Shortly thereafter, we laid down to sleep as close as possible to the brazier in makeshift beds on the well-swept floor of the mess hall, where the intense, dry cold set in and, as I found in the morning, froze the ground a glossy blue. Before I lay down, I stepped out into the crisp night air to rid myself of the effects of the liquor that, out of politeness, I had been unable to reject. The moon was round and bright, whiting out the plain, creating a perfect illusion of continuity between earth and sky; pale and abundant light produced a shadow both gray and luminous and the few things set in place by human hands — a tree, a well, the horizontal logs, irregular and parallel to the corral, things that disturbed the empty space — seemed to take on a different consistency than usual in that illusion of continuity, as if the atoms that composed things, according to the illustrious Greek scholar and the meticulous Latin poet, my teacher’s teachers and therefore mine, had lost cohesion, betraying the conditional nature not only of their properties, but also of all my notions about them and even about my own self. Sharp as their outlines might appear in the light of day, well shaped and solid in the clear air, they now became porous and unstable, disturbed by a pale, tingling unease that seemed to expose the irresistible force that dispersed substance and mixed it, reducing it to its barest expression, with that gray and intangible flux that mingled earth and sky. A commotion drew me out of my reverie: The horses were stirring in the corral, perhaps alarmed by my presence, but when I took a few steps to block the cold air blowing in their direction I saw I was of no importance to them, for the brief murmur they had made not only failed to increase, but seemed to subside as I drew closer. I remained motionless near them for a time, trying to keep silent so as not to alarm them, examining the silver shadow to which my eyes adjusted bit by bit, and I could see that what had made them shift from time to time, lightly blowing and causing a muted shuffling of indecisive hooves, was their attempt to press against one another for warmth, forming a dark and anonymous mass of breath, flesh, and heartbeat, not so different in the end from how the horsemen had massed around the brazier earlier, joined by the same injustice that forced us to exist without cause, fragile and mortal, under the icy and inexplicable moon.
The following day at dusk, we finally arrived in the city. Not a cloud accompanied us in the sky’s pale blue on our last day of travel, but as we arrived, a few slender wisps to the east, motionless against the enormous red disc of the sun as it sunk into the horizon, began to change color: yellow at first, orange, red, violet, and blue, until, having crossed the fork where the Salado river divides and churns into the Paraná, we reached the first miserable hovels on the outskirts, and the air was black from the unrisen moon; under the eaves or within the hovels, the first lanterns began to glow. After coming along with me to the house where I would be staying, which we found without difficulty as its masters were one of the city’s leading families, Osuna and the soldiers went off to the barracks where room and board had been arranged for them for the duration of our stay. The Parra family expected me without knowing the exact day of my arrival, and I must say that the welcome they gave me, though they knew I would remain in their house for some weeks, was of the most pleasant sort, perhaps due to the relief of knowing that I came to take their eldest child, who had fallen into a stupor months ago, for treatment at Las Tres Acacias. As it was already nighttime when I arrived, the young man was asleep, and I postponed the examination until the next day; after dinner and a thorough questioning by the others about the news I might have brought from Buenos Aires and even the Court, they took me at last to a clean, orderly room where they had prepared a comfortable bed. Before I went to sleep, I meditated on what undemanding and effusive hospitality they offered me, which was to make my entire stay most agreeable, and I realized that the tedium of life in a country house, lost at the world’s edge, must be one of the principal causes.
The next morning, I rose quite early, happy to know that hours of riding did not await me and, as the masters of the house seemed to still be sleeping, I went out walking in the city. I had visited it three or four times in the company of my father ten or fifteen years prior, crossing the great river over several hours of sailing from the Bajada Grande of the Paraná, beyond the troubled network of islands and creeks that separated the two main banks by several leagues. As my birthplace was a meager country house stacked atop the canyon that overlooked the river, the city always seemed enormous upon each visit: frenetic and brightly-colored, its inhabitants distinguished people well established in the world and engrossed in important business at all times. But now that I was returning after so many years, having detoured through Madrid, London, Paris, and even Buenos Aires, it was reduced to its actual proportions in my eyes, before which such true cities had passed; as is often the case for most people, the city that remained an unchanging image in my memory had shrunk in reality, as if external things existed in several dimensions at once. The city proper stretched out for a few blocks around the plaza in straight, sandy streets, largely unpaved, running parallel or perpendicular to the river, with a couple of churches; a council building, a long structure that was also the customs-house, jail, hospital, and police station; single-story houses with tiled roofs and barred windows so low they seemed to come out of the ground; and fruit trees, too: oranges, tangerines, and lemon trees laden with fruit, fig and peach trees bare in the cold, loquats, little fields of prickly pear, enormous acacias, jacarandas, medicinal lapacho trees, silk floss, and red-flowered ceibos, and weeping willows that abounded near the water. Orchards and farmyards opened onto back courtyards. In the outer districts, brick or tile-and-adobe houses were less common, and the hovels were spaced farther apart, were dirtier and more wretched, but downtown, a number of businesses had opened in the area immediately surrounding the plaza, and the streets bordering it had been paved. In the old church of Saint Francis, which the Indian converts had helped construct and decorate, was a convent and, five or six blocks from the council building, a house that sheltered several nuns. Of the five or six thousand city-dwellers, very few seemed to have left their houses that morning, perhaps on account of the cold, but I knew that all the city’s riches — cattle, timber, cotton, tobacco, leathers — came from the countryside, and it was clear at that early hour that there was next to nothing to do in the frigid and deserted streets. All the shops were still closed around the plaza. I went walking by the riverside, and I saw a few men fishing on horseback: The two riders entered the water with a net suspended between them to dredge the bottom and then, with a vigorous folding motion, cast the net onto the bank where fish fell twitching on the sand. One of the fish managed such a violent and desperate contortion that, leaping up to a considerable height, it fell back into the water and did not show itself again, which seemed quite comical to the fishermen, who guffawed on and on in noisy celebration.
My stroll had been too early, for it was not yet eight-thirty when I returned to the Parra house, and the family had just awoken. We arranged ourselves, Señor Parra and I, in a large room next to the kitchen, which doubtless served as a dining room on ordinary days, and a negro youth prepared us mate and brought us warm cakes from the kitchen. The night before, we had eaten in a slightly more luxurious dining room, reserved for special occasions, but in the modest room where we took breakfast, proximity to the kitchen made the air warmer and more agreeable, as the adjoining stoves were nearly always lit in the wintertime. We had barely touched on the subject of his son, Prudencio, when Señor Parra openly and meekly offered himself up to my questions.