Tomatis, content, turns around in his seat, though first taking a quick and discreet look at the row behind him, to his right, on the other side of the aisle, where the two boys who’d been chatting since the bus left the terminal have grown quiet, wanting to verify that the cause of their silence isn’t that they’re watching him, as if, studying him closely, they could have gathered from some tiny detail in his behavior the intense emotion that has just struck him and that, more than anything in the world, he’d like to keep from exposing to outside indiscretion. But from what he can tell with a quick look, the two boys have simply grown tired of speaking and are now resting, reading a sporting magazine that one leafs through slowly so that the other, the one on the window side, leaning toward him, can also see the headlines and look at the photographs. Satisfied, Tomatis forgets about them almost immediately and leans back against the seat. The six o’clock sun in the cloudless sky is still high and yellow, yet the shadows from the trees, from the houses, from the warehouses, from the mills, extend to the east, projecting over the grasses that the past week’s rains, which lasted till Tuesday night, and even into Wednesday morning, have revived. After leaving the Rosario terminal, the bus crossed the city’s western neighborhoods until it reached the loop road, and after taking this along the long belt of shantytowns that surrounds the city, it reached the highway and turned north toward the city. It was only then that Tomatis picked up the text about precisionism again — though he knew the ones around Rosario by heart, the poor sections of any city, seen from the bus or from the train, attracted him, and he liked to observe every one of their features in careful detail, the facades, the businesses, the cross streets, often unpaved if they were deep into the outskirts, that disappeared, perpendicular, into the horizon. In the poor neighborhoods of Rosario, in the narrow front gardens, in which there’s barely space for a large bush, there’s often a hibiscus, and every time Tomatis sees one of those plants, he remembers that Frazer says that among many of the ancient tribes of the planet it’s the species whose wood best conserves the primordial fire of the universe, after which the universe was reborn, because it’s the best wood for lighting a fire simply by rubbing it with a stick. According to others, among some tribes the hibiscus symbolizes the universe itself, possibly, Tomatis once thought, because of its continuous and ephemeral blooming: its red flowers (there are other colors, but the red hibiscus is the most common) take shape and bloom over a few hours, but not much longer, and as they whither and fall others take their place, which means the plant grows in a process of continuous change, just like the universe, where worlds, stars, and galaxies are ignited and then extinguished, are born and die, in a constant flicker whose exact duration and interval could only be calculated from some improbable exterior.
The shantytowns, an endless collar of poverty that surrounds the city, just like a slip knot around the neck of a condemned man, Tomatis thinks, have a sense of calm, if not warmth, this Saturday afternoon, despite the paralyzing indigence among the precarious shacks that, miraculously, hold each other up; Tomatis senses this from having passed them many times before over the years. Since his first trips to Rosario, the belt of poverty around the city had been growing, until now it surrounds it completely. It’s been the stop for everyone who, coming from the depths of affliction, from the northern provinces, from Paraguay, from Bolivia, and even from Peru, thought they’d find some relief or some hope in the littoral cities. For the majority, still blinking from astonishment and incredulity after discovering the overwhelmingly stupefying proof that they were raw flesh senselessly thrown to the world, forced to survive with only the placenta that nourished them for nine months, poverty was already progress, the inferno of work a gift, their shack a refuge, and the city to which many come to work, seen from a distance, the promised land. For others, poverty perpetuated the scandal, and to them the ones who weren’t splashing frantically, the ones who through inheritance, luck, perseverance, merit, larceny, or the exploitation of their neighbor, lived in the legendary aura of a world without privation, were like an alien species to them, serpents, black widows, scorpions, with whom it was impossible to identify and who had to be crushed without hesitation so as to avoid the deadly sting, the bite of the atavistic enemy defending its territory. Others were resigned to rummaging in what the city discarded, among the trash heaps, searching for the gold mine of cloth, of paper, or glass, of metal, that would provide them with a day or two of food. There were those who, from an adolescent body, theirs or another’s, sometimes even the one they loved most, where they could have sated their thirst, drawing relief, as from an inexhaustible source of calm, built a chaos of venality, contempt, and perversion, and, from this lifeless decoy, made a business. Some killed or got themselves killed for no reason, inspiring fear not only in their enemies, but especially in their mothers, in their grandparents, in their siblings. And yet, the ones who had come from other places — rural zones lost in the north, impoverished Indian reservations populated with the last representatives of the starving tribes that, had they gone to school, would have learned that there hadn’t been any more Indians in the region for many years — thought, rightly, that they had progressed, from nothing to something, a job, a tiny schoolhouse among the ranches, under a blue and white rag flapping in the air, a clinic, a cafeteria, a chapel or an evangelist temple, but also dances, the political events where the candidates distributed food, clothing, and blankets to buy their votes, or a vacant lot with a white arch at each end where ragged and sweaty kids chased a ball for hours, shouting and gesturing, until they were swallowed by the night. In fact, the bus had earlier passed a group of younger and older kids who were playing a pickup game, and a group of onlookers watched, spread around the edge of the field. To one side, in an open-air courtyard closed at the front by a low mud wall and an unplastered brick arch — the sign above the arch read
La Quema Social and Recreational Club—preparations were being made for a dance that night. Some sections of the long belt of poverty are worse than others; in the worst ones, the shanties, caves of stick, straw, cardboard, cabinetry, and rusted tin predominate, but in other parts the construction is tidied up with clean adobe, unplastered brick, doors, and windows. Out front of some of those houses there’s even an old car, a motorcycle, or a bicycle with a delivery basket behind the seat. A wide strip of grass, split in two by a ditch, separates the ribbon of buildings from the asphalt of the loop road. Around the ditch, the grass is littered with twisted paper, plastic bags, empty cans, broken or mud-stained bottles, and empty cigarette packs; every so often, stands of enormous eucalyptus, of tall acacias, of leafless carob trees with brown vines hanging from their branches, or of bitterwoods recall that at one time that congested strip was countryside, farms, estates, and empty plain. The porous, uniform six o’clock light covers the earth, the buildings, the grass, and the trees in a reddish, pulverized gold patina, its fine dust still floating in the air. The afternoon is so calm that, on one dirt street perpendicular to the avenue, Tomatis saw a cloud of dust, motionless, like an evanescent monument, lifted by some vehicle that had already disappeared, holding together in the warm and windless air without dispersing or falling to the ground. After the turnoff to the road to Córdoba, at the entrance to the highway, two or three kilometers from the loop road, they passed the dump, surrounding them on both sides with its compact strata of steaming garbage, and men, women, and children bent over the mountain of discards expelled by the city, digging through it, searching for their day’s wages. And then the first houses, many of them extremely old, wavering between the country and the city, surrounded by trees, with a horse grazing in the rear pasture, a farm, a rusty, unused windmill, brick smoke floating over the truncated pyramid where they have been stacked. As soon as they left the city, Tomatis started to read the pages that remained, looking up every so often and glancing out the window, and now, after putting away the text, which he’d annotated in the margins, after being struck by a sudden and intense happiness, he has leaned back against the seat and watches the landscape roll past through the window, the only one not covered by a curtain, the others closed to protect the interior of the bus from the setting sun, which is still strong, falling, imperceptibly slowly, toward the western horizon. They left the Rosario terminal thirty-five minutes ago, which means that within an hour and forty-five minutes, at eight on the dot if everything goes well, they’ll be pulling in to the terminal in the city.