosives technician that they had ever had, and he did not want to have any problems with the police. Elena went up to him when they stopped at a red light. The cars headed down Av. Corrientes in discontinuous waves.

  “We have to get to the island,” she said without looking at him. “I have a contact, but I am being watched.”

  “Everyone is being watched,” he answered. And smil
ed at her. When he smiled he looked like a madman. Then he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “The first thing is to get into the Museum,” he said to her. “There’s nothing there anymore, it’s been abandoned, there are only a few remnants left.”

  They were in the Carabelas alleyway, behind the enormous concrete building that housed the Mercado del Plata. The site had been used as barracks during the war, and old faded photographs of Perón still covered the walls. A multitude of refugees and vagrants proliferated through the galleries. The police did not dare enter the building, but the place was infected with government agents. She had the feeling of being lost, of having lost her sense of reality.

  “You have lost your sense of reality,” Arana said to her, as if he were reading her mind. Maybe she was thinking out loud.

  “This is a place without memories,” she said. “Everyone pretends to be somebody else. The spies are trained to disown their own identities and use somebody else’s memory.”

  She thought about Grete, who had become an English refugee who sold pictures in a locale down on the second sublevel. She had been infiltrated, so she buried her past and adopted a fictitious one. She was never again able to recall who she had been. Sometimes, in dreams, she made love to a man she did not know. Her true identity had been converted into unconscious material, episodes in the life of a forgotten woman. She was the best photographer in the Museum. She looked at the world through eyes that were not her own, and this distance showed in her photographs. They had to find her, she could take them to Reyes. The Tano wanted to know who Reyes was.

  “He is an ex-professor of English literature who deals in methadone,” Elena explained to him. “He is in charge of the clandestine hospitals and the detoxification shelters.”

  Grete believed that she used to be his wife, a young Englishwoman from Lomas de Zamora who had fallen in love with the young professor who taught courses in E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. The story was her alibi, she was a disillusioned woman secretly in love with a man on whom she wanted to take revenge. They had to find her. The cellars of the Mercado del Plata connected to the underground streets that crossed beneath Av. Nueve de Julio and the subway passageways of Carlos Pellegrini Station, where all the subway lines of the city converged. That was a point of escape, a nucleus for refugees and rebels, hippies, gauchos, spies, all sorts of ex’s, smugglers, anarchs. To get to the building they had to cross an abandoned parking lot, a no-man’s-land between the shelters and the city. They must surely have already seen them in the alleyway and were now watching them on the closed-circuit screens. She saw herself in the Clinic, the white eye of a camera on the ceiling. She thought Arana was speaking with a nurse behind her. She felt she was falling asleep. She was too tired. The Tano took her by the arm and forced her to keep going, almost running between the abandoned parking meters. It was like crossing a forest. The Irish band The Hunger could be heard through the loudspeakers. It was their new anthem, “The Reptile Enclosure.” They were the children of the children of the nationalist rebels. At seventeen years of age, Molly Malone was the leader of the band, and she had become a superstar singer with her glassy throat. Her brother Giorgio sang backups with his warm tenor voice, but he would go crazy and change the lyrics, sing rap improvisations over the anthems of the Republican Army. The crowds went mad over Molly Malone’s live performances. The concert lasted two hours. The observance personnel had in all likelihood connected their monitors to the broadcasts of channel 9. The Tano thought that luck was on their side and that they might be able to escape. They had one chance in thirty-six. It was always the same. He liked to play roulette because it was a replica of life.