collar of his coat, peers through the window. At last we cross the bridge, heading onto the road, surrounded on either side, as far as the eye can see, by water: water, and sometimes, in the middle of a field, a farmhouse in ruins, of which we can just make out the roof and a bit of the walls; not even the tops of the trees; everything else is water, smooth and calm, level with the embankment. When we get to the first breach we stop the car and get out. The noise of the car doors opening, the sound of our voices and our shoes scraping against the asphalt strewn with rubble rings out and then fades. Héctor talks about science fiction. Then, as we are bent over the rubble watching the torrent flow — in what direction? — through the breach, where the two liquid plains join, almost soundlessly, he recalls Faulkner. Too much literature for a painter, I say. Héctor doesn’t answer me. He removes the flask from his bag and takes another sip of cognac, wrinkling his elastic face. I draw my dull gaze from the torrent at the depths of the breach to the two smooth expanses divided by the road. They tell me nothing. For the first few days I tried to feel bewilderment, even fear, pity for those who the water would sweep away, something, but I managed nothing. I see nothing but a smooth surface, almost placid, extending to the horizon from each edge of the road strewn with rubble, and it gives me no sign. The thing that really makes me shudder, says Héctor, is to think this idea we have that the water must, at some point, stop rising and begin to recede might be utterly wrong. In the middle of the street, the black car, its chrome sparkling in the sun, its doors open, looks as if it had been abandoned long ago. It looks, so to speak, dead. And we, the only moving things in this harsh, monotonous landscape, have also fallen still. A helicopter appears. It wheels over our heads a couple times before heading back toward the city, fading from view. The pilot must have seen us from above, two men dressed in black overcoats, in full sunlight, squatting amid the rubble, looking at the breach in the embankment, and the black car abandoned in the middle of the road, its chrome resplendent in the sun, its doors open. We turn around slowly, cautiously avoiding the water, and once we are pointed in the opposite direction we start heading back to the city. As we leave the bridge behind us and Héctor gives a friendly wave to the policeman who intercepted us on our way out, I see the helicopter passing over our heads again and heading toward the other side of the bridge, flying over the road in the direction of the breaches in the embankment. The delicate frame, red metal and glass, flies low, and I wonder what the pilot must see from above, apart from the breaches and the rubble and the blue strip of asphalt and the two liquid plains. All of that without us, without the black car, I mean, and then, as we begin to drive back along the Avenida del Puerto, Héctor tells me not to worry, that while the water continues to rise — and the radio bulletin, at precisely that moment, says that it is still rising, and will continue to rise — I can stay perfectly calm because, after all, in four days I will be in Paris. I know that he’s watching me intently, with no regard for the road, to see what effect his words have had on me — or at least I assume that if he is watching me so intently, it is for that reason — but I keep staring at the white wall through the dingy window. Really, his words have had no effect on me. I feel as if the tips of everything metal were rippling, now that the sun is almost at its zenith. I haven’t had coffee. Héctor suggests we have lunch together. During the meal, Héctor says, I think, that travel will do me good, take me out of myself a bit. Then he starts, out of habit, to talk about Cat. I think Cat, he says, just doesn’t want to grow up. Predictable end for Cat: a nuthouse. He asks me if I will see him before I leave. And as Héctor talks at the other end of the table, from above his head and his elastic face, above his perfectly cleaned and coiffed hair, the tumult of the restaurant, of which we, too, form a part, the homogeneous noise of the interior where we sit is like an orchestral accompaniment, a base that improves Héctor’s voice, it seems to me, slightly. There is a deafening cacophony of noise. Someone in a gray overcoat, clean-shaven, opens the front door and enters, followed by two women. He approaches our table, removing his black leather gloves. I feel his cold hand when I shake it, because Héctor has introduced him to me. He’s a painter from Buenos Aires or something like that; he has the air of someone who is moving up in the world, or has moved up in the world, economically speaking. The two women linger by the door, taking off their coats. They talk about something they were doing together last night at the time of the explosions. They have been, it seems, at a party or something like that. They mention something that happened, something funny, it seems, because they laugh and Héctor, who is standing next to his chair — just like me, leaning over, with my knees half bent, my left hand holding a glass of wine — says that when I heard the first explosion I was entering the games room at the Progress Club with Tomatis, and that, according to me, when the second explosion went off, the cards on the table were the ace winning against the king on top, the jack and the knight below. And I told him, says Héctor. I told him: Art imitates life. The man throws his head back when he laughs, exposing his shaved neck. Then he leaves. He sits with the women at a table behind Héctor’s head, and I continue to see them the whole time beyond his elastic face, while Héctor is talks about Cat. Not just growing up: Cat has never shown a real or consistent interest in any serious pursuit his whole life. He’s too mercurial. Héctor keeps talking, but all the while food is disappearing from his plate. At last he uses a piece of bread to soak up the red sauce, leaving the white porcelain streaked with red lines, dry and flecked with white. The food must be gathering now in his stomach, which has begun to work in its own way. Two or three discrete belches attest to this work. Then Héctor adjusts his chair and lights, having meticulously prepared it beforehand, a pipe. I smoke a cigarette. Héctor seems to be reflecting on the things he has just said about Cat, as if it is the first time he has said them and he is trying to polish them, mull them over in his mind to reformulate them more precisely. But he has already formed them many times, with that same disjointed style, with that same rhetoric doubly weakened by lack of conviction and repetition. Something about the imminent winter settling down outside has invaded the restaurant, and I think for a moment, fragmentarily, about the breaches in the embankment, opened onto the coastal road, about the asphalt, cracked at the borders and strewn with rubble all around. I think that Héctor must not have looked at me this whole time. I think that he has not even looked at the smoke from his pipe as it unwinds slowly before his face, a blue smoke, and that what he seems to be contemplating now, with his half-closed eyes, is neither the blue smoke nor any present point, nor my face. So entering the games room at the Progress Club with Tomatis, he says, brusquely. Yes, I say. His elastic face flinches from the smoke, and it is obvious how the skin there has worn away and wrinkled over the years. More than feeling unfamiliar, I tell him, then, when he asks me how I will feel abroad, I will have to deal with the unfamiliar thought that a city where I was born and where I have lived nearly thirty years will continue living without me, and then I say that a city is an abstraction we concede to so we can give a particular name to a series of places that are fragmentary, unconnected, lifeless, and that most often exist in imaginary time, bereft of us. And then, slowly at first, timid, polished and perfected through continuous repetition, like the foot of a marble saint smoothed by the kisses of interminable pilgrims, in an order that varies less and less, the stream of Héctor’s memories of Europe: his three years living in Paris, first on the rue des Ciseaux, then on the rue Gassendi, his summers in Italy, his expositions in London, in Amsterdam, in Copenhagen. One of them was attended by Matta, the Chilean surrealist, whom he connected with Breton. He had been to Breton’s house several times, had translated surrealist texts that Edgar Bayley tried to have published in a magazine that recently went out of business. As we leave the restaurant, this stream continues monotonously. In the street, as we walk toward the car, on the sidewalk in front of the Municipal theater, wide and warmed by the sun, another of our friends stops us, extending an icy hand: have we heard the noon bulletin saying that the water is still rising, and will continue to rise? We respond that we had heard the explosions; we’ve also heard the bulletin. Shaking his cold hand again. In the car, having started the motor, we take turns sipping from the leather-covered flask until we’ve emptied it, putting it back into the glove compartment. Héctor doesn’t talk anymore. He holds the pipe, unlit, between his teeth, like a rigid, slightly more polished appendage, the same color as the inhuman material of his face. I’ve just put out my cigarette, and there is a strong, diffused scent of ash in the car. With the motor on, the heater gets going. There is a clear contrast between the cold light outside and the hot, contaminated air inside the car. Now we have reached the southern tip of the city, Boca del Tigre. There is a checkpoint at the convergence of three avenues, and behind the checkpoint the bridge and the highway. On either side of the bridge, water. Closer, to our left, in the huge open space before the soccer stadium, tents, an encampment, military vehicles, an interminable disorder of objects: beds, dressers, paintings, chairs, pots, carts, quilts, animals, people. The sun warms this dismantled anthill. Héctor talks about Marché aux puces and Hôtel Drouot, Parisian markets for secondhand goods, highly surrealist places. He quotes Discépolo from