Back in his room, the screenwriter barely has the energy to read let alone write. Nonetheless, he gathers whatever reserves he has and sits down at the typewriter to record his version of the facts. He doesn’t need much, maybe half a dozen lines, an adumbration of the main idea will do. She’s arriving late, as always, and for the same reason she always arrives late: she was writing. In one of the lounges at the hotel with the English name, a guy is on his feet talking aloud as if addressing a grand assembly. Seated around him, the girl sees the parents of some of the gifted students, the young conductor of the orchestra, the brilliant composer, her mother, and a man she’s never met. The guy stops talking for a moment in order to be introduced, after which he begs the girl to take a seat. We’ve only just started, he says. Then he launches into a screed about increasing the number of performances, making compromises, working hard, and having a winning mentality: in other words, all the things that maximize income. The girl must’ve missed the part about the music — or maybe it’s implicit, she mutters wryly to herself: something so important it needn’t be mentioned. Perhaps the music is implicit in the contracts too. At last, he mentions some other musicians, invoking them as exemplars, and then other large-scale orchestras — some well known, others not. Then he introduces the man she’s never met. It is he who’ll take the reigns and lead the Little Sinfonietta during its transition, he who’ll deal with any problems that may arise. The man speaks gravely, adopting the same tone as her mother when she said that what they’re doing is serious business; it can no longer be treated as a game. The young conductor and brilliant composer are prepared to make a pact with the devil, if this proves necessary to their aims. Like her, they’re also interested in the gateways connecting different regions in time and space, although they only care about being remembered by posterity, about ensuring that decades or even centuries from now their names will glow like embers in the all-consuming ash. Poor fools, she thinks, the only name that can breast the relentless tide of passing eons is Ka, and it will be done through literature, and through an exceptional recording of the 5 Pieces for piano, despite contemporary critics calling the interpretation too slow. There won’t be a trace left of any of these mediocrities. It will be as if they never existed. Will she be known as Ka or K? The girl excuses herself, implying an urgent need to visit the lady’s room, but once in the lobby, she continues onto the street, and has no intention of returning.
Late in the morning, the screenwriter is still asleep. He drank too much, and went to bed late, immersed as he was in the drafts of some scenes, bothered by the second act during which the audience is bound to yawn with boredom, because the story starts lagging, digressing, which will give them the impression the writer has lost the plot. On awakening, he feels confused, and decides to stay in bed and kill some more time in the curtained gloom. Sundays are strange, he muses with displeasure; he’d rather it was any other day but Sunday. When he finally gets up, he drains the half bottle of water he left in the fridge, then gets ready to go out and look for a place to have breakfast. He buys a newspaper at a kiosk where the boulevards intersect, and then limps to the café, with the help of his cane. Once seated on the terrace, he looks around for the waitress who often serves him, but he remembers she doesn’t work on Sundays. Her replacement is an older woman, possibly an acquaintance of the owner. It could be the owner herself, as she’s not wearing a uniform, although the way people dress nowadays, you never can tell. After going over the headlines, he folds the newspaper and leaves it on the table, puts away his glasses, and waits for someone to serve him. Once his coffee arrives, he lights a cigarette and tries to focus on his script. But he’s too distracted by all the movement and noise around him, so he ends up just watching the people strolling around the plaza — seeing them as if through a mist, going about their business — some leisurely, others dutifully, their attitude made plain by their expression and gait, their business remaining a mystery. In the neighboring country’s capital, the women are beautiful, and the screenwriter thinks they have a characteristic style of makeup and dress. Of course, the black prostitute is an exception. But, then, although this may be her native city, her roots are in the former colonies. The screenwriter seems noticeably relaxed, his breathing slow, regular; or, depending on how you see it, labored, sluggish — for he may be too relaxed, he may even be at the point of sleep. He likes the black prostitute because she doesn’t wear makeup. He hadn’t thought about it before. He likes her for other reasons too, but this one never occurred to him. Without makeup, a face seems clean to him, somehow, immaculate, even a face as black as the prostitute’s. He doesn’t feel pressed to go back to the hotel, so he orders another coffee, lights another cigarette, and leans back in his chair. Then he starts thinking about the girl. He wonders where she’ll have gone after ducking out of the meeting. She probably needs to exorcise her demons. He imagines her wandering the streets of the neighboring country’s capital until she remembers her intention to visit one of the cemeteries, and she decides to hail a taxi. There are many to choose from, so perhaps the driver brought her to the nearest one, or perhaps he knows the cemetery the girl’s talking about, the one where all the writers are buried. At the entrance, there’s a map showing the routes to their graves. She reads it briefly and makes a rough sketch of it in her notebook. It won’t be difficult to find them, since the graves are arranged in numerical rows, which are separated by wide avenues. Near the entrance, is the tomb of the inventor of the cinematic spectacle. Although he’s not a writer, she decides to pay him a visit anyway. The girl climbs a hillock between some graves that are shaded by trees. She thinks of the alien hunter from her novel, sees him exploring a cemetery in the City in Outer Space, but there are no illustrious dead, no famous writers or artists buried there. There were only a few of them left even during the war, but as the dead kept piling up, they had to be disinterred in order to make room, and then reburied, as it were, in outer space. Before leaving the cemetery in the City in Outer Space, the old professor of philosophy, hunter of aliens, spares a thought for those lifeless bodies drifting through the cosmos, even identifies with them, for they are his predecessors, and he pays tribute to them by reading some poems and extracts from their works. Perhaps what he feels is the old world calling to him, the world he despises, the world from which he came, although he doesn’t know it, or perhaps he’s just desperate to understand the voices in his head, voices of half-forgotten memories. He’s given up searching for aliens, since he thinks he’s all alone. He’s yet to receive any news from Earth. All he knows is that the war broke out shortly after communications with Earth ceased. He’s occasionally explored the other side of the city, and found nothing there but desolation and ruin. But he’s grown used to the face of destruction, a landscape devastated by war, full of battle-scarred buildings ripe for demolition. Although he’s never encountered anyone in these parts, he’s still cautious, for he has yet to explore the entire city, and he doesn’t know what may be lurking in the shadows. And then, he always hears the same music playing — eerie, slow piano music, accompanied by the almost imperceptible hum of the machines releasing oxygen into the city, music that’s only interrupted by a voice regularly announcing the time and date. He’s not certain if these figures tally with those on Earth, and he doesn’t bother trying to work out his age from them. The girl stops ruminating to add a reminder to her notes on the City in Outer Space that cemeteries should be added to the list of places where contact can be made with aliens communicating from Earth. They’re not the safe kinds of places where large numbers of people gather, like airports or cathedrals, but they may attract a smaller number, the ones who like to set themselves apart from the multitude, who consider themselves different, special. The girl thinks about the kinds of people who might visit the inventor of the cinematic spectacle’s tomb. She supposes film critics, historians of cinema, directors certainly, perhaps the occasional actor or screenwriter. Maybe even a photographer. Then her mind wanders again, now backward in time, into the memories of an old runaway who doesn’t recall his flight from another world, a time long before the war, back when people barely knew what space was, back when he wanted to establish himself as a photographer, having practiced it his whole life and become a dab hand, acquiring an impressive palette of different styles, many for the express purpose of unmasking extraterrestrials. They have a peculiar halo, he recalls. He’s really a professor of philosophy, but he’s become sufficiently adept at photography to make it his métier. He offers his services to forensic laboratories, weddings, baptisms, exhibitions, conferences, and even erotic magazines. He places ads in newspapers, and is offered a deal by a guy who wants him to photograph some children beside a garden pond playing with specially designed sailboats. The girl wonders how they simulate wind in the City in Outer Space. Perhaps the old philosophy professor could earn a living taking pictures of the space dead, cataloguing them.