“The best thing a message can say,” said Barco, “is just message. So even when everything would seem to indicate we should write HELP! I’d suggest that we write this is a message, or just message, short and sweet.”
Tomatis considered this a moment and at last agreed, only to encounter another question: who would write the word?
“Keeping in mind,” said Barco, “that the idea was yours and that there’s reason to believe that in time you’ll become a professional writer, I propose the writing of the text should fall to you.” That said, Tomatis tore out a blank page, placed it on the table under the light of the lamp, cleaned the point of his pen, tested it out on the margin of his geometry notebook and then, slowly, with great care, feeling Barco’s gaze over his shoulder fixed on his steady hand holding the pen, he wrote in great black printed letters the word: MESSAGE; and, as his hand continued moving from right to left, the blank rectangular page passed from extreme whiteness, undifferentiated, from limbo, from a flat and anonymous horizon, selected by chance by a blind hand from among a mountain of identical sheets that lay dusty and mute in the desk drawer, until the word was written, neat and even, and the identity of the page was erased once again, consumed by the intermediate darkness of the message.
The next day they woke at dawn. Tomatis phoned Barco to tell him that in a minute he was headed down to catch the streetcar, that Barco should wait for the next number two car because that was the one he was taking, and soon he saw Barco, through the streetcar window, on the corner, carrying a shovel, the bottle, and a bar of sealing wax. For his part, Tomatis had brought a can of sardines, some tomatoes and peaches, and a bottle of wine he had taken from the fridge. He carried the message, folded into quarters, carefully in the right-hand pocket of his shirt. They arrived at the club, donned their bathing suits, put everything but the shovel in a canvas bag, put the bag and the shovel at the bottom of a canoe, and then pushed the canoe into the river. Barco began rowing, pushing away from the club dock and the suspension bridge and setting a course between the islets and tributaries, skirting the shore that frequently closed in around them, and when at last he was directing the boat with some degree of mastery and had begun to approach the coast it was already past eleven. Barco’s face was red, his body covered in sweat. The sun was white, arid, and its rays perforated the naturally porous and open canopy of weeping willows, projecting patches of light onto the water. They left the canoe in the shade — it caught the patches of light on its bottom — and made their way inland with the shovel and the canvas bag. They wandered for half an hour. Barco discovered a snake and with the edge of the shovel he completely severed its head, neatly, in a single blow; afterward they chose the spot. It was a clearing surrounded by a circle of trees, but trees so short that their branches couldn’t tangle together to form a shaded bower. The sun had dried the ground and the grass around was sparse and yellowed. Tomatis began to dig: the first few impacts sounded dry and the shovel bounced back from the ground, breaking its shell and sending up chips of hardened clay in every direction, but the outer layer gave way quickly and then the earth came deep, soft, cold, and dark, its weight pulling Tomatis’s arms softly downward every time he hoisted a shovelful and dumped it onto the mound that had begun to form to the side of the hole. After a while Barco took over and Tomatis leaned panting against one of the absurd trees and dedicated himself to watching him work. They dug a hole almost six feet deep, wide enough for a man to enter standing. Afterward they sat in the shade and Barco carefully folded the sheet of paper, pushed it down the neck of the bottle, replaced the cork, slapping it with the palm of his hand until he got it in far enough, and in a moment readied the sealing wax and the matches, and lighting one, began spinning the bar of wax on the point of the flame, taking care that the drops of wax fell directly onto the bottle’s spout and the rounded top of the cork. They used up a lot of matches before it was done. Tomatis’s gaze fell alternately on the point of flame melting the wax (sometimes it followed the path of the red wax drops that glittered as they splattered over the spout of the bottle, droplets that Barco ended up filling in and spreading out with the softened end of the bar) and on the interior of the bottle, in which was still visible, through the green glass, the sheet of paper folded so many times it looked like a rigid strip of tape, one end standing on the base of the bottle and the other on the green wall, at a diagonal. Even when Barco moved the bottle, the paper stayed where it was. And when he finished, Barco picked it up and held it with such delicacy that Tomatis wondered if Barco wasn’t just clowning around again, but then, seeing him move toward the hole carrying the bottle in both hands, and afterward kneel next to the mouth of the hole and lean in, inserting the hand that held the bottle in order to deposit it as smoothly as possible at the bottom, almost touching his forehead to the ground, Tomatis understood that Barco wasn’t joking, and if perhaps he wasn’t going as far as solemnity, he was at least disposed to smoothly and simply follow things through. Barco dropped the bottle on the bottom, considered the result of the fall, judged it adequate, and then stood up and began to pour dirt back into the hole with the shovel. After a time he passed the shovel to Tomatis, and when the hole was full to the brim, he took the shovel in his hands again and began to smooth down the top, trying to erase the evidence of their excavation.
“If it rains tonight,” He said when he finished, leaning on the shovel and mopping his sweat, “by tomorrow there won’t be a trace left on the ground.”
And it did rain. Tomatis heard it drumming against the roof as he lay in the dark of his room on the landing. When they finished they had put the shovel back in the bottom of the canoe and then gone for a swim, eaten the sardines and the peaches and drunk the bottle of wine, slept a while beneath the trees and then returned, rowing slowly, taking turns, the river below, arriving so late that when they moored the canoe at the club dock, surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes, it was already dusk, blue and full of noises and voices coming from the beach and the lit-up bar. They took the streetcar home and Barco jumped off and disappeared through the door of his house. Tomatis took a cold shower, ate something, and went to bed. Almost instantly he fell asleep. More than the sound, it was the smell of the rain that woke him, making the heated roof tiles crackle, and afterward the freshness, the fullness of the water coming in through the open window. As he became more lucid, Tomatis thought of the bottle buried in the darkness of the earth, just as he himself was buried in the darkness of the world, and he asked himself what the fate of the bottle would be. Because it could happen that whoever found it might speak some other language, or the same language in which, nevertheless, the word “message” would have a different meaning, even the opposite meaning from what they had intended, even the meaning of “information” that Barco had wanted to eliminate, or possibly that no one would find the bottle at all, the race of men would be blotted from the earth, and the bottle would remain forever buried inside a dry, empty planet, spinning in the darkness of space. But finally, just before falling asleep, Tomatis considered that even when men capable of understanding it might encounter their message, it would not contain them, Barco and Tomatis, just as it would not contain the crashing waves, in the slow smacks of the canoe at each firm stroke of the oar, the lit-up bar they made out from the dock engulfed in blue darkness, and the scent of fresh rain that came in through the window, in gusts, at that very moment.