Tango Cambalache: you’ll see the Bible weeping against a water heater.1 It follows that reality itself is surrealistic, though he has renounced surrealism because too great a love for objects disrupts metaphysical reflection. But the genius of objects, he says, they have it. They have it. Objects tend to gel together, they are gregarious, he says. Adornments are to objects as nineteenth century realism is to surrealism. Still, he, Héctor, he says, is looking for a new way, a third position. Thus, when he is interviewed, he says, laughing, when asked what school of art he belongs to, he responds: Justicialism. When he drops me off at my door, he tells me he will be at his studio at 8 P.M. sharp. I am passing through the little room my mother calls the anteroom when the phone rings. Elisa’s voice asks me if Cat has come back from El Rincón. I tell her that he hasn’t. She asks me if the explosions went off in El Rincón, and I tell her, no, they were much closer to the city, two or three kilometers from the suspension bridge, long before you get to La Guardia, and that I’ve just come back from seeing the resulting breaches with Héctor, before lunch. Elisa asks if Héctor is with me and I tell her that we just parted, that I don’t know where he’s gone. With my husband, you never know, Elisa says, although you can very well imagine. I’m not sure what to say, so I say nothing. After a short, mutually reproving silence, we say our goodbyes and hang up. I smoke for around an hour in bed, thinking. My overcoat and my jacket lie on Cat’s empty bed. The room is filled with smoke. Through the spotless windows, I see the cold light recede. From the other side of the house drifts the sound of television. It is a dull mix of voices and music. From the street, on the other hand, the homogenous murmur, familiar, identical to, although perhaps more profound than this morning, and which will tear itself apart in the evening, rises and resounds. I listen to it for a moment, I focus my attention on it, but it doesn’t leave the slightest impression. Against the wall, on the other side of the bed, is my suitcase, packed since yesterday, next to the blue coat. I have shut it under the impatient gaze of Tomatis, who, I think, was playing with his gloves, bringing them with his fingers up to his face and then letting them fall upon his knees. Or perhaps not, perhaps he was smacking his knees with them, or the palm of his hand. It was probably the palm of his hand, or perhaps his chest. Or even his face, because he was lying face up on Cat’s bed while I packed the suitcase, impatient to go out to eat, or more precisely to go out, because later, as we were eating, he was also impatient and wanted to go I-don’t-even-know-where. Some place other than where we were, I suppose, some place where he, I mean, was not at that moment, thinking perhaps that he should walk around for a few minutes to get under control — I’m not sure if I’m being clear here — because it preoccupied him to know that wherever he was, there was a mountain of other places he wasn’t at all. I get up and put the ashtray, which had been balancing on my chest, on the nightstand. In this room there is a bluish semi-darkness. I must have been lying here almost an hour. I walk around the room a bit and then poke my head out the window: on the sidewalk before me murky figures are passing in front of a shop window with six television sets, all identical, all on. On all six, arranged in two rows of three, one on top of the other, the same flickering image appears, steel blue, the enormous head of a man crying, his face buried in his hands. I recognize the afternoon soap opera. Then I step back from the window, cross through the blue bedroom and the little room my mother calls the foyer, through the living room, where, for a moment, I interrupt my mother’s field of vision as she watches the man crying. When I get to the study, I turn on the light. There are two empty desks, one facing each window, so that when Cat and I would sit down to work, we would be back to back. From Cat’s window one can see the brick-colored tile terraces, patios with dark trees, the white municipal building against the red splendor of the sky. Mine looks out onto an interior patio with yellow and blue tiles lined up against the wall. I’m standing under the light hanging from the ceiling, between two windows, in front of the bookshelf. I’m not looking at anything in particular. Now that I am sitting before my desk and, opening the top drawer, I take out a few blank sheets. At the desk I lift up a green ballpoint pen and write: Dear Cat. I was going to pass by El Rincón to see you but I didn’t have time. I can only hope you aren’t up to your neck in water. It looks like you will be soon enough. I hope you’ve got some news from Washington. Mama won’t be too much work while I’m gone: wake her up after the end of the daily broadcast on TV and tell her she can go to bed now, and turn down the volume for her every once in a while during viewing hours. As always, I am well, and I’ll write to you as soon as I get settled in Paris. Tonight they’re throwing me a goodbye party at Héctor’s studio (he told me not to tell you about it) and I guess I have to stop here because I’m going to be late. A hug. Pigeon. Now I open the drawer to Cat’s desk to leave the note and I see the photograph: there we are, in t-shirts, smiling at the camera, six or seven years old, Cat or me, because I can’t tell anymore which of the two appears there, with part of the house in El Rincón, white, behind us, to the left, and to the right, further off, a few willows and the river. You have to be inside to know which one you are, and in this photo, Cat or me, it must be twenty years ago, in a T-shirt, laughing at the camera, is outside. There is another photo, identical, not a copy but another photo, or perhaps a copy, in one of my desk drawers. Some distant relative took them both, the same day, in the same pose, in the same place, a few minutes apart, not having foresight like my mother, who wasted her youth planting clues all over the world that would help distinguish us; he sent the pictures to us a few months later. As I am passing again through the living room, intercepting the television screen with my body, my mother tells me, according to the bulletin in the afternoon, that the military has exploded dynamite along the coast road to allow the water to flow out and reduce the pressure that has been building for days against the suspension bridge, threatening to sweep it away. She asks me if I have heard the explosions. Now I am putting on my jacket, slowly, and then my overcoat. I close the door behind me, putting on my gloves. It’s utterly dark outside. The murmur fades. Standing in front of the counter of the bar in the galleria, I drink a cognac, slowly, smoking. There’s hardly anybody here. The cashier, dressed in green overalls, flips through a comic book. A man eats green olives from a plate and drinks vermouth, sitting at one of the tables in the hall. Now that I am in the taxi headed toward Héctor’s studio, it occurs to me that I am no longer in the room with the two desks, the room with the two beds, or intercepting the screen with my body as I pass through the living room, or standing in the bar in the galleria. Nor am I in the place where I began thinking, because the taxi is cutting through the cold night and leaves behind street corners fading ever darker. Yet, having stood for a moment between the two desks, under the light, or crossing the living room, intercepting the blue steel of the television screen with my body, I am struck by the fact that the living room and the room with the desks are still in their places, emptied of me, at this very moment. Of all the things in this world, I am the least real. Moving an inch, I am erased. And I see, as we move away from the city, through the streets growing darker and darker, more and more deserted, through the frosty glass, the fixed neighborhoods on whose sidewalks leafless trees expose their ruins to the first frost. Constant and practically lifeless, soundless, a straggling light from a pharmacy or a corner store that shines on the sidewalk, a quick message shouted from one side of the street to the other, a car passing on a cross street, they extend around me, as I pass through rapidly, these neighborhoods that persist. Héctor comes forward to receive me when I clap my hands to announce I’ve arrived. There’s still no one around. He has invited the whole world, he tells me, to come at nine. He says that he wanted to set up the grill and talk to me in peace. All of the lights in the studio are lit and the white, arid walls refract the light and compound its clarity. Only the very top lies in darkness. On the back patio, while he watches over the fire and the meat, and the smoke pries tears from his eyes that dry into the folds of his elastic face, Héctor, who has laid a bottle of wine and two glasses on top of a table covered in a white piece of paper, says that if the water continues to rise, the highway from Boca del Tigre will be cut off and the bus taking me to Buenos Aires won’t be able to get through. I tell him not to exaggerate and Héctor laughs. He’s a bit drunk; weepy. He says that exaggeration is an art form. Cat has perfected it, he says. He does everything too well, he says, Cat does, and he is too well provided for to be capable, even when he tries, and he has tried, moreover, many times, to stick with something. We return to the shed and Héctor shows me the painting he is finishing. It is an arid, white rectangle that in no way differs from the white walls of the studio. It is perhaps a bit whiter and more arid than the walls. The whiteness of the walls has, on the one hand, it seems to me, the purpose of suggesting a certain width, as well as a certain height; in the painting, the horizontal quality is, I have the impression, so to speak, erased. Its whiteness is exclusively vertical. I don’t know if I have seen this or if it was Héctor himself who told me so this morning. In Héctor’s paintings, everything is vertical; not ascending, not descending, just vertical. Serving glasses of wine in the open air by the fire in the back patio, Héctor smokes his pipe and tries to explain to me what it is he wanted to express. We are interrupted by someone clapping their hands in the entrance. It is Raquel. She kisses us quickly on the cheek and disappears into the studio. She returns without her coat and with an empty wineglass in her hand. After taking her first sip of wine she asks us, looking more at Héctor, if we heard the explosions last night. Héctor responds that he was with people, at a party, and that I, when the first explosion went off, was with Tomatis, passing through the door to the games room at the Progress Club. He says that when the second went off the cards on the table were the ace and the king on top, the jack and the knight below, Héctor says. And I told him that life imitates art, he says. For a moment, while the meat crackles over the coals and the smoke rises in a dense, diagonal column, we smoke in silence, taking small sips of wine. Raquel asks me how I feel now that I’m about to leave for Paris. I say nothing. Raquel’s green wool dress hugs her thick body. We are, so to speak, almost cold, between total exposure and the hot splendor of the coals. Héctor starts up again about Cat. Cat is the plague, says Raquel, laughing. A new interruption: Héctor disappears toward the front door, and there comes an increasingly loud tumult of familiar voices, male and female. Quiet, we look at the fire. Now, before Héctor and the recent arrivals appear on the patio, other knocks at the door ring out and the voices multiply. They are all too familiar for us to pay attention to them. In a low voice, Raquel asks me if we could get a drink alone together after the party. Before I can answer, Héctor reappears on the patio. He invites us to come inside. The recent arrivals, six all together, contemplate, arranged in a semicircle before the easel, Héctor’s latest painting, the white surface. They admire it, each in his or her own way. Now the semicircle breaks apart and we greet each other in scattered groups. We talk about the explosions. The night bulletin, someone says, has reported that the water is still rising, and will continue to rise. Alicia, dressed in blue, disappears toward the patio, because Héctor has been called away for a moment to the door. He watches us serenely, his pipe in his mouth, jutting out from his elastic face. At the very moment Alicia disappears, Elisa comes through the front door, without knocking. She greets us seriously, but not coldly. Kissing me on the cheek, I feel her tense a little, as if she were saving for me the little hostility of which she is capable, or perhaps because she has seen, over my shoulder, just as she kissed me, Alicia appear on the patio, followed by Héctor’s misty eyes, which contrast against his dried up, elastic face. At the table, Elisa sits to my right, Raquel across from me. Like a spontaneous, stable, even warm radiation, Elisa’s hostility crashes constantly against my circumspect profile, which sometimes turns, gently, toward her, and rebounds against her wide, stony face. No one who doesn’t know us well, who isn’t habituated to our most intimate particularities, and sometimes even under those conditions, is able to tell us apart, Cat and I, and even we ourselves look at photographs in our desk drawers and doubt the mirror in which we contemplate ourselves reciprocally, identical, and she, who for at least five years has been thinking day and night about Cat, who has been sleeping with him two or three times a week for at least two years, cannot be less than two meters from me without starting to radiate repugnance and hostility. It’s as if I were the inverse of Cat. And he will stay: he will keep waking up every morning beside the river, in the house in El Rincón, will pass through the bars of the city getting drunk until morning, and he will pass through the door of the games room at the Progress Club with Tomatis, he will look at the white municipal building sitting at his desk, not reading or writing anything, and then he will go out onto the street to meet her, to stretch himself out over her, naked, in some hotel, in the house in El Rincón, where Héctor knows he shouldn’t go without calling first, as do I, greeting, on the corner of San Martín and Mendoza, someone who has wished him a good afternoon thinking he is me, he will be standing on the corne